Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Don’t forget I’m bringing the wagon down today.
How could I forget? GIANT SPIDER IS READY TO GO.
She was trying to be fun and funny and let go of the little… ouch that had happened last night. She didn’t need to cling to something that was impossible anyway. She’d let herself get too wounded by something that there was just no reason to get wound up about.
They were decorating the wagon today. They were friends. It was good. It was all good.
Her car was full of decorations, her heart was full of cheer. “And so it is!” she said into the empty space because she was naming and claiming that.
There was a knock on the back door of the shop, and she scampered to the back room and opened it. There he was. All Emperor energy. His wagon was on a flatbed, and she looked up at it. “How do you get that down?”
“We’ll get it down with a winch, and then leave it in one of the parking spaces back here if that’s okay.”
“Yeah. That’s fine.”
He nodded.
“I just have a few things to clean up in here.”
“I’ll get the wagon down, and I’ll let you know when it’s decorating time.”
“Sure,” she said, hoping she sounded breezy, and not breathless.
She picked up her tarot deck and got ready to put it back in the box when there was a knock at the door again.
Clutching the deck, she opened up the door.
“Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“That was quick.”
“With the correct machinery, things go a lot faster.”
There was a vibrator joke in there somewhere, but she decided not to make it, because things were already weird.
Well, they were weird to her. He, apparently, didn’t remember that night. Didn’t remember something that had become a seminal event in her mind.
“I’m just cleaning up.”
“Your store always looks clean.”
“Organized chaos. At least, I do my best.”
“It doesn’t feel chaotic.”
He was being nice enough to her that it made her wonder if he had sensed a bit of the awkwardness, or her woundedness after that whole situation yesterday.
“Do you want me to pull a card for you?”
He had dumped her into a bad space, and part of her wanted, really badly, to make him uncomfortable back.
He narrowed his gaze. “I don’t go in for that kind of thing.”
“Do you have something against it?”
“No.”
“Well, then, aren’t you curious? I thought you were a little more inquisitive than that.”
He looked offended by that. “I’m perfectly inquisitive.”
“No, you aren’t. You decide that you think something is dumb, and then you just cling to the fact that it’s dumb.”
“I didn’t say it was dumb.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Eliana,” he said. “I did not say it was dumb.”
She shrugged.
“Great. Do me a… a reading. Go ahead.”
She began to shuffle the cards in her hand. “Okay. But you need to correct your energy.”
“Correct my energy?”
“Come on, Cooper. You’re bringing negative energy into the space. And it’s going to cloud your reading.”
“I’m good. My energy is positive.”
“Is it?”
“I’m energetically clear,” he said.
“Come here,” she said, gesturing to the back room. She took a seat at the small table that had the crystal ball and shuffled the deck. He was standing there, in the doorway, arms crossed, looking at her skeptically.
“I’m not going to bite you. Or curse you.”
He rolled his eyes. Then he sat down across from her. “Okay. How does this work?”
“Well, let’s see. I think we should do a little bit of an energetic read.”
“You just said my energy was rancid.”
“I did not say it was rancid. And anyway, that isn’t what I meant. Like, let’s get a reading around your life right now.”
“What’s that supposed to tell me?”
“Like I told you, I don’t think anything is as straightforward as fortune-telling.
Life has infinite possibilities. And a lot of Tarot is tapping into your intuition, how it makes you think about your own life when you look at a certain card and the symbolism on it. I think that can lead to clarity.”
“Okay.”
“So, this is about you, Cooper. What energy surrounds you.” She spread the deck out in front of them. “Choose a card.”
He took one and placed it face down in front of her.
She flipped it over. And she laughed. “The Emperor. The Emperor is…” She didn’t want to tell him it was the card she associated with him.
“It’s masculine energy. Discipline. Rules and foundations.
That’s you. That’s the energy you bring to the world around you. You are structure. Dependability.”
“Okay,” he said. “And that’s good. That’s who you are.
So what energy is coming your way soon?” She flipped the card over and just about screeched.
The Lovers. And on this particular deck, that card was sexy.
Two people locked in an embrace, naked. She looked up at him, and their eyes met.
“I… Well. It’s not a reading for me, that’s for sure. ”
“I… Is that…”
“We can take that one at face value. Congrats on your sex life.”
