Page 46 of Witch You Would

Gil looked at the clock, then at the paper. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, in through his mouth, out through his

nose. Then he must have decided something, because he checked his posture, shoulders back, and faced me.

“No,” he said.

“No bubbles?”

“No, we’re not talking later. We’re talking now.”

“We don’t have time.”

“We need to make time. I don’t want to... to pretend everything is okay when it’s not, and have it get worse.”

“Fine.” I put the pencil down and stalked toward the exit. Gil followed. Tori raised an eyebrow at us, and I smiled and shrugged.

Nothing to see here—everything’s fine.

We went past various crew sitting or standing outside, past cables and boxes and all the accumulated clutter of nearly two

weeks of filming. Isaac slumped in his fancy chair, three paper headache charms stuck to his forehead. Liam saw us and mimed

turning off the transmitters.

Right, I thought as I flipped the switch, wouldn’t want anyone to record this. It would definitely make for a super-dramatic

last episode. The opposite of fake flirting: real arguing.

I yanked open the door to the private office we used for confessionals and turned on the soft lights. Gil followed me in,

and I closed the door behind him. The two chairs waited next to each other against the far wall; I dragged one of them across

the floor so it was farther away and sat in it, crossing my arms.

Gil sat in the other chair, moving slowly, like his bones were tired. He stared at me in silence, and I let him. I couldn’t

remember the last time I was this upset. Even getting fired, finding out my rent was going impossibly high—those problems

felt manageable by comparison. They shouldn’t, because they weren’t, and yet.

I must love Gil, because nothing less than love could do this to a person. I still loved him, even though he’d dumped me,

and it hurt that I couldn’t turn that off the way he apparently had.

Gil took off his safety glasses and rubbed his eyes. His mustache was impossible to remove so easily, I knew, but the small gesture made it clear that I was talking to him and not Leandro Presto.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really bad at confrontations, and I know you don’t want to do this right now, and we’re wasting

time when we should be working on our spell, but...” He looked everywhere but at me: up at the ceiling, down at the floor,

at his hands clenched together between his knees.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“It’s not fine.” His voice was quiet, almost too quiet for me to hear. “Every time my mom says, ‘it’s fine,’ what she means

is, ‘I’m not going to tell you what’s wrong until I can use it to hurt you.’”

“I’m not your mom.”

“No, you’re not. I’ve never seen you do something to intentionally hurt someone. That’s why I don’t understand why you won’t

tell me what’s wrong now.”

Seriously? What the fuck?

“I’m not trying to push you,” he said. “If you tell me to, I’ll back off. But I spent a lot of years with my parents refusing

to talk to each other except to fight, and I don’t want us to be like that.”

“What ‘us’?” I said, letting my hurt spill into my voice. “You said ‘us’ would be too hard, and you left me. You said it was

over.”

Gil’s eyes got huge as he jumped out of his chair. “What? I said what?”

I stood up, too. “You said you didn’t want to sneak around and end up on gossip sites. You said I deserved better.”

“Because you do!” He reached for me and I backed away. He let his hands fall.

“So how can you pretend like you don’t know what’s wrong? You dumped me! I was so happy, and you . . . I thought we were . . . I thought . . .” Fuck, I was going to cry again. I would not let him see me like this. I could at least keep my dignity.

I yanked the door open and walked out.

“Oh my god, Penelope, no!”

I walked faster, I didn’t know which way. Away.

“Penelope! Holy shit, whatever I said, that’s not what I meant.”

I couldn’t breathe. Doors flew past me in a blur. Bathroom. Where was the bathroom?

“Penelope!”

Arms wrapped around me from behind. I struggled. Something hit the ground with a clatter. Gil picked me up and I squealed,

kicking the air until he put me back down and let go. Crunch went something under my sneaker.

“Penelope, please,” Gil said. “Please, stop. I love... I love you!”

I froze. What?

“I love you,” he repeated. “I don’t want to have to sneak around because I want to be with you all the time. I don’t want

to fake flirt because I don’t want people to think you’re cheating on Leandro with me. He isn’t real. We are.”

Oh... Oh!

