13. Vesper
Vesper
The fitting room at the back of Vesper’s Vessels is technically a curtained alcove that serves triple duty: clothing try-on space, overflow storage for seasonal stock, and, on occasion, an argument corner when my sage supplier calls to tell me my bundles are back-ordered again.
Today it has a fourth function.
I have my back to Valefar as a matter of courtesy, a belated one, while he pulls on the gray knit sweater I found on the shop’s clothing rack.
It’s hand-dyed, raw-hemmed. I also found him a pair of wide-leg black slacks.
They only needed a little persuasion to button at the waist. The tail was more of a problem…
until I begrudgingly took my embroidery scissors to the back of the trousers, mourning the textile sacrifice.
“You can turn around,” he says, amusement in his tone since he had no issues with me watching.
I didn’t tell him it was for both our benefits since I may have been tempted to jump his bones in here if I saw his dick.
I turn and make a camera frame with my fingers, squinting through it like I’m composing a shot.
The black and gray are extraordinary against his bronze skin.
He’s standing with his natural, enormous posture, hands loose at his sides, tail threading through the hole I cut with more ease than expected.
He looks like an avant-garde editorial, and some very lucky photographer would be insufferably proud of.
“You look amazing,” I say, lowering my hands. “You are—hot.”
He glances down at himself and frowns with genuine concern. “But I am not burning.” He lifts one arm, checking the sleeve. “Am I smoking?”
I press my lips together, emotion cracking in my throat. “No,” I manage. “Hot means attractive. Good-looking. Like crazy good-looking.”
The frown eases. He looks at me instead of himself, which is somehow worse for my composure. Something twists in my stomach. I’ve been ignoring it since the fitting room curtain closed, and I’m not great at ignoring things, so now it rises right to the surface.
I shift my weight, fiddle with my hair, then fold my arms.
He notices. Of course he notices. He takes one step toward me and tips my chin up with two fingers. Not a demand.
“What is wrong?”
I hold his gaze for a second. Then I decide to just say it, because I don’t do coy, and I’ve never been good at performing.
“You’ve barely known me for a day, Vale.
” I let out a breath. “And you’re about to experience more of the real world.
Including other people.” I pause, feeling faintly ridiculous for how much I mean this.
“Let’s just say, you could have anyone you want.
Today, out in the world, you could have people falling all over you. ”
He lifts his brows. “I hope not. It would be quite inconvenient and uncomfortable.”
Despite myself, the smile comes. Lopsided, a little reluctant. “Falling all over you means anyone would want you. Imagine Manny flirting with you but…more.”
His expression shifts. He steps closer, and his hand moves from my chin to cup the side of my face with that enormous, unhurried warmth. The heat crawls under my skin, and yes, I am absolutely flushing, and no, I am not going to acknowledge it.
“Perhaps this is true,” he says. “But there is a phrase I have learned.” His voice drops, quieter, the low register of him being entirely serious. “I read it in the small rabbit book. I have been carrying it since.”
Something cautious and hopeful flutters in my chest.
“The rabbit ran,” he says. “To the mountain, to the river, to the crocus in the garden. And still the mother followed.” He tucks a few stray curls behind my ear.
“I did not understand the story when I first read it. I read it four times.” A pause.
“I understand now. Whatever you become, Vesper—whatever world you carry me into—I am already the one who follows. Hopelessly. Impossibly. Undyingly. I would follow you to the ends of the earth.”
The fitting room is very small. I am very aware of this.
I exhale slowly, and something I have been holding against my ribs since the moment he read that book out loud to my daughter quietly unfastens.
“Okay,” I say softly.
He tilts his head. “Only okay?”
“Okay,” I repeat, “and that was possibly the most devastating thing anyone has ever said to me in a fitting room.”
The corner of his mouth lifts.
I do a double check, commending him on his glamour still hiding his horns and tail. Rising on my toes, I kiss him, quick and warm, before I step back and press the curtain open. “Now come on. I have a shop to run.”
* * *
Vesper’s Vessels is not one thing. It has never been one thing. That’s the point.
The front half is the shop proper with warm amber lighting, exposed Douglas fir beams, and shelves floor to ceiling on the east wall.
Apothecary jars line those shelves, filled with dried herbs, resins, flower petals in eight shades of purple, and glass bottles of oils I blend myself in the back on slow afternoons.
Crystal displays run along the center island—raw chunks of amethyst big as my fist, polished moonstones in small velvet dishes. Selenite towers catch the light like small moons.
A locked case rests near the register for the rarer pieces: moldavite, black tourmaline wands, a single raw ruby the size of a child’s thumb I picked up on a whirlwind visit to Salem, which I wrote off as a business expense.
There are hand-labeled tinctures and ritual candles and a corner rack of clothing, leaning heavily into velvet, gauze, and dramatic hemlines.
On the other side of the shop is the coffee bar. Twelve small tables, two worn leather chairs near the fireplace, and a long reclaimed-wood bar. Pendant lights glimmer low in smoked amber glass. The chalkboard menu above the espresso machine changes weekly.
Today we’re running a lavender oat latte, a cardamom cold brew, and a dark chocolate cortado, and my regular Tuesday crowd has already developed dependency issues with them. Ube will be the next big boom, and I’m already in talks with potential suppliers.
The bar adjoins the brewery room through a pair of antique glass doors—small batch, seasonal, heavy on botanicals. On weekends, it’s standing room. On weekdays it hums quietly in the background, doing its work.
I love every square foot of this place with a fierceness that surprises me sometimes. I built it when I had nothing left to build toward. That matters.
