Chapter 14 Dove #2
A laugh slipped from my lips, and I glanced over at Ellis, who said nothing, but her attention was full and focused, like she was genuinely interested in the answer.
Or was I imagining that?
“Um, fine,” I said with a sigh, keeping my eyes on the road. “I dated this girl in my senior year. She was nice. Cute as fuck. But when we graduated, she got into UCLA and didn’t want to do long distance, and I understood, you know? It was fine. Like, whatever.”
It had not been whatever.
Ellis was still silent, but I thought I saw her flinch a little. At what, I didn’t know.
“Then I dated this girl who was going to school in Chicago. We were together for, like, two years. We broke up... ten months ago now? I don’t know. We lived together and everything.”
“Really?” Liv asked with interest. “What happened?”
That pain that had once been searing hot inside me was dull these days, a small ache that reminded me I’d once been shredded.
My jaw still tightened, though.
“She cheated.”
A beat of silence passed between us.
“In our apartment,” I added. “In our bed.”
“No,” Ellis gasped, her hand flying to her mouth.
“Yep.” I popped the p and found myself clutching the wheel tighter. “With a guy.”
“What a slut,” Liv hissed, just as Ellis offered a horrified, “No...”
“Yeah,” I murmured on a soft exhale, forcing the lump in my throat back down.
“Anyway, she hated the shop. Hated the cards and stuff. She acted like it was cute at first. She would bring her friends in for readings, buy crystals and shit. Margaret didn’t like her.
I mean, she never outright said it to me, but I wasn’t stupid.
She told me I’d have to grow up one day and get a real job. ”
Ellis’s brows pulled together, the expression on her face like she’d been wounded on my behalf.
“Yeah, so that relationship definitely had a shelf life,” I continued, trying to maintain a breezy note in my voice. “It just... soured faster than I thought it would.”
Liv didn’t crack a joke, and Ellis didn’t say a word.
I risked a glance at her. She was staring straight ahead now, at the endless stretch of road before us. But her jaw was tight again, and she was picking at invisible lint on her beige shorts.
I wondered what had gotten the gears turning in her head so quickly. Was she cataloging this moment, adding it to the invisible Dove Marley file?
Then I mentally slapped myself. Bold of me to assume I took up any time in the mind of Ellis Langley.
“You guys don’t have to look so horrified,” I said with a sigh. “It was ages ago now.”
“I mean, it’s pretty horrible,” Ellis said quickly, shaking her head. “What an asshole.”
“Eh,” I said with a shrug and a forced half smile. “She sucked. It’s over. Whatever.”
Liv clicked her tongue beside me and said, “Well, you’re currently in a car with an emotionally complicated lesbian and a ghost. Statistically, I still feel like it’s more emotionally safe here than your last relationship.”
I laughed loudly, despite the tension that had been building, suddenly dissolved by Liv’s words. Ellis laughed too, surprising me, and even Liv’s brows arched slightly.
“So, Ellis,” Liv said brightly. “Are you going to tell us the details of your sordid love life?”
“Not on your life, Liv,” Ellis replied quickly, grabbing her phone again and retreating into the safety of editing.
I snorted and adjusted the volume on the music, turning it up, letting Liv know that girl talk was officially over and that Ellis was not to be pushed.
She flopped back down on the seat, legs hanging out the window once more.
I took a deep breath and focused on the road, my words still hanging in the air, mostly around me. Talking about my ex was one thing, but it felt like I’d shaken loose some dusty, buried part of myself. Words I’d refused to confront, yet now found myself staring straight in the face.
“You need to grow up and get a real job, Dove,” Sarah had told me gently, stroking my hair. Her voice had been soft, full of care, but the words had sliced through me all the same. “Surely you don’t think the shop will be around forever...”
“I’d be a business owner,” I’d replied with a frown, my voice rising with growing defensiveness. “I would call that a real job.”
God, her words still lived in my brain like a shitty roommate who refused to move out. But it wasn’t just her, and that’s what made it worse.
It was my mother’s voice too, layered underneath. The way she’d scoffed when I was told the shop would be mine. The way she’d looked at it like it was some second-rate lemonade stand, and I was just playing pretend until the real world came for me.
