Decaf.☕️🤎

Your family doesn't mean to hurt you. They just do.

It's the same every reunion, somebody's hand landing warm on your shoulder. When are you going to bring someone for us to meet? Are you ever gonna get married? That boat's sailed, hon. You missed your shot.

And their newest addition, just now: So, when's your turn? We really thought you'd be the next one walking down the aisle.

You're in your thirties now. Two cats, an apartment that's exactly how you want it, and you learned a long time ago to deflect, to laugh, to change the subject before anyone got too invested in your answer.

But those words stung.

Because god knows you've tried dating. You wanted the thing everyone kept asking you about, but you couldn't seem to hold onto it. Somewhere along the way you accepted that maybe you weren't meant to, just like the cards said once.

When the answer your cards gave you wasn't good enough, you tried something else: the oracle, rune-casting, pendulum, palmistry. You even ran the extra mile and paid someone to read your matrix destiny, but the answer remained the same: Not for you.

Apparently, the person meant for you was born over a hundred years ago, it wasn't meant to be in this life. Or at least, that's what the woman interpreted for you, it wasn't your line of work, but that night you pulled the cards alone and they confirmed it.

Your mom leans over, snapping you out of your thoughts. "They want you to say something."

You already knew this, you prepared days ago sitting in your apartment with your cats. You wrote and rewrote on your phone, trying to keep your words light and genuine.

"I've known Sarah since we were kids," you say. "She was always the one who knew exactly what she wanted. Not confused like the rest of us, not second-guessing. She just knew."

You can see her smiling, David's hand rest on her shoulder. You take a breath, your eyes are swelling with tears, but that's fine. That's normal at weddings.

"Sarah, David… you deserve each other, and you deserve the whole beautiful future you're about to have together. I hope you know how lucky you are, how blessed you are." Your voice wavers just slightly on that word. "Not everyone gets this, not everyone finds someone who loves them the way you love each other."

You're looking at Sarah and you mean every single word, even though it's cutting into you.

You raise your glass, trying to keep your hand steady despite the awful feeling sitting on your stomach. "To Sarah and David, and the future you deserve."

Later, when you're home at the outskirts of the city, with your cats curled on either side of you, you let yourself cry. Not angry tears, just the deep kind that come from watching someone else get the thing you've accepted you never will.

You think about the cards, about the woman who read your destiny and the words that have chased you since you were seventeen: The person meant for you was born out of time.

And your cousin's husband was born exactly at the right moment, in the right place, in the right life.

You're happy for her, you really are.

You're just so tired of helping everyone else find the life the cards promised would never belong to you.

The fair comes to the edge of your small town every spring, and you've been here for three years now. Your shop is small—just enough room for a folding table, two chairs, and the cards that you've been reading since you've been a teenager and decided to expand the gift you've inherited from your great grandmother.

The bell above the shop door chimes on a slow afternoon, and you look up from the velvet cloth you're arranging to find a couple standing in the doorway. The woman sees your altar in the corner, the crystals and the candles and her face lights up.

"Oh, this is perfect," she says, turning to him. "See? I told you we'd find someone authentic."

The man—dark hair, broad-shouldered, pierced-blue eyes and a very defined jawline— gives you a polite, slightly uncomfortable smile.

"Hey," he says. "She's been talking about you for weeks."

"Come in," you say, standing. You wipe your hands on your skirt. "Welcome to The Velvet Oracle, do you have an appointment?"

"I called yesterday," the woman says, stepping forward, hand extended. "I'm Hazel, this is Bucky. I want a couple's reading, we've been dating for four months and I just thought, you know, let's see what the future holds for us."

You gesture to the chairs across from you. "Sit, let's see what the cards have to say."

Hazel settles in, leans forward eagerly. Bucky sits back with his arms crossed. You don't let yourself look at him too long, because every time you do it you feel your stomach dropping, like when you miss a step in the dark.

You shuffle the deck, the familiar worn edges of the cards grounding you against your palms.

"Alright," you start. "For a couple's reading, I usually pull a few cards for each person individually, and then we'll look at the relationship as a whole. Sound good?"

Hazel nods enthusiastically, but Bucky's expression is somewhere between polite discomfort and outright skepticism.

"I gotta be honest," he says, glancing around the tent at the crystals and candles, "this isn't really my thing."

"I know, baby, but it'll be fun." Hazel tugs at his sleeve until he relents, uncrossing his arms. "Just let her do the reading, okay? For me."

He doesn't look convinced, but he nods and his expression softens for her. You don't know why, but that somehow makes you wanna cry.

You focus on Hazel, spreading the deck in a smooth arc across the velvet. "Go ahead and pull three cards when you're ready."

She leans forward, her fingers hovering dramatically before selecting. The first card makes you nod slowly—the Ace of Pentacles. A seed planted in rich soil. The second is the Empress, all abundance and growth. The third one is the World.

"Completion, fulfillment, a cycle coming to a close in the best possible way."

Hazel beams. "That's good, right?"

"Very good," you gesture at the Ace of Pentacles. "Pentacles are earth energy—practical, grounded, built to last. This is a new beginning with a solid foundation. The Empress suggests growth and nurturing, maybe even family, and the World is a major arcana card of fulfillment. Whatever you're building toward, the universe is supporting it."

"I'm a Taurus!" Hazel claps her hand together. "That's an earth sign. This is so accurate, oh my god! Earth energy for an earth sign, that has to mean something."

"It suggests alignment," you say carefully, because you've learned not to over-promise."The path you're on has stability written into it."

Hazel turns to Bucky with bright eyes. "See? I told you she was the real deal."

Bucky shifts in his chair, unmoved. "Great, so what about the rest of it?"

"Your turn," you say, trying to keep your voice light. "Three cards, same as before."

He looks at the deck like it might bite him. "I don't really believe in this stuff."

"It's just cards," you say. "They only have the power you give them."

Something shifts in his expression—not quite interest, but maybe a grudging willingness. Hazel nudges him with her elbow. "Just do it, Bucky. For me."

He sighs, leans forward and taps three cards with a soldier's precision. One, two, three. No hesitation, like he wants it over with.

You turn the first card: The Lovers.

Your breath catches. You force yourself to keep your expression neutral, but your fingers have gone cold against the velvet.

"The Lovers," you say, and your voice comes out steady, despite the static in your ears. "This card is about significant choices. A crossroad in a relationship or a deep connection that requires a decision."

Hazel practically squeals with excitement. "That's us! A deep connection!"

