24. Cheribelle
Cheribelle
I was so nervous I could eat a sock.
Except that would be a textural nightmare, so maybe not.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Is my outfit okay?
Wait, did I take my medicine? OMG! A date, a date, a date!
Does my outfit look all right?
Am I dressed too casual?
Will he think I’m not taking this seriously?
Am I dressed too formal?
Will he think I’m being a poser?
I’m twenty-six and he’s in his thirties, both of us are too old to be posers.
But not too old for cringe!
Very helpful.
I glanced at the time on my phone again, sure that at least an hour had passed since the last time I checked, only to see that it had only been ten whole minutes.
Damn it!
Full of all sorts of nervous energy, I began to pace, then stopped myself because I didn’t want to work up a sweat and ruin my makeup.
“ Mrrrrow? ”
“I know, I know, my pacing makes you nervous,” I told Hudson, who was winding around my feet. If I was a tiny, eight-pound thing and two of those pounds were just fur, I wouldn’t be cozying up to a giant stomping around with essentially knives strapped to their shoes.
“ Mrrp!”
“You’re right, I should save my feet.”
Although I had a collection of high heels, I rarely wore them, so I’d break a pair out for my first date in… God, how long was it?
At least a couple of years. And a few of those felt like they were contained within the past week.
I hadn’t planned on telling those journalists the truth about my ability, but I hadn’t really planned on journalists being there. Which was kind of ironic, considering the reason I’d originally bullied my way into the situation.
But it had resulted in a boom in business I never could have predicted.
My voicemail was full, and my email was overwhelmingly stuffed to bursting.
I’d been so sure that anyone finding out I was an empath instead of a precog would destroy my chances of continuing my mother’s legacy, but it turned out I couldn’t be more wrong.
“Who woulda thought, huh, Hudson?”
My cat didn’t respond, and when I looked down, she’d left my feet to settle on the closest cat bed and clean her butthole.
“Sorry, didn’t realize I was boring you.”
She did not respond.
But it wasn’t like I was all that eager to have a conversation while I was showering, so I sat down and tried to be patient.
Somehow, even after all the crazy growth I liked to think I had in the past month, I still wasn’t any more patient.
Oh well, we all had our flaws.
But even if I didn’t really have much patience, I did have short-form video content, so that would just have to do. I scrolled mindlessly for about seven minutes before even videos of cats intimidating dogs four times their size couldn’t distract me, then I got up and headed downstairs.
So much for time blindness, I thought to myself as I reached the bottom of the stairs. I was acutely aware of every single second that was passing.
Thankfully, Paul was not the type to be late, and two minutes before our agreed meeting time, I heard a knock on my door.
Oh God! He’s here!
Of course he’s here!
I’ve been waiting for him and looking forward to this all week!
I think I’m gonna be sick.
Maybe I should cancel?
No! Absolutely not!
Shouldn’t I answer the door?
Oh… right.
With one last glance at myself in the hallway mirror, I took the last step forward and opened my door.
Sure enough—not that there had been any doubt—it was indeed Paul standing there with a truly impressive bouquet of flowers.
“Holy moly! I didn’t know you were bringing a florist shop!” I said, happily taking them into my arms.
“If you don’t like them, you don’t have to keep them,” he said. “I don’t mind.”
He reached out a hand, as genuine as he always was, but I playfully slapped it away.
“Unless you want to be the second VanMarche who gets a limb cut off, you leave my flowers alone!” Sometimes (all the time) my mouth moved faster than my mind, so it wasn’t until my words were all the way out of my mouth before I realized what I said. “Oh my god, I’m sorry! Is it too soon?”
But Paul was already laughing and shaking his head. “You know, I don’t need anything else adding to the difficulty people have differentiating me from my brothers. I’ll keep the limb.” He turned and offered me his arm like a classical gentleman. “Unless you’d like to take it, that is.”
I appreciated the subtle pun and grinned as I wrapped my arm around his. “Don’t mind if I do.”
“Perfect.”
Together, we walked down my short driveway and to his car. It felt a bit strange to be dolled up and out and about a little before two o’clock in the afternoon, but that was the time Paul had requested.
