Ian walked through the door and stared.
“Wow,” he said. He sounded impressed, and Cleo tried not to preen.
There was a small stainless steel sink next to the door, and a beat-up stained rug where Cleo slipped off her rubber work boots. She pointed towards it, “Shoes and socks can go there.”
Ian toed off one dirty sneaker, then the other. He rubbed his feet on the coarse rug, and Cleo winced in sympathy. “Don’t worry about it. I track mud through here all the time.”
Cleo was acutely aware of his presence behind her. The linen closet was in her small bathroom, and he followed her in. He seemed to fill the space with his shoulders alone. She handed him the towel and then tried to awkwardly move around him to the door. They did the strange little dance of mirroring each other in an attempt to let the other one pass and Cleo laughed at their absurdity.
Ian stopped moving. “You… have a really nice laugh,” he said. He seemed embarrassed, maybe, and buried his face in the towel, rubbing briskly.
“Ahem,” Cleo cleared her throat politely to buy herself some time. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She squeezed past him, millimeters away from that broad chest and scampered to the kitchen. No, not scampered. Strategically retreated to the kitchen with appropriate haste. Definitely not scampered.
She was putting a kettle on when Ian moved into the kitchen, towel slung around his neck. Cleo stared. He was shirtless. His muscles were nicely defined, big without being pretentious, the result of hard work and the runs she had seen him on.
“Eyes still here,” Ian laughed. He crossed his arms in front of his chest, his legs spread wide, and Cleo knew a pose when she saw one. He was posturing. He was posturing shirtless in her kitchen. Cleo snorted.
“If you didn’t want me to look, then why take off your shirt?” Cleo asked archly.
“Caught me,” Ian said, his laugh quieting but no less warm. “But it really was uncomfortable,” he admitted.
“Sorry about that,” Cleo said, cringing.
“I surprised you,” Ian shrugged. “I probably would've hit you with the hose, too.”
The kettle whistled, and Cleo jerked again.
“Where are the mugs?” Ian asked, “if you don’t mind getting the tea?” He had the gentle, deliberate voice of someone soothing a spooked animal. It was annoying, but even more annoying, it worked. It put Cleo’s mind back on track, to the well-worn path of making tea.
“Got it,” she said crisply. “Green okay?”
“Got any English breakfast?” he asked. She dug through her bin of teas. She was getting low on that one. She liked that he drank tea, that he had preferences and told her them. It didn’t feel overbearing. It felt more like… she could trust him, maybe, to tell her what he wanted. Dangerous, a voice in her whispered. She wanted to tell that voice to shut up, but it was true. It was dangerous to trust him, to like him, to care about his tea-drinking preferences.
“Green is fine too,” he said, after she’d waited too long to respond. It snapped Cleo back into action.
They went through the little ritual of milk, sugar, honey, and the normalcy almost negated the weirdness of a handsome, shirtless man sitting at her beat-up second-hand kitchen table.
Once they were settled, Cleo focused on Ian. “I don’t suppose you came here this morning to get hosed down,” she said, “so what did you come here for?”
Ian paused mid-sip. He started to put the cup down, then brought it back up. His eyes slid from her face to the table.
“Were you serious?” he asked. “About the… curses and...things?”
“I am always serious about ‘the things,’” Cleo joked gently. “But yes, I was.” She wasn’t sure what to do about her hands, so she took another sip of tea.
Ian’s cheeks reddened. “Okay,” he said, “right.”
Cleo waited for him to collect his thoughts. Cleo was getting the impression that Ian was a smart guy, but kind of dumb about using his words.
He pulled a ring onto the table. It was a plain gold wedding band. It looked like every other plain gold wedding band.
“Was this cursed?” he asked.
Cleo was insanely curious. She wanted to ask a million questions, starting with ‘Was this yours?’
Instead, she took the ring in her hand. She really was shit at objects, but it helped that she was here, in her house, surrounded by her plants. The only time she was more powerful was in the woods, surrounded by the green.
She closed her eyes and focused. She blocked out the gentle susurrus of her plants, the quiet not-quite-verbal resonance of their chatter. The ring felt like… a ring. She couldn’t sense anything. No curse, no ill-intent. Maybe a little sadness. Maybe.
Cleo opened her eyes. Ian’s gaze was intent, expectant. She wasn’t sure what he expected, though. So she told the truth.
“It feels like a ring,” she said.
“And?” Ian asked.
“And a failed marriage, maybe,” Cleo said finally.
Ian breathed out heavily. “But are you sure?”
Cleo hesitated. Leveling up this conversation would require either calling in the coven or going into her place of power, deep in the woods behind her house. Neither option was attractive to her, not yet.
“Yes,” she said slowly. She double-checked herself, though. She ran a single finger around and round the ring, her eyes closed. Behind her eyes was the familiar uncomfortable pressure of working something unnatural to her, something not easy, something not quite wrong, but neither was it right. There was nothing. No ill-intent. Nothing wrong or invasive or angry. And that was the key: the lack of anger. Most curses were fueled by anger, sometimes grief, but always with that undercurrent of rage.
There was no rage in this ring. There wasn’t anything but a touch of tired sorrow.
She slid the ring back to him. “Very sure.”
He sighed and slipped it back into his pocket. “That’s what Aunt Jenny said too.”
Cleo smiled at that. “Your witchy aunt is
