Page 21 of Everything She Does Is Magic (Fableview #1)

Anya

I’ve never snuck out of any house. Not when it’s been only Aunt Cal and me, not with any other family member I’ve stayed with, and certainly not during summer visits with my parents.

There has never been a reason for me to leave.

Until Darcy. I need to see her again. And I need it, for once, not to be in some setting with every single resident of Fableview around us.

It’s easier than I expect, with everyone in their respective bedrooms on the second floor and me above them in the attic, pattering down the back spiral staircase that skips their floor altogether. Even if they did hear me, they’d never suspect this is what I’d be doing.

I drive Aunt Cal’s Volkswagen over to Darcy’s, pulling into the alley behind Pam’s Paints like she instructed. It’s a land of dumpsters and unlabeled metal back doors—a nice reminder that even though this town is sometimes unbelievably wholesome, it’s also real.

Darcy’s bedroom has its own balcony that overlooks the alley.

She swings her leg over the side to find her footing on a pipe.

She has a hood pulled over her hair, but her legs are bare, moisturized with something shimmery that catches a glint of moonlight.

It’s nerve-racking to watch her find a way to the ground, but she has that confidence I know now to be a piece of her.

Maybe she’s snuck out a dozen times before, and this delicate dance she’s doing among pipes and windows and siding is nothing new.

Or she knows what we’re doing is dangerous but necessary, precious but risky, and one wrong move will mean we can’t see each other at all.

“You were right. I do find this car very funny,” she tells me as she climbs into Aunt Cal’s yellow Beetle.

Darcy pulls the hood off her head, revealing the same pigtail braids she had on earlier, now sleep-tousled.

She takes in the car’s interior. Aunt Cal’s drying herbs.

All the crystals and talismans Cal’s fixed to the dashboard and roped around the rearview mirror.

“It smells like you in here.” Darcy presses her nose to my neck.

My foot loses its place on the brake. We wheel forward, and we both shriek.

“I thought you had it in park,” Darcy says, sitting very straight now in the passenger seat.

“I wish I did.” What a shame that one small decision has resulted in Darcy’s distance. The feeling of her nose on my neck still lingers, tickling my skin.

She directs me to Fableview Creek, taking care to keep her hands tucked under her legs for the rest of the drive. I grip the steering wheel tighter, all determination. “Oh,” I say. “I won the apple bobbing final.”

“I knew you would,” she tells me, and my face burns with pride. “I wish I’d been able to see it, but I was too busy announcing the pie contest winners with my parents.”

“A worthy cause.”

“Tell me, whatever will you do with your five-hundred-dollar prize?”

“Start a new life.”

She laughs like I’m kidding, which is fine. It’s better not to complicate this with the specifics anyway.

At the creek, the night is so dark, it blankets everything but the stars, which are countless out here in the stillness. The rush of the river in the near distance roars on with the same intensity as my beating heart—loud and steady. Assured.

“It’s really just us out here,” I say, parking the car.

“Us and the moon and the animals,” Darcy tells me.

“Do you want to sit on the car for a better view?”

Darcy nods, and I pop the trunk to set out one of the large blankets Cal keeps in the back—a patchwork quilt not unlike her signature jacket.

It takes some situating, the sloping hood of the Volkswagen not very interested in accommodating us, but eventually we make it work, with the windshield acting as our headboard.

“Thanks for inviting me,” Darcy says once we’ve gotten settled.

And even though we’ve kissed and I know now that she must like me, it still feels rare to hear her gratitude . I’d go with you anywhere , I think but do not say. You’re the best part of every room I’m in.

We’re not touching. Not yet. Close, only inches between us, but not making contact.

“I needed a chance to see you again without the threat of my parents hovering,” I say.

“As you know, I can relate,” she responds with a small laugh.

It’s true. We’re both stuck inside our families’ expectations. She’s got the pressure of being asked to take over her parents’ whole empire, which, now that I’ve had the chance to see it up close, is more work than I’d want to do in a single lifetime.

I’ve got my family’s belief that I’ll be participating in the upcoming initiation. I have my eighteenth birthday. Adulthood, supposedly. With no tools to navigate it.

“Mine came to town earlier than I expected,” I say. “And before they got here, they asked me to do a dinner with my friends in Fableview, so I may have mentioned your name. Which is why I asked you that. In the supply closet.”

This is when I need to convince Darcy I really am a witch. There’s no way it won’t come up at the actual dinner, and it will be better for all of us if Darcy knows ahead of time.

But just the mention of the supply closet has made everything sharper, like a lens that’s locked its focus. Darcy sits up, leaning on her support arm so that she can tuck her head into her own shoulder.

“Are we friends ?” she asks teasingly, scrunching her nose and singing the words. She plants a quick kiss on my nose. “My dear friend Anya.” She plants another on my cheek. “Dear, dear friend .” One on my neck. One on my forehead.

Far be it from me to interrupt these kisses with my inconvenient truth.

“Mom, Dad, this is Darcy. We’re besties,” I say, catching on to the game. When she darts to kiss me again, I grab her, wrapping my arms around her middle until she’s pressed into my chest.

With only one movement, the lack of space between us sucks all the laughter out of the air.