When we’d finally gotten around to planning the date after the furor of giving all our statements, going to the hospital, and making arrangements for Luther to be released into home care along with his fiancée Gem, Paul had mostly asked a few questions before requesting that I leave everything to him.
I’d been curious, of course, and even asked what he was planning, but when he said he wanted it to be a surprise, I decided to roll with it.
Besides, it sure was a more pleasant riddle than the ones we’d been solving (or failing to solve) lately.
So, despite the bright light of day, I was in the dark as he drove along.
Still, I didn’t mind. Although we were all adjusting to our new normal, this little slice of normalcy was pleasant.
Well, as normal as it could be going on a date with the man I had been developing feelings for and trying to deny the entire time.
When he first asked me out with all those journalists’ lights flashing and the barking of the detectives in the background, I thought I was imagining it, that it was a hallucination from my concussion or the other trauma I’d gone through that day.
But no. It had been real. And even though I was in the car with him now, it was still hard to believe that it was actually happening.
After all, I had technically conned him when we first met, and I wasn’t rich by any means.
At least not compared to any of the great families.
I wasn’t refined. I wasn’t a debutante. I wasn’t a shifter.
I wasn’t demure. I wasn’t like any of the matches that had probably been suggested to him for a mating contract.
But that didn’t seem to matter to him, so I decided not to let it matter to me. I liked Paul for his kindness, his bravery, for the way he looked out for the people around him, for the way he bantered with me and accepted me for who I was.
It didn’t hurt that he was also hot as fuck.
And speaking of banter, we did exactly that until we pulled up to a fancy afternoon tea place. I wasn’t quite sure what to think of that, until we walked inside and I realized they had an oyster bar as well as crab and lobster available.
“Have as much as you want,” Paul said once we were seated at an upscale table, not a single booth in sight.
I think I’m in love?
For the first time in, well, ever, I ate as much expensive seafood as I could stomach, and it wasn’t even at an all-you-can-eat place!
It was quite the gluttonous experience, and I grew self-conscious and was worried Paul would be grossed out, but when I looked over at him, he looked pleased as punch.
And that was when I remembered he was a freaking wolf shifter. Not only could he keep up with my voracious consumption of delicious sea boogers and bugs, but he could likely triple it and not even be uncomfortably full.
Hell yeah.
I definitely felt fancy and very full afterward, but much to my gratitude, Paul didn’t seem in a hurry to go. I knew I could have just asked him if we could sit around for a bit while I digested, but it meant a lot that I didn’t even need to.
“So, what’s it feel like now that the secret is out?”
I finished sipping the wine I’d ordered. I wasn’t the biggest drinker, as I didn’t really like how it reacted with my medicine, but the place was just so fancy that it called for nursing the few ounces of rosé I could handle.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you no longer pretending to be a precognitive psychic and showing the world how incredible an empath can be.”
I was grateful for my full coverage foundation concealing just how much I was blushing. Normally, I could handle compliments with a thank-you and a witty retort, but normally compliments came from people I didn’t have a raging crush on.
“It’s interesting, that’s for certain. I got some emails from previous clients who were livid about me deceiving them, and I just went ahead and gave them refunds because they were right.
And then there were a few who messaged me because they were curious how I could have known so many things if I wasn’t a traditional psychic. ”
“I’ve been there myself. When you first told me the truth, I was sure it was a trick, because there was no way you could know all those things you’d said about me at our first meeting if you weren’t psychic.”
Man, thinking back to when I’d first laid eyes on the man was almost like an entirely different lifetime.
I’d clocked that he was handsome right off the bat—I would have had to be blind not to—but it had been that incredibly tight-laid brick wall of protection that had intrigued me.
It was crazy to think there wasn’t a single brick between us now.
He was open as a book, and I did not take that lightly.
Him trusting me so much still made me want to be a better person, but now I felt like I was actually in the process of doing so.
“Obviously, I now know there are many different powers oracles can have, but at the time, I struggled to wrap my head around it.”
“I mean, that could have also been because we were being chased by bloodthirsty criminals at the time.”