Bucky doesn't react. His eyes are on the card, but his face gives nothing away.

You turn the second card. The High Priestess.

The card you've pulled for yourself more times than you can count since you were seventeen. Intuition. The veil between worlds. The woman in the card stares at you from the table, and for a disorienting second you swear the woman on the card has your eyes.

"The High Priestess represents hidden knowledge," you manage. "Things beneath the surface, secrets, intuition… the parts of ourselves we don't fully understand yet."

"What does that have to do with Bucky?" Hazel asks, frowning slightly.

"I'm not sure yet," you lie, because you're suddenly horribly sure of exactly what's happening, and you want to sweep the cards off the table and pretend you never touched them.

You flip the third card with a trembling hand. The Ace of Cups.

The card of new love, emotional awakening. The beginning of something that fills the heart. It's the same card that you've always pulled up reversed for yourself every single time you ask the universe if there's anyone out there for you.

Now here it is, on his spread… along with your arcana.

"A new emotional beginning," you say after a moment of silence. "The Ace of Cups is the start of something in matters of the heart. It's a very powerful, personal card."

Hazel turns to Bucky, her earlier enthusiasm dimming. "Is that about us? Wait— water and earth complement each other, right? Bucky's a Pisces, that's a water sign, I'm earth. That's good isn't it? They balance."

"Water and earth can be very nurturing together," you say, because it's true, even if the cards aren't saying that. "But these cards feel more like a personal message for Bucky, something individual, not necessarily about the relationship."

You don't remember what you say after that. Something about water signs and intuition, something about the cards reflecting individual journeys within partnerships. You're very good at small talk, at telling people something they might want to hear while the cards tell you something else entirely.

Hazel pays you in cash, and she leaves with her hand tucked into Bucky's elbow, already chattering about dinner reservations. He lingers in the doorway for half a second, looking back at you with an expression you can't read. Then the bell chimes, and they're gone.

You sit in silence for a long time, staring at the three cards, still laid out on the velvet. You gather them up with shaking hands and slip them back into the deck, but you can feel them there, warm against the others, like embers buried in ash.

That night, you pull your own cards for the first time in months. You stopped asking about love a year ago, because the answer never changed—the reversed Ace of Cups, Ten of Swords, the Tower. But tonight, you need to know if you imagined it, if the shop was too warm, if you simply wanted something so badly your mind bent the cards to fit.

You shuffle the deck until your fingers ache and cut the deck three times before pulling: The Lovers. The High Priestess. The Ace of Cups.

Exactly the same spread from earlier.

You throw the deck across your kitchen table and watch the cards scatter like birds. You don't read them, you don't need to.

The dreams start three nights later.

You're in the shop, but once you pay enough attention you realize it's not your shop—it's larger, older, with windows that look out onto a street you've never seen, snow falling in thick, silent curtains. Bucky is there, sitting across from you, but he's different. Younger, somehow, though you can't explain how you know that. He's smiling at you, and he reaches across the table to take your hand.

You wake up gasping, your sheets are twisted around your legs, your heart hammering against your ribs.

The second time you dream of him, you're dancing. You're not able to see if it's anywhere specific. It's a dark room, there is music playing from somewhere distant, his hand on your waist, his cheek pressed against your temple. He smells like cedar and leather. You can feel the calluses on his fingers through the fabric of your dress. When you wake up, you can still feel them.

You start drinking chamomile tea before bed. You burn sage. You place an amethyst under your pillow and a black tourmaline at your door, but nothing works. The dreams continue, threading themselves through your sleep like a second life you're living in parallel, and in every single one, he seems like the answer to a question you've been asking for a very long time.

You don't tell anyone. Who would believe you? What would you even tell them? I had a tarot reading go wrong and now I'm psychically stalking my client's boyfriend in my dreams. You'd sound insane. Worse, you'd sound desperate.

You don't hear from Hazel or him again. You tell yourself it's a good thing. You tell yourself the dreams will fade, that the thread between you dissolves with distance and time… except they don't fade, they get worse.

In your dreams you're now in Brooklyn, walking down streets lined with brownstones, and he's beside you, close enough that your shoulders brush. He's telling you about his day, about his past, and you listen until his words start to fade. When you wake up, you can smell his cologne in the air.

You start taking walks in the afternoon, though you don't know why. You pull your cards again, desperate for something—anything—to change.

The Tower. The Star. The World.

Disaster, then hope, then completion. The cycle you've been trapped in for years, except this time the Tower doesn't feel like another heartbreak waiting to happen. It feels like change—the kind you can't stop even if you wanted to.

You don't sleep that night. You sit on your kitchen floor with your cats weaving between your legs, and you rearrange the cards in every configuration you know: Celtic cross, three card spread, relationship spread, past-present-future. Every single time, the same arc emerges: something is ending, something is beginning. And whatever comes next will leave you irrevocably changed.

Your aunt Margaret—Maggie, as you've called her since you were little—tells the family that she has broken her hip on the cellar stairs, that the surgery went fine, but she doesn't want a nurse or a help aide. She wants someone from the family who can come stay with her or she'll manage alone.

The call gets passed down through the entire family, but nobody offers to go take care of her. Your cousins have husbands, kids, mortgages, school pickups… Meanwhile, you have two cats and a tarot shop you can shutter for a season, and nobody says it out loud, but everybody means it: you're the one with nothing to leave behind.

You arrive on a Tuesday with your two cat carriers, three suitcases and the deck wrapped in a scarf at the bottom of your tote. Maggie is waiting in the front room of the brownstone, sat in a wingback chair with a cane across her knees.

"There she is, I knew you would come," she says. "Come kiss me."

You oblige before setting the carriers on the floor and opening them to let your cats wander around and recognize the place you'd be staying for a few weeks.

"I got two rules," Maggie starts, taking off her reading glasses. "The thermostat stays where I put it, and no cards in my house."

"Maggie—"

"I know what you carry around, I have enough ghosts in this old apartment, so there's no way I'm letting you welcome more through…that."

"They're just cards."

"Then it won't kill you to leave them in the bag," she settles back into the chair and picks her crossword up off the side table, and that is the end of it. "The kettle's on, you can take the room at the top of the stairs."

You know arguing with her would be useless, so you go and install yourself in that cramped old room and decide you'll read when she's asleep.

It becomes a ritual within the first week: you wait for the apartment to go quiet, wait for her snoring to even out and you sit at the kitchen table with the deck and a single candle as if you were a teenager sneaking cigarettes. Your cats take turns supervising from the counter, but you keep one ear on the ceiling the whole time, just in case.

