Page 21 of The Sun and the Moon

“You’re the querent, and that means you can ask whatever you like of the cards,” Moira says, pausing her shuffle to rap her knuckles against the bottom of the deck like she’s knocking on a closed door.

“What if I don’t have a specific question?” Or, more accurately, a question I can say out loud.

“It’s not required,” she says, leaning forward in this conspiratorial way that puts me on edge and makes me instinctively want to mirror the move.

With all her clear narcissistic tendencies and my blinders-off awareness of her ability to utilize her charm to bend the will of those around her, my resistance isn’t nearly as strong as I would like.

My understanding of how she hooked my dad is starting to get more defined.

“But if I may be so bold…” Ha! She doesn’t do coy well. My brows jump, and she sets the cards on the table between us. “I sense you have some unease about the future.” Her eyes are pools of endless dark water. “Cut the deck.”

My hand moves, my brain screams, and the only thing on my mind is What if she’s right?

Not just my unease about the future, which feels fucking plausible and like it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone at all that I reek of uncertainty like it’s bad BO.

What if she’s right about Cadence and me?

What if Ranger Girl is my goddamn soulmate?

You don’t believe in soulmates.

Questioning things is a good instinct.

Shut up!

I lift the cards without grace. A chunk comes up, a few slipping from the bottom back to the stack below, and then I set down the cards in my hand. Why is my hand trembling? I curl my fingers into a fist and shove it between my thighs.

“Which one?” she asks. “The stack you pick is the one we draw from.” She’s guiding me more than I expected she would, but she isn’t giving me the answers, either. This is in my hands, not hers.

I let my eyes drop to the two stacks. I don’t know why this feels like a critically important decision—it’s just tarot cards.

A parlor trick akin to one my dad would do in our living room.

A coin behind the ear, a bunny in a hat.

Tarot itself was invented as a playing-card game, glorified only by the adaptation of the deck into occult practices.

(Yes, my deep dive on Moira Connelly led me to the tarot page on Wikipedia.)

This isn’t fate. The universe isn’t speaking. Yet the weight on my chest reminds me of the first time I set foot in a cockpit. Newly minted badge on my breast, 160 souls in my hands. Destiny right at my fingertips.

No, not destiny. Obligation.

My eyes flick up to Moira again, and I point to the stack that was on the bottom—the one the few cards dropped onto after I cut them.

She touches the stack I point to, and I can’t tell by her face if she approves or not.

I inwardly scold myself for caring. She lifts the stack and sets it on top of the other one, pulling it back toward her but leaving it resting on the table.

“Does the order they come out in have a specific meaning?”

“Oftentimes I’ll do a three-card reading for general energy. It could represent past, present, future; it could be the potential on your path.” At the word potential my skin tingles. Just the fingertips, but it’s potent enough to notice. “That one?”

She flicks her eyes over my face.

“I mean, who doesn’t want to hear about their potential?”

“Well, the potential of your path, currently, as of this moment in time,” she corrects.

“You mean, what we see could change?” I ask the question—breathless for the answer. What is happening to me? This spiritually curious person is not me. I’ve never even read a horoscope, though Joe insists I am such a Libra it’s scary .

“Depends on you—what you do with the information the cards present.”

“And not what you tell me to do?” My lips leap into a smirk. She isn’t swayed.

“I’ll have my own interpretation, but it’s up to you what you do with it.”

To me she extends agency. To the girl out front, Lola, she tethers a long leash. But to her daughter she narrowed the vision. Claimed ownership of her future. Told her, point-blank, that her soulmate would only ever cross Cadence’s path because of her.

“I’m ready,” I say with a nod.

She brushes the cards with her fingertips before flipping the first one over toward me. It lands upright. The first thing my eyes grip is the name.

Two of Cups

The words are written in a cool, deep blue, and there’s a treatment on the card that makes it look antique.

Not sepia, but just a careful fade that feels vintage.

The border is done in the same vines as I noticed on the other side of the cards, but within the border the background is a soft pink-and-blue-and-purple wash.

At the center of the card are two figures—two women, I realize upon closer inspection—each holding a cup in hand as they face each other.

