Chapter Sixteen #2
He opened the door for her without using magic, and she let go of him reluctantly as she slid onto the refurbished leather seat.
It smelled like Kass times a hundred in here, oats-and-honey soap mixed with something herbaceous.
Unobtrusive lo-fi beats were playing through the impressive speaker system.
The steering wheel, dashboard, and doors were all inlaid with polished, auburn-tinted wood.
All in all, it was a remarkably soothing environment, and Dani’s nerves unwound slightly as she took it in.
After a moment he got in the driver’s seat and buckled in. “What do you think?” he asked, seeing her looking around.
“You did all this?” she guessed.
“Yeah.”
“I love it.”
“Cherry was my mom’s favorite type of wood, so it felt appropriate.”
“Am I supposed to have a favorite type?”
Kass laughed as he started the engine. “Nah. She was just always really supportive of my art, and when you’re exposed to something often enough, you start to form preferences.”
“Your art?”
“My carpentry, I mean. I’ve made all kinds of stuff ever since I was old enough for my parents to let me near the tools.”
“You can’t use magic to do the carving?”
“I can,” he said. He peeled away from the curb, guiding the car down the road. “And I do, for certain things. But I feel closer to the material when I’m working with it—I mean really working with it, using my hands and that kind of thing.”
“That’s really cool,” Dani said. “I wish I had something like that.”
There was real surprise in Kass’s voice when he responded. “But you do.” She stared at him blankly. “You’re a barista,” he said. “You literally do the same thing with coffee.”
Dani scoffed. “That’s not the same at all.”
“Why not?” Kass said, confusion marking his forehead with a crease. “It’s a craft. You’re making things. You like doing it, don’t you?”
“Well … yeah. I guess so. I just never thought about it that way.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Kass said. “You never think about yourself that way.” This declaration sent a tie-dye of purple and blue into her brain.
She looked at him sharply—not with anger, but with a fine point at the end of her curiosity.
“I mean, not that I know you that well yet. It just seems like you tend to give yourself the short end of the stick.”
“No,” Dani said, “I just have one stick with two short ends.”
Kass laughed so loudly that it made her self-conscious; she had never thought of herself as a particularly funny person.
But then again, she had never thought of her baristaness as a craft, either.
It was weird to be caught in the aperture of someone else’s keen-lensed telescope, and to see herself as they saw her, as clearly as the moon with all its craters and its shadows.
Dani cleared her throat, of a mind to move the magnifying glass away from herself, at least for a minute.
“Before I forget,” she said, “I just found out I have to be somewhere around ten tonight. For a class. I hate it but I kind of have to go.” She caught the flicker of disappointment in Kass’s face before he banished it like an easily broken spell.
“Does that mess up our plans?” she added, nibbling on her lower lip.
“Not at all,” he said, and turned a comforting smile on her. Heat gathered behind her breastbone. “We have plenty of time.”
They didn’t drive in the general direction of his neighborhood, like she’d expected, or to the section of town where the clubs and bars were, but instead headed west, away from the cluster of skyscrapers, past Quarter Cast and into an area she wasn’t familiar with.
“I guess I should have asked ahead of time,” Kass said as he made a right onto a street that had a very distinctive look, with clay buildings and brightly colored roofs, “but do you like Greek food?”
“Love all food,” Dani said, forehead pressed to the window. “Where are we?”
“This is Little Mediterranea,” Kass said. “My family’s old stomping ground.”
“I didn’t even know this existed.”
“Most Leap students don’t,” he said. “But when you’ve lived here your whole life, you know secrets.”
He parallel parked effortlessly in front of a white-and-blue restaurant whose lights shone through the rain.
Dani watched the silhouettes in the windows, people laughing and talking and sharing food, as Kass came around to her side of the car with his magical umbrella.
She took his offered hand, and their palms sparked with connection as he helped her out of the car and toward the building.
“This is my favorite restaurant in the whole world,” he told her, hand lingering in hers a beat longer than necessary before he reached for the door handle. “It’s not super fancy or anything, but trust me, it’s legit.”
She didn’t say it, but Dani was glad he hadn’t brought her to some kind of gimmicky restaurant in an effort to impress her.
She liked the homey interior of the place, which smelled like olives and feta, and she liked the cushiony booth the host sat them in.
She liked the stuffed grape leaves Kass ordered as an appetizer, and she liked the story he told her while they ate them, about how his mom used to make them at home.
“This is where she and my dad met, actually,” he said. “She was a server and he was having a business meeting. It was love at first sight, to hear him tell it.”
“Is that how she told it?”
“Absolutely not. She thought he was kind of an asshole, but a cute asshole—her words, not mine.”
“Then how’d they end up together?”
“Same way I got you to go out with me, I guess,” Kass said. “A little persistence and a lot of luck. I just hope your first thought wasn’t that I seemed like an asshole.”
A self-conscious apricot brushed itself across the canvas of Dani’s mind. “Well,” she said, smiling, as she popped half a dolma into her mouth. “I kind of did. But only because you were violating the health code at the time.”
Kass shook his head. “Me and my lawlessness.”