Every single time, the same cards you pull at your shop with Bucky keep coming.

The Lovers. The High Priestess. The Ace of Cups.

The dreams don't fade with the distance from home, they sharpen. Now the businesses have names, because you've walked past it every time you go run errands for your aunt Maggie. The stoop where he sat beside you, close enough that your shoulders touched, you know it. You've seen the exact iron railing, three blocks east. In one dream he laughs at something, and you wake up missing something you haven't even seen in real life.

You try to build a reasonable conclusion: You've been here previously, you know this neighborhood. You just did one reading to a ridiculous handsome man eight months ago and your lonely, overworked brain latched on, and now it's trying to dress a crush in destiny because it's something you've been trying to change your whole life. That's all this is. A simple crush and a reader's block. It happens sometimes to some people, right?

At least that's what Reddit said last time you checked.

You've almost convinced yourself by the third Saturday in October, which is when you see him at the green market, standing at a fruit stall with a paper bag in one gloved hand. You stop so fast a woman with a stroller clips your heel.

Eight months and four hundred miles, and he's right here, wearing a canvas jacket with his hair shorter than you remember, frowning at the fruit, and your first coherent thought is run, but your feet are refusing to move.

He must've felt your eyes on him, because he looks up.

"You," he says it flat.

"Hi," your voice comes out steadier than you expect, and you silently thank god, the universe and every existent deity. "Bucky, right?"

He crosses the few feet between you, and up close you notice a tension in him that you don't remember from the shop. "What are you doing here?"

"Buying some groceries." You lift the bag as evidence. "I'm here taking care of my aunt and—"

"Right, so now your aunt happens to live here. Funny."

"You can come with me and check if you don't believe me," the bite gets into your voice before you can stop it. "Is there a problem?"

He laughs once, but there's no humor in it. "Is there a problem, you ask? Why don't you pull your cards and figure it out?"

"Okay—"

"Hazel broke up with me," he watches your face while he says it. "Three weeks after that reading, you want to know why?"

The market noise keeps going around you, crates and gulls and a vendor calling out prices, but everything is reducing to background noise while you feel the cold coming up from through your boots.

"She couldn't let it go," he continues. "You said something about a new beginning, some big personal message and she turned it over until there was nothing left. Every conversation we had circled back to it, who is she? When did it start? The cards don't lie. Four months, gone, because you laid out three stupid pieces of laminated paper and made it sound like some stupid prophecy."

"That isn't what I said— "

"Well, it's what she heard."

"I told her those cards were about you, individually. I was careful—"

"You were vague," he says, "which is the whole trick, isn't it? Say something soft enough to fit any shape, take the cash, let people destroy themselves filling in the blanks… there's a word for that." He shifts the bag of groceries to his other hand. "You're a fraud. The polite version is intuitive, a fraud with esoteric words."

You should let it go. He's a stranger, he's grieving a relationship, the market is crowded and you have other things to do, but you don't let it go.

"I didn't make those cards come up." You step in instead of back, and something flickers across his face—surprise, maybe, that you didn't fold. "I shuffled, you pulled three cards, it was your own hands, no hesitation. I read what was on the table and I softened it more than I should have, for her sake. What she did with it afterward isn't mine to carry, and neither is what you do with it."

A muscle moves in his jaw. For a second neither of you says anything, and you notice—stupidly, uselessly—that his eyes are exactly the color they are in your dreams.

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry about Hazel."

"Yeah, you sure do." He steps around you. "Enjoy Brooklyn and stay the hell away from me."

You stand there with your own groceries until your hands stop shaking.

That night you don't pull cards. You lie awake instead, replaying it, building better arguments hours too late, and when you finally sleep, he's there—sitting across a kitchen table that doesn't exist, pushing a cup of coffee toward you, smiling at you the way he has never smiled once in real life.

You wake up furious at your own mind.

The radiator in the front room dies the last week of October, the same week the temperature does.

You find Maggie in her wingback with a blanket over her knees and the phone already against her ear. "It's the front one again," she's saying. "It clanks like the devil and gives nothing… No, don't be silly, after lunch is fine. You'll eat here anyway." She hangs up before whoever it is can argue.

"I could've called someone," you say. "There's a service the pharmacy recommends—"

"A service?" She huffs a laugh, like you've said something completely irrational. "I have James, he does the whole block—the Russo's gutters, Mrs. Ferreira's stairs… he won't take a dime, but I tuck it in his jacket when he isn't looking."

"James," you repeat.

"You'll like him," she says, returning to her crossword. "He's a serious boy, it's good with hands, single…"

The doorbell rings at one. You open the door and there he is, on your aunt's stoop, a tool bag over his shoulder, and you watch the exact moment his face goes through the market all over again.

"You gotta be shitting me," he mutters.

"Yeah, well, I'm not excited either, but I told you I was taking care of my aunt."

From the front room, your aunt's voice: "James! Don't let the heat out, it's the one radiator still working in here!"

You look at each other and there's a long moment where you genuinely cannot tell whether he's going to turn around and walk back down the steps, and then he exhales through his nose and crosses the threshold, being painfully obvious at avoiding brushing your shoulder in the narrow hall.

What follows is the strangest two hours of your autumn. Because the man at the market and the shop doesn't appear. With your aunt, he's somebody else entirely—patient, dry, gentle in an odd way for the way he's treated you. He kneels on the floor and bleeds the radiator and lets her direct him with her cane without complaining. Asks about her hip, and actually listens to the answer.

You stay in the kitchen, mostly. You make the coffee she orders you to make and when you bring it in, Nova—the bolder of your two cats—has installed herself on the tool bag, paws tucked underneath him, supervising, and for your surprise, Bucky is working around her rather than moving her.

He glances up when you set the cup down near him, just out of his way.

"Thanks," it's dry, but it's not nothing.

"You take your coffee black, right?" you say, and then bite your own tongue off, because you don't know that. You've been dreaming of that.

He pauses with the wrench mid-turn. "Lucky guess."

"Well, you look like a man who likes to keep it simple." You say it lightly and walk away before your face can do anything stupid, and behind you, Maggie says something about you reading people, and then you hear the small clank of metal as something in his hands slips.

He doesn't stay to eat, despite your aunt's best efforts. At the door, shrugging the tool bag back up, he stops with his hand on the frame. He doesn't quite look at you.

"Her hip," he murmurs. "If she needs anything lifted, or any errands to run, whatever… Maggie has my number."

