To say I was ready to choke a bitch would be an understatement.
“They still in love?” Tiggy muttered as Gary and Kevin continued to snipe back and forth.
I rolled my eyes. “Disgustingly so.”
“Bet you broom they get back together by time we get to Freeze Your Ass Off?”
“Nah,” I said. “It’ll take them until at least the Dark Woods.”
“Four brooms.”
“Tiggy, that’s still not how you barter when you—”
“Seven brooms!”
I sighed.
We shook on it.
“Sucker,” Tiggy said.
“Hey!”
He went back to listening as Gary and Kevin volleyed insults back and forth.
“You know,” Ryan said, voice slightly muffled from the cloth he had wrapped around his head and mouth, “you could probably just use magic to keep their mouths shut, right?”
“Probably,” I said. “But you would just pop a boner, and I think it’d be uncomfortable to walk with that. And, as a side note, penises are so weird. They broadcast far too much and in such awkward ways. Oh look, an attractive something. Let’s have all my blood rush to this one appendage and make it stick out during church.”
“During… church?”
“I was thirteen,” I mumbled. “The priest was hot. Whatever.”
“I don’t always pop boners when you do magic,” he said. “And gods, I am never saying pop boners ever again. It’s all your fault I talk like that to begin with now.”
“Really?” I said, bringing my hand up, palm toward the sky. “My magic does nothing for you?” I barely had to concentrate before a smidge of sand was floating above my hand, forming a sphere that circled slowly. It caused the barest of tugs around my head and heart, and I knew that Ryan was probably feeling it too, given his propensity these days to be almost an extension of my magic.
“Ungh,” he said, eyes glazing over slightly. He licked his lips, eyes darting from my hand down to my crotch.
“You’re so easy,” I said, letting my hand drop and the sand fall away. “It’s one of the things I love about you.”
“The first minute we get to ourselves,” he muttered, “I’m going to suck your brain out through your dick and make you come on my face.”
I tripped, falling face-first into the sand and rolling down a little dune.
Gods, I hated the desert.
“ARE YOU sure about this?” Mom asked, watching as I rolled an extra pair of trousers before shoving them into my pack. “She’s getting what she wants now. Sam, she’s my mother and I love her, but you shouldn’t trust her.”
I shook my head. “I don’t. And I won’t. This isn’t about her. Not anymore.”
She reached over and touched my arm, causing me to pause. “Then what is this about?”
I couldn’t look her in the eye, because if I did, I knew I’d spill everything to her, every single fear that I had: that I couldn’t trust Morgan, that I couldn’t trust Randall, that I was so angry at them for keeping this from me, that I was worried that I was going to fail. That I wasn’t going to be enough. That I was making all the wrong decisions. That I should be listening with my head instead of my heart.
“It’s about doing what’s right,” I said instead. “It’s about doing what I have to.”
She sighed. “I’m