by Cara Bastone
CHAPTER TEN
“HEY, SEB? YOU HOME?”
“Back here!” Sebastian shouted from his place at the stove.
“Oh, is Tyler coming for lunch?” Via asked, a hostess’s panic in her tone. “I don’t think we have enough food.”
Sebastian chuckled at the look of pure horror on Via’s face. “Baby, it’s fine. I didn’t know he was coming so there’s no way he can be offended that we didn’t make lunch for him.”
Fin, watching all this with a raised brow, shuffled the cards and waited for Tyler to burst into the room, bringing his ridiculously loud energy with him.
They heard him wrestling with his shoes in the front hall. When he entered the kitchen, Fin’s hands stuttered on the cards.
He was...very sweaty.
It was brisk outside, probably forty degrees, but sunny, and he’d obviously gone for a jog.
Well, from the looks of things, it had been more of a sprint than a jog. His pale blue T-shirt stuck to his chest. She could see straight through it to the chest hair underneath. He wore joggers and a stocking cap, his earbuds draped over one shoulder. She’d never seen his color so high, his chest heaving in and out. She’d seen Tyler enjoy himself before. She’d seen him tease, she’d seen him loose. But she’d never seen him quite so relaxed before.
To her own chagrin, for just the flash of a second, Fin wondered what Tyler might look like right after he was finished having sex. It was only an instant, not longer than the irregular heartbeat it elicited from her, but the image was potent. She, for some strange reason, could perfectly picture him on his back in a bed, sheets askew, his hair damp with sweat, his eyes blurry and blissed out, one arm flung over his head, the other hand firmly clamped over the ass or breast of whoever he was with—
“Oh.” His eyes landed on Fin and again her hands stuttered on the cards. “Hi.”
“Hi.” She wondered briefly if he was thinking about the zipper of his coat.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt your tarot card reading, Via,” Tyler said, snarky, but not unfriendly.
She let her irritation at Tyler rush through her, a welcome, grounding feeling. This was how she was supposed to feel about Tyler. Irritated.
Via laughed. “These are just playing cards. Fin doesn’t do tarot. We’re about to play gin rummy. Did you wanna stay and play?”
To Fin’s surprise, Tyler actually looked a little regretful when he said no. “I can’t. I’ve gotta get back, shower and get some lunch together before I go get Kylie from her meeting with her social worker.”
“You could eat here,” Seb suggested.
“No thanks, I—Hold the phone, are you cooking?”
“I can cook!” Sebastian insisted. “How come no one thinks I can cook? I fed Matty for years before Via came along.”
Via and Fin made eye contact, both of them hiding their smiles.
“Right,” Tyler said soothingly, as if he had no interest in poking the bear. “Even so, I’m going to have to decline. I just came by to see if you still had that external hard drive I loaned you? I need to back up my columns. Haven’t done it in a while.”
“Sure. It’s in the closet somewhere.”
Tyler went to follow Sebastian and then paused in the doorway. “Where’s Matty?”
“Joy’s house,” Via answered.
“And Crabby?” Tyler looked around in confusion.
Fin cleared her throat and pointed down at her feet where Crabby, usually spastic and so excited about the world he could barely live, slept peacefully.
“Figures,” Tyler mumbled, rolling his eyes to the sky. “Traitor,” he said to Crabby, winking at Via.
In a move that she hadn’t performed since perhaps age six, Fin couldn’t help but stick her tongue out at Tyler. He blinked at her for a moment before his eyebrows rose and he stuck his tongue out right back at her.
“Here you go.” Sebastian came back and slapped the three-inch hard drive into Tyler’s hand. Tyler, who’d still been looking at Fin, his navy eyes strangely clear to her, even from across the room, broke the eye contact and zipped up the hard drive into his pocket.
“All right, kiddies,” he said. “Enjoy your burned grilled cheeses.”
“Scram,” Sebastian said darkly. “And don’t forget basketball tomorrow.”
