Chapter Five #2
Oh. So . . . she didn’t win? ‘What are the conditions?’ Blair asked.
‘One, you stop accusing me of sabotage without proof, and two, we walk. One round of the flea market, twenty minutes, tops.’
Blair’s brows knitted together. ‘You want to walk with me?’
‘I want to talk to you. Without you running away or accusing me of sabotaging your life. Let’s clear the air so we can both exist in Moonbeam Hollow, because that bakery is opening whether you like it or not.’
Blair blinked. He was asking too much. She couldn’t walk around the market with him, not when her hair stood on end and her heart raced whenever he was near. Not when her body didn’t seem to dislike him nearly as much as her brain did.
‘Come on, Blair,’ Luke pleaded. ‘Wouldn’t this be easier if we weren’t enemies?
I want to talk. That’s it.’ Blair couldn’t read his expression.
Actually, she couldn’t trust it. Luke had technically never intentionally caused Blair pain once they’d stopped being rivals and started dating.
He’d been the cause of a lot of comfort for her.
Of pleasure. Even joy. But the pain, that was all self-inflicted.
Blair had dumped him. She’d lied, telling him she never loved him when she had.
And that’s why she couldn’t trust him now.
He said that the reason he was building his mother a bakery café next door wasn’t to get back at Blair, but how could that be true?
If their situations were reversed, and Luke had been the one to break her heart, Blair would have turned Luke into a toad.
Okay, maybe not, transmutation magic was really, really hard.
But she would have at least made him smell like a toad for the rest of his life.
She should have done that, anyway. Because his familiar scent of pine, sandalwood and Luke was, so, so hard to endure again.
‘Okay,’ Blair said softly. ‘Twenty minutes. And no accusations.’ She hoped she wouldn’t regret this.
She set an alarm on her smart watch, because she was not sure her heart could manage more than twenty minutes without beating right out of her chest.
* * *
The glassware vendor offered to hang on to Luke’s purchases during their walk, and Blair was pretty sure it was because she wanted an update afterward. After Luke stashed the painting and the cake stand behind the woman’s counter, Blair and Luke set out on a stroll around the flea market.
It was weird, walking with Luke Caldwell again. She didn’t know what to say. But maybe she didn’t need to say anything. This was his idea so he should be the one to initiate actual conversation. But he was quiet, too. Blair wondered if he found this as hard as she did.
‘Do you remember the first time we were at this flea market together?’ Luke finally asked.
Blair frowned. She’d never been here with Luke before, had she?
He chuckled. He was looking straight in front of him, not looking at the vendor booths on either side, or looking at Blair.
‘You don’t remember. Dan Sinclair wanted apple fritters after we won that battle-bot tournament in Peterborough, so he made his mom stop here on the way home.
You were annoyed that his mom wouldn’t let us get ice cream because she didn’t want us making a mess in her car. ’
Blair smiled. She did remember. It was late June of grade eleven.
The four of them on the team had worked so hard on their battle robot – named The Moonbeam Massacrer, which despite its mouthful of a name, had been undefeated in the tournament.
It was the first time Blair had worked with Luke instead of against him in school.
Moonbeam Hollow High had only one robotics team, so they’d had to collaborate for the first time.
To be perfectly honest, it was the first time Blair saw Luke as anything but her aggravating rival in school. Since that day, Blair had ordered apple fritters each time she’d come to this market. But that wasn’t because of Luke.
‘We weren’t here long,’ Blair said. The four of them had ordered two dozen fritters, which they ate in the car on the way back to Moonbeam Hollow.
Dan’s mother was mad that they got powdered sugar everywhere.
Luke touched Blair’s skin for the first time when he wiped sugar off her nose.
And she noticed that he smelled like sandalwood – despite spending the day in a sweaty high school gym surrounded by robotics nerds.
It was a memory that Blair had pushed to the corners of her brain.
But now Luke was here, and the memory was back, and Blair wished she could banish it to the corner again.
A memory that Blair hadn’t been able to banish was the shift between them after they won that tournament.
They weren’t exactly friends – but they weren’t really enemies anymore, either.
They actually spoke to each other with civility.
Smiled when they passed in the hallways or on the street.
And Blair had become strangely obsessed with Luke’s hands.
With the curve of his shoulder. With how his smiles always started on one side before spreading to his whole face.
The following October, Luke had asked Blair to be partners for a physics project and Blair said yes.
She told herself it was only because she wanted the best possible grade.
After working on the project in Blair’s dining room one Saturday, Blair’s mother offered to drive them to the Moonbeam Hollow Fall Harvest Festival, since they’d been working so hard.
Blair was even more aware of Luke at the festival.
He smiled more than almost anyone else Blair knew.
And he smelled so good, like pine and sandalwood.
Blair wanted to put her nose on his neck to know if the smell came from his clothes, or him.
They did the hay maze together just as the sun was setting, and Luke’s enthusiasm took her breath away.
Blair was quite sure she would explode if she didn’t touch him.
And apparently, he felt the same way, because when Blair turned a corner, lightly bumping her hand into his, he stilled, then took her hand and squeezed it.
They were alone in a corner of the hay maze, their hands joined, and that slow smile transformed Luke’s face. When he stepped toward her, she gasped. And when he touched her cheek, she was sure her heart would race right out of her chest.
But when he kissed her, at sunset in a secluded corner of the Moonbeam Hollow Fall Harvest Festival Hay Maze, Blair knew in an instant that her life would never be the same again.
She’d been shocked at how her body reacted, instinctively pulling him closer and parting her lips so his tongue could explore her mouth.
She held the back of his head so she could finally feel that wavy dark hair she’d admired so many times.
He pushed her against the hay bales, prickly hay poking her back, and she didn’t care.
Nothing in the world had ever felt as good as being surrounded by Luke Caldwell with his mouth on hers.
But when they heard voices in the maze, they pulled apart quickly, both wide-eyed and shell-shocked.
They finished the rest of the maze with their hands joined, and when they reached the end, Luke kissed the tip of her nose and said he’d wanted to kiss her for weeks.
Now, Blair exhaled long. Maybe she should practise a memory-wiping spell to get that day out of her brain forever. And maybe taking a simple walk with Luke Caldwell was impossible, because the way Blair felt about this person had never been simple.