When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey (best books to read non fiction TXT) 📕

“Good,” she says. “Comfortable.”

“Think you’ll do this one again?”

She shakes her head, hesitates, then nods. “Probably. I mean, I look handsome as hell.” She waggles her eyebrows. “Don’t pretend you didn’t notice.”

“How could I miss it?” I laugh, and she gives me another wolfish grin.

We talk about college, and about New York, and about whether she’ll stick with female pronouns when she leaves our little town. We talk about State, and about the apartment I’m going to share with Roya and Maryam, and about how hard it is to believe that there are only three weeks left until summer.

“I meant what I said last time we talked about this. I’m going to miss you a lot, you know,” she says, no grin this time. I put my hand on her shoulder and she clears her throat. “All of you guys.”

“We’re going to miss you too. But we’ll come visit you in New York, and you’ll show us Times Square and all the best restaurants and clubs and stuff.”

“Yeah,” she says with a small smile. “Yeah, that’ll be great.”

We spend the rest of the drive talking about how scary all of this is—how awful it is to be losing pieces of ourselves as we get rid of the pieces of Josh. It feels like we all just started really understanding who we are, and now that’s all changing, and it’s awful.

Talking about it doesn’t make it better. But it’s good to tell someone I’m scared. It makes it easier, knowing that I’m not alone.

We get to Barclay Rock and lapse into a heavy silence. Paulie pops the trunk and hands me Josh’s arm. We walk into the trees and find the tree trunk we sat on last time. Paulie casts a net of magic out into the tree line, and then she spreads out a little blanket on the ground, and we sit on it and pick at the crunchy grass and wait.

“Do you think I can touch her this time?” Paulie asks.

“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” I answer. “She’s a coyote.”

“You touched her,” Paulie mutters. I glare at her and she holds her palms up. “Okay, okay, I was just asking.”

When the coyote finally shows up, she pauses and smells the air for a full minute before approaching us. She looks a little less ragged than she did last time we saw her. A little less bony.

She sits near the edge of our picnic blanket and cocks her head. Her muzzle is brown, muddy-looking, and I wonder if it’s dirt or dried blood I’m looking at. I hold out a hand and she growls, a low rumble in her throat, but she lowers her head and shoves it against my palm.

More meat for you and your pups, I tell her.

Why what smell who meat smell good meat why

I point to the arm, and she smells the full length of it before grabbing the wrist in her teeth and using it like a handle to tug the arm.

Wait, I tell her. Come back?

She looks up at me with golden eyes and drops the arm. She steps toward me and waits, her body tense.

I grab Paulie’s hand. Her fingers shift under mine, trying to lace into the spaces between my knuckles, but I turn her hand over so her palm faces down. Out of the corner of my eye I see her look at me, but I don’t take my gaze away from the coyote.

Slowly.

Slowly.

Easy now.

Careful.

I lift Paulie’s hand to the top of the coyote’s head.

As her fingertips land on fur, I let my thumb brush against the coyote’s head. Still, stay still, it’s okay, she’s good, I say, as quietly as I know how to talk in this language that isn’t talking. The coyote is unmoving, but rigid. Her ears twitch. Thank you thank you thank you, I say, and the coyote licks her chops, and I pull Paulie’s hand away. Her fingers twine between mine, and I can feel her trembling.

The coyote is gone before we can say anything else. She takes the arm with her. Paulie lets out a long, slow exhalation. She’s still got my hand in hers, and she’s staring at the tree line with a look on her face that I’ve never seen before. She looks scared, and excited, and full.

“It’s amazing, right?” I say.

“Yeah,” Paulie answers. “It’s totally amazing. I tried to talk to her the way that you do, but I couldn’t figure it out. It’s—her fur was softer than I thought it would be?”

“Yeah, she’s been shedding her undercoat a lot lately, and probably hanging out with her pups a lot, so she hasn’t been out roaming around. But I didn’t know she’d feel like that either,” I admit. “I didn’t know she’d be so small.”

“I can’t believe I just pet a coyote,” Paulie says, and then she doubles over laughing, the kind of breathless laughter that comes after you do something incredibly stupid.

“You did it, kiddo,” I say, laughing with her. She sits up and looks at me, and the laughter on her face changes. The I-can’t-believe-we-did-that grin softens. It turns into something that’s still a smile, but different. It’s between the two of us. It’s a smile that’s only for me.

I realize that she’s still got my hand. Her thumb is tracing an arc from the back of my wrist to the inside of my palm. Her gaze flicks from my mouth to my eyes, and she bites her lip hard enough that if I were Maryam, I’d yell at her.

Part of me knows what’s coming. And part of me wants it. We’ve been flirting for years, even during times when I’ve had a girlfriend and she’s had a boyfriend, or the other way around. Part of me knows that it would be so easy, so nice. Part of me wants to make Paulie happy. Part of me thinks I could be happy too. Maybe I could.

She leans forward and lifts her free hand to my cheek.