Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Lennon
The inn’s kitchen is never fully quiet, even at this hour. The refrigerator unit hums, the old pipes knock somewhere behind the walls, and the fan above the stove ticks as it cools.
The counter is already clean, but I wipe it down again anyway, because the motion gives me something to do with my hands that isn’t thinking, and thinking is the one thing I absolutely cannot afford right now.
My head is doing that thing where it aches behind my eyes and at the base of my skull simultaneously, which means I’m either getting sick or I’ve been clenching my jaw for fourteen hours, and I know which one it is.
Jasper showed up an hour ago to help with dinner service, which in practice meant stealing bread, critiquing my music choices, and narrating his entire day at a volume that suggested he’d been saving it up.
He never asked if anything was wrong. He just stayed, and somewhere between the last table clearing out and the mop going back in the closet, he hopped up on the counter across from me, pulled out his tarot deck, and started shuffling with the purposefulness of someone who has decided they’re going to help whether you’ve asked for it or not.
I haven’t asked for it. I also haven’t told him to leave, which probably says something.
Mostly, I’m too tired to pretend I don’t want company.
“You don’t have to do that,” I tell him.
“The universe wants to help you.” He doesn’t look up. “Who am I to stand in the way?”
“The universe should mind its business.”
He looks up at that, briefly, with those knowing blue eyes that have no business being that perceptive. “You’ve wiped that same section of counter four times.”
I look down at my hand. At the cloth. At the counter.
“It’s a stubborn spot.”
He chuckles and goes back to shuffling.
I try to remember what I’m supposed to be feeling right now.
Tired. That’s the main one. Tired, and my skull is three sizes too small for everything happening inside it.
Also, as if I’ve done something irreversible and possibly several somethings, and I can’t quite figure out which one to be most alarmed by.
Paul.
Ridge.
And—and this is the part I’m not examining—Nevan, who was in my dream in a context I am aggressively not thinking about, even though it wasn’t real, even though I was asleep, even though dream logic is not the same as waking logic, and nobody holds you accountable for your subconscious. That’s literally the whole premise.
I wipe down the counter a sixth time.
At this point, I’m basically polishing my own denial.
“Okay.” Jasper holds the deck in one hand and knocks on it with the other, eyes squeezed shut. “What do you need, what do you need, what do you…”
A card slips free and flutters down on the counter.
He cracks open one eye, looks at it, and snorts. “Oh. Wow. Yeah.”
“What?”
He scoops it up and holds it out to me. The Ace of Wands. One very obvious wand, held aloft by a hand emerging from a cloud.
“You need dick.” Jasper grins.
I stare at him and think about Paul’s hands on my thighs on his white couch. About Ridge’s voice in my dream, saying, “greedy girl” as if he meant it sweetly. I think about Nevan in the same dream, which I am not thinking about.
“Creative energy,” Jasper continues cheerfully. “Passion. Life force. New beginnings.” He grins hard enough that both dimples appear at once. “But also, yeah. Dick.”
“I’m not discussing dicks with a teenager.”
“Interesting that you made it plural,” he notes immediately.
I open my mouth, only to immediately close it
“Besides, I have an old soul.”
I give him the look. The one that is supposed to communicate that I am a grown adult, he is almost a child, and this conversation has a ceiling.
“I also know my way around dicks,” he says, entirely unintimidated. “Venus in retrograde taught me plenty.”
“Jasper.” I slap his arm. “No.”
“Okay, okay, fine.” He rubs the spot with theatrical suffering, though his smirk doesn’t go anywhere. “Something else. Universe, help us out here. Something other than phalluses.”
He shuffles too fast, with too much confidence, and the entire deck launches itself out of his hands and explodes across the kitchen floor in a cascade of illustrated cards, skidding under the counters and fanning out across the tiles as if the universe is making a point.
Jasper goes very still, closes his eyes, and exhales, his cheeks turning pink.
I look at the chaos of cards around our feet. “And what does that mean?”
“Probably that you need to get your shit together.”
“Well, if that’s not the truth,” I mutter, crouching to help him gather them.
We collect the cards, and I’m almost grateful for the task, when Jasper says, “You know what I’ve been thinking about lately?”
“I genuinely never know what you’ve been thinking about.”
“Nevan’s cards.” He stacks a small pile and taps them evenly.
“I’ve been reading for him for a while now.
And there’s this pattern that keeps coming up, this…
energy, I guess, around connection. Around someone who comes from somewhere else.
