Chapter 10
GRAND GESTURE. WITCH-STYLE
Cassie pulled in next to Margaret’s old truck.
For a moment, she just sat there, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, the glow that had been radiating from her skin for the past twenty minutes pulsing in time with her heartbeat.
The motel’s sign buzzed overhead, the Y in SHADY flickering in and out like it was having an existential crisis.
She knew exactly how it felt.
Margaret had been characteristically brisk when Cassie showed up on her doorstep at seven in the morning, wild-eyed and still faintly luminescent.
“Room 12. Second floor, corner unit.” She’d handed Cassie a thermos of tea without being asked. “He’s been there since he left your place. Hasn’t checked out. Hasn’t gone anywhere except the hardware store.”
“The hardware store?”
“Apparently the sink in his room was dripping.” Margaret’s expression had been carefully neutral, but her eyes sparkled. “He fixed it. Also the wobbly railing on the stairs, the squeaky door on room 8, and the ice machine that hadn’t worked in six years.”
Of course he had.
Cassie had laughed—a wet, hiccupping sound that was half sob. “He can’t help himself, can he?”
“No more than you can help glowing like a firefly when you’re emotional.” Margaret had patted her arm. “Go get your handyman, child. Some things don’t need magic to work.”
Now, sitting in the parking lot with the engine cooling and her courage threatening to evaporate, Cassie forced herself to breathe.
You can do this. You came all this way. You finally figured out what you want.
Now you just have to say it out loud.
To his face.
Without setting anything on fire.
She got out of the car before she could talk herself out of it.
The stairs to the second floor were concrete and creaky, and she noticed as she climbed that the railing was, in fact, rock-solid. No wobble at all. Because Liam had been here for two days with nothing to do but wait and fix things, and god, that was so perfectly him that her chest ached.
Room 12 was at the end of the walkway, its door painted a faded turquoise that had probably been cheerful once. Through the thin walls, she could hear the sound of running water. A radio playing something tinny and old.
She raised her hand to knock.
Paused.
Lowered it.
What if he doesn’t want to hear it? What if he’s done? What if she’d pushed him away one too many times and he’d finally accepted that she was too much work, too much chaos, too much—
The door opened.
Liam stood there in jeans and a gray t-shirt, a wrench in one hand, looking exactly as grumpy and rumpled and unfairly attractive as he had the day she’d accidentally summoned him into her kitchen.
His hair was damp. His jaw was set. His eyes—those storm-gray eyes that had been watching her with varying degrees of exasperation and something warmer for weeks—went wide.
“Cassie.”
“The bathroom faucet?” she heard herself ask, because apparently her mouth had decided small talk was the way to go when her heart was trying to pound out of her chest.
He blinked. Looked at the wrench in his hand like he’d forgotten it was there.
“Dripping,” he said slowly. “I couldn’t sleep with the—” He stopped. Shook his head. “What are you doing here?”
Good question. Excellent question. She’d rehearsed an answer to this question for the entire drive over, and now every single word had fled her brain like rats from a sinking ship.
“I practiced a speech,” she said. “In the car. It was really good. I hit all the major points—apology, explanation, emotional vulnerability. Very well-organized.”
“And?”
“And I have no idea what any of it was now.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Just barely. “That tracks.”
“I’m sorry.” The words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other like they’d been waiting to escape.
“I’m sorry I pushed you away. I’m sorry I accused you of only being there because of the spell.
I’m sorry I tried to break the binding before we could—before I could—” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “God, I’m terrible at this.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“I’m really not.” She laughed, and it came out shaky.
“I had a whole thing. About fear. About how Derek spent twenty years making me feel like I was too much, and then I spent the next three years making myself invisible so I’d never feel that way again.
About how I was so convinced you’d leave that I made it happen first, because at least then it would be my choice. ”
Liam leaned against the doorframe, watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. The wrench dangled forgotten from his fingers.
“And then you left,” she continued, “and the binding broke, and you were free to go anywhere in the world, and you went—” She gestured at the faded turquoise door, the flickering neon, the parking lot full of potholes. “—here. Twenty minutes away. Close enough to come back.”
“Close enough for you to find me,” he said quietly. “If you wanted to.”
“You were waiting.”
“Aye.”
“For me to figure it out.”
