Page 21 of Witch You Would

My brain almost never stopped. I’d lie awake at night with my eyes closed and imagine random, pointless things. Spells I couldn’t

afford to try. Conversations with people I’d never meet. Moments from a million years ago that any normal person would have

forgotten. Just a constant background noise, like a fan whirring, a refrigerator humming, traffic zooming.

I stared into Leandro’s dark brown eyes, and my thoughts dissolved into a cloud of butterflies that flew down into the pit

of my stomach. The garden was already hot, but my skin felt like the sun had noticed me and come in for a closer look.

I had two choices: I could climb off him and make a joke, or...

I leaned in, closed my eyes, and... our foreheads bonked.

I flinched back, more from surprise than pain. My first time trying to kiss a guy in forever, and of course I’d messed it

up.

“Sorry,” I said. “Are you—”

Leandro grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me.

Our lips pressed together softly at first, sweetly, his mustache tickling me.

He smelled like sweat and apples and lavender and a little pepper.

I put my palm on his chest and tilted my head, my mouth opening enough to taste a hint of the chocolatey dessert I must have missed.

I wanted more, so I licked my way inside.

One of his hands slid to my neck; the other arm wrapped around my back. He held me tighter than he had in the studio, so I

could feel his muscles flexing through his sleeves. I shifted in his lap, trying to get closer, wanting more of my body to

touch more of his. Was I rubbing against him like a cat? Maybe. I didn’t even know. My hormones, which mostly hibernated,

had woken up and gone feral. My fingers dug into the pleats of his guayabera and grabbed fistfuls of linen. I kissed him and

kissed him, and he kissed me back. It went on forever and not nearly long enough.

We broke apart to catch our breaths. Leandro looked like I felt, like we’d just stumbled off the teacups ride at the fair

and everything was still spinning.

Something moved out of the corner of my eye.

The glass sculpture bloomed, opening to reveal an egg-shaped bubble, milky white and iridescent like an opal. As the light

caught it, there seemed to be a shadow inside, like some creature was about to be born. I gasped and waited. Then the tendril-petals

closed and went back to writhing as if nothing had happened.

“Wow,” I breathed. How many people had missed that because they’d wandered off too soon? How long did it take for the enchantment

to go through that state change? Or was it triggered by something environmental?

Oh no. My brain had started up again. Also: I was still in Leandro’s lap, his arm around my waist. Also also: I had just kissed

Leandro Presto. The day after we had been told to pretend to be into each other.

Apparently we didn’t have to pretend very hard.

I stared at the sculpture, blushing. What could I even say to him? What was I supposed to do now?

Kiss him again? I mean, it was an option.

“Penelope,” Leandro said.

“Mm-hmm?”

“Do I need to apologize?”

Now I did look at him. His eyebrows scrunched together, and he’d leaned away just enough that I could wriggle out of his arms

if I wanted to.

“No,” I said. “Do I?”

He smiled softly. “No way.”

Well, that was good. Wasn’t it?

My brain inhaled deeply and started to spew.

Now every time you look at him for the next two days you’re going to think about this kiss. You’ll be distracted and make

mistakes. And then you’ll lose and Leandro’s charity will shut down and you’ll have to move in with your sister. Or worse,

do the drive of shame back to your parents after you said you’d never, ever live with them again when your mother told you

not to waste your life studying magic theory when you could major in something useful like your sister. Why can’t you be more

like your sister? Why do you always have to make everything so hard?

What about Gil? I’d spent months crushing on a guy, and all it had taken was two and a half days of nice-smelling, muscular,

curly mustached distraction to make me jump to a new ship? I didn’t even know Leandro. His videos were clearly a front, so

who was he, really?

“There’s steam coming out of your ears,” Leandro said. “What are you thinking?”

Oh no, I’d made him feel bad. It wasn’t his fault my thought trains were actually thousands of corgis riding around on skateboards until they got distracted and started chasing bubbles.

“Too many things,” I said.

He rubbed the back of my neck. “Do you want to talk about it?”

No, I wanted him to kiss me until my thoughts went away again. Instead, I looked him in the eyes and my brain said helpfully:

Gil has dark brown eyes, too.

“Later,” I said. “Talk later. We should... confessionals.”

“Right.” He rested his forehead on mine. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

No, I was shook. Customer service smile: go. “Totally.”

Instead of smiling back, Leandro frowned. “That’s your fake smile.”

“It’s real!”

“You don’t have to lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” I lied.

