“Come on, let me introduce you to everyone,” Alina said with a glowing smile as she took me by the hand.
An hour later, we were in Alina’s fabulous trailer having a chat.
“So, did you meet anyone you like?” she asked, sipping on some cinnamon tea I’d made for us.
“Well, everyone here is beautiful,” I admitted sheepishly, crossing my legs.
“Right, there are lots of options,” she agreed. Then she took another sip and there was silence. “I think Reese likes you — he was looking at you like you were a snack.”
I nearly spit out my tea. “The director?” I pictured him — an older guy with salt and pepper hair. Slim, well-dressed, but had somehow retained that sparkle of youth in his eyes.
She nodded with a smile.
“What makes you think that?” I asked, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks. I could get down with a director, and for a moment I wondered if it was him. If that was my heartmate Hazel had told me about. I had written down “creative” in my notebook about what I wanted him to be like. It was something I was sorely missing when I dated Boring Guy.
“Just the way he looked at you,” she said tantalizingly. “Call it a women’s intuition.”
I couldn’t hide my smile as I wiggled with excitement.
“There are more people to meet, too,” she said, letting her words hang in the air dramatically. “The rest of the cast is in town right now, exploring. I’m sure you’ll get to meet them all later.”
She began curling her eyelashes.
“Are you done for the day?” I asked.
“No, we have to shoot one more scene today, and it has to be at sunset.”
I knew exactly which scene she was talking about. I’d spent the past few weeks reading the Black Castle books.
“Ah, that scene,” I said knowingly.
“Yeah, that scene,” she agreed. “The scene where Prince Valentine realizes that Lady Bryn — me — is his soulmate and that he has to leave his wife!” she explained dramatically.
“Soulmate or heartmate?” I asked.
One of her black eyebrows went up. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing, just something I’ve been thinking about,” I dismissed. “So what do you guys have around here for lunch?”
“No, no. I want to hear what you meant,” she said, turning away from her vanity mirror to face me with a serious expression. “Heartmate?”
I furrowed my brow. I shouldn’t have said anything… she was going to think I was crazy. But holding Hazel’s words close to my heart, the ones about choosing love over fear, I decided to trust her.
“Soulmates show up in your life to teach you things,” I said. “Heartmates are your one true love. The other half. The big fish,” I finished.
She looked at me like she’d just turned over a stone and discovered it was a sparkling geode. “Wow, that— I’ve never heard it put that way before!” she said with an expression of wonder.
“Wait, you’ve heard of… of this stuff before?”
She nodded excitedly, then sat down next to me on the bed. “My grandma — she was super into that stuff. Always talking about star signs and making charts and things… her hobby was practicing tarot cards.”
“What?! Oh my God Alina, that’s so cool!” I exclaimed. “Can I meet her?”
I was picturing Hazel and wondered if the world was small enough for Hazel to be Alina’s grandmother.
Her eyes filled with sadness as she said, “No… she passed away a few years ago. But she was smart as a whip until then.”
I nodded and put my hand on hers.
“Oh, it’s nothing I’m still super sad about,” she waved off. “I was just reminded of her, that’s all.”
“I wish I had someone in my family like that,” I admitted, thinking of my parents. “I come from a family of rationalists.”
She chuckled. “My mom is like that. Every time we’d go over to grandma’s house when I was a kid, my grandmother would tell me that I was destined for big things. She’d wait until my mom went to the store or something, or went outside to water the garden, and then she’d do a tarot reading for me.”
I was sitting on the edge of my seat, desperate to get more glimpses into this secret world that Hazel was from.
“What was that like?” I asked, hunting for more details.
“Well, my mother didn’t like it. She liked things that were normal, stable, predictable. As soon as she’d leave the room grumbling about all this ‘gypsy stuff,’ grandma would say my mom was made of metal.”
My memory quivered at that, and I thought about how Hazel talked about my ex, the Boring Guy. Earth and Metal, she’d said.
And with a newfound clarity, I could picture exactly the type of person Alina’s mom was: Stubborn, headstrong, solid, predictable. Traits that I’d once admired in Boring Guy.
“I loved the visits to my grandma’s house. Everything about her made me feel loved and accepted, and she kept telling me that I was going to be great someday.”
I was reminded of Hazel again. That’s exactly how she made me feel.
“And when she talked about my love life, she said I’d have so many admirers, many loves, a lot of soulmates. But one big soulmate — the love of my life I guess.”
I was staring at her with my eyes wide. “Have you met this person, you think?” I asked.
“I dunno…” she trailed off, her eyes fixed on her trailer window. Then she turned to me. “Do you think you’ll know it when you see it? Like, is there something that happens when you come into their path? Do you feel fireworks inside?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, thinking of this magical man that Hazel claimed was in my future. “Sometimes I wonder the same thing.”
Admittedly, I had never felt that kind of magical chemistry with anyone. Everyone I’d been with in my past I’d had a lackluster meet-cute with. I wanted to cling to the belief of
