Chapter 10
It was a calculated retreat, not fleeing in craven cowardice.
At least, that’s what I told myself as I defied the swampy atmosphere and speed walked all the way to…
where the hell was I even going? Did I have a destination in mind, or was I just trying to put as much distance as humanly possible between Dash’s place and me?
I couldn’t call Yaz. I mean, I could, because she always made time for me, and if I was genuinely upset, she would never dream of sighing or saying I told you so, no matter how much I deserved it.
But I had promised myself that I would stop coming to her with every single flail, especially of the romantic variety.
It was late enough that when I hesitated right in the middle of the sidewalk, I wasn’t immediately barraged with half a dozen New Yorkers being vocal about this vile offense to their sensibilities.
I did get stopped by a very drunk girl sweetly asking if I was all right, seconds before she told me I was cute and asked her partner if I could go home with them.
Somehow, I managed to smile and thank her because hello, I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t appreciate this boost to my vanity.
Then they wandered back into the bar they had stumbled out of and I was left stranded at the drive-in like John Travolta in that musical that Yaz makes me watch over and over again, only this was an abandonment of my own making.
The panic was, if anything, stronger. It had turned into a roar in my ears, loud enough to drown out the uncomfortably hard thump of my heart. And along with it had come this sickening wave of… familiarity.
I knew you’d overreact. That was what Milo had said to me when I first confronted him about his lie. That the reason he’d never told me about being with other women and wanting to break up was because I was too loud, too dramatic… too much.
And I know. I’m a woman of the twenty-first century with access to the internet and decades’ worth of “Am I the Asshole” scenarios.
I wasn’t naive enough to think that Milo trying to shift the blame onto me was anything more than a shitty excuse for his bad behavior, not to mention his cowardice. And I’d told him as much.
Still. That was the kind of thing that left a mark on you.
I knew better, of course I did, but a small part of me couldn’t help believing him.
The truth is, I am too much sometimes. I can be overwhelming, even.
And if there was even the slightest chance that it was the reason why I kept getting ghosted…
Why even my own mom had exited stage left the second I was legally an adult…
My hands felt shaky as I rubbed my palms on the skirt of my dress. Which had a pocket. Inside of which was my phone. I skipped the part where I gave a second’s worth of thought to what I was about to do and instead went immediately for my phone.
A moment later, I had scrolled past my pinned conversations from contacts I had saved as Yazzified, Tía Nena, and Duke Dashwood, and found a text thread that hadn’t been opened in a few weeks.
The name at the top had been replaced with a string of emojis—a bowl of soup, a plane, the little hat with the green bow, and an apple.
Randomly chosen, kind of impersonal emojis that did a pretty decent job of conveying my relationship with her.
My mom.
I let the phone ring three times before I panicked and tapped out of the call.
I’d probably get more comfort and better advice by going into any of the bars littering Ninth Avenue and spilling my guts to a random bartender than by calling her.
I probably didn’t have the right number for her, anyway. She changed it as often as she changed locations, and in the eight years since she’d started traveling the world, that averaged out to once every couple of months. Sometimes less.
So yeah, whatever. I kept my phone in my hand, because when you’re a single girl wandering the streets of any city after midnight, it’s always good to have something you can chuck at the head of a potential murderer before screaming and running.
And I put my mother out of my mind, where she belonged.
It wasn’t until I caught sight of myself in the glass storefront set into the basement of a brownstone that I realized I was still wearing the pineapple hat.
And it didn’t even go with my poufy party dress.
The gods must have been watching out for me that night, because the hat’s skinny green elastic had miraculously not gotten tangled in my curls and I was able to pull off the hat without breaking any strands.
As I threw it inside the garbage can outside the store, I saw the neon sign blinking at me from a corner of the window—Twenty-Four-Hour Psychic Readings, $10.
