Page 14 of The Sun and the Moon

Sydney

Dread snakes its way around my throat as I replay the night’s events.

Dad tugged me aside right after the meal. Seconds, that’s all we had to chat alone.

“What a ride that was!” he said, looking invigorated and enthused.

“You like her, right? I mean, since she answered your questions?” Hardly!

But I didn’t want to disappoint him. Not when he’s clearly smitten and all I have are bad vibes and the testimony of a perfect stranger with her very own vendetta.

It’s after midnight. I’m still recovering from days in the air, still disoriented about what time zone I’m in, exhausted as fuck, but even after two Benadryls and a dose of melatonin, I’m wide fucking awake.

I feel responsible for how the conversation derailed so completely, never managing to get on track with our original plan.

Cadence tried to warn me about her mother.

The cultish way her personality curls around you like rope and ties you all up in knots.

I never should have let that conversation escalate as far as it did.

I thought I had it under control, but, wow, did I think wrong.

I don’t really know why it got under my skin so fast, either.

But it was like from the moment I met her, she had some sort of dirt on me, like she was a journalist with a scoop.

I just couldn’t put my finger on what the scoop was.

I felt weirdly exposed and defensive, like I had to prove I was stable and happy and exactly where I want to be lest she try to advise me on a better way to go.

I do not need advice—I am doing just fine .

We never got on topic after the toast, and I feel shitty about it.

Moira won’t be easy to break, even with Cadence here setting her on edge. It’s crazy to think I went that deep with her—talking about belief as if it were casual dinner conversation. I don’t do that shit, not normally. But Moira pushes the boundaries.

God, I need sleep. My eyes ache, my skin feels tight.

Nothing is working to quiet my mind. In my experience, there is one thing that almost always does the trick when nothing else will.

I flip over, yanking the drawer of my bedside table open and pulling out my vibrator.

Small, discreet, and pink, with the best sucking action known to woman.

A little release might do the trick to carry me off to dreamland.

I clutch it in hand, falling back against my pillows.

Everything that is meant for you will find you.

Fuck my mind for that betrayal.

How am I supposed to get off with her words echoing in my brain?

The conversation with Moira more than rattled me—I’ll admit it. To myself, anyway.

I’ve dated around enough to know that I don’t have a clue what I’m looking for in a romantic partner, but I’ve otherwise always felt pretty sure-footed when it comes to everything else.

It really bugs me how she poked at my belief in the little birdie pin.

Sure, it’s a fucking superstition that I inherited from my dad.

Just like my blue eyes or my spatial awareness.

Why does it feel like she was saying so much more than that?

And why do I care?

I shake my head and let out a groan.

I am right where I need to be. Successful, independent, living the dream. Single and mingling. And sure, maybe it gets old going from person to person, but the idea that I could find someone I would want for more than a few days or weeks isn’t an idea that I’ve entertained as plausible.

It’s not that I don’t want it. Of course I’d like a partner to do this thing with.

It’s more that I don’t want to rely on a person, because even your person can leave.

Mom didn’t choose her exit from our lives, but that didn’t change the nature of her absence.

She was gone, and it was us against the world . Just Dad and me.

I’ve never found another person who I thought could become a different us with me. An us all my own.

So I leaned on what I knew best. The against the world mentality.

Joe is the closest I’ve had to a partner, and we’re the farthest thing from romantic. Always have been. It’s nice to have him around as a roommate. Low stakes but still valuable in a way most every other relationship I’ve been in isn’t.

I curl my fingers around the vibrator and close my eyes, willing myself to conjure up literally any image that might get me off.

But what comes is much more complicated.

Black curls hanging wild. Long, lean limbs. A taut but supple backside that looks good in a pair of jeans. Skin like sugar. Lips like roses.

Cadence Connelly should not invade my brain in this way. There’s danger in entertaining the fantasy of her. Not just because of the very real stakes of our scheme to split up our parents, which, should that succeed, would make any kind of connection between us tenuous.

You don’t do long-term anyway . The voice in my head taunts as my mind’s eye slides over the slope of her hips. The devil on my shoulder isn’t wrong. Even if this line of thinking very much could be.

