Chapter 16
I honestly don’t know where I’m going, but my feet seem to. They carry me right into the sanctuary of the church.
I haven’t been to the actual church building in so long, I’d almost forgotten what it looks like.
The sanctuary itself is tall, with pointed arches, everything made of white brick and pale gray cement.
The doors are open tonight, and I push them, letting the freezing cold air within surround me, carrying with it the faint smell of lemon cleaners and spicy incense.
The windows are also tall and skinny like the interior, with black boards framing the stained glass. On one side of the church, the stained glass depicts key scenes from the Old Testament; on the other, it’s all the key scenes from Jesus’s life.
It hits me, what @tryingsomethingnew had told me about the church. The weird doors. The weird architecture. I want to kick myself for spending so much time with people that I lost sight of my little investigation into the possible Cranberry witches’ cult.
There are a couple of women praying right in front of the altar.
The church always has its doors open between Masses for that purpose—to allow people to come and talk to Jesus.
They’re so immersed in their divine conversations that no one looks at me as I walk around the perimeter of the sanctuary, looking for anything unusual.
I walk around to the bathrooms and examine both the men’s and women’s.
The church store is closed, but when I stop to examine it, peeking in though the door windows, I notice something a little bit strange.
Almost all the relics are not of Jesus, Mary, or random angels.
They’re of Mary Magdalene. There are prints of old paintings, little saint cards depicting her being carried by angels, her hair dark and flowing, her gaze tilted toward the heavens.
For some reason, I don’t remember the focus on Mary Magdalene when I was a kid.
Has the church store always been this way?
Or did this change happen when I was in a coma in an oak tree?
My phone beeps. It’s Adam.
Hey, where are you? Is everything okay?
I don’t know what to say to him. I’m not mad at him, exactly, but I don’t feel great about how easily he’d forgotten me when his adoring fans appeared.
Just two hours ago, he was pouring his heart out to me about his List of Impossible Ghostly Things.
Just forty-five minutes ago, he was telling me he’d do anything to see me smile.
And now he’s only just noticed I ran away—I check the time—twenty minutes after I’d left him.
I’m fine, I tell him. Thanks for checking in.
Where are you?
I swallow. I don’t want him to know how hurt I feel right now. Oh, around. I have a ride home so you don’t have to—
“There you are.” Before I finish the response, Adam’s voice, Adam’s words, are behind me, surrounding me just as the church air had earlier when I first stepped inside.
I open my mouth to say something, I’m not sure what, when he wraps his arms around me in a big hug.
“Oh,” I say, and after a moment, I put one arm around his shoulders and the other around his waist.
His lips touch my neck. Not in a kiss, exactly, but in relief. “I was so worried about you. Why did you turn your phone off?”
“I didn’t?” I say into this shoulder. His voice is reverberating into my skin. It’s making goose bumps trail down my body. It’s making my nipples hard.
“I called you, like, a dozen times. It went straight to voice mail.” He pulls back and looks around. “I’m pretty sure most of this building is shit service. You been here this whole time?”
I nod.
He swallows. “Why—why did you leave me?”
In response, I can’t help it: I burst into tears.
“Sky. Sky,” he murmurs, pulling me back into his arms. It feels so good to be wrapped up by him, by his large, warm body. I hold him tight and my shoulders shake as I try to get words out.
“It’s Grayson Baker,” I sob.
“Baker? The one who was just out there with Fatima and them?”
“Yeah. He tricked me. He…we were going to hook up but he humiliated me instead. I was half-naked…he had his friend on the phone…”
I don’t even get to finish the sentence when Adam pulls back. I’m startled into silence. I’ve never seen this Adam before. His jaw is clenched so tightly, I can see the muscles ticcing in it. His eyes are…not sparkling, that’s for damn sure. They’re sharp. Violently so.
“He humiliated you? He tricked you?” His voice is nearly a growl. I wonder if he realizes it.
I close my eyes. More tears trail down my cheeks, and then Adam’s warm fingers are there, brushing them away. “I would have been fine if he had pretended like I wasn’t there just now. But he looked at me and smirked and, and then he winked. I just had to run, you know?”
Adam nods. “I know.” His jaw is still firm. His eyes still as bright as a blazing fire. “You ready to go?”
I nod, and he wraps an arm around me. We walk quickly, past the Wild Whirly Whirl ride, past the popcorn and candy apple vendors, slowing once we are near the Ferris wheel. “One second,” he tells me, releasing my shoulder. I miss the warmth of his arm. Stupid, I know.
He walks over to the crowd still by the benches he and I had dinner at. “Baker,” he shouts.
Grayson stands up, a big smile on his face, his arms wide. “What’s up, Noemi?”
“This.” And then Adam punches Grayson right across the face.
Grayson collapses instantly. Three seconds later, someone shouts, “He’s out cold!”
Adam walks away from the scene without once looking back. He comes back to me and grabs my hand. “You ready?”
I nod without speaking, because the words just won’t come to me right now. What can I possibly say to that? To what just happened? I’m still trying to process it.
Did Adam Noemi really punch Grayson Baker in the face?
All because he’d hurt me?
I want to shiver. I want to high-five Adam. I want to cry all over again.
