Tags: anything that can go wrong…, bipoc character, bisexual character, chance meeting, fat character, magic user, missed connections, mutual pining, past tense, pov third person limited, reunion, second chances, witch, wlw
*
Sun. There’d been sun five minutes ago with nary a cloud in the sky.
Daisy’s coven mother used to tell her the rain goddess favored her more than most of her chosen. Iris’s alleged favor was good for the plants Daisy coaxed to life with her magic, but it was horrible when she was already running late to work only to have the sky open up the moment she walked outside.
She’d need to order a broomshare. It couldn’t be helped. Beneath her apartment building’s excuse for an awning, she dug through her bag, pushing aside old receipts and keys. Beneath mail she’d been meaning to sort through for at least a week, she found the small, branded crystal for the Swyft-n-Lite service and gave it a squeeze, holding it until it pulsed in her hand to let her know she’d joined the queue.
Pressing her back against the brick as much as she could, Daisy sighed deeply and wished—for not the first time—that she was a different type of witch, the kind who could turn a small clutch purse into an umbrella or a gutter into an awning. Or an awning into an even bigger awning. The kind who could fly her own broom instead of relying on Swyft-n-Lite. She pulled out the crystal again, the surface of it shifting the moment it encountered her skin. Two small dots carved themselves into the sapphire.
Two minutes. Two minutes, and she’d be secure on a broom equipped with a water-repelling charm. She’d tip an exorbitant amount if the witch flying it could charm her dry as well.
Raindrops marked the seconds, slanting sideways and soaking her to the bone. When the standard electric-blue shaft of a broom appeared, Daisy nearly sagged with relief.
“Well, well, well. Daisy Guthrie.”
On the back of the broom, a witch pushed back the cloak of her hood to reveal a tangle of hair colored every hue of the rainbow.
Helix Andromeda patted the handle of her broom in invitation. Daisy swallowed hard.
Helix looked… well, she looked even better than she had when they went to college together, back when Daisy had harbored a massive crush on the girl who sat two seats down from her in Magical Ethics. The hair was different but not unexpected. Helix had always liked to play with magical body modification. Daisy had seen her hair sea-green and caution-yellow and—one summer session during Pride month—pink, purple, and blue all together. The Helix grinning at her from the back of a broom, both of her dark brown cheeks dimpled, had charmed her eyes today as well. In the natural near-black of her irises swam a cosmos of stars and comets that glittered and winked.
“You getting on?” Helix asked.
Daisy blinked at Helix from where she’d been frozen to the sidewalk, no longer concerned with the rain beating down on her favorite lilac sundress—homemade on her coven mother’s vintage sewing machine because Daisy was sick and tired of fast-fashion plus-sized clothes that never accounted for fat arms. Laughing awkwardly, she clambered onto the back of the broom.
“I can dry you off, if that’s okay with you?” Helix offered, already kicking off of the pavement.
“Please.”
In one big rush, all the water fell from the hem of Daisy’s dress. She supposed Helix could’ve muttered the proper spell beneath her breath, but some part of Daisy knew better. Helix had mastered silent casting in the years since graduation, and no, this utter display of competency in her field of magic was not going to drag Daisy’s old crush up out of the soil like an old bulb bursting back to life. It wasn’t.
“So, how long have you been doing this?” Daisy asked, intently focusing on the way the raindrops seemed to blur past them from within the cocoon of magic surrounding Helix’s broom. It was that, or she might notice the way Helix’s thighs looked when they flexed around the handle to turn this way and that. She’d rather walk to work in the downpour than take that dangerous road.
“A few years. Just off and on around holidays and special occasions. Gift giving as a love language, you know? What are you gonna do?” Helix shrugged in front of her and expertly maneuvered the broom between two buses, ignoring the way both drivers honked at her.
“What’s the occasion?”
“Double full moon this month. Celeste is one of my patrons.”
