Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(4)
“I’m sticking with the mulled wine,” I decided, banishing the Ghost of Sydney Past with as much firmness as I could muster.
“Foolproof choice.” Jessa pursed her lips and squinted at the menu for another moment, the bulb’s ruddy light picking out wavering highlights in the rings stacked above and below her knuckles. She had a metallic rose-gold French manicure this week, too; seriously, what the hell kind of amenable clientele did she even have? “Okay, yup. I’m gonna take a gamble on the hot toddy and see if I live to rue the day.”
I huffed a laugh into my handful of popcorn, shaking my head. “As if ‘regret’ even figures into your vocabulary.”
“Just because I choose to look back fondly on most of my mistakes doesn’t mean I don’t learn from them.”
Once our order was in and the menus whisked away, Jessa draped an arm over the table and rested her chin in the cup of her other palm, giving me a frankly assessing stare.
“How worried do I really need to be about you, sweetheart?” she said, matter-of-fact but still in that sweet tone that dissolved anything sharp or accusatory before it could make me shrink into myself. “This two-step of meltdowns and existential malaise is starting to seem like more than you should have to handle on your own. What does Sassy Sue have to say about this situation? Is it time to consider meds?”
Sassy Sue was my much beloved and, yes, profoundly spicy and no-nonsense therapist. WWSSD—What Would Sassy Sue Do—had long been Jessa’s and my tough-love code for “Get your shit together and make the right call.”
“We’ve discussed it,” I said, wiping popcorn grease off my hands and then folding the napkin into a neat little square before setting it aside. “But she thinks, and I agree, that my issue is more situational. Meds might give me a little boost, sure. But the thing is, I don’t actually feel the chronic kind of depressed, Jess. I still like my job, and I enjoy working out. I get pretty reliable jollies from my preferred forms of retail therapy, just like before.”
And I still adored the magic in my life every breathtaking bit as much as I ever had, not that I could share that with Jessa.
“No issues getting out of bed in the morning or motivating,” I went on. “So it’s not that I’ve become constitutionally incapable of producing happy feelings. I’m more or less fine—as long as I don’t venture beyond my comfort zone.”
Jessa gave a pensive nod, mulling it over. “Got it, I think. So, what is the problem, then? Is it that you still miss her?”
Our drinks arrived, just in time to help choke down the tangle of emotions clambering up my throat like climbing vines. I closed my eyes, took a therapeutic inhale of the boozy steam followed by a semi-scalding sip of red wine. Cinnamon and nutmeg and the bright, sweet tang of hot alcohol seeped into my mouth, blunting the thorns in my throat into something more manageable.
“No,” I said, fighting the tremble in my voice; even though the real answer was unfortunately still sometimes. “It’s when I start trying to move forward, to do anything new. It makes me feel so lost, Jess. So . . . disjointed, permanently off-balance, somehow. Like I woke up one morning and suddenly found myself a castaway, stranded in the wrong life. I should be married right now, to the love of my life. Maybe even starting to think about having kids.”
Jessa suppressed a little eye roll, presumably bored stiff by the unforgivably vanilla spouse-plus-2.5-kids slant of my life goals. I felt a stab of annoyance back at her, for not understanding the way she usually did, with ample empathy. I certainly expended enough of it on her, trying to wrap my brain around the offbeat way she conducted her relationships.
“Look, I’m well aware those aren’t your things,” I said, a little sharply, “but they are mine. You know that.”
Her round face softened immediately, brief chagrin glinting in her brown eyes. “It’s not that, Nina. I’m just not sure I’d call Sydney ‘Jacqueline-pronounced-Zha-KLEEN’ Grant the great love of your life, you know? She did call the wedding off a week before you were supposed to get married. Might as well have ditched you the day of, at least let you have your beautifully tragic moment at the altar if you couldn’t get your damn deposits back.”
I gritted my teeth at the memory of Sydney sobbing in our loft apartment—she’d cried much more than I had at the time, which struck me now as quite a bit of bullshit—as she trailed me from room to room, wringing her hands and pleading for my understanding while I paced back and forth, my entire life dissolving around me like an ice palace under a blowtorch. I just can’t breathe when I’m with you, Nina, she’d said through shimmering tears; Sydney somehow even cried prettily, like she was creating content for her Instagram reels just by existing. It’s like there’s not enough air around you, like you create this vacuum wherever you are. And I . . . I don’t want to live the rest of my life that way, so joyless, so arid.
I can’t do that to myself. I won’t.
You’d have thought she might’ve been struck by this tragic revelation at any other, more convenient time in our four years together—before, for instance, proposing to me, and insisting on a December wedding even though she knew how much I hated winter.
Now, instead, I had to live the rest of my life knowing I was the kind of “joyless,” suffocating person who made other people feel like they’d been vented out of an airlock.