But I don’t do any of these, instead opting for the continuation of my stunned silence.
We get in his car once more; this time the night around us is thick as ink.
Adam starts the car, and we drive home in silence.
He’s seething, I think. I can feel the tension and frustration emanating from him in hot, sharp waves. One punch wasn’t enough for him.
He pulls into Nadia’s driveway and turns the car off. He turns to me. “Are you okay?”
“Are you okay?” I ask him, gesturing to his hand. “That looked—you know. That was kind of a hard punch, it looked like.”
“Yeah, well.” Adam rubs his knuckles. “He deserved worse.” He shakes his head. “I’ll be fine. Are you okay, Sky?”
I nod. “Yeah. I’m good.”
“Good.” He sighs and lets his head fall back on his seat. He covers his face with his hand and chuckles. “I haven’t gotten into a brawl since I was a teenager.”
“To be fair, I don’t think knocking a man out with one punch counts as a brawl.”
Adam lowers his hands and looks at me, no longer laughing.
He’s serious, what about, I don’t know. The streetlamps around us paint him in sheets of amber.
He looks like he did that one night, when I was still a ghost—angelic.
“Sky,” he says, and his voice is husky once more, just like before, when he caught me staring right at his lips way too hard.
A knock on the window has both of us jumping, with me shrieking as though the whole car had shattered. But it’s just Nadia.
Of course. Nadia is literally never here when I’m craving company. But when I have company? Here she is, smiling like she knows something I don’t, waving at us from outside the vehicle, gesturing for Adam to roll the window down.
Once he does, she says, “Adam! What a nice surprise! Want to come in for some flan?”
Adam smiles. His eyes stay a bit weary. “Thank you so much for the offer, Ms. Flores. But I need to check on my grandfather.”
Nadia, of course, has to push it, by offering to wrap up flan for him and William, but Adam is firm in declining. It’s clear he wants to be alone. “Nadia,” I say, getting out of the car. “I’ll bring them your flan tomorrow, okay?”
“Well. Okay.” She gives me the stink eye, as though I were the one having trouble understanding Adam’s clear boundaries, and then waves at Adam. “Good night, young man!”
He nods and waves, turning the car back on and slowly driving across the street to William’s. Meanwhile, I turn to Nadia and raise my eyebrows.
“Adam already knows you’re trying to play matchmaker. So you can cut it out now.”
“Cut out what?” she asks in a fake innocent voice.
But then she adds, “Is it matchmaking if I already know what’s coming?
Eh?” I roll my eyes as we both climb the three steps to the porch side by side.
Since she’s in her seventies and putting off another knee replacement her doctor has recommended for a decade, she goes a great deal slower than I normally do.
I offer my arm, but Nadia hisses and lightly smacks it, as though I had gravely offended her as well as all the ancestors instead of just offering help.
“Amá Sonya came into my work and told me Adam wasn’t a good match because he has no money.”
“Ah.” Now Nadia looks sincerely offended. She and her sister, Sonya, act like they hate each other’s guts about ninety-eight percent of the time. In the other two percent, they merely tolerate one another. “So you want to take her advice? End up in a marriage like hers?”
I frown. “She is mostly alone. He’s always away. That’s what makes her happy, right?”
Nadia raises her eyebrow. “If you think your grandmother is happy, I have some seaside property in Oklahoma to sell you, amor.”
I roll my eyes. “Whatever.” I open up the fridge to pull out some cold water.
“He punched that man for you, no? That’s love.”
I abruptly place the pitcher back on the shelf. “You know that? From your knowing? Already?”
Nadia lifts her phone. “My knowing is fast. But sometimes the Cranberry grapevine is faster. There’s a video in the WhatsApp chat I’m in with the nuns.”
“Let me see.”
“Ah-ah-ah,” she says, pulling her phone back. “Why do you need to see, if that man isn’t your true love? Huh?”
I roll my eyes. “Whatever. I’m sure it will be in the Cranberry Facebook group soon enough.”
“Sí. Then everyone will see his love for you!” she calls as I stomp upstairs.
After showering, and washing my face, and applying moisturizer, I don’t open up any social media groups. Instead, I pull up Matchmakr, frowning when there are no new messages from @tryingsomethingnew. My little Good morning looks lonely and a bit pathetic now.
It takes me a long time to decide to just let it be.
The last time he and I communicated, we got all spicy and both allegedly had orgasms thanks to turning each other on.
What if he’s the kind of guy who abandons a woman after fooling around with her?
I may have spent basically all my adult years in a supernatural hibernation in the forest, but I still know how some men can be.
And if that describes him, well, maybe I don’t want to know him like that anymore.
I want to text my sisters so bad right now.
Tears sting at my eyes. I need someone to really listen to me and everything I’m going through.
Between Adam and this anonymous man, between Nadia and Amá Sonya trying to get in my head, I feel so confused.
My thoughts are pulling me this way and that, leaving me feeling groundless and numb.
It’s like I have a pile of yarn in front of me, all wound up and tangled. Sage and Teal would be able to help me sort it.
But what good is their help if they forget I’m their sister? If they forget I need them?
This is how I end up crying myself to sleep.