“Pretty cool that you can shapeshift, by the way,” she said. “Is that an acquired skill, or something you’ve always been able to do?”
“A little bit of both,” Kass said. “Not every mage can do it, but it’s not like you’re born with the ability to transform into whatever you want, unless you’re super powerful. It was something I learned in high school, when my dad made me go to spellcraft camp during the summers.”
“Wow,” Dani said, lost momentarily in the fantasy of being raised by parents who sent you to camp to learn something instead of spending the summer at a betting hall. She let out a breath to blow the image away. “That’s impressive. Did you get to pick the dog?”
He laughed. “No,” he said, “that’s just the form the gods decided I got, I guess.”
“Interesting,” she said. “But seriously—health violations aside—are you worried about being an asshole? Because you shouldn’t be.”
“I don’t know. Maybe sometimes. They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“Proverbs are only useful when they’re useful,” Dani said, “and in any case, there was more than one tree you could fall from.”
“You’re not wrong.” Without her pressing him further, Kass kept going—but to her pleasure, no colors formed in the wake of his words.
“I’ve honestly never really thought to compare myself to my mom now that I’m older.
I was twelve when she died, and it’s just been me, my dad, and my sister since then. ”
“I didn’t know you had a sister. Are you two a lot alike?”
His eyes grew wide as he shook his head emphatically.
“We couldn’t be more different, I don’t think.
I mean, we kind of look alike, but our brains don’t work the same way at all.
She’s always been my dad’s idea of a perfect child—followed the exact path he laid out for her, from going to the grad school he picked to marrying the right person.
She works for his company now, which is, like, the last thing I’d want to do on this planet. ”
Their server returned to take their order.
Dani insisted Kass choose for both of them, with the assurance that she was completely omnivorous and allergic to nothing that she knew of, so they ended up with a smorgasbord of spanakopita, souvlaki, moussaka, and pita with tzatziki and hummus.
Dani was ravenous, and it all looked so delicious that she threw etiquette to the wind and helped herself to big portions of everything.
Twenty minutes later, they were laughing and talking as comfortably as if it were their fifth date rather than their first.
“So,” Dani said, having eaten as much as she could possibly fit into her jeans, “what’s the first thing you’d want to do on this planet?”
Kass swallowed some of his water wrong and coughed into his napkin. “Sorry?”
“Earlier you said working for your dad was the last thing you’d want to do on this planet. What’s the first?”
“Oh,” he said, looking down at his lap. “It’s kind of silly.”
It echoed what he’d said the first time they’d studied together at Quarter Cast, when he’d told her about his father’s expectations.
That night, he’d dodged giving her any concrete details about what he’d really like to do if he got to pursue his passions, and she hadn’t pushed him.
Tonight, though, she wanted to hear it. She took a sip of water and watched him intently.
“Well, first I’d like to travel the world and do research,” he said finally, like it was a terrible secret.
“I’d like to visit all kinds of ecosystems and study the magical properties of trees in different areas.
Maybe go to grad school—one that I pick—and do my thesis on whatever I find the most interesting. ”
“Then what?”
“Then?” Kass looked up, but not at her, gazing instead into space, as though glimpsing the future.
“If I could choose anything, I’d find a little cottage in the forest, maybe a farmette.
I’d still study trees, or maybe have a little furniture business, and carve wooden flutes for my kids, and just be happy. ”
His eyes focused on her again, and she could see that he was bracing himself to be laughed at, but she only smiled gently.
“Kass,” Dani said. “You’ve been telling me to be kinder to myself.
I think you should take your own advice, even if just this once.
Your dream isn’t silly. It’s just yours.
” She didn’t know what emboldened her—the vulnerability of his answer or the connection between them—but she reached across the table and put her hand on his.
He didn’t speak, just twined their fingers together, and they shared a quiet moment just like that, knowing they understood each other, and that understanding didn’t need any qualification.
He looked down at their hands, only to startle at the sight of his watch. “Oh shit, it’s almost eight thirty. Our next thing is at nine—we’d better get going.”
There was still a pita point left over, so Dani scarfed it, full or not, while Kass signaled their server and took care of the check.
For a moment she considered telling him they should split the bill, but everything happened so fast. It wasn’t like she really had the funds to cover her half anyway.
But I will, she thought, remembering suddenly the payout Silva had promised her. If all went according to plan and she had twenty-five thousand dollars in her bank account by the end of the semester, she’d treat Kass to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town.
For now, she allowed him to take her unabashedly by the hand and lead her out of the restaurant.
He forgot to put up the umbrella charm, so they were drenched in the fifteen seconds it took to get into his Subaru.
They were both laughing and wet and for a brief, electric second she thought she might kiss him, or that he might kiss her, but the moment passed.
Kass started the car and pulled away from the restaurant.
“What’s next on the agenda, Mr. Mysterious?” Dani asked, smothering her disappointment with the promise of the rest of the evening.
“Please, just call me Kass,” he said. “I think we’re at that level now. And I prefer to show, not tell, if you don’t mind waiting just a little bit longer.”
“Fine,” Dani said with mock impatience. “But this had better be good.”