“You need to do something real, you know?”
Something real? Like the years I’d spent following Margaret to carnivals, watching her do readings, helping her set up, and studying under her.
Feeling her magic. Like the hours I’d spent stocking shelves, taking inventory and polishing crystal displays.
Watching Margaret hold the hands of desperate people—dying people, the deeply lost—and guiding them through their grief, like that wasn’t real?
The aftershocks of her words had lingered for months.
They left me feeling like a fraud. And even now, I struggled to connect with the magic I’d once trusted so easily. The energy I used to feel from people. The truths hidden inside words that were once so easy for me to extract and untangle.
Then there was that part of me that had been festering ever since Margaret’s death.
The part that feared I’d screw it all up. That I’d tarnish years of history.
Was I still that same young kid playing dress-up, sitting in Margaret’s chair, trying to fill shoes I was never truly meant to grow into?
Half the time, I didn’t even feel like a grown-up.
What even was a grown-up?
I paid bills on time. Helped Margaret balance the books.
Sometimes, when customers wandered in with red eyes, I knew exactly which deck to recommend or the right thing to say.
Sometimes, I’d pull a card with eerie accuracy, and I could almost feel Margaret’s undying smirk over my shoulder, approval trembling down my spine.
But most times? I felt like I was faking it. Still waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say it was time. That I was done. That I was being sent off to the boring horrors of reality.
I’d never air these thoughts out loud. Never share them with anyone.
Never admit that the ache growing in my chest since my ex’s careless words had taken root, that I’d carried it with me, let it weigh me down, let it settle in some ugly, dark corner of my mind where it whispered doubt into my ears.
I let out a breath and flexed my fingers around the wheel, letting the motion ground me. I listened to the hum of the Mustang’s wheels, rolling steady against the asphalt.
All I could do was prove everyone wrong.
No matter what it took.
I really wasn’t sure what I had been expecting when Ellis said the words “Blue Whale of Catoosa” this morning, but it definitely hadn’t been a smiling—and mildly deranged-looking—sea creature lounging long and proudly across a murky pond just outside rural Oklahoma.
“Okay,” I muttered as we approached it. “This is kind of iconic.”
Liv was already halfway up the tail of the whale, her boots clattering loudly with the grace of a Broadway acrobat, yet with the zero caution of someone who knew she could no longer break a bone.
“What’s up, Moby Dead!” she shouted triumphantly as she stood at the head of the whale—likely near the blowhole—and spread her arms wide, looking weirdly majestic in her black thigh-high boots and sparkling sequined outfit, her pink hair flying in the wind as she whooped loudly.
I approached the mouth of the whale, where Ellis was standing, snapping photos of the giant sea creature.
“Let me get you a full one,” I offered, holding out my hand for her phone.
She handed it to me with a smile and then posed in the mouth of the whale, one hand on the brown pole, the other raised in the air, a grin on her face, the wind catching her hair just right.
I snapped a few different shots before grinning and handing the phone back to her.
“Do you want a picture?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, passing her my phone and swapping places.
I wasn’t cute enough to pull off those kinds of poses, so I stood in the same spot, one hand on the pole, the other dangling awkwardly at my side, as I smiled.
Ellis snapped the pictures and handed me back the phone.
“This is kind of awesome,” she said, her voice echoing down the tunnel of the whale. “I don’t even know why I like it so much. Maybe because it’s random and quirky. Like, it’s not a car museum, you know? It’s just so random.”
“It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” I agreed with a grin. “Even weirder than the Gemini Giant. Do you have some nerd history on it?”
She flushed, and my mouth went dry as she brushed a strand of hair from her face and shrugged. “Only if you want to hear it. Because obviously, I do.”
God, at this rate I wanted to hear anything she had to say.
God damn it, Dove.
“Tell me,” I urged.
“Okay,” she said with another dazzling grin.
“Come here.” She stepped out of the whale’s mouth and moved to the side, closer to the water.
She pointed toward the whale’s body, where Liv was currently treating it like a balance beam.