Daisy didn’t ask any more on that. Relationships between a witch and a deity were sacred, the details of any rituals or requests often kept secret from everyone but their most trusted friends and family members. Daisy never talked about Persephone and Iris, either, and as much as she might have wanted to be that close to Helix many full moons ago, she wasn’t.
With that sobering thought, the broom pulled to a gentle stop in front of Daisy’s Delectable Desserts.
“I’ve seen this place a few times,” Helix said, offering Daisy her hand to help her off the broom. “It always made me think of you, but I didn’t realize it actually was you.”
“Well…” Daisy did a little point-and-dance that she definitely would not lie awake thinking about for days on end. “Now you know.”
Helix grinned at her and then got a faraway look in her cosmic eyes. “I still remember that one equinox bonfire. You brought…” Helix held up two fingers in the universal symbol for “very small.”
“Pomegranate tartlets?”
“Yes! Perfect balance of tart and sweet, melt-in-your-mouth crust. I didn’t know what fruit was in them, but I still dream about those tarts.”
Daisy felt her cheeks warming. “Oh. Uh, yeah. Thank you.” Smooth. “I have them. Inside, I mean. Well, not right now. But at spring equinox. And I have… I could make you some. Sometime. You know, before then. If you wanted.”
Very, very smooth. Daisy wasn’t going to get a full eight hours for days at this rate.
But if Helix thought she was being strange, she didn’t show it. Instead, she gave Daisy a slight smile, warm as the re-emerging sun kissing Daisy’s arms.
“I’ll hold you to that, Daisy Guthrie.” With that, Helix gave her a small salute and took off. A few seconds later, it started raining again; Daisy hastily retreated inside with at least two customers on her heels.
*
A week passed, giving Daisy just long enough to only barely obsess about how ridiculously she’d spiraled into a sapphic panic at seeing Helix again. She tried out a new recipe for a lemon-and-violet Danish. She tacked a new positive article about her bakery to the corkboard behind the register. And she worked on an elaborate three-tiered wedding cake, replete with two magical wizard statuettes the customers had provided, both of whom refused to stop kissing and dancing together long enough for her to actually place them.
She was halfway through pouring them a dance floor out of chocolate so they’d stop ruining her chai buttercream when the bell on the front door jingled.
“I’ll be right there,” Daisy called from the kitchen.
“No rush.” Helix’s voice floated back to her from the main space in the bakery, making Daisy fumble and spill half the chocolate on her stainless-steel work table instead of in the mold. A good portion of it dripped over the side and onto her dress and shoes.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh gods.”
“Hey, are you… oh.”
Why?
Daisy turned toward Helix and did her best to shrug, like this was no big deal, happened all the time. She meant to do this, actually. Chocolate is very, very “in” this season. All the rage in Paris and Milan.
“I’ve got you, Spring Daisy,” Helix said. And, just like that, Daisy watched all the chocolate arc through the air and back into the pot, leaving not even a drop behind. This time, she knew it was wordless casting. Helix’s mouth hadn’t even moved. Daisy put the pot down and did her best to stammer out a “thank you,” a task that got harder the longer she looked at the woman across from her—hair a bright ombre of aquamarine giving way to deep teal, eyes still glittering with all the vastness of the universe.
But that smile that Helix never altered was the real killer—a 6.0 on the Dimple Scale.
Daisy was not going to fall for her again. Except…
“I was hoping I might take you up on those tarts, but you seem to have your hands full.” Helix moved closer and bent down to watch the two figurines in starry cloaks twirling on Daisy’s work table. She laughed when one of them dipped the other low and then had the gesture returned in kind. A kiss followed soon after, giving way to their foreheads resting together while they swayed to music only they could hear. Helix watched them for another moment and then turned her bright eyes on Daisy. “Hope I’m so in love one day that mere Imprints of the two of us are this sickeningly sweet.”
“Is that what they are?” Daisy asked.
