Lib Novel Page 37
Some of them looked intense, especially one with an illustration of a grim reaper standing on dead bodies in the middle of a plague. As the woman tapped the cards, she looked up at Sayeda every so often.
“What’s she saying?” he whispered. “Or is it confidential?”
“She’s saying that I’m struggling with making a decision,” Sayeda explained. “It’s a problem that deals with…good and evil, you could say. I’ve always done exactly what’s expected of me, but I find that my priorities have been…shifting.”
“So, you want to be evil?”
“I want to follow my heart.”
“What does your heart wan?—”
“This,” she pointed to a card, “is considered The Empress Card, and she’s not in the forward position.” Amusement sparkled in her eyes. “It means that I have someone in my life who’s always stuck to me. Like peanut butter.”
“You invited me out. What’s she really saying? Because I know she didn’t refer to me as peanut butter.”
“It means I’m feeling things I’ve never felt before,” she quietly blurted out. “Things I keep telling myself I shouldn’t be feeling, but that only makes them torment me even more.”
An invisible comb dripped dollops of honey onto his sour attitude. “How do they torment you?”
“Mostly at night, when I’m alone.” She held his gaze, blinking slowly. “Lately, during the day.”
“How often do they torment you?”
“Multiple times. Sometimes back to back, over and over.”
“Are they strong?”
“Intense.”
“Are they…wet?”
From the way the fabric shifted, either she’d licked her lips or worse—she was sucking on her bottom lip, threatening to give him his fourth “situation” of the day.
The fortune teller tapped the last two cards, and when he and Sayeda looked away, he swore he felt the tear, again like duct tape. Despite the lust cloud he’d gotten himself trapped in, he paid attention just enough to notice that whatever the fortune teller had shared, it wasn’t on the positive side of things.
“Is she saying you’re going to die?” he asked.
Sayeda shook her head. “No, she’s not, but is it okay if I don’t tell you?”
“Well, does it involve you getting hurt?”
“What kind of hurt?”
“The kind of hurt you won’t have to worry about coming from me.”
The veil shifted in the same way, and he considered kissing her through it. When compared to nudging her onto her back and kissing her in other places, in the middle of the market, kissing fabric didn’t seem as strange. Then he shrugged, and the words came spilling out, especially with her sitting there with those eyes, looking at him the way she was.
“I like you, Sayeda.”
She exhaled, the breath unsteady. “I like you too, Adrían.”
The fortune teller finished the reading.
“It’s your turn now,” Sayeda said.
“What if she tells me something personal?” he asked. “You’ll know all of my future secrets when I don’t know all of yours.”
Sighing, she rubbed the space between her eyebrows hard enough to wrinkle the fabric. “The World Card and The Death Card are working together for my future,” she explained. “If I go against the rules, the result won’t be what I hope.”