“So, the whale is actually eighty feet long and twenty feet tall. It was originally built by a guy named Hugh S. Davis, he was a zoologist…”
I watched her as she spoke, her eyes bright with animation as she recalled the details stored in that binder of a brain she had.
Clearly, this kind of stuff fascinated her, and I wasn’t about to yuck her yum.
Honestly, this version of her—the one geeking out about roadside attractions—was a lot nicer than the version I’d started the trip with.
“So yeah, that’s the history,” she finished, glancing down at her phone. “Okay, we should head toward Tulsa. We can grab some lunch and look around before heading to Oklahoma City. I prebooked a room there.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, my voice a little airy as I turned back toward the path.
“Oh shit!”
Ellis’s voice was followed by a startled yelp. I spun around just in time to see her foot twist on the slick mud. She flung her phone further up onto dry ground as her arms flailed, reaching for anything to steady herself.
I didn’t think twice.
I reached out and caught her mid-stumble, grabbing her by the waist and pulling her upright, taking a few quick steps back to steady us both.
The movement brought us chest to chest.
Her breath hitched as the yelp died on her lips.
I felt her heartbeat through her shirt, and then I wondered if it was hers or mine. She smelled like strawberry shampoo and sunscreen, and I became dangerously aware of the curve of her hip beneath my palm. Her shirt had risen slightly, and her skin was cool to the touch. My hand felt seared.
Her eyes were wide. Her face and neck flushed.
And then…
Her gaze dropped.
To my mouth.
My skin prickled as I lost all sense of thought, every cell in my body seeming to snap to attention, my pulse roaring in my ears.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I felt frozen in time.
“Well, well, well,” Liv’s voice rang out suddenly, shattering the moment like someone had smashed a plate. “What is going on here?”
A few things happened in quick succession after that.
Ellis leapt backward, a shocked gasp on her lips at Liv’s sudden intrusion. Her jump made me stumble, and I could already feel myself overcorrecting. A shriek left my mouth, hands flailing as I watched Ellis topple backward into the water.
As my feet carried me forward, I hurled my phone onto the bank, and then I was down too, landing face-first into the shallow lake, the air nearly knocked out of me.
“Ahh!” I spluttered, my hand slapping the lakebed as I scrambled to my knees.
Ellis was gaping like a fish, sitting on her ass, completely soaked from the fall. Her hair had come loose from her clip, now dripping wet.
Liv let out a shrieking scream from the bank, doubled over with laughter.
“Oh my God, you guys!” she wheezed between cackles.
Ellis groaned loudly as she got to her feet, water sloshing around her. I followed, my feet slipping on the muddy lakebed.
“I don’t believe this!” Ellis hissed, stomping up the bank. I trailed after her, spotting both our phones, dry and untouched in the sand.
“Well, I can,” Liv sang as she twirled around us. “Honestly, the tension between you two was about to drown someone. I probably just saved a life.”
“You scared the shit out of me!” Ellis roared, then turned to me with wide eyes. “Oh my God, I am so sorry!”
I grimaced at the water in my shoes, shaking my foot uselessly. “Well, you couldn’t fall alone… you kind of dragged me with you.”
“I pushed you away!” Ellis defended.
“I slipped from the push!” I countered, mildly pleased she’d admitted it.
“I didn’t ask you to—”
“I wasn’t going to let you just fall in—”
“Man, if I had a nickel for every time a near-drowning kicked off some repressed gay feelings,” Liv cut in, voice full of taunting laughter, “I’d have one nickel.”
Ellis let out a strangled noise and actually stomped her foot. “We need to change into dry clothes. There’s a bathroom block over there.”
Liv opened her mouth again, but Ellis held up a palm, eyes blazing.
“Not. A. Word,” she seethed, wringing out her hair.
Liv let out another shrill laugh and danced ahead toward the Mustang. She twirled, turning to face Ellis.
“Too late, Ellis. It’s literally going in my memoir. Chapter Fourteen: The Whale of Denial.”
From the look on Ellis’s face, if Liv hadn’t already been dead, she might’ve been.
I followed silently behind them to the car, fighting to keep the shit-eating grin off my face.