His expression was more than a little dubious. “Yeah, right. I can see that going over really well — me telling you I was actually a member of the Wilcox clan when you were there with your posse of McAllister witches.”
“And you didn’t have a posse of your own?” I retorted.
“No, I didn’t. I really was there with just a friend. My friends — the civilian ones — don’t know anything about…all this.”
“Really?” It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. Not that I had a bunch of civilian friends, but of course Sydney knew the score when it came to the McAllisters. I couldn’t imagine having not even one person outside my clan to confide in. It would mean an almost unbearable pressure to keep everything in, to never allow anyone to know the truth about you or your family.
“Really,” he replied, his tone flat.
I decided to leave that aside for the moment, because once again I was starting to feel sorry for him. He didn’t deserve to be felt sorry for, not when he had lied to me and been complicit in my kidnapping. “Okay, whatever. But maybe you could’ve said, ‘Hey, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I’m the man you’ve been dreaming of for the past five years, and let me drop this illusion so you can see my eyes are really green and that I’m a member of a witch clan just like you. Sorry I’m a Wilcox, but I’m sure we can work this out.’ Maybe if you’d done that, we actually could have. Worked it out, I mean.”
The look on his face had shifted from dubious to outright disbelieving. “That’s a nice fairytale, Angela, but don’t tell me that’s really what would have happened.”
I said softly, “I guess we’ll never really know, will we?”
“I guess not.” He stared at me for a long moment, one in which I didn’t even dare blink. Was he going to move toward me?
Apparently not. He glanced away, then said, “I need to check my email and handle a few things. You know where the TV is.” And he took his water and went upstairs, leaving me to watch his departure and wonder how on earth we were going to survive being thrown together like this.
* * *
I really didn’t feel like watching TV, but I didn’t have a heck of a lot of choice. Trying not to sigh — loudly — I resumed my seat on the couch and started channel surfing. He had the full cable lineup, with HBO and Showtime, and Netflix and Amazon Prime video to boot, but I still couldn’t find anything to hold my interest. How could I, when I was here under an even worse house arrest than I’d suffered back in Jerome?
But since Connor didn’t show any signs of reappearing any time soon, I settled for a re-watching of Last Holiday, since I liked the movie and had only missed the first ten minutes or so. Maybe it would help me to escape for a few hours. Maybe.
It actually did take my mind off my worries, so much so that when it ended I was surprised to see Connor standing at the edge of the living room, watching the last of the credits roll. I was also surprised to see that it was dark outside; he must have flipped on the light in the kitchen without my even noticing.
“Good movie?” he asked.
I nodded.
“It’s almost six. I thought I’d go around the corner and grab some tapas for dinner. I don’t cook much.”
I reflected on the irony of him having a three-thousand-dollar Jenn-Air stove and not actually cooking anything on it. All I said, though, was, “What’s tapas?”
A flicker of surprise crossed his face. “They really did shelter you, didn’t they?”
I crossed my arms and scowled at him.
Appearing to relent, he replied, “It’s Spanish food. ‘Tapas’ just means small plates. You get a bunch of different small things to eat and share. It’s good.”
“Okay,” I said, my tone guarded. Not what I would’ve chosen for my birthday dinner, but….
No, I wasn’t going to go there. I’d almost managed to make myself forget it was my birthday. And he was trying to make a gesture, however small.
“That sounds good,” I added.
“I’ll be back in a while, then.” He paused at the closet in the hallway and put on a black peacoat and buttoned it up, then wrapped a scarf with gray, black, green, and white stripes around his neck. For some reason the ensemble just made him look that much more gorgeous, and I had to swallow and look away, pretending to be intent on finding something else to watch.
Without saying anything else, he let himself out of the apartment and closed the door quietly behind him.
Since he’d said he’d be a while, I assumed waiting for the food to be prepared, I wasn’t sure what I should be doing. One movie had been enough for me, and though I supposed I could have gone back upstairs to steal more time on his laptop — maybe checking what those all-important “emails” he’d been reading all that time had been — that didn’t sound like such a great idea.