Four Of A Kind

I watched her walk away and made a mental note to tell Iris that Vivienne’s version of flirting involved crisis management terminology and performance metrics. Iris would draw it into her manga immediately. She had been working on a character who spoke exclusively in business jargon and wore reading glasses she didn’t need. The resemblance was not coincidental.

The espresso machine needed me back. I returned to the station and found Harlow pouring milk into a cup with her tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration. She was humming something that sounded like an anime opening theme, her body swaying slightly with the rhythm while she tried to create latte art with the foam.

The resulting shape looked less like a bat and more like a potato with wings, but the girl receiving the drink squealed with delight and photographed it from six angles, so I counted it as a success. Harlow beamed at the reaction and immediately started telling the customer about the different foam techniques she had learned from YouTube tutorials. The conversation lasted another three minutes. I didn’t interrupt.

"You’re making friends," I told Harlow as I reclaimed my spot behind the machine.

"Everyone loves tiny bats!" She beamed at me, her purple eyes bright with enthusiasm. "Also, Iris told me that Sarah told her that the girl at table five has been taking videos of you for twenty minutes and posting them to TikTok with the hashtag vampire butler boyfriend material." She paused. "Sarah showed me the account. You have a dedicated fan page now. It has two thousand followers."

"Of course she has."

"Also, Sabrina wants to talk to you." Harlow’s expression shifted slightly, her smile taking on a more knowing quality. "She said to come to her booth when you get a minute."

"Is it urgent?"

"She said, and I’m quoting directly: ’When it concerns Isaiah, everything I say is urgent.’" Harlow scrunched her nose, her head tilting to the side. "That’s very Sabrina. She does this thing where she makes everything sound like life or death. Last week she told me it was urgent that I stop leaving my sketchbooks in the common room because ’visual clutter disrupts cognitive function.’ I still don’t know if she was serious."

I wiped my hands on a towel and crossed the gymnasium floor toward Sabrina’s fortune-telling corner. She had positioned her booth in the darkest section of the room, where the fog machines had been working overtime and the candelabra light barely reached. The effect was theatrical in a way that felt intentional. Her crystal ball reflected purple fragments across the black tablecloth, and the tarot cards lay spread in a Celtic Cross pattern that she almost certainly arranged for aesthetic purposes rather than divinatory ones. The entire setup looked like it belonged in a gothic novel rather than a high school festival.

Sabrina sat with one leg crossed over the other, her knee-high boots catching dull light. The laces wound up her calves in a pattern that looked complicated enough to require engineering knowledge. Her tied-off black shirt exposed a strip of pale midriff that she seemed entirely unconcerned about, and her skirt had ridden up on one side to a height that would have given Patterson a stress ulcer if he’d noticed. She didn’t adjust it when I approached. She just watched me with those half-lidded purple eyes, waiting.

"Sit."

I sat across from her. The chair was too small, clearly designed for someone shorter, and it forced my knees against the table edge. The angle pressed my leg against Sabrina’s leg underneath the tablecloth in a way that neither of us acknowledged. The contact was warm despite her reputation for being cold in every measurable way.

"Your reading." She gathered the cards without looking at them, shuffling with hands that moved like they had done this a thousand times before. Her fingers were long and elegant, and the motion was hypnotic in its precision. "Since you refused earlier."

"I don’t believe in tarot."

"You don’t have to believe in the cards." She set the deck between us, her eyes never leaving mine. "You have to believe in the reader."

I studied her face for a moment. The candlelight painted shadows across her cheekbones and made her wine-red hair look almost black at the ends. She was serious. That much was clear. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a game.

"Cut it."

I split the deck. Sabrina took the halves and laid three cards face down on the velvet. Her movements were slow, deliberate, like each card placement required thought.

"Past." She flipped the first card.

The Tower. A building struck by lightning, figures falling from the windows, flames erupting from the crown. The image was violent in a way that felt too on-the-nose.

"Something collapsed. Something you thought was permanent turned out to be temporary." Her voice was soft but steady. "Foundations cracked. You fell. Or maybe you jumped."

"You could say that about literally any eighteen-year-old."

