Chapter Fifteen Nora
Chapter Fifteen
Nora
Sometimes a spell sees the greater purpose, even when the witch can’t.
—Rules for Witches
Nora really didn’t want to have to tell Sam he was right. But they were moving Soraya into her apartment, and she was in Sam’s truck, and the longer she didn’t talk about last night, about all the revelations, about her total implosion, about the revenge spell she had cast . . .
It just started to feel silly. If not silly, then totally dishonest.
She already knew he’d just say that Ben was awful, and he’d known it all along.
He wasn’t going to be sympathetic. He would tell her how the institution of marriage was a lie, and she had been stupid to ever believe in it.
Or maybe that she was stupid to have ever believed a Ouija board when it told her she would find love.
Oh, the love spell. It was painful now.
“So, Ben is cheating on me.” She rubbed her knuckles against the passenger-side window, because for some reason she thought that might break some of the tension.
“What?”
Sam slammed the brakes and cranked the wheel sharply, pulling the truck over to the side of the road. He looked at her, an expression on his face that wasn’t shock but was definitely fervent.
“Yeah, I did some digging around, starting from the Instagram you showed me.” It felt like the whole sky was bearing down on her head, collapsing beneath the weight of the truth. “And I was pretty suspicious, but then he butt-dialed me during the act.”
“What?”
She’d never seen Sam look so shocked before. If it weren’t about something so hideous, she might have enjoyed it.
She shook her head and closed her eyes, just for a second. Like it might disrupt some of the intensity of the moment. Of him being so close. Looking at her. Seeing this humiliation.
“Yeah. It was awful. Thank God I didn’t see anything, but . . .” Her throat tightened, and she swallowed hard in denial of the emotion. She didn’t want to be sad about it. She was angry, and she deserved to be angry.
“That’s really, really horrible, Nora. I’m sorry.”
Sam looked helpless. She’d rarely, if ever, seen Sam look helpless. Kids like them couldn’t afford helplessness, and even if they did feel lost, they rarely showed it. It was an inglorious honor to have a problem so big her friend seemed stumped by it.
He unbuckled his seat belt, and before she knew it, he was across the truck and had her pulled into his arms. It was more unexpected than the hug Soraya had given her last night.
His arms held her tight, and she could feel his heart beating against her cheek, and she wanted to melt against him.
They didn’t touch like this on a normal day.
They didn’t touch at all. Nothing in their lives had added up to make them physically demonstrative people.
He was doing this for her. To make her feel better.
She took a deep breath that became more of a sob and turned her face against his neck, letting him hold her. Letting him take some of the pain away.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had done that, if ever. The last time she had let someone comfort her. Maybe she was a wall. Maybe she was every bit as difficult as Ben had said she was. Except . . .
Sam was here with her. He had been here all this time. Soraya had given her a hug. Daisy was here for her.
She was letting them. She would continue to let them.
He was the one who shifted in the hug slightly, and then their faces were close.
She couldn’t breathe. He was right there, so close she could see all the colors of blue in his eyes.
Sam and all the ways he was beautiful wasn’t some truth she had just stumbled upon when she had walked into the bar and looked at his back muscles.
He always had been.
She’d tried not to linger on it. Never to think about it. Fantasize about him. He was too important for that.
Nora had, historically, enjoyed some bad decisions. Sometimes the guy was hot even if he was temporary. Sometimes the drink looked good and the idea of getting high sounded like a relief, even if it wasn’t a great choice.
But Sam had never been one of her bad choices. He meant too much to her to be a mistake. That had been true since she was a teenager with no perspective, and it was even truer now.
She was married. He was her best friend. The person she needed more than anyone else to get through this.
It was just . . . It was a no. She took a shuddering breath and put distance between them.
“Poor Soraya,” she said.
“Poor Soraya?”
“Yeah. Keep driving. We need to get to her house so we can help. She might be having a breakdown over which sourdough starter to bring. Though, she can probably bring as much of her sourdough starter as she wants.”
“Right.”
“You can start driving again.”
“Nora, we were talking about you.”
“But I’m not the only one going through this. Daisy’s husband is marrying somebody else and . . . I’m not the only one going through this. It sucks. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. But it’s fine. I mean it. It’s mostly fine.”