But then there’s the soulmate-prediction elephant in the room. Huge and hulking despite the two of us adamantly and openly declaring we don’t believe in the concept. The shiver through my center, settling cold right behind my belly button, sends my eyes flying open.

Questioning is a good instinct. Madame Moira fucking strikes again.

My hand releases the vibrator, and that anxious restless energy coils around my thighs. No relief on any front. I get up, yank on my Ritz-Carlton bathrobe (stolen after a one-night stand in Vienna), and venture out into the kitchen. Maybe some chamomile tea will do the trick.

Joe is in the kitchen making himself a late-night Kraft Mac & Cheese snack. He’s standing over the stove, face above the lightly rolling water to get the pore-opening benefit of the steam. I watch him for a second with his eyes closed, his lips slightly open.

Joe was the first person I told I was bi.

He was an inexperienced Midwestern bi baby himself, barely out.

We bonded over the experience, shared dating horrors over Slurpees at two a.m. At the time, I was just starting to come out of my sexuality shell, and I didn’t yet understand how my queerness would affect my sexual experience.

The broad spectrum of attraction, the way I approached intimacy—it was all a big question I was trying to answer.

Still am, if I’m honest. Romance is a whole other layer. You can feel attraction and not experience love. You can experience love and not feel attraction. Joe would say that my Sagittarius Venus just thrives on adventure, and maybe he’s right.

Sometimes I fear that it’s deeper than that. That if I found the right person, I would still itch to get away from them, eventually fuck it up.

Wind up on my own again.

“You’re staring at me,” Joe says. His eyes open, the dark row of lashes sticking together in little clumps from the steam.

“Oh good, you’re awake. I was worried for a second that you were sleep cooking again,” I snark. Deflection is one of my favorite forms of coping.

“You joke, but you also benefited from that little brush with sleep psychosis.”

“Your snooze brownies were exceptionally yummy.” I scoot onto one of the kitchen island stools.

He pours the pasta into the rapidly boiling water. “Glad you’re up. This way I won’t have to eat alone.” His eyes settle on me, and I know I’ve been caught. I can tell by the way his lips twist into an almost frown.

“I’m fine.” I try to head off the concern.

“Anything but,” he says. “After you came home cosplaying Oscar the Grouch, I was happy to let you brood in your room for the night. I planned to draw it out of you by whatever means necessary in the morning.” He stirs the pasta mindlessly. “This is better.”

“Just because it’s after midnight doesn’t mean I’m going to be any more forthcoming.”

Now he does pout out his lower lip.

“You’ll sleep better if you spill it.”

The problem with spilling it is I would have to know what it is that I want to spill. And right now the feeling is more like a nebulous orb floating in a bowl of cosmic goo. Dark matter from the core of reality.

“I don’t know what’s actually gnawing at me,” I say in a burst of irritation. “But it’s driving me fucking crazy.”

Joe grabs the milk and a few slices of plastic cheese (more Kraft) from the fridge.

I eye the extra cheese. He shrugs. “What? My toxic trait is that sometimes I eat literal garbage, and I like it better than Nobu.” I cackle.

“You’re no different, Ms. Mama Zuma’s Revenge Habanero Chips with a Dash of Tabasco. ” He mimics barfing.

“Don’t knock it until you try it.”

“I did try it. I had heart palpitations.”

He starts mixing the milk and cheese packet together, spooning out a little pasta water as he does. “You’re veering off when you should be baring your soul.” He plops the cheese in the milk mixture and sticks it in the microwave for thirty seconds.

“It’s something we talked about at dinner,” I say, but it feels like even those words are being excavated rather than offered.

“Who talked about it?”

“The psychic,” I say, pausing to watch for his reaction. In a calculated move, he turns around to grab the colander. “And me.”

“So a convo between you and the woman you’re treating like a pariah for falling in love with your dad”—he dumps the pasta out—“has you all shredded up?”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Like, on this planet?” He makes a yuck face. “Pretty sure it’s because May and Daniel Lee boned.”

I cackle. “You know good and well that’s not what I mean.”