"Okay."

"For her," he clarifies.

"I understood you the first time," you say sweetly and shut the door on whatever his face does next.

In the front room, Maggie has watched this entire exchange over her glasses.

"You didn't tell me you know James."

"Barely."

"Mm." She picks up her pen. "It seemed like more than barely to me. But if that's how you treat men no wonder why you're still single."

You gasped audibly and she winked an eye at you before going back to her crossword.

You start running into him in an almost daily basis. The neighborhood is small—twenty thousand people and somehow the same six faces every single day— and now that you know he's in it, he's everywhere. Outside the hardware store with a length of pipe over his shoulder. At the pharmacy counter, when you go pick up Maggie's medications and he's talking to an Asian man. Across the green market, where you both pretend with great commitment that the other one is invisible.

But there's no real conversation until now.

You've misjudged the sky and the distance, so you're hauling two grocery bags and a sack of cat litter up Pierrepont when the cold drizzle turns serious. You stop under sycamore to redistribute everything you're carrying, water running off the end of your nose, and a shadow falls over you. You lift your gaze and he's there, hood up, his hand already out reaching for you.

"What? Your cards didn't tell you there would be a storm?"

"Ha-ha. Very funny."

"Give me the litter."

"I've got it."

"You're going to put your shoulder out being stubborn. I said give me the damn litter."

You could protest, but you know it's pointless to fight with him, so you give him the litter and walk the last two blocks side by side without speaking, rain hissing on the pavement, his boots and your boots out of step.

He sets the sack on the second stair of your aunt's gate, but he doesn't leave immediately.

"At the market," he murmurs, to the gate rather than to you. "When I— when I said those things to you… I was out of line."

"You were rude."

"I was out of line," he repeats.

"You called me a fraud, and you said my intuition was exactly that, a fraud with esoteric words."

"Well, if you were so intuitive, wouldn't you have known about the rain?" It takes you a second to hear it, the dry shift under the flat delivery, and you laugh before you decide to. He looks surprised, like he wasn't expecting the sound either.

"Go home, Bucky," you say. "You'll catch a cold."

"Is that a prediction?"

You rolled your eyes. "There's no need for that, it's logical."

"Tell Maggie I left the wrench in the bin by the door… for the sink." He's already turning. "Don't let her do the sink herself, she'll try."

"I know my aunt."

"Then you know she'll try." And he's gone into the rain, shoulders up, and you stand at the gate watching him go for longer than you should.

That night you dream of him again, except the dream is just this: the two of you under a sycamore, rain coming down, but this time he's laughing—really laughing, head tipped, the whole architecture of his face rearranged by it— at something you can't hear yourself say.

You wake before dawn with your heart going hard and the echo of his laugh still in your ears.

It's a crush, you remind yourself staring at the ceiling.

Then why does your heart feel so heavy?

By November, your aunt has invented a maintenance schedule that no brownstone in history has ever required. The storm windows, the cellar light, a cabinet hinge you're fairly sure she loosened herself, because you watched her test it with her cane the day before she called him.

"You're matchmaking," you accuse, setting her tea down.

"I'm maintaining my property." She doesn't look up from the crossword. "Seven across, six letters. Foreseen by the stars."

"Fated."

"That's five."

"Destined is eight. Fated is five." You count it on your fingers. "What's six?"

Maggie hums thoughtfully and writes something down where you can't see it.

Bucky comes back on Thursday to check the storm windows. It's the fourth time, not that you're counting, and something has shifted in the dynamic between you—the hostility has burned down to a kind of wariness, and that wariness keep springing leaks.

He lets you hold the frame steady while he drives the screws, close enough that you can smell the cedar on his jacket. He answers your aunt's interrogation about his week in actual sentences. When Nova bolts for the open window, Bucky catches her one-handed without looking, absorbs the betrayed yowl and deposits her on the sofa with a flat "No". You expect retaliation, but Nova—who has never once obeyed you—stays.

"Traitor," you tell the cat.

"She respects the chain of command."

Maggie goes up for her nap at three with a theatrical yawning that should embarrass her. Bucky's packing up the drill in the kitchen and you're making coffee because it's cold and the radio on the counter—her ancient radio, permanently tuned to an AM station that plays classics—is murmuring under everything.

And you go still.

It takes you a moment to realize, and another to find why: he's humming. Barely, under his breath, and the song sounds pretty familiar.

The mug slips, you catch it against the counter, there's coffee slopping over your knuckles, and the burn makes you realize that song was playing in the dream where he danced with you in a dark room. You've never heard it awake in your life until right now. You don't know its name either, you only knew the next three notes after he hummed them.

"You okay?" He's looking at you now.

"It's nothing," you run your hand under the tap. "Just… wanted to heat my hands a little bit."

It's just an old song, it's an old radio station. Men hum old songs; it's logical. You repeat it in your head twice but your hands don't believe any of it. And god forbid you, you neither.

When you turn around, he's leaning against the counter, watching you with an expression you can't quite read.

"I've been meaning to ask you," he starts. "About the cards. Why do you do it? And I don't want the speech, I want the real answer."

You dry your hands slowly, deciding how much truth he's earned.

"My great grandmother read cards," you start, leaning against the counter across from him. "She read for people in her village back in the old country. My mom said she could look at someone and see the shape of their life, like… like they were made of glass. She tried to teach my mother, but the gift skipped her and landed on me instead."

You take a pause, watching the radio, the floor, anything but him.

"I was seven the first time I saw something I couldn't explain. I touched my grandmother's deck and I knew things about her neighbor who was sitting at the kitchen table. That she'd lost a baby the year before, that her husband was sleeping with her sister, that she was going to leave him by spring." You swallow. "I said all of it out loud, like an idiot child, because I didn't know you weren't supposed to just say those things."

Bucky's quiet. You can feel him listening, like he's cataloguing every word.

"My mother was horrified. My grandmother on the other hand wasn't. She said the cards chose me, and that I should learn to read them properly so I'd stop blurting out unfiltered truth at dinner parties." A small, humorless laugh leaves you. "So I learned. By the time I was a teenager, I was pulling cards for friends, for strangers, for anyone who asked. And most of the time, it's just… pattern recognition and intuition working together. The cards are a tool, not a magic trick, but sometimes—"

"Sometimes what?"

"Sometimes they show you something that doesn't fit any pattern you know. And you have to decide whether to believe what you're seeing or pretend you didn't see it."

The radio changes songs.