“Your husband is cheating on you,” he said.
“I know. There’s nothing I can do about it. He’s half a world away.” She tried to take a breath, but it got stuck. “You’re not even going to say you told me so?”
“No. What kind of dick do you think I am?”
“Are you going to pretend you’re not one? That you’ve never been one?”
“No. But I’m also thirty-five, and I know how to choose my moments now. I’m not the same kid I was in high school.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I do. I do. Sam, you’re one of the most important people in my life.
You’re the only person I’ve known for this long.
Nobody else knows me like you do. You actually saw what it looked like when my mom didn’t come.
Or when my grandmother declined to take custody back.
Don’t ever think that I don’t look at you and see the importance.
There’s a reason we’re still in each other’s lives. ”
“Yes, there is.” He sighed heavily and pulled his truck back onto the road. “I’m not going to say I told you so, because in all honesty, Nora, I wanted this to work for you. Hell, I wanted to believe it was possible, you know? Forever. Even for someone like us. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“I know you didn’t want me to get hurt.”
“I really didn’t,” he said, something firm and certain in his voice. “I really, really didn’t. I wanted it to be forever, so you could have that. I wanted the same thing you did. I wanted you to have normal and safe and good and . . .”
“But you didn’t want it for yourself?”
“No. It mattered to you. I wanted you to have whatever you wanted.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. What about what you want?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“That’s bullshit. It does matter. You’re so stable, you know? That’s why it surprises me that you don’t want a relationship or anything. I mean, you’ve got such a good job.”
“I feel like I did as much better than my parents as I could. I’m not an addict, I support myself. I have friends. That’s a good thing.”
“Yeah. It’s a good thing. But—”
“We weren’t talking about me,” he said. “You keep doing that. You keep making it about somebody else.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s just my own sadness.
We can go over it and over it, but it isn’t going to change anything.
” Her throat suddenly went tight. Grief was like an anvil pressing on her chest. “It won’t make me understand it any better.
I wanted to believe that this was happily ever after.
I wanted to believe that I changed. But I’m stuck again.
Just being a foster kid. Somebody who gets abandoned.
You can’t outrun it, I guess. It’s always going to be waiting there in the shadows. Looking for a chance to swing on you.”
“Or,” he said, “and hear me out—Ben sucks.”
It wasn’t funny, but she laughed anyway. “This is getting dangerously close to I told you so.”
“It isn’t, though. Because what I’m telling you right now is you’re wrong. There’s nothing inherently wrong with you. Maybe there are certain blind spots that you have.”
“Here we go,” she said.
They were getting close to Soraya’s house, though, so the conversation would have to end.
“What? You don’t think you have any blind spots?”
“I think you were just taking the long road to do exactly what I thought you were going to do.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But maybe some things need to be said so you’ll finally believe me when I tell you I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, and you don’t seem to believe that.”
He snorted. “Waiting for empirical evidence.”
“Same. Same.”
They finished the rest of the drive in silence, and when they pulled up to the house, there was an actual moving truck Daisy was standing next to, looking perplexed.
“Oh.” Nora slid out of the truck. “I thought we were doing this incrementally.”
“So did I,” Daisy said. “It’s kind of a . . . It’s a long story.”
Then the cab of the truck opened, and Zach Woods, famous, hot as a house fire, got out.
“Oh. Hi.”
“Hi.” He stuck his hand out. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“No. I’m Nora. You’re Zach Woods. Of course I know who you are.”
“I don’t need you to do that.” He looked almost comedically uncomfortable for a man who must get recognized all the time. Nora wasn’t one to be starstruck, but she also wasn’t one to pretend to be deliberately unimpressed just to be cool, which was about the most try-hard thing a human could do.
“I’m not doing anything, I promise. I just thought it would be dumb if I pretended I didn’t know who you were. This is Sam.” She gestured to him.
Sam didn’t look impressed or starstruck, and she knew him well enough to know that wasn’t a bit.
If anything, he looked irritated by the whole thing, though she couldn’t imagine why.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, whatever irritation he felt locked down deep enough that probably only Nora could see it.