The Goddess Rules Read Online Free Page B

in
Titanic.
” Kate followed Tanya’s lead and sat down. “I hope she’s not planning on staying too long.”
    “So Jake,” Tanya reminded her. “What happened? Did he call? Did he show up unannounced? Do you think one of your spells worked?”
    Kate looked a bit embarrassed by the last suggestion. When she and Jake had first broken up, Kate visited a psychic who told her that they were two sides of the jagged heart who’d been together in a past life. Which actually made her stop crying for thirty-seven hours. Then she’d had her tarot cards read and they told her that she was currently experiencing widowhood, female sadness, embarrassment, absence, sterility, mourning, and separation. Which was such an impressive list of bad things that even in a spectacularly pessimistic moment, Kate might have struggled to dream up such curses. But she learned her bitter lesson. He who lives by the Harrow Road dies by the Harrow Road. Meaning if you go to cheap, nasty fortune-tellers in run-down parts of town, you can’t expect them to speak of untold riches and love everlasting.
    And finally, in a desperate moment, Kate bought a love spell from a witchcraft website. She had burned a candle every day and night on an altar that consisted of Jake’s guitar plectrum and a photograph of him in a pub in Scotland. So now, as she looked at Tanya’s expectant face, Kate felt her toes curl a bit because although she was still in love with Jake, she was no longer in the insane phase of mourning. That shameless period where the only way to get by is to believe in the supernatural and focus on your chakras. Men, in the same phase of mourning, simply have sex a lot. With other women. But straight after the breakup with Jake, Kate had been prepared to try anything. She had also gone to Harvey Nichols, where the shop assistant had handed her a bag with an eight-hundred-pound dress in it. Which wasn’t witchcraft but felt so good that it should have been.
    “I don’t really think that it was one of the spells working,” Kate conceded. “I think it was more because it was his birthday and the idea of not having sex would have made him a monumental failure in his own eyes,” she added pragmatically. If there was one thing that she had learned during her relationship with Jake, it was pragmatism. Which is not the same as good things like learning to give unconditionally or learning to share your deepest dreams with another person. But it was something, she supposed.
    “A sympathy fuck?” Tanya asked, horrified.
    “No, I think he really wanted to do it,” Kate reasoned.
    “Good God, Kate, I meant you gave
him
a sympathy fuck.”
    “Oh, right.” Kate nodded. Though she wasn’t sure that it was the case. She had been just as in need of last night’s exchange as Jake had. If not more. After all, it had been Jake who had walked out of her life. Not the other way around.
    “So, what, you guys went out to dinner and then . . . ?” Tanya prompted.
    “We didn’t go out to dinner at all. Actually.” Kate began to look sheepish. “Not dinner. No. He called by on his way home the next morning. Just to say hello.” Read
have sex
for “say hello.”
    “And then he invited you to dinner? Right?”
    “Why are you so obsessed with dinner, Tan?” Kate asked disingenuously.
    “It’s a euphemism for Jake taking you seriously. To prove he wasn’t just calling back so he could scratch his birthday itch. See?” Tanya was reluctant to make Kate suffer any more than necessary. It would probably take about two days, she estimated, for Kate to realize she’d made a huge mistake in backpedaling with Jake to a time when she was vulnerable, at his mercy, and unspeakably unhappy.
    “Tanya, I’m still in love with him.”
    “I know, sweetie.” Tanya let out a deep sigh. “And everyone’s allowed to slip up once in a while. But you know that if you got back together with him, it wouldn’t be any different from before.”
    “Before was