People assume I come from money, which is hilarious.
The truth is simpler and more sentimental.
Harold Finch was a retired herbalist and practicing Druid who lived three streets over from my childhood home, had no children, and decided I was worth betting on.
He left me everything when he died—not a fortune, but enough.
Just as he left me a package of brown paper labeled in that small neat handwriting—use it well—and I brought the book home.
He never explained. He just placed things where they needed to be and trusted you to figure it out eventually.
I’m still working on that, Harold.
I built the online shop first, a kitchen-table operation which became a whole thing: the channel, the Patreon, the eBook on protection craft which still sells 100 copies a month without me touching it. The following paid for the down payment on this building.
I pass by the wall with the plaques, admiring the gleam more than my reflection.
My Samhain elderflower stout took gold at the Oregon Craft Brewers Cup two years running.
So popular, a regional distributor picked it up, and the licensing income paid off the business loan eighteen months ahead of schedule.
Harold would have been insufferably smug about it all. And proud. I think about that every time I unlock the front door.
Thankfully, most of this happened before Rick. Sometimes, I wonder if he married me because he knew my finances would be joined with us as the church dictated.
And if it weren’t for three years of my ex quietly helping himself to my accounts to cover gambling debts I didn’t know existed, while funneling the rest into alcoholism, I wouldn’t still be looking at a stack of bills every month.
Valefar spends the first twenty minutes standing very close to me and watching everything I do. When I explain what a customer is looking for, like a crystal for grief, a tincture for sleep, a candle for protection, he listens. I can tell he is filing everything away.
When the shop starts filling, and I move to the coffee bar, he follows at a careful distance. He watches me pull shots with the expression he usually reserves for small revelations.
“You make art in the cups,” he remarks.
I glance at the rosette I’ve just etched into the foam of a lavender latte. “Latte art, yeah.”
He considers this. “In Hell, beverages are not customarily decorated.”
“Noted,” I say with a smile and slide the cup across the bar.
“Is it another social custom?” he wonders.
I shrug. “More of a professional courtesy and a creative expression of courteousness.”
I put him to work carrying trays. He is extraordinary.
He moves through the narrow coffee bar space, completely aware of his surroundings, which should not be possible in someone that large.
He balances a full-service tray in one hand without a single wobble, ducking precisely to clear the pendant lights.
Three separate people at tables stare at him the way people stare at solar eclipses—slack-jawed, forgetting how rude it is to stare so long.
By noon, a woman at the window table has asked him twice if he’d like to sit down, her hands fiddling with her hair in a strategic and flirtatious deployment.
Two of my Thursday regulars—men who come in for the cold brew and each other’s company—manage to engage him in a conversation about the sweater, which somehow ends with one of them writing his number on a napkin.
My heart burns with…possession. Perhaps not jealousy. But the possessiveness is undeniable.
Valefar eyes the napkin, completely baffled but courteous. He says thank you. But he returns the napkin gently to the table. He comes back to my end of the bar.
“You were right,” he says.
“About?”
“The falling all over.” He picks up the next tray. “I would prefer it remain metaphorical.”
I bite back the smile. “Good answer, Big Guy.”
* * *
My extremely Catholic mother arrives at a quarter after six. Right on schedule.
Ugh.
She always comes in through the coffee bar entrance. She has never once, in six years of this shop existing, crossed the threshold into the main retail space. Not once.
The herbs make her nervous. The crystals make her nervous. The ritual candles make her extremely nervous, and she once asked me, with genuine concern, if I was “doing anything with goats.” I told her no. I was not doing anything with goats. She seemed only partially satisfied.
Though I have, more recently, been doing something with horns. Someone.
Today she’s in a lavender cardigan and a look I recognize from childhood—one that means she has a thing to say and has been mentally rehearsing it since breakfast.
She orders her usual herbal tea. I make it. We exchange the usual pleasantries, which take approximately forty-five seconds. Then:
“We should talk about Mass this Sunday.” She wraps her hands around her mug. “Father Martin has a beautiful new choir—”
“Thanks, Mom. Not my thing.”
“Vesper—”
“Still not my thing. Moving on.” I turn back to the nearby counter.
She sighs and sets her mug down. “Rick had dinner with us the other night.”
My spine bristles.
I grit my teeth, reach for a cloth, and start wiping down the already-clean counter. “Good for him.”
“He’s been clean for six months.” Her voice goes careful and even, the tone she uses when she thinks she’s walking on thin ice and would like me to stop making the ice thinner. “No alcohol, no gambling. He’s in counseling at the church. He’s really trying, honey.”
I set the cloth down. “Of course he is.” My voice is flat.
Steady. Not angry. I am genuinely not angry.
I haven’t been angry about Rick for a while now, which is a milestone.
“That’s how it always goes. Best behavior.
Clean slate. He’s reformed, he’s trying.
And then the moment the pressure comes back, or the debt comes back, or someone says the wrong thing on the wrong night—” I don’t finish the sentence.
I don’t need to. “I’m not falling for it again, Mom. And you shouldn’t either.”
“Forgiveness is a process, but—”
“Don’t.” I keep my voice quiet but precise.
“Don’t talk to me about forgiveness. I’m not angry.
I’ve moved on. Bethie is my priority, and I have full custody.
He gets supervised visits once a month. That arrangement exists for a reason, and no amount of dinners at your house or church counseling changes that.
” My tone turns firmer because it must. “You need to respect that, or you can’t have a place in Bethie’s life.
And this is not the time or place, Mom. This is my work. I have customers.”
I don’t wait for the response.