“Okay.” He lifted me off him, giving me a chance to stand before he let go. Then he got up and brushed the dirt off his pants.

I was still holding the deck of cards, the one I was so sure was a trick. Maybe Leandro was, too. Maybe all his shy talk about

fan panties was how he got into people’s pants. What did I know?

Catastrophizing. Overthinking. I had to stop. If nothing else, we were a team. We wouldn’t win if I second-guessed everything

and didn’t trust him.

Did I trust him? Trust had to start somewhere.

I held out the cards. “Here.”

Leandro gave me a sad half smile. “You don’t want to check them, after all that?”

“No. It was a good trick. Knowing how it works would ruin the magic.”

“Sometimes knowing makes it more impressive.”

“That’s true. But sometimes...” I gestured at the sculpture with its shifting threads. “It’s okay to just enjoy something,

right? Like a kid. Have fun and not worry about the why and how. Sometimes magic can just be magic.”

I had forgotten that at some point, hadn’t I?

Leandro’s smile slipped into what I was starting to recognize as his stage mode. Maybe that’s why he noticed when I did the

same thing. He held up the deck and fanned it out, then turned it around so I could see the cards.

All of them were different. He stacked them together again and passed his hand over them, then held the deck out to me. “Check

the top card.”

I turned it over. The queen of hearts. Magic.

I tried to give the card back, but he pushed my hand away.

“Keep it,” Leandro said. “For good luck.”

“But then that deck won’t have a queen.”

“Ah, but it doesn’t need one. You’re already the queen of my heart, m’lady.”

I rolled my eyes. “Is that one of Sam’s pickup lines?”

“Nope. That’s a Leandro Presto original.”

I slipped the card into my back pocket, which was too small, so it stuck halfway out. Hopefully I wouldn’t lose it before

I could put it in a safer place.

On the walk back to the lake, I rebuilt my calm stone by stone until I was once again Penelope Delmar, spell technician and

Cast Judgment contestant. I wasn’t sure who I’d been for those minutes in the butterfly garden. Maybe the real me.

Or maybe overstressed me. Didn’t some people do wild stuff in high-stress situations? Like making out with cute available guys, and how about let’s not think about Leandro’s hands on me because now I was hot again. Hotter, I mean. It was Miami. Always hot.

Now that I knew what might happen between the two of us, I could be more careful. Pretend to flirt in ways that wouldn’t get

me all... whatever this was. Unlike the sculpture, I didn’t need to open up to him and show him my boring center. Nothing

to see here, move along.

Or...

No “or”! Shut up, brain.

My brain did not shut up. I got hotter. Thankfully we were hustled into hair and makeup as soon as we got back, and then we

had separate confessionals instead of paired ones.

I had told Leandro we would talk later, but I still didn’t know what I wanted to say, so I didn’t look for him when we were

dropped at the hotel. He didn’t come find me, either, and I didn’t see him at dinner, possibly because I grabbed my food and

took it to my room for some quiet time.

Except my brain was too loud. I thought about Leandro, and Gil, and kisses, and life. When I finally got to bed, the queen

of hearts rested on the nightstand next to me, and we both stared up at the ceiling in the dark.

Quentin and Tanner’s station had been cleared out, leaving only the appliances. It probably shouldn’t have felt weird, but

it did.

The rest of us stood next to our areas, Syd and the judges once again at the front of the room, about to deliver our new brief.

We were running an hour behind schedule. Lights were lit, cameras pointed in the appropriate directions, and the thing Leandro

told me was called a slate finally clapped, super loud in the space.

Tori had taken me and Leandro aside to tell us we were doing a good job “vibing” as requested, and to see if we could turn it up a little without overdoing it.

I didn’t know whether we would overdo it, underdo it, or just do it do it—no pun intended.

My stomach fizzed every time I thought about our kiss.

And of course we matched. Were we ever not going to match?

Leandro wore yet another long-sleeved button-down shirt someone’s abuelo had rocked fifty years ago. This one was white and

covered in breakfast items: reddish bacon, buttered toast, cast iron pans with fried eggs inside, red carafes and cups of

steaming coffee, random utensils... I wondered if it had ever been cool, or if that mystery abuelo had also been a giant

nerd.

My apron for the day, courtesy of my sister, was the red of his shirt’s carafes. Instead of breakfast stuff, mine was Cuban

coffee–themed: gray cafeteras, white cups and saucers, and swirls of sugar and coffee grounds rising out of iron cauldrons.