“I don’t know what I said last night, but obviously I totally fucked up. Please... please let me fix it? Please?” His voice

cracked on the last word, as if he was struggling to keep it together as much as I was.

I turned around. His mouth was half-open, his forehead wrinkled, his eyes... his eyes!

“Your glasses,” I said. “Where are your glasses?”

We both looked around. I spotted them first, on the floor, where apparently I had stepped on them. They were totally destroyed.

Gil nudged the plastic shards with his shoe. “I don’t care. I’m done caring about Leandro Presto. I care about you more.”

The hole in my stomach flooded with butterflies that burst up and out, through my heart and my veins and the rest of my body, until it felt like I was floating.

I flew toward Gil, jumping on him so hard I nearly knocked him down. He caught me, and I kissed him, over and over. I kissed

him like I needed it to breathe, like our love was a spell we were casting on each other, binding us together with an enchantment

that couldn’t be broken.

“I love you, too,” I whispered.

Behind us, someone started clapping. Shit, we had an audience. I looked over my shoulder as more people joined the applause.

Little Manny whistled, and Big Manny grinned, and Liam gave us a double thumbs-up. Even Fina and Bruno were there, smiling,

and in Bruno’s case, wiping a tear out of the corner of his eye.

Isaac was the only one who looked annoyed. He stalked over to us, glaring at Gil, his forehead charms flopping around.

“What the country-fried fuck are you doing?” Isaac asked. “You’re supposed to be pretending to flirt, not acting out the end

of your mom’s favorite rom-com in front of the crew.”

“We aren’t acting,” Gil said coldly.

“What part of ‘level up your pussy game’ did you not understand?”

Excuse me?

“Are you seriously going to blow off being the lead on your own show for this... mediocre salesgirl?” he continued.

Gil shifted me sideways but didn’t let go. “No, I’m blowing it off because you’re a piece of shit and I don’t want to work

with you again.”

He what? I was missing something here, and it sounded bad.

A charm fell in front of Isaac’s eye and he yanked it off. “You’ll be lucky to get a job picking up my dry cleaning by the time I’m through with you. You’re done. Finito. Shark food. Now get the fuck out of my sight and back on set.”

I would have flipped him off, but he’d already turned around to stomp back to his fancy chair. Unfortunately he was right:

we were still in the middle of the round, and time was running out.

“Are we good?” Gil murmured into my ear.

“We’re good,” I replied.

Except I hadn’t told him about the contract. Oh no.

“What, what’s wrong? You just tensed up.”

“I signed a contract,” I said. “With Charlotte’s company. I was going to tell you about it, but then you, um, said what you

said and I didn’t get the chance.”

He turned me so he could look at my face directly. “What contract? For a job?”

“Yes. She wanted me to lose the contest on purpose or I get no job, plus some kind of penalty.”

“You thought after what happened that we’d lose anyway, so it wouldn’t matter?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

“It’s okay.” I grinned at him. “I never gave it back to her. It’s still in my room, and Charlotte hasn’t signed it. I was

thinking of ritually burning it on the pool deck tomorrow night, actually. I’m desperate, but there are lines I won’t cross.”

Gil rubbed my back with one hand. “I know. I trust you.”

I should have trusted him, too, but in my defense, he had extremely sounded like he was breaking up with me. I wasn’t thinking

straight, or I’d have realized something was off sooner.

“I wanted to warn you that she’s probably the one behind the sabotage, not Felicia,” I said. “I think she paid someone else to do it so her hands would stay clean, but still.”

He kissed me. “If she tries anything, we’ll make her sorry.”

I kissed him back. “We’d better go before Isaac yells more.”

“Ugh, fuck that guy.”

“Why are you so mad at him?”

Gil shook his head. “I’ll tell you later.”

My plans for later had involved ice cream and more crying. Now?

Okay, maybe still ice cream. But I was done crying.

“Seriously, though,” I said. “What about your glasses?”

“I have a backup pair in my bag,” Gil said. “Leandro is a mess, but I like to be prepared.”

Ah, I did love this man. We were going to rock this round. As soon as we figured out what the hell we were doing.