My eyes jump back and forth between the two women as heat creeps up my neck where it warms my ears. Something about this card is giving gay love. Love is love. You are about to be in love.

I don’t love this for me. But still, my heartbeat patters. A faster beat, the yearning kind.

Without saying anything about the first card, Moira flips over the next one.

The Sun

The words are written in a soft, shimmery gold this time, and they have been given the same antique treatment, that same winding vine border, and the background is done to look like a soft blue sky, below which rolling hills expand to the horizon.

In the center of the card is a woman curled into a ball, the long gold tendrils of her hair fanning out in a shape that mirrors sunbursts.

She glows, her face illuminated as if from within.

I stare into her face. Her expression set in a smile, her eyes focused forward, on the future.

Moira flips over the next card.

The Moon

Shimmery silver letters, antique treatment, winding vine border, only the background of this card is the inky blue of a night sky.

There are purple and silver swirls at the edges and what looks like tiny starlike dots in the deep color.

In the center is a woman curled into a crescent moon shape, cloaked in her raven hair, illuminated from behind with a silver glow.

I look between the three cards, fighting the thoughts in my head as they scream, This reading is about you and Cadence! Me, the Sun. Her, the Moon. Us, together in a romantic way, with our cups running over with…lust? Desire?

Love?

I swallow the panic and hope it will stay down long enough for me to get through this.

“Interesting spread,” I say with a frog-like croak. I will myself to look up at her face. She’s not looking at me, though. Her attention is on the cards, her expression pensive. “I have no idea what any of this means,” I prod, the panic threatening to rise back up.

“Where would you like me to start?” she asks, looking up at me finally. I know she can read the fear on me. I just hope she can’t pinpoint why.

“How about this one?” I point to the first card I pulled out. “Start at the beginning, I guess?”

She runs her finger over the edge of the first card. “The Two of Cups is a soulmate card.”

“You sure you haven’t rigged this deck?” I say with a scoff. Her smile is Cheshire.

I’m playing it cool, but inwardly I’m screaming.

I do believe in coincidence. Happenstance that leads to moments that feel like they were meant to be.

After all the questioning I’ve been entertaining despite my better judgment, it seems now I can’t escape my very own Madame Moira soulmate prediction.

“You’re not in the market for a soulmate?” she asks. There’s almost no inflection in her voice. Unlike yesterday, when she prodded me toward a conclusion through our conversation, right now, she has an almost neutral tone. Like she actually wants me to make my own mind up.

I shrug. Match her energy, keep it neutral.

This nonanswer is enough to send her eyes back to the cards.

“You’re the Sun here, and this person you’ll love, they are the Moon,” she says, moving the cards closer in proximity. “There is a story here that describes that push and pull, the give and take, much like these two forces in our skies. One cannot exist without the other.”

Moira’s words stick in my head, brambles of a rose with thorns aplenty.

“So, like, opposites attract?” Cool as a cucumber, even if my brain is on fire.

The first thought I have is a dangerous one.

Cadence and I aren’t just extroverted and introverted.

I don’t just have sunny blond hair, and she doesn’t just have hair the color of an inky starless sky.

We aren’t only opposites who could very easily attract.

We’re opposites who could very easily go together .

Like sweet ice cream and salty French fries, like laughing so hard you cry, like pairing leather with lace or polka dots with stripes.

We don’t make sense, but we may be even better together than apart.

Moira sits back in her chair, looking me over with eyes like an X-ray. She’s got this calm that feels otherworldly.

Or maybe I’m just in the eye of the hurricane.

“When the Sun and the Moon are together in a tarot reading, they are a powerful combination,” she says, and my adrenaline shoots into action.

There’s that whirling, swirling, dragging me off the ground to toss me around in the sky.

“The cards are transformation with balance. They are light burning away confusion. They are hope”—she touches the Sun card—“and intuition”—she touches the Moon—“working together for the hand of fate.”

Fate.

Almost every decision I’ve made about my life since entering high school has been planned to the letter, no room for magic or fate.

I became an overachiever with very little space in her life for deep feelings and even less space for divergent paths.

Partying and dating casually have been my vices of choice to deal with it, and I’m just not sure why I can’t sit still, can’t commit, can’t be grounded for long.

But maybe I’m ready to find out.