“Not that I’m going to get annoyed with you or anything but… are you sure you wanna start messing with these kinds of things?”
Nellie pursed her lips as she glanced around the shop she had mustered up the courage to finally walk into.
Quinn was a few feet away from her, his voice barely above a whisper so as to not disturb the stillness that surrounded them. His dark eyebrows were slightly furrowed- his face was pulled into a look of soft concern, complete with a barely perceptible frown beginning to appear in the corners of his lips.
Even though she could understand why he felt this was something to ask her about, seeing how it was incredibly out of character for her to do something quite like this… it still kind of annoyed her.
“I’m not messing with anything.” she responded in a quick whisper, then turned her eyes fully on the products laid out in the table before her.
It wasn’t a lie, she told herself. It couldn’t be one, after all, when she really didn’t mean to do anything more than just buy a new tarot deck. She wasn’t interested in looking at the other paraphernalia housed within the dark shop that she knew had a variety of uses within any and everything that pertained to witchcraft. Not at all… well. It wasn’t like Quinn knew she was interested in it, even if he was right.
“Uh-huh.” he replied in a voice that dripped with only sarcasm, slow and disbelieving. “So, is there any great, big reason as to why you’re suddenly interested in stepping foot into a shop that used to give you the heebie-jeebies the first time I invited you to come along?”
Quinn had only invited her to join him on a trip to this store once; back then, it had been the first time he would have ever visited a spirituality-based shop that advertised itself as occult and had not wanted to go alone. That time, Nellie had admitted that she did not feel particularly comfortable heading into a shop that might dabble in things that her parents wouldn’t approve of. Quinn had been disappointed but accepted that reason as good enough and invited another one of their friends to accompany him. After that, their conversations had never gone back to talking about anything spiritual or occult, even though it wasn’t a grand mystery within their group of friends that Quinn was very much into these topics.
Because of the way she had been raised, Nellie had been anxious about the possibility of things going very wrong for Quinn once he got more and more involved in a world she had not understood. Back then, she had only known the version of this world that had parents had painted for her.
Now, though, that she was beginning to dabble into it herself and was actually learning about it from people that were of the culture, not outside of it… she could very clearly see that she had been an idiot to have thought so negatively about it.
The shop owner had been so nice with the way she had greeted them too! Nellie wasn’t sure if this was normal within these kinds of circles, but it had been the first time she had ever had any employee within a store she visited offer her tea and biscuits to enjoy while she looked over the items in the store.
“Let’s call this a simple change in perspective.” the collection of decks currently on display was vast, every single deck unique and particular in comparison to the rest. “I’ve… you can keep a secret, right?”
Quinn and she had never been particularly close. For the two years they had known each other, he had been a friend of a friend to her; she had been the same to him, after all. They got along well enough and did very well in having superficial, easy conversations. But even with the friend group they had in common, they ran around different circles and focused their lives on incredibly different interests. The only reason Quinn had invited her along initially had been because he had thought she might get a kick out of visiting, seeing how they had managed to bond so well over spooky themes in fiction and a shared love for certain horror movies.
It wasn’t really normal for her to ask so much of Quinn. They weren’t close enough to share the kinds of secrets that were supposed to be kept from other, much closer friends.
But.
Quinn was a bit of a wildcard within the friend group; he did as he pleased and no matter what anyone thought of him, the only person that was capable of convincing him about what he should do in his life was himself. In a way, Nellie had always admired that about him. In another, she had feared him, just a little, over how little he seemed to care about what he chose to do with his life could affect those around him.
She was not supposed to be like him, though. And what she was thinking of doing… what she was actively orchestrating to be able to accomplish… half of her friends would call her crazy and probably start pushing her away while the other half would try and convince her that this wasn’t her, there were other ways to get better, why not go into therapy?
Her friend group was big and filled with people that cared about her. But there was the monumental drawback that they cared enough to be far too vocal. And, to be perfectly honest, they just wouldn’t understand what was going on in Nellie's life. None of them had ever had to find their baby sister in bed with the person that was supposed to have been the love of their lives.
Quinn’s steps were light as he stepped up beside her. Nellie kept her gaze on the decks, feeling her heart rate begin to speed up. She knew that his eyes were on her; it made her want to fidget.
