Charmed (28 page)

“Well, I better go,” I say, forcing a smile.

“Have fun,” Aunt Penny says. She waggles her eyebrows suggestively. I roll my eyes as laughter follows me outside.

Bishop leans against the door of his Mustang, a single red rose held up under his nose. The setting sun makes copper highlights shine in the dark hair that falls in perfect, messy waves around his jaw. He’s wearing his usual worn leather jacket, but underneath it is a button-down and tie. He gives me a crooked grin that makes adorable laugh lines sprout up around his eyes. My heart gives a thump.

I cross the road to him, and he holds out the flower. My first thought is that it’s so unlike Bishop to get me flowers, but then I realize that he’s never been given the occasion. We’ve never been on a real date.

“For the lady,” he says, wiggling it in front of my face. “You look gorgeous.” I give an embarrassed smile and take the stem from him, holding the bloom up under my nose.

“Well, come on, we don’t want to be late.” He crosses to the passenger door and holds it open for me.

“Late for what?” I ask.

“Nice try. Get in.”

I fall into the seat. When he starts the car, the radio blares a song I recognize—the same song that we sang on our way to the Guadalupe sand dunes the day I tried to seduce him. He goes to turn the volume down, but I stop him.

“Don’t. I love this song.”

He smiles across at me before putting the car in drive.

It’s so
normal
just driving around with Bishop that I’m sort of sad when he announces we’re at our destination. He parks the car off the curb on Spring Street, right in front of the Last Bookstore. It’s a grand building made out of light gray stone, with ornate carvings under the windows and a gilded placard across the door. The Open sign is switched off.

Bishop pulls a big canvas backpack out of the backseat.

“What’s in there?” I ask, giving the bag a wary look as I recall the snake he’d brought along on our last excursion.

“You’ll see.” He climbs out of the car.

I trip after myself to catch up to him as he ducks into an alleyway. I find him tinkering with the lock of a metal door set at the side of the bookstore.

“So we’re breaking and entering for our first real date? Nice.”

“I have permission,” he says.

I raise my eyebrows at him, a grin pulling up my lips. “And that’s why you’re using magic to unlock the doors?”

He smiles at me as the lock pops open and he throws the door wide. “After you.”

The Last Bookstore is the epitome of old-fashioned charm. Cedar shelves stretch way over our heads so that a rolling ladder has to be used to access the books on the top. Velvety red carpeting covers the spiral staircase that twists up to a second floor, and the ceiling is painted in an elaborate fantasy mural. The scent of musty books and coffee beans linger in the air.

He takes my hand, his big and warm and callused around mine, and I feel the thrill of it like it’s the first time I’ve ever had my hand held by a boy. Thoughts of Mom and Paige and Cruz and Aunt Penny push into my mind, but I push them right back out, because I need this right now. I need normal. As normal as breaking into a bookstore after closing time is.

He leads me upstairs, through the aisles, to a door set into a back wall. The door opens to a staircase. We climb up, and when we emerge through the door at the top, we’re on the roof. I suck in a breath. Los Angeles unfolds before me, a city teaming with palm trees and vibrant-colored buildings and
life
. And beyond it all, set into a lush mountaintop, is the Hollywood sign.

“So we’re not reading on our date,” I say.

“Did I have you worried?”

I grin at him. “A little bit.”

He reaches into his bag and pulls out a big red blanket, then fans it out in front of him.

“Have a seat, m’lady,” he says. I smile coyly at him and duck into a spot on the blanket. He reaches back into his bag and pulls out a box of Pop-Tarts, followed by a package of juice boxes and some Fruit Roll-Ups.

“What is that, Mary Poppins’s bag?” I ask.

“Nope, no magic on this date,” he says. “It’s a one hundred percent normal date. Or else I wouldn’t be serving PB&Js for the main course.” He produces a bag of smushed sandwiches.

“Oh, whoops,” he says.

I can’t help giggling.

I watch my boyfriend, his brow furrowed in childlike concentration as he arranges our ghetto picnic across the blanket, and all I can think is that I wouldn’t be happier if he’d taken me to a five-star restaurant.

And God, there it is again, that guilt stamping down my happiness. Here’s my boyfriend, doing all of this for me after every awful thing I put him through. After Cruz.

He catches my wrist suddenly, and I gasp.

“Don’t,” he says.

“What?” I ask, heat staining my cheeks.

“Don’t think about it. Everything that happened is in the past.”

“But, but there are things you should know….” I force
myself to look up at him, letting the guilt show through in my eyes. His throat moves up and down as he swallows.