"Is that what happened with my reading?" he asks quietly.

No, you think. It's worse than that.

"I read what was on the table," you say instead, because it's the truth, even if it's not all of it. "I didn't make it up, Bucky. I've never fabricated a reading in my life. The cards that came up for you were clear… unusually clear. And I softened them because Hazel was sitting right there and I didn't want to hurt her, but I didn't lie."

He studies you for a long moment, and you can see the war happening behind his eyes—the part of him that wants to believe you fighting the part that needs to think you're a con artist, because the alternative is harder.

"Okay," he says finally.

"O—Okay?"

"I'm not saying I believe in it. I'm saying I believe you believe it, and that's… different."

It's the most generous thing he's said to you since the market, and it lands somewhere under your ribs.

It's a Tuesday in late November, and Maggie has sent him to fix a leak under the kitchen sink that you both suspect she caused by hitting the pipe with her cane. He's on his back under the counter and you're handling him tools, trying not to notice the way his shirt rides up when he reaches for the wrench.

When he slides out, wiping his hands on a rag, he looks at you for a while.

"There's a place two blocks over. They make decent coffee, if you're done pretending you don't need a break."

"That's the worst invitation I've ever heard. You're just observing that I look tired."

"You do look tired."

"Wow, thank you. A true gentleman."

His mouth twitches. "Do you want coffee or not?"

You want to say no, because saying yes feels too much like stepping off a cliff, but the word comes out before you can stop it. "Fine, but only because you're paying."

Maggie, from the front room calls out: "Take your time! I'm perfectly fine!"

You both know she's been listening to every word.

The walk to the café is silent.

The place looks cozy—it's small, warm and smells like cinnamon and cardamom. He orders black coffee and you order a latte and a slice of walnut cake. You sit t a table by the window where the afternoon light comes in, and for a few minutes neither of you says anything.

It should be awkward, being here without Maggie or your cats between you, but it isn't.

"Would you mind if I ask you something?"

"You're going to ask whether I say yes or not."

"Smart man." You turn the cup slowly. "Why do you do this? The handyman thing… Maggie says you work for the whole block. But you don't charge, you won't take money—"

"I take money, I just don't like to ask for it, besides, Maggie always invites me to eat."

"She tucks money in your jacket while you're not seeing."

"She's not as subtle as she thinks." He takes a sip of his coffee and ten looks at you. "I like fixing things, always have. When something's broken, there's a right way to fix it, and when it's done, it's done, it's done. You can see the result, it's not…"

"Ambiguous?"

"Yeah, exactly. It's not ambiguous."

You understand suddenly why he hated the reading and everything related to it. You gave him a puzzle with no solution, a fix with no steps… you made him sit with something unfixable.

The conversation moves easier after that. He tells you about the neighborhood, about Mrs. Ferreira, about Yori—the Asian man you saw the other day who feeds pigeons from his window, about the old man on the fourth who swears at everyone in Italian. You tell him about your shop, about your cats—Nova and Salem, about the time you accidentally read cards for a man who turned out to be an undercover cop investigating a psychic scam two towns over, and how you spent forty-five minutes proving your cards weren't marked.

You see him laughing, not the polite sound from always, but a real one. You drink your coffee and eat your cake and try to not think about the dreams.

It becomes a thing. He finishes a repair at Maggie's or passes by to eat and you end up at the café, or walking the two blocks to the park where the benches face the water, or simply sitting on her stoop in the last cold light of the afternoon while you both drink coffee.

You learn things about him in pieces. He's from Brooklyn—born and raised, he says, but the tone on his voice tells you it's partly a lie. He has a best friend named Sam who's a pain in the ass. He doesn't talk about his family, but you don't push. He served in the military, a long time ago.

He learns things about you too, like the fact you talk with your hands when you're passionate about something, or that you hum when you're thinking and that hum is always off-key. He learns about your habit of reading strangers on the street and narrating your observations under your breath.

The first week of December arrives with an ugly wind that rattles Maggie's windows and makes your cats burrow under the blankets. Maggie has graduated from the cane to limping short distances without it, which means she's mobile enough to meddle full-time.

Bucky comes by Wednesday to check a draft Maggie swears she can feel coming from the baseboards. You both know there's no draft, but he comes by anyway.

You open the door and he's standing on the stoop with his hands in his jacket pockets, his tool bag over one shoulder, and there's snow in his hair—not much, just dust, but it's there, melting against the dark of it—and your heart does something complicated because of how good he looks.

"Maggie's napping," you say.

His hand comes out of his pocket. He's holding a folded napkin, and he holds it out to you like it's a wrench.

"I made reservations," he murmurs. "At Valentino's, this Friday, seven o'clock."

You stare at the napkin. "Did you just… write it on a napkin?"

"I didn't have a paper." He shifts his weight. "Sam says you're supposed to give the person a specific time and place, so… there it is."

"You asked your friend how to ask someone on a date?"

"Well, he tells me a lot of things, more of it is useless." He's looking at the doorframe while he speaks, then he glances at you. "This part seemed right."

You unfold the napkin. His handwriting is surprisingly neat—small, precise letters. Friday, 7 pm- Valentino's on Henry St. —B

"Is this because Maggie put you up to it?" you ask, because if this is charity or pity or Maggie's matchmaking you'd rather know now and bleed later.

"No. She might take credit for it, but no. I was going to ask you at the café last week, but then you started reading people and I lost my nerve."

Bucky lost his nerve.

"So, Friday… at seven."

"Is that a yes?"

"That's a yes."

He nods once, and you can see his shoulders drop half an inch. You want to laugh, or cry, or both, so you just fold the napkin carefully and put it in your pocket.

"Are you going to come in and check the nonexistent draft, or…?"

"Might as well, just to keep the appearances."

He brushes past you in the doorway, and unlike the first time, he doesn't avoid your shoulder.

When Friday night comes, you don't understand why you're so damn nervous, but here you are, changing your outfit twice before settling with a blue dress and a pair of boots that Maggie claims make your legs look like they go on forever. You're halfway down the stairs when the doorbell rings.

He cleans up well. That's the first thought you have when you open the door. He's wearing a dark jacket over a sweater, and his hair is pulled back in a way that shows the sharp lines of his face, and he smells so good you have to resist the urge to lean closer and breathe him in again.

"You look nice," he says when you open the door.

"You too." You grab your coat from the hook. "Don't wait up, Maggie."

"Go. Don't come back before ten, I have a television program."