Tyler waved at the rest and then was gone, out the front door as soon as his shoes were on.
Fin could feel Via’s eyes on the side of her face but suddenly found shuffling the cards took up all of her attention. She focused her eyes on the cards, the blurring red and black dividing, slapping together, stacked neatly, newly combined in a fresh pattern. She thought about the rightness of that. Those cards all mixed up together. That was the way they were supposed to be, the only way you could fairly play the game.
* * *
FIN HAD TO admit that the chicken curry was good. Not grand, but good enough to have seconds. She’d been surprised to get the invite from Tyler for dinner, a few days after seeing him at Seb’s. She’d been under the impression that she’d only be invited to do things that took place outside of the house.
She was thrilled to hang out with Kylie in her natural habitat.
But on the other hand, that meant spending more time in Tyler’s home. Which was kind of a minefield. His energy, though not the preppy, entitled, douchey energy she’d originally expected, was just so freaking loud.
It overwhelmed everything in the room. Swallowed everything down. Including Kylie. Serafine hadn’t seen her room, but there was very little trace of Kylie having made this place her home.
Looking around, Fin didn’t even see Kylie’s school bag. Or her shoes, for God’s sake.
After dinner, which had been largely a quiet affair, Fin would have normally volunteered to do the dishes. But she wanted to avoid touching too many of Tyler’s belongings. It was the same idea as folding a lot of heavily perfumed scarves. If she did the task, she’d go home with the scent of perfume on her hands. And she really didn’t want to take Tyler home with her.
So, bad manners and all, she thanked Tyler for dinner and then left him to the dishes and wandered after Kylie, who was making a beeline for her room.
“Nice room,” Fin said, standing in the hallway and peeking in.
“Oh. Thanks.” Kylie, realizing that she had a visitor, opened the door wider and stepped back to sit on the bed. “You can come in if you want.”
Fin sidled in and sat on a leather desk chair that looked out of place in the room. She realized her mistake immediately. This wasn’t Kylie’s chair. This was definitely Tyler’s chair. A chair that he’d spent a great deal of time in. A strange electricity jolted through Fin, almost like the tingling in her arms and legs before she’d passed out when she’d been sick with the flu that one time. She stood and instead wandered over to the windowsill. But...her body still tingling from having sat in Tyler’s chair, all Fin could see as she looked around was Tyler. He was everywhere in this room too.
She blocked him from her mind and turned her focus onto Kylie. “So. How’re you getting used to Brooklyn? I know it can be a lot.”
Fin thought of the first time she’d ever ridden over the Manhattan Bridge, her eyes on the East River so far below. It had looked far less muddy than the Mississippi. Her eyes had tracked to the side, to what had to be the Brooklyn Bridge on their right, disorienting in its instantly recognizable familiarity. Beyond that, shockingly green and shockingly small in the distance, had been the Statue of Liberty winking in the sun. She’d just gotten off the plane from New Orleans, barreling through a new city with Aunt Jetty, whom she barely knew, at her side.
She hadn’t expected New York, so overbearing and rude and closed off, to give up one of its secrets for free like that. She’d expected to have to pry every beautiful thing from its clawed-off, East Coast fist. But there she was, Lady Liberty, standing at at
tention, a lovely shade of sage. It was fitting to Fin that she was facing away.
“Brooklyn,” Aunt Jetty had said, still watching her niece with all-seeing eyes that Fin had wished she’d point somewhere else for a while. “There’s psychics there too, if you’re curious. And good food. Where we live there’s lots of Italian food. Some Russian too.”
We.
The word had hurt.
Fin’s mother spoke Cajun where the word oui translated to mean yes. But over the years that yes had often disintegrated into a no. Just as Fin’s we with her mother had slowly disintegrated into an I.
It had been a terribly long time since Fin had been a part of a we with someone. But that we, with Jetty, came with an entire, terrible city. It came with winters and no more NOLA. That we had not included her mother.