“It’s okay,” he says finally. His dark eyes burn into mine, and in this instant I know he knows. He knows I did something wrong—not exactly what—but he doesn’t care. Or if he does, he forgives me. I nod, and he lets go of my wrist.

“Now turn that frown upside down,” he says. “We’re having fun tonight.”

I force a smile and dig into a package of Pop-Tarts, cradling one in my lap as Bishop pulls the wrapper off the straw of his juice box with his teeth. He spits it out over his shoulder and punctures the top with the straw.

“So, what’s your favorite color,” he asks cheerily, like we didn’t just have this intense moment.

I tilt my head, thinking, the setting sun warming my face. “I dunno. I guess I don’t really have one.”

“If you had to pick.”

“I guess red,” I say. “I like red lipstick and red nail polish.”

“Red’s a bangin’ color,” he says. “Mine’s black.”

“Black’s not really a color.”

“Depends who you ask. What’s your favorite movie?”

“Easy.
She’s the Man
.”

“She’s the Man?”
he asks dubiously. “I’ve never heard of it.”

I laugh. “It’s this totally awesome comedy about this girl who dresses up like a boy so she can try out for their soccer
team. There’s this one scene where one of the boys on the team finds a tampon in her bag, and she sticks it up her nose and pretends she uses it for nosebleeds….” I trail off at the look of horror on Bishop’s face. We both burst into laughter. “It’s much funnier in the movie.”

“We have to watch it sometime.”

I smile. “I’d love that.” A beat passes in comfortable silence. “So,” I say finally. “What’s your favorite movie?”

“Don’t have one,” he answers.

“If you had to pick,” I say.

He thinks for a moment. “Then it’d be a three-way tie between
The Goonies, Super Troopers
, and
I Love You, Man
.”

“
Super Troopers
? I love that movie! ‘All right, meow, hand over your license and registration.’ ”

“ ‘You boys like Mex-
i
-co?’ ” he adds. We both roar with laughter.

I can’t believe we have the same taste in stupid one-star comedies.

“How ’bout books?” he asks.

“Hmm. That’s hard. Maybe
Gone with the Wind
?”

“Really?” His eyebrows get lost in his hairline.

“Why is that so shocking?” I ask.

“Isn’t that, like, three thousand pages?”

I slap his arm, and he laughs.

“So what are you going to do now? With me back at school and everything.”

He shrugs. “I dunno. I guess drown my sorrows in booze and strippers.”

I mock-scowl at him, and he laughs, but it dies quickly and unexpectedly turns into a sigh. He traces a pattern on the roof with a finger. “I have thought about it, actually. There’s this boarding school…for witches and warlocks.” He looks up at me from behind a twist of hair that’s fallen in front of his face.

I sit up a bit straighter. “Yeah. Penny told me about that.”

“I was thinking about applying there. Like, as a teacher.”

My mouth drops open.

“Flies are going to get in there.” He reaches over and closes my jaw.

I sputter for words. “Wh-where is that?”

“New York.”

“New York!” I repeat.

“Is that a problem?” he asks.

“Problem? No.” Well, besides the second heartbeat that’s started in my stomach. But the more I think about it, I guess I can’t expect him to just play with Lumpkins in his mansion all day until I get off school. I mean, he’s this amazingly powerful warlock, and he has a life too. It strikes me then that if he were with someone closer to his own age, like, say, Irena from the Black Market, this wouldn’t be a problem. They could just go together, travel the world. I still have another year and a half of high school.

“We’d still see each other,” he says, as if reading my
thoughts. “I do have this nifty teleportation trick up my sleeve.”

Well. That
is
a bit reassuring. I give him a ghost of a smile.

“Anyway, it was just something I was thinking about,” he says. “Let’s not talk about that now.”

He smiles at me—a winking smile that makes my insides melt and all thoughts of boarding school fly out of my head. He’s going to kiss me—he’s going to do a lot more than kiss me. But I’m not going to wait for him to make a move.

I set down my Pop-Tart.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

Brushing the crumbs from my skirt, I step over the picnic until I’m standing over him, and he has to crane his neck to look up at me. He starts to get up too, but I push his shoulders down and straddle his lap. His eyes go wide at the way my skirt rumples up my thighs.