"We're going to dinner, Maggie, not—"

"Door will be locked before ten o'clock," she insists, and shuts the door on your face before you can answer, letting you at the bottom of the stairs.

You turn to face Bucky and the way he looks at you makes you forget every argument you've ever had with yourself about why this is a bad idea.

"Ready?" he asks.

"It depends. Are you going to accuse me of fraud tonight?"

"Not tonight."

"Then I'm ready."

Valentino's is tucked between a laundromat and a bookshop. The hostess greets Bucky by name and leads you to a corner booth where the candlelight flickers against the red-checkered tablecloth.

"Fancy," you tease.

"I said it wasn't fancy."

"Exactly," you unfold your napkin and look around—warm brick walls, fairy lights strung along the ceiling, and and old man at the bar arguing with the bartender about baseball. "I like it."

He orders wine for the table without asking, but it's the good kind, the kind that tastes likes blackberries, and when he catches you watching him over the rim of your glass, he doesn't look away.

You're talking about the shop—what you'll do when you go back, whether you'll reopen at all—when he leans back in his chair and takes a deep breath. "I want to ask you something, but I don't want to fight."

"That's a promising start."

"Why do you believe in it? The cards, destiny, all of it. You're smart. You read people like they're open books. How do you also believe that pieces of cardboard can tell the future?"

It's not hostile. It's genuine curiosity, and that's worse, because you owe him a real answer. You down the rest of your wine for a bit of liquid courage.

"When I was seventeen," you start, and your voice is careful, like you're walking on ice, " my great grandmother died. She'd been sick for a while, and when I went to see her in the hospital she… she told me she'd been reading my cards since I was born. That she'd asked about my future every year on my birthday, the way she did for everyone in the family. And every year, the same cards came up."

The restaurant noise fills the silence—the clink of glasses, a murmur of conversation from the next table—but you're hyper aware of him.

"She said love wasn't meant for me." You trace the rim of your glass with your finger. "I didn't believe her, I was seventeen, I thought she was a dramatic old woman who loved tragedy, or that maybe she was way too high on her meds. So I started reading for myself, I pulled my own cards every week, every month, every time I met someone I thought could be something. And every single time, the same answer. Reversed Ace of Cups. Ten of Swords. The Tower. Not for you, not in this life."

You laugh, but it comes out humorless.

"I even paid a woman to read my destiny matrix, I tried runes, I tried everything because I wanted so badly for the answer to be different; but it never was. I tried dating, I did. I wanted so bad to be loved. Apparently, the person meant for me was born over a hundred years ago, and I was born now, so the timing was wrong, and that's it."

Bucky is very still across the table. He hasn't moved, hasn't reached for his glass, hasn't done anything except listen with an intensity that makes your skin prickle. The silence between you stretches. He's looking at you with an expression you can't decode.

"Bucky?"

He exhales slowly, and his jaw works twice. Then he leans forward, resting both forearms on the table. "You don't have any idea of who I am?"

"Should I?" you ask, confused.

He stares at you for a long moment like he's looking for some sign that you're joking. "You really don't."

"Bucky, you're freaking me out a little. Are you in the mob? A famous musician? Because I have to be honest, I don't really follow the news, and history was never my strong subject. I know the major stuff, but—"

He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet, sliding something across the table toward you.

It's his driver's license. You pick it up, squinting at the tiny photo—he looks exactly the same, of course he does, that hot bastard—and then your eyes drop to the birth date.

March 10, 1917.

You read it three times, but the numbers don't change. You look up at him, and he's watching at you with an expression you can't read.

"I was born in 1917," he says quietly. "Here in Brooklyn. I went to war in '43 and… I didn't come back the way I left. They did things to me, changed me. I don't age the way normal people do, and there's a lot of years in between that I'd rather not talk about in a restaurant."

Your hands are shaking. You set the license down on the table between you like it might burn you.

"The matrix destiny," you whisper. "It said a hundred years ago. You were born a hundred years ago."

"Yeah." He leans forward. "And here's the thing. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in stars writing our stories for us, because if I did—" His voice breaks, just slightly, and he catches it. "If I did, then I'd have to believe that what happened to me was determined. That the things that I did, the things that were done to me, they were written in stone before I was even born. And that's too cruel, that's a crueler god than I'm willing to worship."

He's breathing harder now, and you realize with a start that he's scared. Bucky Barnes, who caught your cat mid-air and argued with you in the rain, is scared of what you might say next.

"But you," he continues, softer now. "You showed up in my neighborhood reading cards and talking about things you shouldn't know. And I kept seeing you everywhere, and I kept telling myself it was a coincidence, that Brooklyn is small and you were just… there. But there's something here. I feel it every time I'm in the same room as you, and I don't know if that's fate or if it's just—" He stops, running a hand over his face. "I don't know what it is. But I know I haven't wanted to spend time with someone like this in a long time. And if that means the stars finally decided to do something kind for once, then maybe… maybe I'm not as angry at them as I thought."

You don't know what to say. The pasta arrives and sits cooling between you, forgotten. You think about every card you've ever pulled, every spread that ended in the same lonely answer, every time you accepted that love wasn't meant for you. And now, he's sitting across from you, born in 1917, a hundred-year-old soul in a young man's body, and the math is so simple it makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.

"You're quiet," he says.

"I'm not quiet," you manage, but your voice sounds like it's coming from very far away. "I'm just… I don't know what to say. You don't— you don't just drop 'I was born in 1917' into a conversation and expect someone to have a response ready."

The corner of his mouth twitches. "Fair."

"You fought in World War II."

"Yeah."

"And you're telling me you don't believe in fate, but you just handed me proof that the answer I've been getting my whole life wasn't wrong."

"I'm telling you that I don't care what the cards said," he reaches across the table, his hand hovering over yours for a moment before he covers your fingers with his palm. His skin is warm, calloused, and you feel it everywhere. "I care that you're here, right now. And I'm here. That's enough for me."

You look down at your hand under his, at the candlelight pooling in the hollow of his palm, and you think about the High Priestess card, the one you've pulled for yourself a hundred times. Hidden knowledge, the veil between worlds, secrets.

Maybe the secret was that you weren't waiting for a ghost after all.

You eat eventually, though you barely taste it. He tells you about Sam, about the boat they worked on together, about the neighborhood changing and staying the same all at once. You tell him about your cats, about the way Maggie pretends to be asleep every time he comes over so you'll have to answer the door alone.

But mostly, you sit in the candlelight and let yourself have this. Whatever this is.