“Yeah.” Helix playfully nudged one of them just enough to make them swat at her with a soundless laugh. “They animate with an impression of you. It’s like magical memory foam. They aren’t you, but they’re the vibe you put out into the universe.”
Daisy watched the two miniatures laugh at a joke no one else could hear. “Deities above and below, if that’s just their vibe.”
“Exactly. They must be, just, Darcy and Liz ’05 happy.”
“Achilles and Patroclus in Elysium.”
“Jane and August.”
“Kelly and Yorkie.”
“Yusuf and Nicolo.”
With every passing name, Helix and Daisy smiled at each other a little more. Daisy turned her attention back on the figurines, now sitting with their backs against a mixing bowl, one tucked under the other’s arm.
“I’m glad we both acknowledge Darcy and Liz as the only acceptable het couple,” Daisy said.
Helix scoffed. “Daisy, did you even pay attention in English Lit? As if either of those absolute bisexual disasters were straight.”
“Okay, you’ve got me there.” Daisy laughed. “Darcy was at least a little into Bingley.”
“And Liz and Charlotte were really good friends.”
“Just a couple of gals being pals.”
“Girls were just more affectionate with each other back then.” Helix leaned against the work table with her back to the cake, palms on either side of her wide hips, fingers curling over the rounded edge. She’d charmed her nails a bright blue that matched the lightest parts of her hair, but they didn’t stay that way for long—the color faded darker and darker into a deep ocean-green. Daisy stared at them for a beat too long, until they started lightening again, and then she looked up at Helix, who raised one thick eyebrow.
“Brought you something, by the way,” Helix said, tossing a book at her. It was a journal bound in thick leather, embossed with ivy. “For recipes, notes to your patrons, your beautiful thoughts. Whatever. It’s charmed so no one else can read it. I just vaguely know you’re in it with Persephone, too, and ivy is a thing for her, right? Either way, plant witch. I thought of you.” Helix shrugged and licked her lips.
“Th-Thank you.” Daisy cleared her throat, running her fingers over the cover. “If… if you, uh, can come back after three, I’ll have tarts for you.”
Helix lit up like a sacred hearth. Dimple Scale: 10.0. Alert, alert. Situation critical!
“Yeah?”
“Sure. And a fresh pot of homegrown herbal tea to pair with them.”
“Daisy Guthrie, you sure know how to show a gal a good time,” Helix said in a mock old-timey Hollywood accent.
Daisy pretended to rub at an itch on her neck for fear that Helix might see her pulse point jumping beneath her skin. “Well, toots, you know me.” And, wow, okay, not the worst reply, actually.
“I’ll go put on my best dress then, sugar.” Helix did a silly little curtsy and headed out of the kitchen.
“It’s a date then, doll.”
At the swinging door that led back out into the small dining room, Helix turned back and locked eyes with Daisy. Supernovas exploded in both irises. “Gods, I sure hope so.”
When the door swung shut behind her, Daisy immediately needed to sit down. She had to take several breaths before she was able to make herself get up and start tempering another batch of chocolate to finish the wedding cake.
*
At ten minutes before three, Daisy found herself in the kitchen of the bakery, covered in flour and with her fingers stained pink-red by pomegranate. She’d meant to make a full batch of two dozen tarts, with a handful plated and looking pretty next to steaming cups of tea, the rest packed up in one of her signature white-and-green boxes. She’d have had the fruit juice stains scrubbed away with Mitsi’s Magical Mess Remover, her dress dusted clean and hair fixed into something respectable.
She’d be sitting casually in the cozy dining room of her bakery, sipping her tea and waiting while reading her almanac or one of the magazines sitting in her mail stack. There’d be an empty planter on the table and when Helix walked in, she’d push a flower up through the soil just for her.
Instead, she had managed to assemble exactly six tarts so far—unbaked and sitting in the pan. The kettle wasn’t even on. Her hair frizzed more and more from the humidity of her own nervous sweat.