“First,” I say, “I want you to know I’m not upset or vulnerable or anything else right now. Well, I am, but it’s not clouding my judgment. I know what I’m doing, okay? So don’t try to stop me. Unless, of course, you want me to stop, you know, for your own reasons, which would be totally okay—”

He takes my head in his hands and shuts me up with the barest of kisses. Soft and featherlight. A buzz of warmth travels down into my belly. I pull my fingers through the silk of his hair as he takes my mouth deeper and harder, his arms coming up around my body like he wants to devour me. When his fingers dig into my hips, my body turns to fire.

But then he stops suddenly and pulls back, looking intently into my eyes.

“Indie,” he says.

“What?” I ask, out of breath. What could he possibly have to say right now that would make him interrupt the best kiss of my life?

“I love you.”

My breath catches at the unexpected words, my heart fluttering like a bird trapped in a cage.

“I love you too,” I say.

And I know it’s true. Whatever happened with Cruz was messed up and wrong and inexcusable, but it doesn’t change the fact that I love Bishop. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving it to him.

“I love you,” I repeat.

Saying the words, I can’t help but think of our odds. Some new band of sorcerers could attack us again. Bishop could go to New York and love it so much he decides never to come back. He could meet someone else, someone his own age. There are a thousand reasons it wouldn’t work between us, way more reasons than it ever would. But sitting here, with Bishop’s arms solidly around me, our odds don’t scare me.

I’ll take my chances.

This book exists because of the support I received from a host of amazing people.

Sincere thank-yous to:

Adriann Ranta, for her incredible business savvy and endless patience, but most of all, for “getting it.” (Hopefully she knows what I mean.)

Wendy Loggia, for her kindness, sharp insight, and unswerving enthusiasm. I’m forever grateful to be under her wing.

Beverly Horowitz and the entire team at Delacorte Press, for making this book and its predecessor a reality. Particular thanks to Alison Impey, for creating not one but two covers I fell in love with; Nicole Banholzer and Sadie Trambetta, for handling publicity for my books; the copyediting department, for saving me from my own embarrassing mistakes; Stephanie O’Cain and the marketing team, for getting my book out there; and everyone who I’ve never spoken with but who have undoubtedly done more than their fair share for
my books (Krista Vitola, I’m looking at you!). Thanks also to Amy Black, Pamela Osti, and the rest of the team at Doubleday Canada for helping my book reach Canadian readers.

Brandy Allard, for putting up with years of conversation monopoly and always believing in me even when I didn’t. (It’s your turn. And yes, you
can
do it.)

Ruth Lauren Steven, for reading everything—sometimes two, three, and four times—giving me critical insight that manages to make me laugh, and letting me know when I’m being a miserable cow.

Amy Plum, for giving me a stellar blurb for
Hexed
. I’m honored to have her name on my books.

Amy Tintera, for not missing a beat when I said, “So say Los Angeles was a prison city for the paranormal divided into two rival gang territories—how would you split that up?” Thanks also for the very kind blurb for
Hexed
.

Everyone in Gunning for Awesome—Natalie C. Parker, Stephanie Winkelhake, Gemma Cooper, Deborah Hewitt, Amy Christine Parker, Lori M. Lee, Corinne Duyvis, Kim Welchons, and again, Ruth Lauren Steven and Amy Tintera—for the long emails filled with wisdom, insight, and belly laughs. Thanks also for brainstorming a title for this book, even though we eventually went in another direction. (It’s a crying shame
Hex Pot 2: Bound and Waxed
didn’t make the final cut.)

My blog, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook followers, for making this whole process fun.

The authors of OneFour KidLit, for being such amazing supports during the debut process (and for the bourbon and donuts).

Amanda Pedulla from Chapters in Thunder Bay, for hawking my book to everyone who walks into the store. (You’re the best!)

My coworkers in the NICU at the TBRHSC, for eagerly asking about my books, even when it embarrassed me to no end.

The entire Krys and Couture families, of which there are too many members to name individually, for always being so supportive and excited about my writing. Thanks especially to my sister, Crystal Couture, and my mom, Phylis Kaukanen, for the plot ideas and the dinners in sweatpants, which is really the only way to have dinner. Thanks also to Barb Hemsworth, for being the best beta reader a friend could ask for, and for always suggesting a girls’ recon trip for “book research.”

My long-suffering husband, Logan, for letting me disappear for hours on end while I wrote this book and for hashing out plot points when witches and sorcerers aren’t exactly his thing. My books wouldn’t be possible without his commitment to letting me follow my dreams. And Benjamin, for being the kind of boy moms dream of—all the success in the world wouldn’t be worth it without him. (I love you to the moooon!)

Finally, a heartfelt thank-you to my readers. You’re the reason I do this. Much love.