Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(11)
When I burst out laughing, she gave me that wolf’s grin again, her eyes narrowing above it. “Just suck it up and trust me, okay? Upon my honor, I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
She scooped up her Demonic Decadence, which came in an admittedly adorable coupe with a devil’s tail wrapped around the stem.
“To fucking Gareth Blackmoore,” she pronounced, lifting the glass toward me, “whose heart is darker than even his ancestral name. May he step into a puddle and ruin his uninspired and overpriced Italian footwear every day for the remainder of his life. Which will hopefully be as brutish and brief as the poets promise.”
“To a toast that literally can’t be improved upon,” I agreed, clinking my plastic pumpkin to her coupe, then taking a devil-may-care swallow of my drink. It was richly creamy but not at all cloying, with notes of bourbon and maple bitters and only a hint of sweet pumpkin pie.
It was also so strong that I could feel a smolder catch in my belly, the heat radiating upward to my chest like smoke off a fresh-lit bonfire.
“Tasty, right?” Talia said smugly, catching my startled expression. “Told you. Morty’s this town’s best-kept secret. I mean, besides its generations of real-life witches.”
“I’ll allow that it tastes way less like a Chili’s seasonal special than I feared.”
“Aha!” She pointed at me with her cocktail toothpick, speared with a chocolate-dipped strawberry, before taking a nibble of its tip. A vivid sense impression popped into my drink-hazed brain of what kissing her might taste like—tart and fruity and candied sweet—before I hastily banished it. “So you admit that you’ve actually sampled a Chili’s cocktail!”
“I have made the occasional late-night Chili’s run in my misspent youth, yes, before I came to know better. It’s called personal growth.”
“Never heard of it.”
I took a few more swigs, until my head felt like it was bobbing somewhere above my neck like a loosely tethered balloon. For a second, I had the vague and troubling realization that it had been a long time since I’d eaten much of anything, but I dismissed this as something I could worry about down the line.
“So,” Talia prompted, nudging my shoulder with hers. “You were going to tell me about how Gareth drove you out of town.”
“I was.” I slammed the rest of the Pandemonium down for liquid courage, fiddling with the empty plastic pumpkin. “Though it wasn’t quite that dramatic. We started dating end of my junior year. Right before his graduation, and school letting out for the summer. He insisted we keep it under wraps; too many Blackmoore haters in his business, was the alleged reason. Should have been my first red flag right there.”
Thinking of that summer, the sweltering heat cut by the balmy breezes that swept down from Lady’s Lake—like every other season, Thistle Grove summers were never less than flawless—resurrected a deep, dull pain, like prodding at a thick scar. That May, Gareth had started leaving magical-missive spells in my locker. A coin that turned into a hummingbird with a teensy note strapped to its needle of a leg, before the whole thing vanished in a puff. Origami stars that burst into miniature fireworks spelling out haiku composed just for me.
Hackneyed, juvenile spells that, at the time, seemed like the most charming and meaningful of romantic gestures.
Especially to seventeen-year-old Emmy Harlow, who in her wildest dreams would not have imagined that Gareth Blackmoore—scion of the most powerful magical family, captain of the basketball team, and swoon-worthiest male specimen at Thistle Grove High—might take an interest in her.
“Who wouldn’t have been swept off their feet,” Talia said cuttingly after I described it to her, but the edge in her voice wasn’t meant for me.
“Right? It was all so profoundly ridiculous. But it meant so much that he noticed me.” I stirred my drink absently, mouth twisting as I stared into the tiny whirlpool at the center. “You don’t know what it was like growing up here as a Harlow, permanently on the lowest rung on the magical ladder. Knowing that you were born into mediocrity and never going to work your way up, no matter how hard you tried.”
“Well, we’re not as powerful as the Blackmoores, either,” Talia pointed out. “No one is.”
“Maybe not, but you’re the next best thing,” I countered. “Even the Thorns can do amazing shit, whereas the Harlows barely even have an affinity to speak of. But being with Gareth . . . it wasn’t just about being in love with him. The really intoxicating thing was, if he could see something special in me, maybe it meant I really was more than just the Harlow girl. Like maybe I could still become someone, even if I stayed here.”
And I had always been the kind of ambitious that demanded the culmination of becoming Someone. I craved the validation of high achievement, the sense of wielding control over your own life. The fulfillment you could find only through setting up lofty goals for yourself, then knocking them down one by one.
“Fuck,” Talia said grimly, intuiting the trajectory of my sorry tale. “And then the bastard dumped you.”
“That, he did. He said he needed to start thinking about his future, and he just ‘couldn’t see himself with a Harlow long-term.’ I think he actually meant for it to be an easy letdown, like, ‘It’s not you, babe, it’s your last name.’?”