Someone who brings something he doesn’t have…
” He pauses, eyes flicking up to mine as if he’s checking whether I’m following, or maybe whether I’m ready to hear the rest. “It’s interesting. ”
I keep my eyes on the floor. “Jasper.”
“I’m just saying. Hypothetically. If I were to pull cards for two people together—”
“Jasper.”
“… which I’m not doing, I’m just thinking out loud.”
“You’re not thinking out loud, you’re pitching.” I hand him a stack of cards. “And I’m telling you, with all the love in the world, to pitch it to someone else.”
He takes the cards and looks at me with those eyes. “You didn’t say it was a bad idea.”
“Goodnight, Jasper.”
“That’s also not a denial.”
“Sleep well.”
I stand and press my palms flat against the counter’s cool surface, thinking about how I’m here for Tessa. That’s the whole reason. Tessa is stuck somewhere between sleeping and waking in a room across town, and I drove three thousand miles to get to her.
Instead, I’m standing in a kitchen at eleven at night while an eighteen-year-old reads my tarot, and I try not to think about the temperature of Paul’s hands or the exact way Ridge’s voice drops when he says, “sweetheart” like it’s a verdict.
This is grief. Grief makes you do things. Stupid things. Things that feel enormous and significant when really, they’re just the mind trying to fill the hole someone left behind.
I’m not losing it. I’m just sad. I’m just…
The kitchen door swings open, and Nevan comes in with his easy smile and his oversized hoodie, his hair slightly disheveled from wherever he’s been. My entire nervous system does something embarrassing and immediate.
Fuck, I think. All of this.
“Is this guy bothering you?” He jerks his head at Jasper.
“Deeply,” I sigh.
“She loves it.” Jasper shrugs, completely unbothered. “I was just telling her how well your cards align.”
Nevan stops walking and looks at his brother with the expression of someone who has been subjected to this before and has developed a policy about it. “There is something wrong with you.”
“There’s something wrong with both of you,” I mutter.
“But you love it,” Jasper shoots back.
“I might love it.”
Jasper’s grin goes wide again, then he points at me, then Nevan, then back at me. “See?”
“I see someone who should be in bed.” Nevan points at the door. “School night. Go home.”
“Fine. But for the record—”
“Goodnight, Jasper,” we both say at the same time.
Jasper’s smile turns deeply satisfied, then he opens his mouth.
“Don’t.” Nevan points a finger at him.
Jasper closes his mouth, then presses his lips together, visibly containing himself with enormous effort.
Then he comes around the counter and wraps both arms around me without warning.
I hug him back, and my throat goes tight, because Jasper gives hugs like he does everything—completely and without reservation—and I am tired and sad.
I wasn’t going to let it mean anything, but apparently, it does.
“Night,” I tell him into his shoulder.
“Night, Lenny,” he says, and squeezes once before letting go, then he’s gone, door swinging behind him, and the kitchen is quiet except for the low hum of the refrigerator.
Nevan is leaning against the counter with his arms still crossed, watching me with that quality of attention he has, and I go back to cleaning things that are already clean.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Of course. Why do you ask?”
“You promise?”
I look up at him. “Why do you keep asking?”
“Because… and yes, on the danger of sounding like Jasper, your sunshine is dimmed.”
“You can read auras now?”
“No.” The corner of his mouth lifts, but his eyes stay steady on me. “But I know your baseline.”
And that, annoyingly, gets me right in the chest.
I look back down at the counter. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me too.”
Something besides the obvious.
He steps forward, and his thumb finds the bridge of my nose—that gentle press he does when I’m scrunching it, smoothing it out before I’ve even noticed I was doing it.
“I love whatever is wrong with you. But I’m also mad at you.”
That makes me look up at him. “Why?”
“Because you didn’t call me after your date. And you’ve said maybe ten words to me today.”
“I’ve been busy.” I step back, pull the apron over my head, and fold it. “Dinner service was more work than I expected.”
“The stroganoff was incredible,” he says, which is not the same as accepting my deflection, and we both know it. “Everyone loved it.”
I shrug and set the apron on the counter.
He looks at me for a moment longer, but when he opens his mouth again, my phone pings. On reflex, I pull it from my pocket.
Paul
How was work? I just know the stroganoff was a hit. I would love to drive you home and hear about it. Let me know.
I stare at it. The warmth of it, the carefulness of it. How he offers things as if they’re obvious, like, of course, he’d drive across town at eleven at night.