The spell is a success. Deborah gives up and stomps back to her car. Her tires squeal ominously when she tears off into the night, which is probably pretty close to the same sound she’s making twelve inches from Harold’s face right now.
I wipe the tears from my eyes and give him a high five. “Holy shit, dude!”
“I know!” He’s got a crazed grin, chest heaving deeply. “Unhinged” is my new favorite look on him. I think back to the conversation we had in the car after my stop-and-run fiasco at the traffic light in Beaufort, and how he said that messing with his parents could be fun as long as he was in on the joke, too. He really meant it.
I slide my palm over his cheek, matching his grin. “I’m proud of you. I wish I could see your mom’s face right now.”
“She’s going to kill me.” His smile freezes as he realizes what just happened. “Oh my god, she’s going to literally kill me.” He leans over, hands on his knees, breathing in through his nose and out his mouth like a woman in labor. I pat his back and a few anxious honking noises thump right out of him. “Did I seriously say all that? To my mom? Can we run off to an uninhabited island?”
“I like islands. Let’s go. We’ll have coconut pie every day.”
“I can’t believe I did that.” More honking. “I got a little carried away, didn’t I?”
“I want to see you get carried away all the time.” I get a zap of inspiration and tap the windowsill. “Hey, can you go down there and stand where your mom was standing? Just for a sec? I want to check something.”
He arches a brow at me but obliges. While he heads downstairs, I dash into my bedroom and fish a package of balloons out from under my bed, which I’d purchased when he and I were still sabotaging each other. I race into the bathroom, fill one up with water, and return to the window.
“Okay, I’m down here,” he says, voice drifting up with a coil of white breath. “What did you need to check?”
“This,” I say, letting the bomb drop. It doesn’t land on his head as planned, but splatters all over his shoes.
Nicholas jumps back, arms out, staring at the dark spots on his pants. A thrill chases up my spine. Slowly, slowly, he lifts his head and growls, “I’d run if I were you.”
With a gleeful scream, off I go.
I spend the weekend getting entirely too used to being on friendly terms with Nicholas. He teaches me how to drive Frankencar, which I’m initially resistant to out of nerves. But I get the hang of it pretty quickly and drive us to Beaufort to buy a canoe, which we strap to the roof of my car. We buy three oars and paddle out to rescue his wayward canoe. We spend Saturday on the pond, stabbing our oars at chunks of ice and playing bumper cars. Then we sit on the sofa in the drawing room, side by side, and watch the snow fall while we drink hot chocolate. He plays Nightjar (on my account, so that he can play God with my trident and exclaim, “Hey, you have to come look at this! I’m a unicorn! Look, Naomi, I have a horn!”) while I read Riverdale fan fiction on Tumblr, and it’s mellow and ordinary and achingly perfect. It makes me so sad that all the good parts in the story of us are rolling in right at the end.
An evil twist of fate: I don’t think I want it to be the end. Not anymore. But while we seem to be learning how to treat each other’s feelings with more care and making better choices, we’re not what an engaged couple ought to be.
When he comes home on Monday all I want to do is gather up all my failures into a pile and sweep them under the rug, but instead I make myself share the parts of myself I’m not so proud of. I make myself say, “Today sucked. I spent half an hour on an online application before it got to the last page and they said a minimum of five years’ experience in the food industry was required.”
“What sort of position?”
“Assistant manager. It was the only opening they were hiring for.”