“Hoping.” He set the wrench down on the small table just inside the door. “Not the same thing.”
“Liam—”
“You told me to go.” His voice was even, but she could see the tension in his shoulders, the careful way he was holding himself still.
“You’ve told me to go a dozen times. Pushed me away every time I got too close.
And I kept staying because I thought—” He exhaled.
“It doesn’t matter what I thought. You made it clear you didn’t want me there. ”
“I was lying.”
“I know.”
“I was scared.”
“I know that too.” He looked at her, and for the first time, she saw the exhaustion underneath the stoicism. The hope he’d been carrying alongside the hurt. “The question is whether you’re still scared, or if something’s changed.”
Cassie took a breath. The glow that had faded during her fumbling speech flickered back to life, soft and warm along her skin. Not chaotic. Not out of control. Just there, rising with the truth she was finally ready to say.
“I’m terrified,” she admitted. “I’m a complete disaster. My magic sets things on fire. My cat is mean to me. My ex is engaged to someone who can do a handstand for eleven minutes and looks good in yoga pants, and I can’t even touch my toes without making noises that suggest I’m dying.”
The twitch at the corner of his mouth became an actual smile. Small, reluctant, but real.
“I’m probably too much,” she continued. “I feel everything too big. I want things too loudly. I spent my whole marriage being told I needed to take up less space, and now I’m—I’m glowing in motel parking lots and talking to my toaster and I have no idea how to be a person who deserves—”
“Cassie.”
“—someone steady and patient and good, someone who fixes ice machines he doesn’t even need to fix just because he can’t stand to see something broken—”
“Cassie.”
She stopped.
Liam pushed off the doorframe and closed the distance between them in two steps. He cupped her face in his hands—those capable, calloused hands that had fixed her fence and her gutters and her grandmother’s music box—and looked at her like she was something worth looking at.
“You’re not too much,” he said. “You’ve never been too much. You’re exactly enough. I’ve been saying that since the beginning, and I’ll keep saying it until you believe me.”
“But—”
“No buts. You’re chaos. You’re exhausting.
You cast spells while I’m in the shower and summon people across continents and turn your garden into something out of a fever dream.
” His thumbs traced her cheekbones, gentle and steady.
“And I’m here anyway. Not because of magic.
Not because of binding. Just because I want to be. ”
“You want to be?”
“I drove halfway across the country after my divorce swearing I’d never get tangled up with another witch again.
And then you yanked me into your kitchen with pipe slime in your hair and panic in your eyes, and I thought—” He laughed softly.
“I thought, not again. And then I thought, no, this one’s different.
And I haven’t stopped thinking that since. ”
Cassie’s vision blurred. She blinked, and tears spilled down her cheeks—the good kind, the relieved kind, the kind that came when you finally stopped holding your breath.
“I practiced a speech,” she said again, because she didn’t know what else to say. “It was supposed to be good.”
“It was good.”
“I forgot all of it.”
“It was still good.” He was smiling now, really smiling, and the sight of it cracked something open in her chest. “Did the speech include a part where you tell me what you actually want?”
She reached up and covered his hands with hers. The glow brightened between them—not a surge or a storm, just a steady warmth that felt like rightness.
“I want you,” she said. “Not because of the binding. Not because you were stuck here. Just—you. Grumpy and Scottish and terrible at small talk and too good at fixing things that aren’t yours to fix.”
“Aye?”
“Aye.” She laughed through her tears. “Is that—I mean—is that okay?”
“Cassie.”
“What?”
“Stop talking.”
And then he kissed her.
Not like the almost-kisses before—interrupted, tentative, heavy with all the things they weren’t saying. This was something else entirely. This was a choice. His mouth on hers, her hands fisting in the fabric of his shirt, the soft exhale he made when she pressed closer.
No magic required.
Well. Maybe a little magic. The light bulb in the motel hallway popped, showering them in a brief rain of sparks.
The radio in his room switched stations to something slow and French-sounding.
And Cassie could swear—swear—she heard the ice machine on the first floor rumble to life like it was applauding.
She pulled back just enough to look at him.
“I did that, didn’t I?”
“Probably.”
“Sorry about the light bulb.”
“I’ll fix it.”
She laughed—really laughed, the kind that came from somewhere deep and relieved—and kissed him again.