He insists on walking you home. It's not far—five blocks, maybe six—and the December air is sharp enough to make you tuck your hands into your coat pockets. He walks on the outside of the sidewalk, closest to the street, the way men used to do when he was young, and something about that makes your chest ache.

"You okay?" he asks as you turn onto Maggie's block.

"Yeah." But you're not, not really. You're overwhelmed, full of things you don't know how to say. You want to tell him that you've dreamed about him, that you've known the shape of his laugh before you ever heard it, that you pulled his cards in your kitchen and you threw the deck across the room because it was too much to believe. You want to ask him if he feels it too, this gravity, this sense of falling into something you never expected to find.

But you don't say any of that. You just walk beside him in the dark, and when you reach Maggie's stoop, you turn to face him.

The streetlamp behind him casts a halo around his shoulders. You think about all the years he's lived, all the winters he's seen, and you can't believe any of them led him here. To you. To this moment in your aunt's cracked concrete steps.

"I had a good time," he says.

"Me too."

He steps closer. You can smell the wine on his breath, the cedar of his jacket, the cold night air clinging to his air. He's close enough that you have to tilt your head back to look at him, and his eyes are darker in the shadows.

"I don't think I need to." Your voice is barely above a whisper. "I think I already know how this goes."

"Yeah?" His hand finds your waist, tentative, asking permission. "How's it go?"

And then he kisses you.

It's soft at first, careful, like he's giving you time to pull away. But you don't pull away. You reach up and curl your fingers into the front of his jacket, and he makes a sound against your mouth before deepening the kiss. His hand slides to the small of your back, pulling you closer, and you can feel the warmth of him through every layer between you that suddenly feels like too many.

He tastes like red wine, and his jaw is rough under your palm, and when you break apart you're both breathing hard, foreheads pressed together.

"Okay," you whisper. "Okay."

"Okay," he repeats, and he sounds almost drunk with it. He kisses you again, lighter this time, on the corner of your mouth, your cheek, your temple. His lips brush your ear as he murmurs, "I don't care about fate. But if you want to tell me what the stars said, I'll listen."

You laugh, a little watery, and push at his chest. "Go home, Bucky. It's cold."

"I know." But he doesn't move. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, his fingers lingering against your jaw. "I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow."

He finally steps back, down one step, then two. He's smiling, the kind that reaches his eyes and rearranges his whole face into something boyish and new. "Night, then."

"Night."

You watch him walk down the block, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders relaxed in a way you haven't seen before. You watch until he turns the corner and disappears, and you stand there for a long moment with your fingers pressed to your mouth, trying to remember how to breathe.

The front door opens behind you.

"You're welcome," Maggie says.

You jump so hard you nearly fall off the stoop. "Jesus, Maggie!"

She's standing in the doorway in her robe and slippers, her crossword in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. She looks entirely too pleased with herself.

"You were watching!" You accuse.

"I was observing, there's a difference." She steps back to let you in. "I told you he was a good boy, serious, good with his hands." She winks. "And now you know for sure."

"Maggie!"

"Don't 'Maggie' me. I didn't raise you to be ungrateful." She shuffles toward the stairs. "You can thank me properly at breakfast. And don't think I didn't notice you sneaking cards at my kitchen table for three months straight. I may be old, but I'm not blind."

You stand in the hallway, coat still on, cheeks burning, and listen to her cackle all the way up the stairs.

Your cats appear from the front room, twining around your ankles, and you bend down to scoop Nova up, burying your face in her fur. She purrs, loud and indignant, and you laugh against her soft orange head.

"Okay," you whisper to him, to the empty hallway, to no one in particular. "Okay."

You don't know what happens next. You don't know how any of this works, a tarot reader and a century-old soldier, two people the universe apparently decided to throw together just to see what would happen.

But as you climb the stairs to your cramped little room, you think about the spread you pulled the night before you left for Brooklyn. The Tower. The Star. The World.

Disaster, then hope, then completion.

Maybe The Tower wasn't heartbreak after all. Maybe it was just the world rearranging itself to make room for something you never dared to ask for.

You fall asleep that night without pulling any cards, without any dreams at all, and when you wake up in the morning, the first thing you hear is Bucky's voice downstairs, asking Maggie if she takes one sugar or two, and the sound it's better than any spread you've ever read.

June.

The summer breeze at Coney Island smells like salt and fried dough, and you were wearing the jacket Bucky lent you because you misjudged the wind off the water. It's still too big, the sleeves past your knuckles, and he keeps reaching over to roll them back up for you, his thumb brushing your wrist every time.

You can't remember whose idea it was to come here. Maybe yours, maybe his. Maybe it doesn't matter, because Bucky's hand is wrapped around yours. You've been official since January, though the line between before and after has blurred into something that feels like it started long before either of you were brave enough to name it.

The boardwalk is crowded with families and couples and teenagers laughing too loud, but Bucky moves through them like he was made for this—for cotton candy and carnival lights, for the easy joy of a Brooklyn summer night. He fits here, you realize. He fits now. A hundred-year-old soul learning how to be young again.

"Step right up! Test your luck!" A barker's voice cuts through the noise, and you follow it to a row of old arcade machines tucked beneath a stripped awning. Skee-ball, claw machines, a racing game with a faded steering wheel—and then you see it.

A fortune teller machine.

It sits in the corner like something out of another era, which, you suppose, it is. Madam Zola's Mystical Fortune Cards, the peeling gold paint reads. Insert coin. Receive Your Destiny. The mechanical woman inside has painted glass eyes and a silk scarf draped over her plastic hair, and her hand rests on a deck of cards that probably haven't been mystical a day in their life.

Bucky follows your gaze and laughs. "You're kidding me."

"I'm absolutely not kidding you." You're already digging in your pocket for a quarter. "Madam Zola and I are colleagues, I need to know if she's legitimate."

"She's made of plywood."

"So judgmental." You find two quarters and press one into his palm, your fingers lingering against his. "For you, professional courtesy."

He looks down at the quarter, then back at you, and something softens in his expression. "Alright," he says. "But if this thing tells me I'm gonna die alone, I'm blaming you."

"Fair."

You drop your quarter in first. The machine whirs to life with a dramatic creak. Madam Zola's hand moves across the cards in jerky, mechanical motions, and after a moment, a small white card drops into the brass tray below.

You pick it up. It's not a real tarot card—just cardstock, cheap, the edges already soft from humidity—but the image printed on it makes your breath catch. Two hands clasped, reaching across a starfield. Beneath it, in gold script: The Lovers.

