“That’s…” I tighten my arm around him. I get my wing around him, too. I like having four arms to hold him. “It’s good. It’s better already, isn’t it?”
“Better than what?” he asks. （I think he knows the answers to half the questions he asks me. He just likes to make me talk.） “Yesterday,” I say.
“Everything is better than yesterday,” he says. “Yesterday was the nadir.”
“It feels so long ago.”
Baz sets down the milk. He brushes some crumbs off the duvet. I slink back in his bed, leaving my arm and wing open. His pillows are so fluffy.
They probably cost a fortune. He glances at me, then away. I bring my other wing around to herd him in—he lets me. I pull him down to me, and he lays his head on my shoulder. I like this. It makes him seem shorter than me.
Baz sets his hand on my chest. I don’t think he’s ever touched me here, bare, when we weren’t fooling around, or trying to. Maybe he’s trying to …
“I like your chest,” he says.
“That’s because you remember what I looked like before I got fat.”
“Nonsense, Snow. You’re not fat.”
I bloody well am. But, as Baz would say, it’s not my biggest problem.
“You used to get so thin over the summers…” He traces his fingertips over my heart.
I shiver and cover his hand with mine, stopping him. “I could never keep up with the magic.”
He looks up at me.
I try to explain: “I think the magic took a lot out of me. It was always there, even when I wasn’t using it. They didn’t starve me in the care homes, but it wasn’t pot roast and all the scones you could eat. I’d come back to Watford so hungry, I could hardly think. One year, I went straight to the dining hall, and sat there eating from lunch to dinner.”
Baz turns his face to kiss my chest. “You’re not fat. I like you like this.”
“Is there a way you don’t like me?” I say it like it’s a joke. But I bite my lip.
He looks up through his eyelashes and shakes his head. Christ, he makes me feel warmed through. It’s so good, I can hardly stand it. It makes me want to bash my head into a wall, just for the distraction. Maybe he can tell. He doesn’t kiss me again, and his hand stays motionless.
“Is your aunt still in jail?” I ask.
“No, I bailed her out—didn’t you get my texts?”
“Yeah, sorry, I—”
“Was ghosting me, your boyfriend of eighteen months, hoping I’d get the message and silently fade away?”
I sigh. “It’s like you don’t want me to forget even for a second that you’re merciless.”
Baz tweaks my nipple. “I don’t want you to think this is all a dream.”
“Hey!” I squirm and squeeze his hand. “Hey … I’m sorry. About the texts, specifically.”
“I bailed Fiona out,” he says. “She was trying to steal something from Watford, I still don’t know what.”
“So she could come back to the flat at any minute?”
“Not likely. I think she has a boyfriend.”
“I did read the texts about your stepmum. I’m sorry. How’s your dad holding up?”
Baz rolls his face into my shoulder.
I let go of his hand, so I can touch his hair. It’s dark and thick, and it falls past his shoulders when it’s wet. “That bad? Is there another man?”
He pushes himself up onto an elbow. I shift my wing out of the way.
“You’re not going to like this,” he says.
“Why would I like it?”
Baz pinches the bridge of his nose.
Then he tells me the whole story.
21
PENELOPE
I got a series of texts from Simon in the middle of the night: “pen, call me”
“something weird going on, a magickal thing—you’ll prolly think it’s interesting, could use yr brain. + prolly yr wand”
“call me”
“or baz.”
I saw them when I woke up at nine.
“Simon,” I texted back. “This is exactly what you said you didn’t want to do anymore. And I think you were probably right. Who are we to investigate ‘interesting’ magickal problems? If you really think something is amiss, you should tell my mother.”
Then I shoved my phone off my bed and went back to sleep.
When I wake up again, my room smells like a Greggs. Shepard is sitting next to my bed. He’s hauled in a chair from the kitchen.