We accept the love we think we deserve. It was a relatively nice Sunday afternoon—aside from the incredibly awful summer sun that was beating down. The witches and wizards of Exley had been frequenting the ice cream shop in town so often that it had run out of most flavors until it only had taro and blood left, so that was how it had come to be that Matthew and Caelia were sitting at a picnic table by the lake, partially shaded by trees, licking identical purple ice creams.
Caelia hadn’t spoken in awhile, instead focusing on her cone and the witches, wizards, and other humanoid magic creatures who were spending their day off swimming or sunbathing on the banks of the lake. Matthew was sitting on the table, his feet resting on the bench where Caelia sat a few feet away, his body hunched over as he nibbled on the sweet cone. He was hidden by the long branches of the weeping willow above them, a discontented air about him.
Matthew was everything Caelia wasn’t supposed to like. She wasn't entirely sure if he liked her back—they had only just reconnected, only just started to mend their broken friendship. He rarely wrote her, but when he did his letters always said the right thing and therein, was the catch. At Sonora all her friends adored her and Caelia adored them too, but no one had captured her attention the way Matt had with his elusive answers and non-committal attitude. And there was something in the way he looked at her sometimes...
Yet she had received a rather confusing, passive-aggressive message from him regarding her date to the ball. He hadn’t liked her friendship with Ali, Caelia knew that and she understood it to an extent. Alistair represented a life that had rejected Matt and, she supposed, Jack also belonged to that life. But he was the younger brother of her brother’s girlfriend which meant he wasn’t going anywhere.
“So,” he prompted, turning his head to get a better angle on his dessert. “We just going to sit here in silence, or?”
Caelia shrugged. She liked Jack, he was pureblood, he was proper, he played Quidditch, he was kind. Like Alistair, he was everything she was supposed to like. And, like Alistair, Matthew had forbidden her from being friends with him. She really liked Matt, but they’d had a big fight when he came by to pick her up from her grandmother’s—waiting on the other side of the fence, under the shade of the lilac tree at the corner of the yard so that Viviane didn’t know it was him Caelia was going with.
“C’mon, Cael,” he scooted a little closer, nudged her shoulder gently with his knee. “Talk to me, you’re not still mad, are you?”
She shrugged again. She didn’t really feel like talking. Matt liked her at least a little bit, she could tell. He was the only guy who had ever shown even some interest in her. Caelia knew she was pretty, but the wizards at Sonora didn’t seem to think she was anything more than that and her only consolation that anyone thought she was more than a stupid girl was the yearbook award of best looking and Class Lady. “Alistair’s my friend,” she finally said. “And so’s Jack. His sister is dating my brother, I don’t want to just stop talking to them.”
Matthew sighed. “Caelia, look at me. Look at me.” He sighed again and stood up, tossing his half-eaten cone away to pull Caelia to her feet, her cone also falling to the ground and he held her two hands with one of his and used his other to tilt her face up to his. “I’m sorry, okay?” She didn’t say anything. “Look, I just…I get jealous, okay? That doesn’t make it right, but…you’re off at that school, where I should be. Learning with other witches and…wizards and…” He turned away for a moment, pausing in his train of thought.
Caelia looked up at him hopefully, her cheeks slightly pink as she waited to see if now was the moment he would finally confess. “Yes?”
He looked back at her, mildly annoyed now. “You’re not a smart witch, Caelia, but you can pick up on things. I like you, it’s obvious and when you hang out with other guys—with wizards… I don’t like it, okay?”
“Okay,” she nodded.
“Yeah?”
She smiled. “Yeah.”
“Good,” he smiled back down to her and pulled her chin closer, placing a very chaste kiss to her lips.