Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(27)
I peered around, ticking my fingertips nervously against the bar top. “What exactly is this motif supposed to be, anyway?”
“Like I said before, my mom’s Irish. Well, Welsh and Irish, but born in Glengarriff.”
“Oh, my family’s Welsh, too!” I broke in, surprised by this congruence. “Though, quite a few generations back.”
We probably didn’t need to begin the primer on Thistle Grove with the fact that my family traced our lineage all the way back to Morgan le Fay; the reality of twelfth-century sorceresses seemed like something I needed to ease Morty into slowly.
“So, my pops is first-generation Portuguese, met her when they both moved here within a few years of each other. This place . . .” He waved a hand around at the Shamrock’s questionable glory, fondness skimming over his delicately chiseled features. “He opened it kind of tongue-in-cheek in her honor; the plan was he’d do the bartending, she’d take care of the books. She likes ‘a bit o’ flash,’ as she’d happily tell you, so he did everything up very kitsch Irish as an inside joke to begin with, crossed with a little witchy shit to go with the town’s history.”
“Right,” I said, eyeing the flickering bat-and-pumpkin lights above my head. “I can see that. Very, um, authentic.”
“But then she loved it for real, so, here we are, almost twenty-five years later. There’ve been a lot of tweaks over the years, of course,” he added, jerking his chin toward the skeletal travesty. “Proud to say that Dead Frederick over there was my contribution. But the spirit is the same.”
“This place has been around for that long?” I asked, marveling, even as a part of my brain noted that of course the whacked-out skeleton had been Morty’s brainchild. “I had no idea it was such a Thistle Grove institution. You must be really proud.”
“I am. As a matter of fact, it predates Ye Castle Cornballfest,” he said, raising a sharp dark eyebrow like a fencing blade parry. “So maybe you can see why we might’ve been averse to letting your Dread Empire buy it out from under us to assimilate into the collective.”
I chewed on my lower lip, barely restraining myself from twisting a lock of my hair around my finger, lest he think I was trying to flirt instead of defusing mounting anger.
“Look, I’m aware our past interactions have been less than ideal, given the circumstances in which we now find ourselves,” I said, summoning up as much cool and poise as I could, though my skin felt like it was buzzing with irritation. “And you’ve been decidedly unambiguous about how much you hate my brother. But I’m not Gareth, clearly, as you can see.”
He waggled his head back and forth, lips pursed, as if this point were somehow debatable.
“And the stuff that happened with your bar?” I went on, my cheeks burning. “That was just me doing my job, protecting my family’s business interests like I’m paid to do. And I’m not exactly dying to be here, either, but I still showed up tonight like I said I would. Because having this conversation was the right thing to do. So can we tone down this whole ‘Blackmoores are the spawn of Palpatine, and/or the Borg’ energy?”
This time both eyebrows shot up, and he rested his inked forearms on the bar top, leaning over them. I did my best to ignore the way the tendons shifted under his ink with the movement, the way those watercolor tattoos flowed over them. I’d never wanted tattoos of my own, but I loved the look of them on others.
And I always was the very worst sucker for a beautifully sculpted forearm.
“Star Wars plus Star Trek references seen and raised, no shit. Wouldn’t have pegged Nineve Blackmoore, Esquire, for the type to hang with all that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, do only nerdboy edgelords get to enjoy such cool-kid stuff as sci-fi classics?” I snapped, losing the remainder of my patience. “Did I not understand the assignment about what girls like me were supposed to like, to your personal satisfaction? Maybe you can just tell me which references are in my lane, so I know to stick to them. Am I a Kardashians devotee, perhaps? Housewives of Somewhere, possibly? Seriously, you tell me. I’ll wait.”
He stared at me for a moment, taken aback, then gave a slow, acknowledging nod.
“You know what,” he said, straightening up from the bar and running a hand through the tousle of his hair. It fell right back over his forehead, unfazed by the interruption. “You’re right. All the other shit aside, I actually am the asshole here, in this moment. My bad, okay? I’m sorry. My family’s in kind of a complicated situation right now, and . . . well, even if that weren’t the case, I’m not always the best with bygones. So, truce? For this evening, at least?”
He held out a hand across the bar, his dark hair flickering with the white and orange reflections of the string lights, eyebrow cocked.
I stared at him for a moment, my nervous system still buzzing like a disturbed beehive, a little uncertain how to take this unexpected apology. In my family, moments of high conflict didn’t tend to resolve like this, with so little bloodshed and drama, and in such a short span of time to boot. Even Sydney had been part of that ingrained pattern, instigating and then elongating arguments until they felt like you’d become trapped in a M?bius strip of time that would possibly outlast the universe itself. Sydney also faithfully subscribed to the “don’t go to bed angry” maxim, mostly because you weren’t ever going to get to sleep, not on the night of a fight with her.