“Nellie, if there’s someone that’s hurting you,” his concern was so palpable that it made her want to turn around and hug him immediately.
“That’s not it.” she took just a second to glance at him, only to find that his dark eyes were narrowed in clear worry. She breathed in deep and did her best to form her lips into a reassuring smile, “Well, I was hurt. Still am. But that’s not what this is about.” with a few taps of her thumb against her index finger, she turned back to look over the decks. “I think I want to learn about being a witch. And I want to try and use tarot in my practice.”
The silence that settled between them didn’t last nearly as long as she had worried.
With a simple “Oh,” tumbling from his lips, Quinn then moved on to be the absolute best person to have confided in about this whole thing. “How about this one?” he reached over to a box at the very back of the table, over which a label read in bold, cursive print Used, Cleansed, And Seeking New Owner, in smaller letters below, a quick note had been added in a hot red ink, and a little bit of love wouldn’t hurt.
Quinn pulled out a tattered box that had undoubtedly seen better days; unlike the newer decks, there was no shrink-wrap to protect it from the elements. There was white fuzz along some of its edges, most visible in the corners of the top lids. The font on the length she could see was suffering from slight chipping, but the letters were more than whole enough to be able to fully understand what it read: The Runaway Tarot. Whereas all of the box was in a mostly dark blue color, the font was in a gray so light it could have easily been confused for white.
It looked… interesting.
She reached out for it and Quinn placed it gently within her palm; when she moved to close her fingers around it, she felt this sudden, inexplainable desire to not obscure the deck in any way. It was odd, yes, but instead of closing her hand, she was careful to move it closer to herself. She glanced down to find that the cover art was comprised of a person with a grin so wide it took up most of their face, their wild mane of red hair flowing in the wind as they ran away from a dark and gloomy silhouetted city.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
This person was… beautiful.
And most importantly: this person was free.
The longer she looked on at this person’s exhilarating liberty, the more she felt like her fingers began to buzz. But, unlike with her deck, this sensation didn’t burn and pain her. Instead, it almost felt like the glow of a peaceful afternoon’s sun- warm, present, and grounding, but not such a blaze that it could burn her.
With wide eyes, Nellie caught herself as she wondered if this was what it was supposed to feel like to find a deck that was meant for her. She blinked and found that she needed to work to look away from the deck. When she finally managed to tear her gaze away from it and back to Quinn, it was to find that he was back to looking over the rest of the decks; Nellie didn’t know if he had meant to and, really, it didn’t matter. Without her having to ask it, he had given her what little privacy he could.
They had never really been that close. And, yet… he seemed to treat her with more consideration than Bennie ever had.
“Maybe this other one?” he pulled yet another box from the rest of the used decks, but Nellie took just one look at the pale blue design and immediately knew that she had no interest in it.
With a quick shake of her head, she made sure to lift the deck Quinn had first picked out with the care it undoubtedly deserved, “I think you already found the winner.”
----------------------------------------
“Ah, I understand now.”
It had been years since she had last felt the compulsion to open up a brand-new item and ignore the rest of the world as she got to explore absolutely everything about it. This had been the kind of feeling she most strongly connected to memories of Christmas; to having a good time with family and getting to open well-meaning presents. There was just something indescribable in the kind of fun she had not given much thought to in years; in the exhilaration of having something unknown to her right in her hands at the same time she had the promise to eventually get to know it.
It had been years since she had felt quite like this.
“You don’t have to go through this alone. I know this kind of journey is a very personal thing, but personal doesn’t need to mean isolated.” she could hear the concern in his voice, clear as day.
With a deep breath in, Nellie looked away from the cup of coffee she had busied herself with swirling around. She kept her left hand’s fingers coiled tight around the ceramic spoon. She didn’t understand why, necessarily, but she knew that it felt nice to keep her fingers like that.
“I’m not even sure what journey I’m on.” it didn’t feel right to admit this out loud… but, at the same time, Nellie could feel as if a weight began to lift from her shoulders. “I feel like an idiot.”
Quinn’s pale lips formed into a small, soft smile. It was a small, crooked thing, awkward from lack of practice because Quinn had never really been the kind of person to use his face all that much. His facial expressions tended to remain in the most neutral space allowed, only ever really showing obvious variation when something was important.
