“You are an idiot!”

She repeats the words.

“What did I do? I just said that I forgive you?”

“How can you forgive me?! I—I betrayed you! I took your magic and brought it to [Archmage] Titus!”

“So?”

“You should hate me! You should be disgusted by my sole presence!”

“Meh, come on, now. Everyone fucks up sometimes.”

“You—”

Lucinda looks at me with narrowed eyes and trembling in pure anger.

“Look, Lucy, it’s not a problem. I should have been more upfront with you. You fucked up, yeah. But I was hiding stuff, testing you. I was setting you up to fail. If I had been honest, told you all I could really do, and that I was really talented, would you have betrayed me?”

“NO! I WOULD—”

She shouts and flips the table we were sitting at. Like flip. Wow. She also kicks a chair, and then she looks at me so fiercely that I feel like running away to avoid being kicked as well. I look at the truth-stone on the bracelet on my wrist with a stealthy movement. It’s something I had Claudius enchant according to Lord Juler's directives. The [Enchanter] said it could be a revolution in truth stones. It’s basically impossible to evade the truth with this. And now, it’s not reacting. Not an ounce of a lie in that statement. I wasn’t really being honest in putting this on when I got my hands back on my bag of holding, but I’m also not inclined to be fooled again.

“We could—”

Her speech is fragmented and pained when she looks at me.

“We could have been a power couple. The secretly great [Mage] who poses as a [Baker] and the hot big-boobed [Archmage] of wonders.”

As her gaze moves to the counters, I start going for the door. I recognize that stare. She wants to throw something at me. It has happened in the past already.

“You!” she grits her teeth and starts walking toward me with a dangerous glint in her eyes.

I give her my signature wink moments before she grabs me by my robe and stares dead into my eyes.

“Kiss me,” she says.

“I mean, isn’t this harassment?” I say with a benevolent smile while looking wistfully at her deep green eyes.

“I said—”

Before she can speak, I land a kiss on her lips. And once again, for the first time since we last parted, I feel my bones melting. Hell, I feel all my worries melting away. It’s like God just threw soap at a metal concert and washed away all the filth from such a sick place.

We continue kissing without moving, stamping our lips on each other for what feels like a rightful eternity. No one wants to end it; we are trying to freeze this moment of history and mark it with a blazing spike on our souls so that we shall one day look again upon it and find solace from it.

When we relent, I have a pained expression on my face, and she looks as sad as me. Maybe sadder. Her face is slightly paler, her eyebrows frowning, her lips pursed, and her mouth slightly open. She wrinkles her nose multiple times.

“Is this a goodbye?”

Just the thought makes my stomach plunge.

“What?” she asks with a massive frown.

“I mean, you looked all sad, I thought you were going to say we couldn’t do anything together now. That we were destined to be apart. I don’t know. Maybe add some stuff about how we just hurt each other so much that we shouldn’t be—”

She takes me by my ear, eyes blazing again.

“Are you an idiot?! I’m frowning because you stink! Let’s go; you need a bath!” she shouts in my ear.

“Ouch! Ouch! Ok! I’m coming, I’m coming! Let go of my poor ear! Please!”

“You thought I would leave you?! You goddamn idiot. Not two times. If you want to go, go! Now!” she instantly releases my ear and looks at me with her steely expression.

Lucinda’s not good at expressing emotions. I found out when we were dating. She’s got a very hard-to-break demeanor, and she would rather have something explode under her ass than speak out about how she truly feels. You'll have to keep your mouth shut around her. You have to anticipate her moves and understand what she wants without asking. Yeah, just a woman that’s more of a woman than the average, nothing that strange. But she’s also angry, fierce. In a cold way, though. She got handsy after we started dating. Otherwise, she would barely move her body around me. When she’s not doing magic, she’s always restrained, almost awkward at what she’s doing. She observes everything and carefully ponders what to do, even if it’s the smallest thing.

But now, she’s clearly asking a question with her eyes.

“I want you, Lucinda. But I have a very important question before we try all of this,” I move a finger back and forth between us, “again. Can you answer one question truthfully?”

“The answer is yes,” she sighs while her cheeks get some color.

“You don’t know the question,” I say with a frown.

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“You are a child.”

“What? You don’t know what I was going to ask!”

She looks at me pointedly before sighing and putting her hands on her sides.

“Come on, ask the question.”

“No! Now you tell me what you think the question is!” I say, putting my hands on my sides as well.

“You wanted to ask me if we could have a bath together.”

“Ha! I wanted to ask if we could—”

Oh?

“How did you know?!”

“Joey, you love asking stupid stuff when you act serious. When you talk about serious stuff, you act like an idiot. And vice versa.”

Oof.

“Well, that’s true. Anyway, are we still on for the bath?”

Lucinda scoffs and goes for the door, leaving the kitchen without looking back.

As I’m starting to get depressed about the missed occasion, a robe hits me in the face.

“Are you coming or not?”

I look at the garment in my hands and run for the door.