And underneath that, smaller: You've found the one. Don't waste time doubting it.

You stare at it. Bucky leans over your shoulder to read it, and you feel him go still.

"Huh."

"Your turn!"

"I don't need a card to tell me—"

"Your turn, Barnes."

He huffs, but he drops in the quarter you gave him. The machine grinds and another card falls. He picks it up. You don't see it at first, but you see his face—the way his jaw loosens, the way his eyes soften at the corners.

It's the same image, but the text beneath reads: What was written in the stars has come to pass. Trust the path, trust your heart.

The noise of the fair fades to a distant hum. You look up at him, and he's already looking at you.

"Bucky—"

"I don't care if it's rigged. I don't care if every card in that thing says the same thing. You're—" He stops, swallowing thickly. "You're it for me. You know that, right?"

Your heart is doing that complicated thing again, the thing it does every time he looks at you like you're the only person in the world.

"I know," you whisper. "Me too."

He kisses you then, right there in front of Madam Zola and half of Brooklyn, his hand cradling your jaw like you're something precious. When you pull apart, you're both breathless, and someone's wolf-whistled from the skee-ball line, but none of you seem to care at all.

"Come on," he says, lacing his fingers through yours. "I saw a ring toss on the way in, I need to win you something."

It takes him four tries and an embarrassing amount of money, and by the end he's swearing at the rigged bottles while you laugh so hard you have to lean against the counter for support. But on the fifth throw, the last ring catches, and the barker hands over the prize with a grudging nod.

It's a ridiculous bear, oversized and caramel-colored, wearing a tiny red bow tie. Bucky presents it to you as if he was handing you over the Holy Grail.

"For you. I was gonna go for the giant panda, but this one looked like it needed you more."

You crush it against your chest, burying your face in its soft synthetic fur. "I love him. I'm naming him James."

"You're not naming him after me."

"I'm absolutely naming him after you. Look at him, he has your expression."

Bucky stares at the bear's blank button eyes and then at you, and then he laughs, tilting his head back and you want to take a picture of him like this—careless, happy.

"Let's go to the photobooth," you demand, grabbing his hand. "Before the light changes."

"Bossy."

"You love when I'm bossy."

He doesn't agree, but he doesn't deny it either.

The photobooth is tucked behind the funhouse, a vintage four-strip model with a faded red curtain and a sign that flashes OUT OF ORDER every third flicker. But when you slide your money in, it whirs to life, and the first bulb flashes before you're ready.

"Wait—" you laugh, still adjusting the bear on your lap.

Too late. The first picture capture you mid-laugh, Bucky leaning in with his mouth open, probably saying something sarcastic.

"Okay, okay, be serious," you say, turning toward him.

"Serious," he repeats, but his eyes are dancing.

The second flash catches you pressing a kiss to his cheek, his hand coming up to rest on your waist. The third finds him turning his head at the last second so your lips meet his instead, his fingers threading into your hair. The fourth flash finds you both laughing into each other's mouths, your foreheads touching, the bear crushed between you. You don't remember who kissed who, but you don't care.

When the strip slides out of the machine, you hold it up to the light, watching the images develop in slow motion. Four tiny windows into a perfect moment. You look at them, and you think about al the cards you've ever pulled, all the lonely spreads and reversed cups, all the years you believed love wasn't meant for you.

And here you are. Here he is. A love out of time.

"I'm putting these on the fridge," you say. "When we get back to the apartment."

"Our apartment," he corrects and your heart flips.

You're moving in together next month. You found a place in Brooklyn with a windowsill wide enough for two cats and a fire escape that gets morning sun. He's already planning on building a spare room for your appointments, and built a shelf for your cards. You told him he didn't have to, that you'd find another place to do your readings and keep the cards in the closet if he wanted, and he looked at you like you'd suggested drowning a kitten.

"It's your gift," he said. "Why would I want you to hide it?"

Later, when the moon is high and the fair lights are starting to dim, you sit together on the boardwalk with your shoes off, toes buried in cool sand, sharing a funnel cake.

"We should get home," you say, but you don't move. "Salem and Nova are probably destroying something."

"They're fine, Nova's probably sleeping on my tool bag, and Salem's judging her from the windowsill."

"How do you know that?"

"Because that's what they do every time I'm there." He licks powdered sugar off his thumb. "Those cats have a very established routine. Nova loves me, Salem tolerates me… it's a good system."

You smile, leaning your head on his shoulder. "Salem tolerates everyone, that's just his personality. Nova loves anyone who gives her attention. They're not a good benchmark."

"Okay." He pauses. "Then you love me. And you're a much better benchmark."

You go still. The word hangs in the air between you, but he doesn't take it back. He just turns his head and looks at you, waiting, his eyes reflecting the last of the carnival lights.

"I do," you whisper. "I love you."

His smile is small and yet so full of hope it makes your chest ache. "I love you too. I think I started loving you the day you shut the door on my face."

"You have terrible taste."

"Must be the century I was born in, we liked 'em feisty."

You laugh, pushing at his chest, and he catches your hand and presses a kiss to your knuckles. You sit like that for a long time, watching the tide come in, his thumb tracing slow circles in your palm. Eventually, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the fortune card from Madam Zola's machine.

"Do you think it's true?" he asks quietly. "The whole destiny thing. Do you really believe we were supposed to find each other?"

You look at the card, then at him—the man who was born over a hundred years ago, who fought a war and survived things you can't imagine, that sometimes admit not knowing how to do any of this, but that tries anyway for you.

"I believe," you start, "that the cards pointed me in a direction. They told me to wait, to not settle for something that wasn't right." You turn his hand over, tracing the lines of his palm—his life line, long and unbroken; the heart line, deep and sure. "But I don't think they made this happen, Bucky. I think we did. I think you showed up at my shop and you were rude and impossible and I couldn't stop thinking about you anyway. I think we let Maggie manipulate us into falling in love. The cards didn't do that, we did."

"Okay," he says. "I like that better anyway."

"Me too."

He folds the car again and tucks it back into his pocket, over his heart. "I'm keeping this, though. As evidence."

"Evidence of what?"

"That sometimes the universe gets it right."

You don't pull cards that night, haven't done it for a while, because you don't need to. You fall asleep with Bucky's heartbeat against your back, Salem purring at your feet, Nova curled on the pillow between you like a furry chaperone, and you dream of nothing at all—just the deep, peaceful dark of a life that's finally exactly where it's meant to be.