Why hadn’t she said four o’clock? Or seven? Or next Wednesday?
Logically, she knew it didn’t matter. This wasn’t a work deadline or an appointment. This was just a friend coming to get some tarts with another friend. Maybe a date, but had they been serious about that part? Daisy genuinely wasn’t sure, but she…
“Oh, gods,” Daisy cringed, her hand accidentally slipping into the mixing bowl of pomegranate filling, half-tipping it, goop dripping sadly over the side when she righted it. It was at that precise moment that she heard someone come into the shop. Daisy looked at the door to the kitchen and saw Helix peering through the little window before pushing inside.
Helix looked at her hand and then stopped at the end of the work table several feet away. A small smile played at her lips—blue, now, to match her hair and nails. “Hey again, Daisy.”
“I swear I’m not usually this much of a mess all at once on a single day.”
Helix kept looking at her. Her dimples slowly appeared, hovering at a quiet 2.0. “Really? Because I seem to remember a fire in the twelfth-floor kitchen of Jupiter Hall.”
“It wasn’t a fire! Some frat boy or other absolute heathen had left an entire puddle of melted plastic on the bottom of the oven.”
Helix’s dimples briefly deepened to a 6.0. “I remember the fire alarm going off, and walking outside, and there you were, already dripping wet from the sprinklers. You were in those pajamas you had—the green ones with the little succulents in teacups. For a second, Celeste threw light on your hair, and then…”
Daisy sighed. “And then it started raining.”
Helix stepped closer, pulling a clean kitchen towel from a shelf on the way. It was that, instead of magic, that she used on Daisy’s hand, wiping away most of the pomegranate filling with gentle swipes of terry cloth.
“You looked really pretty, you know,” Helix said softly, “with Her light in your hair.”
Goosebumps tracked down Daisy’s arms, her throat feeling a little tighter than it was supposed to. Helix dropped the towel on the counter and glanced at the mess around the kitchen and on Daisy’s clothes.
“Please,” Daisy whispered, and without so much as a twitch from Helix, the entire kitchen seemed to leap into the air. Helix kept her eyes on Daisy’s even while flour swirled around them in clouds reminiscent of cosmic dust. Red joined the white—specks of stray filling forming the nebulae of this galaxy that circled around them. It seemed like eons that they stood there in the center of this hurricane, but it was likely only seconds, the mess sorting itself and quietly streaming into the trash, laundry, compost, and recycling.
“There,” Helix said hoarsely, and Daisy looked down to find that even the pink on her fingers was gone.
“Sorry I’m terrible at timing.”
“Don’t be. I’m not.” Helix turned toward the worktable, clean now except for the half-made tarts and ingredients. She picked up the tiny round cutter Daisy used to cut her dough and started pressing out rounds. Daisy watched her for several seconds before Helix glanced her way and gave her an amused look that seemed to say, Well, are you coming over here or not?
“Oh, uh…” Daisy started picking up the dough rounds and pressing them into the tin, rinsing and repeating and instructing Helix on how to re-roll the dough (with a little magical chill added in to keep it from getting too warm) until the tin was full.
“Would it be against your morals as a baker to let me fill these?” Helix asked. “I’m faster than a spoon.”
“Be my guest,” Daisy said, and pomegranate filling leapt into each of the miniature shells. She let Helix at her tea leaves while the tartlets baked, using that time to put the extra dough and filling away in the walk-in and to make sure she didn’t miss any of the orders she needed to have done for pick-up the following morning.
By the time the tarts were ready, Helix had a pot of tea and two cups set on a table out in the dining room, right next to the empty pot Daisy had placed there several hours ago.
“I’m doing a really bad job hosting this date, if we were serious about that,” Daisy said, sliding a plate of tarts onto the table. Normally, she would’ve let them cool more before serving them, but when she’d said that aloud, Helix had given her a look and, right, of course. Helix was the right kind of witch to speed up that process.