Darcy Keller is on top of me.

I am holding her, feeling her heart against my own, her legs slotting perfectly between mine. It has the odd effect of calming me. Subduing the nerves that want to take hold of this moment.

“I’ve never dated anyone before,” I whisper as low as possible, a secret for Darcy and the stars. “I don’t know if I’m doing any of this right.”

Her head tilts to the side. It’s the same way she looked at the paintings that night I took her class. Curious. Interested. And maybe even a bit…admiring? Finally, she drops her head beside mine, presses her lips right against my ear, and whispers, “Are we dating ?”

It might have been a ridiculous leap to make. But also, every activity we’ve done around Fableview has felt a little date-like. And, well, she is currently on top of me, and all the other pressing matters between us don’t seem to matter half as much as this does.

She’s got that same teasing tone, but her question is valid. And true. Maybe it’s bad form to wonder, but I want to know what we are. There is so much about my life I don’t know, but this is something I need to understand.

“I’ve spent my whole life getting good at change,” I say.

“I’ve lived in so many places, adjusting to a dozen different daily routines and rituals.

It’s always been about how I can fit into someone else’s life.

How I can learn whatever they want to teach me about our family.

I’ve never had anything that belongs only to me.

Except for this, with us. It’s mine. Ours , really. ”

“Ours,” Darcy echoes. “I like the sound of that.” She holds my cheek with her palm, using the pads of her fingers to lightly brush the hair off my face.

It’s so small. But also, it’s everything.

“I don’t know exactly what we are, but I know it’s something I want to keep figuring out. ” She strokes my hair.

“Me too,” I say.

She kisses me deeply. Slowly. It’s a new kind of kiss for us. All of this is new. But this one has a way of speaking. Whatever we are is the best thing anyone could ever be.

When she peels herself off me, I don’t even mind it. There is no rush. No expectations. She puts her hands behind her head. A drive-in movie theater where the only view is the water.

She pulls one knee up while the other stays flat. I put my finger on it to trace stars into her leg, hypnotized by the softness of her skin and the stillness of the night. How everything just is .

I feel the truth about tomorrow’s dinner forming in my mind, all the necessary pieces of information gathering together like the supplies that come to me when I’m mending. It might look broken on the surface, but I believe that I can fix it.

“Did you know my grandma was best friends with your grandma?” I start.

“Really?”

“Yeah. According to my mom. Your last name caught her interest.”

“Ah, so you mean my dad’s mom. I never got to meet either of my grandmas,” Darcy tells me.

“They both died before I was born. But I feel them a lot. Hard not to, since I’m living in the town they both grew up in, working at the shop one of them owned.

” She pauses. “Sorry. I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m annoyed by my family history.

Obviously I’m not. Everyone always says my grandmas were wonderful.

I’m not surprised your grandma was best friends with one of them.

There’s just so much happening right now. ”

The possibility of her defensiveness won’t scare me off. Not this time. Not when I know it’s just that—a shield, designed to keep me from seeing her. “How do you do it all?”

“You should be the last person to ask me that,” she says. “You must be on track to be our class valedictorian.”

Okay, perhaps I’m not prepared, because this is not the argument I expected her to make.

It derails my entire plan for this reveal.

My silence isn’t intentional, but she reads it as modesty, and it gets her to slap my arm in that playful way of hers.

Then she rests her head in the crook of my shoulder, and I’m happy to be confused if it means having her this close to me again.

“C’mon,” she says. “You have a 107percent in French.”

“Because French is the only class you and I have together,” I tell her.

She tilts her head, looking at the side of my face with her nose almost pressed into my cheek. I can see the mental math she’s doing to accommodate for this admission.

“You’re only good at French because you want to beat me at it?” she asks. “You really are competitive. No wonder Kyle fearsyou.”

“I’m good at French because paying attention in that class is the only thing that’s kept me from thinking about you the whole time.”

It’s another heavy thing. Maybe a mistake. But Darcy laughs her real laugh, the one that sounds like wind chimes in a summer breeze. “I’m glad to know I motivate you.”

“Oh yes. If you were in all my classes, I probably would be valedictorian. But since you’re not, I’ve got B’s in everything else. Actually, I almost failed gym class last semester. You can ask Kyle about it. I’m sure he’d love to tell you.”

“I will never forget the look on his face when you won the apple bobbing contest,” she says.

“Me neither.”

We fall quiet. It’s on the tip of my tongue. But bringing up the truth will disrupt this perfect peace. I have to hold on to this as long as I can. Because soon I’ll have nothing to hold on to atall.

Darcy slides off the top of the car. She opens the passenger door and rummages around for something inside. When she comes back, she has her phone in her hand.

“I want to take a picture,” she whispers. I expect to see her align her phone with the water. It would be dark, but maybe she wants it for her art. Something to paint.

Instead she turns the phone toward us, resting her head in the crook of my neck again. “Smile.”

I do. How could I not? Because this perfect, fleeting night will exist long beyond my memory of it.

No matter who we someday become—Darcy hopefully off to some college far away, me living off five hundred dollars of apple bobbing money somewhere else—there will always be proof of our night by the creek, when the only thing that mattered was that we were here together.