Because she knew this, she understood just how much it truly meant to see this kind of smile; just like she knew how important his small frown back in the shop had been.
“You’re not an idiot.” he leaned to the side, a good piece of his body disappearing beneath the table between them. She heard the sound of a bag rustling before he returned to sitting normally; he held a book in his hands now. “I got this for you.” as he said this, he offered the book over to her. “I know it’s kind of weird to give it to you now and not in the shop but… uh… I guess I just wanted to make sure it’d be a good idea, I guess.”
The book’s cover was the common, sturdy plastic that had a soft finish- it was pleasant to touch, but unimpressive in just about every way. It had a good weight to it, admittedly, and the cover, while simplistic in that it was just solid black with only a framed outline in white to center the title and author’s name, seemed interesting enough to her eyes. In large letters, above a black and white image of a witch on a broomstick, Nellie read:
SEEING THROUGH THE VEIL:
A CONCISE GUIDE TO WITCHCRAFT FOR THE MODERN WITCH
by Esme Shadowmend
To her, it didn’t really seem any more or less outstanding than the other witchcraft related books she had managed to learn about in the research she had taken part in over the last few months. If anything, it looked a little on the older side with the main illustration- a lot of the more recently published books she had found tended to utilize more minimalist or modern approaches to decorative motifs. The older, slightly ugly witch utilized here, along with the black cat, was something she had come to understand came from a time when people still perceived witches to be more crones than anything else and believed them to be aligned with much more villainous intentions than were necessarily real.
As she took in the name of the author, she heard Quinn clear his throat. “This came out like two decades ago and some of the info needs to be updated, but I found that this was the best book to go to at the start of my journey.”
Those words shocked Nellie.
My journey?
Did that mean-?
When she looked up from the book and over to Quinn, she found that his small smile had lost some of its shine. His eyes had taken on an uncomfortable glint, narrowed as he glanced around the mostly empty coffee shop around them. There was distrust on his face that read to her as wariness. He was scared.
It didn’t feel right to see him like this. Especially not after what he had just confided in her.
“Thank you.” those were the only words she could think of as appropriate. What else could she say, after all? Even though Quinn had just acknowledged being incredibly aware of what she may be undergoing, he hadn’t said as much out loud. This could be a big secret he wanted to keep under wraps. Just the fact that he had said this much spoke volumes. And having said so little also told her that she needed to be mindful of this, handle it carefully and quietly.
He nodded and she hurried to hide the book away inside of the bag that held her brand new tarot deck. Part of her was curious to see what was inside of this book- what kind of amazing knowledge it held within if Quinn had been willing to buy her a copy and gift it to her; what it was about this book that made it a great resource for properly embarking on her journey into becoming a fully-fledged witch. But with Quinn’s obvious discomfort, she felt it more prudent to leave satisfying her curiosity for when she was behind closed doors, and no one was around to see the kind of book she was learning from.
It wasn't all that surprising, really. Unfortunately, even though times were changing and more people were coming to understand that witches weren't the monstrous, vengeful beings that most works of fiction depicted them as, there was still a lot of distrust for anyone that utilized such a label for themselves. In a place like America, where most of the population held some kind of Christian belief as their religious foundations, there was a distrust for any that practiced magic.
Or, well, the wrong kind of magic, if Nellie's analysis of her upbringing was correct. She may not know much about many religions, but she did know that there were plenty of practices that were common to many religions that, when observed as an objective outsider, could easily be categorized as magical practices. Her parents took part in the eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ because, at least to them, it symbolized a way to get rid of their sins. And if that wasn't some spooky stuff they were taking part in, Nellie would never know what spooky truly meant.
Nellie watched the way in which Quinn used hands that trembled ever so slightly to slurp quietly at his drink. His eyes were darting around with clear discomfort.
He had done so much for her...
Nellie smiled softly as she decided to ask him about what he had been getting up to in his life- successfully moving the conversation away from a topic that seemed to be important to the both of them, even if it wasn't the most appropriate to speak about in such a public space.
Besides, she could admit, it would be a good idea to leave exploring her new deck and book for later. She had Quinn right in front of her and it had been far too long since they had last managed to hang out and share more than just a few words in passing.
She could leave reading for when she was alone.