He rolls his eyes. “I don’t think about it like that.

Like there’s some grand master plan and I’m meant to figure it out.

” He adds two pats of butter to the noodles, then points at me with his knife.

“Do you ?” He dumps the sauce over the top and stirs.

I fidget with discomfort over the direction this is heading.

“I am tonight.” I sigh deeply. His brows cinch.

“Because of the psychic?” he asks.

“Have you ever talked to a psychic?”

“No, not my thing. Though I think my mom got a saju reading for me when I was a kid.” When my face makes it clear that I don’t know what he means, he elaborates, “It’s a Korean form of reading your fortune.” I nod. Makes sense and sounds interesting.

“Did it say anything about soulmates?” As soon as the question leaves my lips, my head feels light and weird. Questioning everything also means questioning my belief in that .

“God, probably, but I don’t really believe in soulmate messaging,” he says, spooning servings of pasta into bowls. He gives himself a heftier portion. “Even if I did, like from a purely romantic, daydream, pie-in-the-sky sort of place, it wouldn’t change the way I live my life.”

I tuck in to the bowl for a bite. “Why wouldn’t it?” I ask around my chewing. Joe takes a bite, chewing slowly. Buying time to get his words just right. The Scorpio comes alive at night. He’s at his most philosophical, most intense, most thoughtful.

“Because love is still a lot of work, whether it’s with someone the universe fated for you, or whether it’s just someone you choose and keep on choosing.”

He’s always known deep down that he wants to get married, have kids, settle into a little bungalow, and barbecue on the weekends.

He doesn’t have a gender requirement for his happily ever after, but he knows that he wants it.

Me? The only thing I know for sure is I’m terrified to love a person so much that my life becomes partially theirs.

“Sometimes I forget how poetic you get after the witching hour,” I say, deflecting the uncomfortable feelings rising to the surface of my skin.

“And I forget how emo you get,” he says with a snort.

I shovel a few bites, one after the other, into my mouth. Trying to push the image of Cadence out of my brain again.

It’s illogical, almost intrusive, but somehow I feel myself letting her get under my skin when I should be guarding my peace with an arsenal of fire. All of this stuff has me questioning more than I want to. The only way to shake the feeling is to say it out loud.

“If I tell you something wild, you have to promise not to be weird.”

“You know who you’re talking to, right?” he replies.

“Exactly.” I wait. He rolls his eyes.

“All right, I promise,” he says, raising his left hand and placing his right one on his heart.

“When Cadence—”

“The park ranger daughter of the woman you want to send to the other side of the galaxy?” he interjects. I nod.

I decide to deliver the information as succinctly and swiftly as possible.

“Cadence believes that when she and I met at her mother’s shop, we fulfilled a soulmate prediction Moira gave her as a teenager, and it’s freaking me out in the context of everything else.”

Joe blinks at me. His lips drop open. His dark eyes narrow.

“ In the context of everything else ,” he says, putting dramatic air quotes around the phrase. “You think she’s hot.”

“No—well, yes, but that’s not the point at all.”

“It sounds very much like the point.”

“I just told you her psychic mom predicted the exact scenario we met under, and this is the part you choose to fixate on?”

Joe screeches, tossing his head theatrically. When he brings it back upright, he smiles. Genuine and open. “Sweetie, you don’t even believe in long-term relationships.”

I want to defend myself. I want to argue.

“And what if this whole time I’ve been wrong?” I set my bowl down on the countertop, dropping my fork back inside with a clink. Joe sets his bowl down and comes around the island to swivel my chair so I’m facing him. He places one hand on each shoulder, dropping down to look me right in the eyes.

“Then you change your mind,” he says tenderly. “And you invite in whatever new truth you want to embrace.”

Change is my least favorite word.

Not for how it sounds or the way it rolls off the tongue. It’s the way it grips me right in the throat like a clenching fist. It’s the way it sends shoots of electricity from my heart to my stomach to my fingertips and toes. The flight response that has nothing to do with landing a plane.

Horrible, terrible, incredible.

Coming right for me no matter how hard I try to avoid it.