Helix didn’t answer the “date” comment at first, choosing instead to take a tart and pop it into her mouth. She chewed on it for what felt like decades, eyes closing like she needed to shut off one sense just to better appreciate every note of flavor. When she finally swallowed, she reached for a cup of tea brimming with cream and took a sip.
“No one believes in fate more than a witch, Daisy Guthrie.” Helix sat back in her chair and folded her hands on the table. Her nails continued cycling through hues of blue.
“I don’t understand.”
“Once upon a time, I saw a girl with moonlight in her hair, and I fell a little in love,” Helix pulled another tart onto her own little plate, but she left it there. “Once upon a time, I listened to a girl go on a rant about consent in Magical Ethics, and the way she got so passionate about it and about all the other things she cared about… I wanted her, and I wondered if Celeste hadn’t put me onto her on purpose—if my goddess hadn’t known something I didn’t. And then I proceeded to finish college and never do anything about it. Even when my heart did a little involuntary magic every time I saw her.”
“I…” Daisy slumped in her chair. “But I just grow plants, and you can move mountains, and I was the one with the crush who never did anything.”
“Like I said, no one believes in fate more than a witch. When the girl you never ’fessed up to comes back into your life seemingly out of nowhere, maybe you need to pay attention.” Helix finally ate the other tart, much faster this time. “And as beautiful as you were with moonlight in your hair, and as much as you hate the fact that Iris loves to drench you, you look absolutely stunning covered in rain.”
“I…”
“And I’ve seen what plant witches can do, Daisy. Plant witches can re-forest entire areas destroyed by arson or wildfires. They can remove invasive species that are choking out native plants or waterways. Don’t act like you couldn’t move mountains, too, if you had enough vines to work with.” Helix took another sip of tea. “But also, the size of the things we do with our magic—or even without it—aren’t what make us worthy of life and love. You love to bake, right? So you use your magic for that, and you make yourself and others happy. It’s enough for you. Why wouldn’t it be enough for me?”
Daisy took a swallow of her own tea, mostly to keep the ache in the back of her throat from spilling out of her eyes. Slowly, she reached for the empty pot, wrapping her hand around it and coaxing a lily up out of the soil, petals an unnatural hue of blue to match Helix’s… everything. The galaxies in Helix’s eyes died out while she watched it grow, leaving behind only the soft deep, deep brown.
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” Daisy asked.
“Because”—Helix smiled, reaching out to gently touch a petal—“I’m a hopeless bisexual.”
“Maybe not so hopeless now, huh?”
“And, also, because half of the stuff I just said is stuff I learned from you. Isn’t that the way of girls who like girls? To be so intimidated by each other for different reasons?” Helix shook her head.
“Gods above and below,” Daisy whispered into her teacup. Because it was true. Helix had worded it differently, but she’d gone on that same rant more than once in Magical Ethics class for a myriad of reasons. That it didn’t matter if someone’s magic was capable of rewriting the universe or only rewriting a grocery list. What mattered was that they were a living, breathing being who the gods chose to bring into existence for one purpose or another. Their value was that, and so was everyone else’s. She looked at Helix. “It’s amazing sometimes how we forget to grant ourselves the grace we give to everyone else.”
Helix smiled her quiet 2.0 dimple smile. She shifted and laid her hand on the table within easy reach of Daisy’s. It rested between the tarts and the teapot like a quiet invitation—there, if Daisy wanted to take it.
“For the record,” Daisy said, putting down her teacup, “I remember you having plenty of passionate opinions of your own, a lot of them great, a lot of them a part of who I am even after all this time.”
On the tabletop, she found Helix’s hand and covered it with hers, her fingers curling around one side toward her palm.
Across from her, Helix picked up a tartlet with her free hand and held it up like a glass of champagne at a queer wizard wedding.
“To fate,” Helix said.
With a grin and a fluttering heartbeat, Daisy reached for the plate.