She bites her lip to keep from smiling too wide, and my pulse speeds up. I’m suddenly and painfully aware of how her bare knees rub against my jeans, of the way the thin cotton bodice of her mini dress pulls away from her skin, revealing to an explicit degree how very much she is not wearing anything underneath.
I lean down. The camera’s still dangling in her hand, the standby light blinking, but I ignore it and use my thumb and forefinger to guide her face up to mine.
She blinks those long, dark eyelashes once, twice, and then I bring my lips to hers. She is all soft warmth, sunshine and cinnamon, and I breathe her in even as I kiss her, even as I dizzily wonder if this is how it happens for other people. Do they eat wings and see psychics and have awkward run-ins with parents? Do they spend days on random adventures, treasuring every single second spent in each other’s company?
This isn’t a fake date at all… I realize. This is a real date now.
“This is not a kissing parlor,” a brusque voice informs us.
We straighten up, and I turn around to see a woman with scratchy-looking blond hair and more beaded necklaces than I would have thought possible.
“Madam Psuka?” Devi asks, standing up from the chair and straightening her clothes. “Hi. I’m Sue’s daughter.”
“Yes, I know who you are,” the medium says impatiently. Her accent is of indiscriminate origin—definitely former Soviet Bloc—and when she waves her hand, I smell Aqua-Net and the kind of perfume that you buy from a grocery store.
“We’re actually here for my friend Logan,” Devi explains. “I wanted him to come get a reading.”
“What kind of reading?”
They’re both looking at me. “I, uh, don’t know?”
Madam narrows her eyes at me. “No palm reading today, I think. No horoscope or rune stones. You need tarot. One card.”
Devi practically jumps up and down. “Tarot’s my favorite!”
“This will be quick,” Madam says in a way I find weirdly ominous, and then she vanishes into her inner chamber and returns with a wicker basket filled with velvet bags. “Pick deck,” she orders in that clipped accent of hers.
I pick a velvet bag at random, right there in the foyer, and then Madam nods, as if that’s the deck she expected me to pick all along. There’s a glass counter in the corner with an ancient register on top and flyers for psychic fairs and New Age conferences pinned up on the walls all around, and she walks over there now, setting the bag down on top.
She pulls the cards out and indicates that I should come stand by her.
“Knock once, then shuffle with the question in your heart. After that, hand the deck to me.” She hands me the cards, and I glance over at Devi, who nods in encouragement, and I think, why the hell not? I’m on this sort of accidentally real date with a girl I’m in love with, why not see where this takes me?
So I rap on the deck with my knuckles and then I pick the cards up to shuffle them. They are larger than playing cards, but my hands are big enough to make it work. (That’s what she said.)
As I shuffle, I get glimpses of the art on the cards, which seems to be comprised of lots and lots of naked people. Fitting, I guess, but maybe a little too fitting, judging from Madam’s smirk as she notices me noticing the cards.
Just a coincidence. I don’t believe in this shit, and Devi doesn’t either. Right?
“Think of it as focused meditation,” she says, as if she knows what I’m thinking. “It will give you a new frame of reference for your question.”
Oh, shit. The question. I cast around for anything I want to ask, but actually my life is really solid right now. Good money, steady work I enjoy. Closure over Raven (if not over my dog.) Really the only thing up in the air is Devi, and she’s not so much a question as a…
A what? A hope? A possibility?
I don’t know what to ask, so instead I just think of Devi. I think of Devi and I think of Star-Crossed and I think of all the times I’ve felt that big, magic feeling with her. And I hope the tarot deck can make sense of all that.
I finish shuffling and hand the deck to Madam Psuka, who briskly cuts the deck into three stacks. “Point to pile.”
“Um…”
“She means that you need to pick a pile to go on top,” Devi whisper-explains.
I point to the center stack, and again Madam gives that nod, as if that’s what she expected all along. She gathers up the deck, with the stack I picked on top, and then she slides the card off the top and with great flourish lays it on the counter.
“The Hanged Man,” she announces dramatically, as if I’m supposed to know what that means. I look over at Devi, but her face reveals nothing.