Free A Little Night Magic by Lucy March Page A

before.”
    I snorted and looked up. “It’s been that kind of a week.”
    He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes on me. “I want you to tell me what’s going on.”
    I let my eyes drop to the floor. “Nothing’s going on.” Except that I might be crazy. Or possibly dying.
    Or worse.
    “You know you can tell me, right?” he said. “Whatever’s happening to you, no matter how crazy it sounds. I’ll believe you.”
    I thought about that for a bit. Reversing the situation, would I believe him if he told me that his fairy godmother had shown up and given him magical powers that made him turn household objects into living critters?
    No. But then, I wasn’t as good a person as he was. Still …
    “Nothing’s going on,” I repeated, meeting his eye steadily.
    He went quiet for a moment, then stood up. “Come on.”
    I looked up at him. “We’re going somewhere?”
    He jerked his head toward his kitchenette. “I’m gonna feed you before you puke eighty-proof all over my couch.”
    I glanced back at the couch as he grabbed my arm and pulled me up. “Yeah, I don’t think anything’s going to make that couch worse.”
    He led me to the kitchen island counter, where I sat on a stool. He moved around the kitchen, grabbing flour and eggs and oranges and something from the spice rack, and it looked like dancing, his movements were so smooth. I had watched him cook at work, and he was always in command, moving fast and lithe, but at home, he cooked like it was fun. He smiled and teased me and it felt like it had always been, the two of us comfortable in our little bubble where we were always us and nothing would ever change.
    “Okay,” he said as he drizzled the hot syrup over the tops of the two plates of waffles, “these are cinnamon orange Belgians with an amaretto pecan caramel sauce. It’s my own recipe, so if you hate it, lie.”
    He placed the plate in front of me, and I looked up at him.
    “Waffles? Really?”
    He put a fork in my hand. “The best you’ve ever had, yeah.”
    I raised the fork, and could see Tobias watching me with a big smile out of the corner of my eye. I cut off a bite, put it on the fork, and then hesitated.
    “Something wrong?” Tobias asked.
    “No.” I lowered the fork down an inch, then another. The warring voices inside my head said, You’ve already had eighteen hundred calories today, and that was before the liquor, and the other said, oh my god they smell so gooooooood …
    “What’s the matter?” he asked.
    I white-knuckled the fork. “I’ve given up waffles. Well, most food, really, but specifically waffles.”
    “You love waffles.”
    “I know.”
    “This doesn’t make any sense.”
    “It’s just that I was already at my calorie limit for the day before I had the liquor, and I want to go to Europe in my skinny jeans.”
    “What the hell are skinny jeans?”
    “They’re the jeans that you buy that are too small so that someday you can wear them and feel awesome.”
    He put his fork down and stared at me, openmouthed. “There are so many things wrong with that sentence. I don’t even know where to start.”
    “It’s okay. This is advanced self-loathing. You’d have to be a woman to understand it at this level.”
    He pinched a bit of the denim above my knee. “What’s wrong with these jeans?”
    His touch sent tingles up my thigh, and I pulled my knee back a bit. “They fit.”
    “Jesus Christ.” He snatched my plate away from me and started cutting into my waffles with his fork.
    “I don’t want to be super-skinny, I just think if I lost—”
    “Doesn’t even matter what I say here, does it?”
    “—twenty pounds or so … What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
    “This is my standard expression when I’m staring into an abyss.”
    “Don’t blame me. I’m just a product of my misogynistic environment.”
    He stabbed a bite of waffles expertly with the fork. “Fucking hell.”
    “I don’t—” But I couldn’t finish