Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(9)

And of the few guys I remembered among her conquests, none had been of Gareth’s dick-swinging ilk.

“Trust me, I’m aware of the cognitive dissonance,” she said dryly, as if she’d read my mind. But though divination was among the Avramovs’ skills, they were much more into communing with the spirit world than prying into living people’s thoughts. “It was not my finest hour. But I was coming out of a pretty terrible breakup, and he was around, and he can be, you know. Oddly charming when he’s not too far up his own ass to make an effort.”

“I do know,” I said, mortified when my voice wavered a little. I set my jaw, absolutely refusing to cry over the memory of my own stupid, broken heart.

“So, it was because of him, then,” Talia said softly, still watching me with that hyperfocused intensity. “Why you never really came back after high school.”

“Partly, yeah. But it was . . . more complicated than that, too.” I paused to toss back the dregs of my drink, taken aback by just how much I suddenly wanted her to understand what had really happened.

It wasn’t like Talia and I had some profound and long-standing bond, beyond the shared history of all the Wheel of the Year holidays our families had celebrated together by Lady’s Lake, the solstice and equinox circles blessed by moonlight. But neither of us had ever gone out of our way to seek each other out at those events, what with her being older and intimidatingly hot, and me too shy and self-contained to even consider initiating contact. At best, we’d been fellow celestial bodies whose orbits coincided at regular intervals.

But maybe it was that I felt half-drunk, along with battered and off-kilter from the collision with Gareth. Or maybe it was that Talia was unspeakably beautiful and smelled like a goddess and was watching me with those magnetic eyes, with the kind of concentrated attention that made me feel almost tipsier than the liquor. Whatever it was, I very badly did want to tell her. And for once, my pride didn’t feel like a compelling enough reason not to throw caution to the winds.

“The thing is, it’s presumably more complicated than someone who, say, hides under a glamour so they can canoodle with Dead Frederick while avoiding living human interaction would care to hear about,” I added, giving myself a respectable out in the event that she was only being polite, though from what I remembered, decorum had never been her style.

Talia gave a low little laugh, a rich sound that sparked an actual physical reaction somewhere just below my navel, like iron striking flint.

“Let’s say, just this once, I might be willing to set aside my comfortable misanthropy long enough to listen. I’ll even throw in as many drinks as it takes to dull the pain. Sound like a plan?”

She raised an inviting dark eyebrow at me, drawing a silver-ringed hand through her hair and sweeping it over her other shoulder. With it out of the way, I could see her double helix piercing—a silver snake coiling around and through her ear—and the slim black choker snug around her long neck, set with the traditional Avramov garnet at the center. It made her look more like the person I remembered, the chaotic-neutral girl who smoked unfiltered cigarettes under the bleachers at recess and managed to make fingerless gloves look unironically cool.

The kind of girl who should definitely not be drinking a tourist-trap concoction with such evident relish.

“Technically, yes,” I said, eyeballing her drink with more than a little trepidation. “Literally, I’m a little afraid of what you might consider a beverage suitable for this occasion. I mean, what is that travesty? A Sex on the Beach with Scorpion Bowl aspirations?”

She pressed a fingertip to her lips, her eyes flying wide with mock outrage. “Hush, child, before you utter something that cannot be unspoken. I’ll have you know this is a Rainbow’s End Gimlet, the finest of all Morty’s creations. The homemade bitters really highlight the flavored vodkas, of which I believe there are at least three. It’s delicious, and it will knock you straight on your ass.”

I cocked my head, nodding slowly. “It’s . . . shall we say, interesting to me that this is your drink of choice on a Sunday night.”

“What can I say? I’m basically Russian. Random drunkenness is part of my life philosophy—and yours, starting now. Excuse me, sweet pea,” Talia called out to Morty, who’d emerged from the back. He turned to give her a beaming smile several leagues away from the stoic courtesy he’d reserved for Gareth and the Blackmoore brood. Unlike them, she was clearly a genuinely welcome regular here. “Think you could curate a Shamrock flight for us?”

Morty popped her a crisp salute. “Nothing I’d rather do, lovebug.”

While he set to mixing and pouring, Talia propped an elbow on the counter and cupped her chin, eyes drifting back to mine. “So, before we get into the heavy—what have you been up to all these years, Harlow? Living the normie dream, I take it?”

I winced a little at the slur that I had once slung around with similarly casual abandon, before it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t entirely cool. “Pretty much. Kicked things off with a comparative lit degree at the U of Chicago, with a minor in business.”

“Figures.” Another of those high-voltage smiles, a coy little tilt of the head. “Ever the high achiever. Weren’t you valedictorian your year?”

I blinked, surprised that she’d remember, especially since she’d graduated two years before I did. “Uh, yeah, I was. Just one of those weirdos who loves to learn, I guess. For a while there, I thought maybe I even wanted to go into academia. But since I’m partial to the idea of paying off my student loans before I have grandkids, I wound up taking a job with a subscription box start-up a few years back.”