And look, I’m not going to say that I didn’t have my doubts about Midtown Manhattan psychics and whether or not this was some sort of tourist scam or the kind of fraud perpetrated on people going through a hard time, making them believe they were in the grip of some curse that could be broken for the low, low price of their entire life savings.
But I wasn’t about to haul my ass uptown in search of an actual bruja this time of night.
Anyway, it wasn’t like I was expecting some earth-shattering revelation about how my life line and my rising sign both indicated that I was doomed to eternal heartbreak.
All I wanted, really, was someone to talk to for a beat.
And maybe kill some time before going back to my apartment and facing up to the fact that I had just done exactly what I had promised myself I wouldn’t and now working with Dash was going to be uncomfortable at best and no longer possible at worst and I was so close to going completely broke and having to move back to Miami and become a couch troll in Yaz and Amal’s fancy Brickell condo while they got married and had babies and jobs and a life.
Spiraling, me? Never.
See, this was why it was safer to keep my emotions bottled up all nice and tight—less danger of me bursting a blood vessel in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen.
Whatever. I was going in.
I may have been a perennial screwup, but at least I was smart enough to keep a couple of twenties and a MetroCard tucked into the little pocket on the back of my phone case. You know, for emergencies. And if this didn’t count as one, I wasn’t sure what would.
The steps down to the store were lined with flowerpots, the iron rail twined with multicolored Christmas lights.
I pushed the door open to the sound of wind chimes—real ones, not the electronic kind.
The place looked like something straight out of that old TV show Charmed, with long shelves full of crystals, packages of tarot cards, bundles of sage, and plants in handmade pots.
I took a look at a price sticker, and the words popped out before I could keep them back. “Holy bougie occult shop, Batman.”
A loud peal of laughter from one side of the room drew my attention to the pale-skinned woman behind the register. Her hair was blue in streaks and piled up in a messy bun, all the better to show off her earrings, which were shaped like dangling swords. “It kind of is, isn’t it?”
I’m usually pretty immune to embarrassment, but even my shameless self had the grace to feel a little abashed. “Sorry. By bougie, I really meant awesome.”
“Sure,” the woman said dryly, pushing up the sleeves of her black mesh top. “My name’s Aria and I use she/her pronouns. How can I help you?”
I went over to the register and folded my arms on the counter as I told her my name and pronouns. “I know it’s kind of late, but is the psychic still in? I’m in dire need of a spiritual consultation and possibly having my soul saged.”
“That would be me, and I’m sure your soul is fine. Why don’t you come with me to the back?”
Motioning to the other sales associate to take over the register, she led me down a short hallway. There was a little bit of a stomp to her step, not quite like she was mad, more like she liked how the clunk of her Doc Martens sounded on the wood.
At the end of the hallway was a private room that was mostly lit by a squiggle of blue neon that matched the sign out front. The only other light was a small round lamp that looked like a crystal ball, resting on the table where a deck of tarot cards had been laid out.
“Why are you open twenty-four hours?” I asked as I slipped into one of the chairs. “You get a lot of tarot emergencies?”
“You’d be surprised at the amount of people who need spiritual consultations at three in the morning,” Aria said, adding with a quirked eyebrow, “and how many of them come from the bar next door.” She shrugged.
“I live upstairs, and I’ve been woken up enough times by drunk strangers pounding on the door that it’s just easier to hang out down here until things quiet down.
And I share the space with a couple other people, so there’s always someone around to cover the daytime shifts.
It’s kind of like a little occult collective.
Will this be a love, career, or general life reading? ”
“I have to choose?” I asked wryly. Then I flashed back to the hurt, confusion, and embarrassment that had crashed over Dash’s face in the split second between my pulling away from him and running out. “I guess we can start with love.”
I almost wanted to laugh—that was probably the hysteria at work, though, because the whole thing was deeply unfunny.
Because when this evening started out, my love life had been the only thing that was under control, if only because I’d been ignoring it so aggressively.
Kissing Dash was the one thing guaranteed to mess up everything else even more than it already was.