The Misadventures of Anna Cabbot

Research

If she hadn't been a chemical engineer she'd have probably majored in history. There was something fundamentally wonderful about being surrounded by old books — the smell alone was enough to make her swoon.

Nico Fitzwilliam had called her fucking weird in the high school library — she'd been trailing her fingers along the book spines — and had expected her to sit there and take it like everybody else he made fun of on a daily basis did. Instead, having had enough of his shit, she'd hurled a section of the Encyclopedia Britannica at him; he took it full on the chin and went backward into a shelf of nonfiction.

He hadn't told the teacher what he'd said. Anna's only response was that he should have ducked quicker.

She was so firmly ensconced in her current research — books, papers, notebooks, her computer, and a mug of tea all within reach — on her back porch she never heard Stevie's door open, her footsteps, or her sigh.

"One would think you were in college again," she said, startling Anna so badly she choked and slopped tea onto the papers in front of her.

Aware it could have been her keyboard instead, she set the mug down well clear of anything electronic or belonging to the library. "Yeah. It's for this thing I'm working on."

Stevie wrapped the open ends of her cardigan more securely around herself. "Of course. That's why you're doodling Jamie in the margins?"

Anna's face heated and she dropped the lone fiction book she'd borrowed onto the corner of a computer printout that was indeed graffiti-ed with Jamie's profile.

"Oh, honey," she sighed. "You could do worse from the sounds of it."

"I know." Anna swiveled carefully to look at Stevie head on. "I got rid of worse last year." She flailed for a few seconds until she corralled her hands in her lap. "What's the usual waiting time you're supposed to take before you jump from one person to another?"

"Well," Stevie said slowly, leaning on the porch railing that divided her side from Anna's, "why would you need to wait?"

"Propriety?"

"For who? You?" She snorted. "You don't give a damn about propriety unless it deals with witch things and then you remember that there is apparently tradition and decorum. Which, that's not a bad thing, but sometimes I think you just...forget to live a little."

Anna let her knees drop until so she was sat cross-legged. "Now I definitely don't follow."

Stevie swung a leg up and over the railing so she could fold herself to the deck boards, mirroring Anna's pose on the other side of her research ring. When she continued, her gentle tone reminded Anna of her mother. "You do really well living for experiences. You say 'I want to do the thing' and you go out and you do the thing. Whether it's different and scary or familiar, you want to do the thing, you do the thing. But you don't do the thing when it comes to people." She reached out and moved the romance novel off the doodle. "You don't do the thing when it comes to Jamie."

"I don't...I don't want to try and fail," Anna whispered.

"You try and fail at things all the time," she said. "That thing that was supposed to be a pound cake Sunday is a good example of that."

"God, that was awful, wasn't it."

"It was chewy. It should not have been chewy." Stevie waited until Anna's latest round of giggles had dried up, then reached over and set her hand lightly on Anna's knee. "Your heart — your metaphorical one, you smartass — gets dented and dinged when it loves, but it also soars. There's happiness to you whenever you come back from having coffee with him. It's okay to let him in."