Kylie sighed, and it brought Fin back to the present. Kylie looked slightly bored, like she was resigning herself to having this tired conversation with yet another adult. “It’s fine. I don’t mind the city.”
Fin nodded, reaching into her pocket, her fingers brushing against the small, loose crystals she carried there like pocket change. An idea struck. “Do you like jewelry?”
Kylie, surprised at the conversation shift, raised her eyebrows. Today, her hair, curling at the temples, was still flattened from where she’d worn her winter cap. “I guess. My mom has a lot of it. I don’t really.”
“I make jewelry. Like this.” Fin pulled her crystal necklace out from under the collar of her shirt. It was a milky orange crystal affixed to a silver chain.
“Pretty,” Kylie said, her eyes flitting back up to Serafine’s face.
“Thanks. I make a lot of it. I sell it too.”
“But I thought Tyler said you were a fortune-teller.”
Fin rolled her eyes. “Of course he’d describe it that way.”
For some reason, that made Kylie laugh. “How would you describe what you do?”
“I describe it differently to different people,” Fin said with a shrug. “But to you... I guess I’d say that I work with people’s energy. I can read them well. Sometimes it helps me see problem areas in their life that they’re blind to.”
“Can you see the future?”
Comfortable with the subject and thrilled with the interest she saw in Kylie’s freckled features, Fin tried to explain. “Not the way you’re probably imagining. More than anything I see patterns. Sometimes the paths that people take are obvious. You can often tell where someone is going based on where they’ve been.”
Kylie’s brow furrowed down hard as she stared at her own crisscrossed legs. “I’ve noticed that about people too.”
Fin knew, without a doubt, that Kylie was thinking of her mother. She felt the cold, sharp ache of the girl’s pain. Even from all the way across the room.
Fin pulled the crystals out of her pocket. There were five of them, all of them smaller than a dime. They’d traveled in her pocket for years. Each one was a different kind of crystal. One pink, one silverish, one clear with internal fingers of gold, one green and one dead black. Every day she transferred them to whatever she was going to wear that day. They were warm from her body and felt as much a part of her as her fingernails did.
“If you pick one of these, I’ll make you a necklace or bracelet from its type of crystal.”
There were many crystal and rock shops in New York City, one of the things that Fin loved about the city, and her personal supply of gems and crystals was hearty. Kylie, seeming to understand inherently that she was supposed to look at the gems in Fin’s hand and not touch them, folded her hands under her chin and leaned over to get a better look.
“I like that one.”
Fin kept her reaction smooth. She knew well enough it was no coincidence that the crystal Kylie had been drawn to was the silvery hematite. It was a crystal associated with defense. Justice. And, most hopefully, healing.
“Necklace or bracelet?”
Kylie looked up, her dark eyes slightly uncomfortable as she pushed back the shock of red hair that had fallen in her face. “Is one more expensive than the other?”
“Normally they’re priced differently. But this is my gift to you. A welcome-to-Brooklyn gift.”
Kylie looked like she wanted to argue but after a second, she snapped her mouth closed. “Necklace then. Please.”
“I’ll bring it by in a few days.”
Fin slipped her crystals back in her pocket and stretched. “I should head back home.”
“Fin?”
“Yeah?”
“Never mind,” Kylie said after a beat. “Goodnight.”
Fin paused. “See you soon.”
Fin ducked her head into the kitchen, saw it was empty and clean and headed to the living room. There, stretched out on the couch, his eyes closed, was Tyler.
She wanted to creep past quickly, but something made her pause. Her eyes snagged on him. She’d never seen him in repose before. Most people curled up when they were resting. A bent leg or arms folded under their heads. But Tyler laid on his back, his legs crossed at the ankle and perfectly straight. His hands were folded over his stomach. Fin could perfectly picture him napping like that under a weeping willow, a book folded over his face to keep the sunshine off his eyelids. How had she never noticed just how long he was?
