Any Witch Way You Can Read Free Page B

pick up the feed we ran into him – and he didn’t have a shirt on.”
    “Impressive sight?”
    “You have no idea,” Clove giggled. “He looks like one of those guys on the fliers for the gym in Traverse City.”
    “He looks gay?”
    Clove snorted. “He’s definitely not gay. He about fell over himself when he saw Thistle.”
    “He was very professional!” Thistle raged suddenly.
    I bit my inner cheek to keep from laughing out loud. “Did he ask you out?”
    Thistle started picking at her frayed jeans distractedly. “No.”
    “Why not?”
    Thistle shrugged.
    “I think he’s shy,” Clove answered for her. “Of course, Thistle was so flustered she practically dragged me out of the store before he could really talk to us anyway. She didn’t give him a chance.”
    “You think you know everything,” Thistle said malevolently.
    “He was definitely interested,” Clove said.
    “How do you know? Did you read his mind?” In certain circumstances, Clove can actually hear what people are thinking. That’s her “gift.” It doesn’t always work, but it is pretty accurate when it does.
    “Let’s just say that the first thing he thought about was what she would look like naked.”
    I giggled despite myself. “What was Thistle’s reaction?”
    “Pretty much the same as his. You could actually feel the temperature rise in the room. I was afraid all that hay would suddenly catch on fire.”
    “You’re making that up!” Thistle argued vehemently. “You can’t read my mind.”
    This was true. No matter how hard she tried, Clove could never ready the thoughts of other witches. I turned to her curiously. “How do you know what she was thinking?”
    “You don’t need to be a mind reader to recognize the smell of sex in a room,” she snickered.
    This is true.
    Thistle looked uncomfortable. She kept shifting in her chair. I realized I hadn’t seen her this interested in someone in a really long time. She was more the love them and leave them type. I suddenly felt sympathy for her.
    “You could ask him out.”
    “Maybe,” she said noncommittally.
    “You have a reason to go back. We always need feed. I think the aunts are using it for more than feeding the horses.”
    “They’re probably using it for spells,” Clove agreed. “There’s no way four horses use as much food as they order.”
    “Speaking of, we have family dinner tonight,” I remembered.
    Thistle and Clove groaned in unison. I felt their pain. We all loved our mothers. We all loved our aunts. We all really loved our Great Aunt Tillie – even though we often wondered if she hadn’t went completely round the bend in recent years. Family dinners, though, were more work than anything else. The women in my family were witches also – obviously – but they were also spastic at times. Much like Clove, Thistle and I, they were ridiculously close. It didn’t help that they ran the bed and breakfast together – and were constantly on each other’s nerves – and at each other’s throats.
    “I wonder what they’ll be fighting about tonight?” Clove wondered aloud.
    “The same thing they always argue about. Who is the best cook, who is the best gardener, who is the smartest . . .”
    I smiled to myself as I pictured the scene that was sure to unfold this evening. Utter chaos.
    “We could say we’re too busy to go?” Even as I uttered the words I knew how ridiculous they were.
    “Yeah, they’ll believe that. It’s a small town. They know we’re not too busy,” Thistle said.
    “I like family dinner sometimes,” Clove admitted.
    “I do, too,” I said hastily. “I’m just always so tired from the arguing afterwards.”
    “It is exhausting.”
    Thistle fixed a no-nonsense gaze on both of us. “There will be no Marcus talk tonight,” she said. It was a statement, not a plea.
    “Of course not,” I agreed. It was one thing for the three of us to bag on one another. It was quite another thing for the aunts to do it. They would