The door is unlocked at the bottom, and I slip easily into the store. It’s currently empty of customers. Since the stairs open up into the back, which is hidden from the front of the store by two walls, I find Luna bent over a big worktable with a strange gold-looking glass jammed into her eye while she holds a stone in tweezers and inspects it. What do they call those things? A jeweler’s glass or something? It looks like a fancy, shrunk-down pirate-looking glass to me.
I clear my throat, but Luna heard me coming. She carefully sets the stone down onto a bed of black velvet on the table and lowers the pirate-looking thing from her eye.
She immediately looks alarmed, but seeing as I’m not panicking about anything, her eyes narrow, and her look changes to one of fierce annoyance. I like those flames in her eyes. Does she realize how comely they make her look? Not that she needs fire to be beautiful. I don’t think Luna’s beauty has ever been properly appreciated by anyone. It’s understated, but that’s what makes it even more special.
I certainly didn’t let her know just how gorgeous she is, back when she was with me. Or even how wonderful, smart, and utterly amazing.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and it’s continuously showing me what an ass I was. I deserve to be cursed to walk around with an itchy butt and not a pretty bracelet, which I keep in my pocket for reasons I haven’t even explained to myself yet.
Thinking about how badly I treated Luna makes me feel indigested, and I have to clear my throat to get rid of the sour taste of bile in my mouth. “It’s been…not that I’ve been counting, but well, I haven’t called an emergency meeting with my cousins yet.”
“An emergency what?”
Right. She doesn’t know about the curse and the pact. Best not start from the beginning.
Her right eye ticks. “Who’s watching Milo if you’re down here?”
“He’s sleeping.” I pull out my phone. “I bought this thing that lets you watch kids when they’re napping, and you don’t even have to be in the same room. It links right to your phone.”
“Oh,” she states with more dryness than a pot full of dust. “You mean a baby monitor, which you bought to watch a four-year-old.”
I just shrug. Pulling out my phone, I flip to the app and show her the screen, which shows Milo peacefully asleep in his bed, his books on the nightstand, covers pulled up, and blinds closed shut. Luna gasps. I do a double-take because if something has gone wrong up there, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself. But no, everything looks as it should. No lurking boogeymen or someone clad in black sneaking up two flights to cram himself through the tiny window. I’m not cooking, so there isn’t anything burning or on fire.
“The room,” she gasps out. “It’s clean.”
“Right. Yes. We’ve been working on picking up. I made a game out of it. Not a thirty-second clean-up, though I do see the value in that, and it’s most efficient, but a game of exchanges.”
“Oh god. Why do I not like where this is going?” Luna rises off the small stool she was arched over. There are jewelry supplies all over the table. She’s working down here, making things when she doesn’t have people in the store. Well, obviously, as she’s the one who supplies the product.
It’s like a lighted match straight to my nuts—no, wait, that’s the bracelet burning furiously and suddenly from my pocket—when I recall how many times I told Luna it wouldn’t work. That she shouldn’t follow her dreams because she wouldn’t make it, and how her business model sucked while her stuff wasn’t good enough for people to want to buy it. I never said any of that in those exact words, as back then, I wasn’t a total asshole all the time. But I did let her believe all of it in so many other words. I never once encouraged her to follow her passions, and I never told her how marvelous the things she made actually were.
“Show me,” I suddenly say, even though it’s not what I’ve been planning. “What you’re working on, I mean.”
She eyes me with ultra-suspicion, which is a step above typical suspicion. “I thought you were going to tell me about the exchange system.”
“Oh, right.” I shrug. “I pay Milo to clean his room. For every single thing he puts away, he gets twenty-five cents.”
“You what?” Luna sputters. “No! You can’t pay him to clean his room! This way, he’ll never do it for free!”
“Relax. I plan on weaning him off of it. Plus, if he wants to start doing chores, I figured it’s a good basis for an allowance. That way, I can spoil him, but he still has to earn it. I thought it was fair.”