He didn’t say anything else. She blew out a harsh breath and then tried to think of another question.
“What should you be looking to right now?” She drew the card and flipped it over.
The Three of Pentacles. “Oh,” she said. She felt relieved by that.
“That’s about teamwork. Working together.
So, the community. You working with the community, doing this hayride. ”
“Well, there you go. You got all that from this. But I don’t know what to tell you. The lovers card doesn’t resonate.”
“Well. Great. But then, you’re not the one who’s cursed.”
“No.”
They looked at each other, and her stomach went tight.
“Anyway. Let’s go get the decorations going. I want to get the wagon done before it gets dark.”
“Yeah. Good thinking.” They walked out of the back room, and she decided to just leave the cards. She felt scalded by the reading. Jealous and out of sorts.
She didn’t want him to know that.
“The decorations are in your car?” he asked when they got out to the main part of the room.
“Yeah. In the car.”
He nodded. “All right.”
She was suddenly unbearably conscious of the fact that they were in the shop alone. Standing there.
And he was tall. So tall, and sexy as hell, and he filled up the space in a way that made her feel tiny and fragile, and not in a scary way, in a sexy way.
He made her so very aware of the fact that she was female, and he was male. That he was hard and angular and strong, and she was soft and untouched. Begging to be touched.
She practically scampered toward the door. “Yes. Let’s go. Let’s go and decorate the wagon.” She sounded overly chipper, and she knew it. She hoped that he wouldn’t identify why she had gotten so overly chipper because it was straight up embarrassing.
Eliana, get up off the floor.
When she stepped outside the back door of the shop and got a better look at the wagon, she saw the hay was perfectly stacked inside of it, making a perfect place for people to sit in a circle around the perimeter.
Right at the head of the wagon were two bales of hay stacked on top of each other, so that she could sit a little bit higher than everybody else as the storyteller.
“Oh, it’s perfect. You really have a vision for it.
” She didn’t add that his vision was clearly limited, because it didn’t extend to her idea about the spider, but she felt that he deserved more credit, less criticism.
After all, what he was doing was more than enough.
“You’re a prince among men,” she said.
He snorted. “Doubt that.”
“Why do you doubt it?”
“I think that’s overstating things a little bit.”
“I don’t know about that. I think this is wonderful.”
She turned away from the wagon and toward her car, opening the back doors and beginning to ferret out her decorations. He followed, but when he got a look in the back and saw the giant spider, he gave her a terse look with his furrowed brow.
“What?”
“I don’t like that thing at all.”
“It’s charming,” she said, reaching in and taking out the massive arachnid. He had a fat, fuzzy body and wide, spindly legs. “I have a bunch of batting that can be a web.”
“Great.”
“Do you not like spiders?”
“Does anybody… like spiders?”
“They’re extremely functional. They are a friend to all.”
“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that they are a friend to me.”
“They eat garden pests!”
“Then they’re not a friend to garden pests.”
“Well, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But also, I think they’re cute.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“I’m not.”
She liked all living things, if she were honest. They all served a purpose, and in her experience, when nature presented itself to you, it was often trying to send you a message. She was never going to smash a messenger.
He reached into the car and took out a few bags full of decorations, and she hefted her giant spider, wrapping her arms entirely around its fat body, and carrying it, legs sticking straight out in front of her, into the back of the wagon.
“It is a little heavy,” she said. “So maybe you’re right. Maybe on top of the wagon burden, we don’t want to put it on one of the horses.”
“I would never let you subject my horses to that thing.”
“I think you’re being very hateful toward Harold.”
“Harold?”
“That’s his name.”
“Since when?”
She shrugged. Unwilling to tell him that she had just now decided on a name, because she had sensed that it would irritate him. And there was something about irritating him that really appealed to her.
Maybe because that felt like a distancing tactic, and maybe the distancing would get her mind out of the mopey-forlorn-perennially-rejected-friend’s-little-sister funk. It was worth a shot.
She cheerfully carried her spider – now dubbed Harold – to the wagon, and experimented with where she thought he might look good on the back. Then she set him down and dug in one of the bags for cotton batting. She began to unspool the batting, using it to drape cobwebs all over the wagon.
“I have to build a house for Harold first,” she said.
He didn’t sigh heavily, but she could feel that he wanted to.
Poor guy.