Sorcery and the Single Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

note in homeroom, asking him to check one box if his answer was yes, and another if his answer was no.
    I was being ridiculous. I was a grown woman. I was a professional librarian. I was experienced, confident, capable. I was a witch, for heaven’s sake.
    I wasn’t going to let one silly invention—the telephone—get in the way of my finding eternal happiness with the most gorgeous man I’d met since the I.B.
    The Itinerant Bellyache. I’d pursued him, and look where that had gotten me. I’d even asked him up to Gran’s farm, invited him to my family reunion, so that my humiliation could be placed on full display for everyone I knew and loved.
    Wait. I’d asked the I.B., but only after he had invited me to lunch. He had asked me out first. He took the lead, and the relationship ended up in the toilet. There. The powers of the universe were clearly sending me a message. They were obviously demanding that I change my ways. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and all that jazz.
    I grabbed the phone and punched in the number before I could talk myself out of acting.
    One ring.
    I nearly hung up.
    Two rings.
    I caught my breath.
    Three rings.
    I started to compose a message for his answering machine, thought better of it, decided that I’d just throw away the card, that the universe was clearly reversing its original message. Now it was shrieking: Run! Run! Flee before it’s too late!
    Four—
    “Henderson.”
    “Madison,” I said, before I could stop myself.
    I was such an idiot! He didn’t even know my name. He was going to think that I was mocking him, just for answering his phone with a crisp, businesslike precision. “Jane Madison here,” I clarified, before he could hang up. “We met yesterday. At Cake Walk.”
    “Oh yes,” he said, and I could hear him smile as he spoke. Yes. Hear him. Those perfect lips, curving around those flawless teeth. The British dentists’ union should stage a protest—whoever maligned them in popular American media had clearly never met Graeme Henderson. He said, “The Lust girl.”
    “Er, yes,” I said, and made a face I meant to be funny. I scowled when I realized that he couldn’t see me, and then I felt even more stupid. My not-so-becoming flush was rising to my cheeks once again. No wonder I had sent Adam Lehrer a note in eighth grade—that communication was a thousand times easier than this one, even if I had needed to debate the size and shape of the boxes for him to check. Fortunately, Melissa had convinced me that heart-shaped boxes were Not Cool. “I wanted to follow up with you,” I said to Graeme, clutching at straws to move this conversation forward. “To find out if the people at your dinner party enjoyed the dessert.”
    I was not going to say the word “lust.” Wild horses couldn’t make me say it.
    “It was everything I’d been told it would be,” he said. And then he lowered his voice and whispered, “And more.”
    Now he was definitely toying with me. He probably left his card on counters all across America. He lured poor unsuspecting shopgirls into thinking he was some harmless football-player frat boy from the Midwest, and then he dropped his sleek Acquisitions card, trolling to see just how many of them—of us —were foolish enough to phone him. He probably had this whole call scripted. He already knew what he was going to say, how he was going to lure me into making more of a fool out of myself.
    “Well good, then,” I heard myself say in a tiny voice that might have traveled all the way from Mars. “Um, goodbye.”
    “Just a moment,” he said, and my heart pounded so hard that I needed to open my mouth to take a breath. “Don’t be so hasty.” Hasty. Did Americans ever say hasty? It was a British word. Like naughty. I jerked my thoughts back from that precipice.
    “I’m truly glad that you rang me up,” he said. “I wanted to speak with you longer in your shop, but I was late to meet my