Maybe because she’d usually seen him compared to Sebastian. Who was maybe an inch taller than Tyler and much wider, more barrel-chested. Tyler wasn’t skinny, but he was a bit lanky. He had wide shoulders and narrow hips and stem to stern, he did not fit on that couch. His head was crooked up on the arm in what looked like a very uncomfortable position.
She could feel the calmness of his rest. If he wasn’t sleeping, he was nearing it. Not wanting to wake him, for myriad reasons, she slipped quietly into her shoes and coat and crept out.
For the second time in as many days, Fin opted for the long walk home. It was 8:45 on a cold December night and anywhere else in the world, the sky would have been as black as a chalkboard. In Brooklyn, though, with the clouds in a thick sheet overtop and the city lights reflecting down on her, Fin had a kind of orangish night-light to walk her home. She wove down some of the more residential blocks instead of walking up Flatbush, which was busy with traffic and smoggy with exhaust. It took her an hour to get from Tyler’s building in Midwood to her place on Ocean Avenue.
She took the elevator up and breathed a sigh of relief as she stepped into her own space. It smelled like sage and mint with just a touch of lavender.
Happy to be home, she went right into her bedroom and took off all her jewelry. She didn’t need her talismans when she was in her own home.
And then, even though it was getting close to bedtime, she headed into her kitchen to see about her makeshift herb garden. The scents of fresh herbs inundated her, and Serafine breathed deeply, an irascible joy rising within her.
She took down the tarragon she’d put up to dry a few days before and carefully bottled it into two small glass jars. One of them she’d take to Via for cooking, and one of them she’d keep for herself. Tarragon was a useful herb in many of the kitchen spells that Fin was learning how to work. She wasn’t much of a cook, but as she’d been proving for most of her life, there was plenty more a person could use a kitchen for than just cooking.
Her mind flashed back to her evening. To the meal that Tyler had cooked for her. Good, solid home cooking. She’d left without saying goodbye.
Frowning to herself, Fin fixed a cup of her personal blend of sleepytime tea, and grabbed a chocolate Popsicle from her freezer.
She settled into her living room and pulled out her laptop to watch some Netflix. Pulling up a rom-com she’d seen a hundred times before, Fin settled back, not needing a blanket in her hot apartment, but feeling cuddled up all the same. She delighted in the simple pleasure of a swallow of hot tea followed by a lick of cold Popsic
le.
What more could she want—
Tyler is a really good person.
Mary’s voice suddenly echoed in Fin’s head and she frowned.
Blind spot, Mary had said.
Blind spot about what? Tyler? Who he really was?
She frowned.
Going back over the night in her head, she zoomed back to the dinner, where Tyler had barely said two words. His hair had been perfect, his face shaved, his collared shirt immaculately ironed. Had she let all that fool her into missing the dark circles under his eyes? The way his shoulders had sagged?
He’d grocery shopped for that meal. Fresh ingredients. She’d seen the recipe book open on the counter. He’d made it. From scratch. For his sister and for her.
Why, oh, why, did she continually think of him as a selfish person?
Tyler really is a good person.
If she’d seen a still of that night, instead of having sat there in person, she’d have seen an overworked guardian doing his best to make things all right for his sister. And honestly, his best wasn’t too shabby.
He could have been serving Kylie microwaved meals, and Fin wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But he wasn’t. He was taking her to basketball games. He was allowing Fin to get to know her. He was grocery shopping, home cooking dinners on school nights.
Was it possible that she really thought so little of a man simply because he’d asked her out on a date months ago? It was depressing to think that all it took to plummet her opinion of someone was them proclaiming interest in her. What did that even say about her?
Fin got up, went to her coat closet and dug her cell phone out of her coat pocket. Finishing the Popsicle off in one last chunk, she huffed herself back to the couch, frowning at her phone, at herself, at this entire predicament.
She pulled up Tyler’s number and sent a quick text.
I just wanted to say thank you for dinner. It was delicious. Sorry I didn’t help with dishes. And sorry I left without saying goodbye.