Page 107 of A Dead Girl's Guide to Living
She sighed.
“Jules likes you,” I found myself saying, a sour tone in my voice that I hurriedly tried to mask halfway through.
Ellis wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “No.”
And it wasn’t ano, she doesn’t kind of voice but more of a flatno, that isn’t happening.
My heart rose.
Then something shifted, right as I took a shoulder-loosening, body-calming breath. It felt like a bone-deep pulse, beating within me, and it was as if, while I looked into her watery green eyes, I could feel what I could only describe as her.
It was as if the energy around her shimmered, cracked, and glowed, and I could only liken it to the effect of stained glass holding back the brightness of the sun. I could feel a fire in her, and a longing so sharp it cut, and a hunger—a hunger so raw it felt like a reaching for something, someone, anything. But it also felt as if she were pulling it back and stuffing it down.
I could feel it as if it were a pulse against my own ribs.
I could feel a heavy weight over her chest, and it didn’t feel like her heart had just been transplanted. It felt as if it were buried under layers, just beating alone, jagged threads of guilt wrapped around it and tangling through her thoughts, carrying the echoes of old things, old thoughts, old losses.
Then there was an ache, the wanting, the soft yearning of not wanting to be left behind but not knowing how to step forward.
My throat felt tight as I experienced the war Ellis was fighting inside herself on a daily basis. My fingers twitched at my sides, every part of me wanting to pull her close, to help her, to take these feelings on as my own.
But I couldn’t.
She needed to beat them.
The Lovers card flashed in my mind’s eye—not upright but reversed.
Tension.
Doubt.
Fear of choosing.
Then a thread, what felt like a pulsing glow between us, and the peace of alignment, that if we moved through this moment together, everything would change.
“Everything would just be,” I found myself uttering, eyes locked onto Ellis, whose face now looked pinched and confused.
“The energy between people, Dovey,”Margaret had once uttered as she did my cards, eyes half-lidded.“That’s where the true magic sits.”
I knew what this was. I knew what I was experiencing right now, and I could feel pure elation course through me. Second sight, Margaret had always said gently after a reading. The gift I thought I didn’t receive, but she was adamant I had.
“You’re just blocked up, Dovey,”she would tell me.“You have it. I know it’s there.”
My chest tightened.
It wasn’t the shop or the candles or the cards or crystals or the incense-scented air. It was all me, standing alone in a bar bathroom, staring into the eyes of one of the most broken people I had ever met, finally feeling all the things Margaret had assured me I had the ability to possess.
“You okay?” Ellis asked, her voice a little nervous as she looked at me.
I blinked, and the simmering energy snapped, like an elastic band let go, and I felt like me again. Just Dove.
“Dove?” Ellis tried again, poking me lightly on the shoulder.
“I’m good,” I told her, pasting a smile on my face as I tried to come down from that experience without telling her I’d just had the most personal insight into her.
I doubted she would appreciate it.
“We probably lost trivia,” Ellis muttered. “Can we go now, then? I think I met the going-out quota.”