"I’m saying it about you." She didn’t blink. Her gaze held mine with the kind of intensity that made looking away feel like surrender. "About the Philadelphia apartment you left behind. About your mother who sent a text message instead of staying. About the four-thirty alarm you set every morning because sleeping in means failing your sister."

The gymnasium noise faded at the edges. The music and laughter and overlapping conversations became background static, muffled and distant. I became aware of how close her face was across the small table, how her purple eyes reflected the crystal ball’s light in twin points that looked like stars sinking into water.

She flipped the second card.

The Chariot, reversed. A warrior in a chariot pulled by two horses moving in opposite directions. The reins were tangled. The warrior’s face was obscured.

"Present. You’re being pulled by competing forces. You want to go forward but the things you love are trying to take you in different directions, and you haven’t decided which direction is actually forward." Her fingers traced the edge of the card. "Philadelphia and Manhattan. Iris and the Valentines. Survival and attachment. You’re standing in the middle trying to hold the reins while the horses tear you apart."

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t a good answer to give.

"And the future?"

She flipped the third card.

The Lovers. Again. The same card she had shown me that morning in the library, the same card she had tucked into her breast pocket with deliberate ceremony, the same card that featured two figures standing beneath an angel with a choice laid before them. The symbolism was so obvious it felt like being hit with a brick.

"You keep drawing that one," I said.

"I keep finding it in the deck." Her lips curved slightly. The expression was subtle, almost hidden, but it was there. "Funny how that works."

"Because you put it there."

Her lips curved further. Not a smile. Something more private, something that existed in the space between amusement and a confession she wouldn’t make out loud. She reached across the table and placed her palm flat over mine. Her skin was cool against the warmth I’d built from five hours of handling steaming cups, and the contrast sent something electric up my forearm that settled in my shoulder and stayed there. Her thumb brushed once across my knuckles.

"Isaiah." She said my name the way she always said it, like she was reading it from a book she had already finished and loved. "The photo is going to spread. Your face is going to be in places you can’t control. And when that happens, the world is going to look at you and decide who you are based on a single image of a boy in a costume making coffee."

"I’m aware."

"Good." Her fingers tightened over mine. Not painful, just present. "Because when people look at that photo, they see the costume. The cape and the fangs and the espresso machine. They see a character. A story they can project onto. A fantasy." Her voice dropped lower. "But I see you. I have seen you since you walked into the library carrying a book about revenge and pretended you didn’t care about anyone in the building. I saw you before the suit and the car and the Valentine name and the kiss on the steps. And I need you to understand something before this weekend ends and the rotation begins and everything changes."

"What?"

Sabrina leaned across the table until her face was close enough that I could count the individual strands of wine-red hair that fell across her cheekbone. Her breath smelled like the taro milk tea she had been drinking all afternoon, sweet and faintly earthy, and her eyes held something that I had only seen once before—the night she crawled into my guest room and kissed me against the headboard without warning or explanation.

"Whatever happens with my sisters," she whispered. The words were barely audible over the festival noise. "Whatever choices you make or don’t make. Whatever my mother threatens or bribes or manipulates. I will not compete for you. Competition implies the possibility of losing, and I have never lost anything I decided to keep."

She released my hand, sat back in her chair, and gathered her tarot cards into a neat stack with the composure of someone who had not just detonated a bomb in the middle of a school festival. Her expression returned to neutral. The mask slid back into place with practiced ease.

"Your reading is complete." She placed the deck beside the crystal ball, her fingers aligning the cards until they formed a perfect rectangle. "That will be five dollars."

"You’re charging me?"

"Festival rules. Every service has a price." She held out her palm with her fingers curled upward, her expression serious. "Cash only. Vivienne’s orders. She has a spreadsheet tracking every transaction. If I give you a free reading, she’ll notice and adjust the café’s profit margin calculations to compensate."

I pulled a crumpled five from my pocket and placed it in her hand. The bill was wrinkled from being shoved into my apron alongside receipts and tip money. Sabrina took it without comment, folding the bill once and tucking it into her skirt waistband, directly against the bare skin of her hip, while holding my gaze with the kind of eye contact that made thinking difficult and breathing optional. Her expression didn’t change. She just watched me with those half-lidded purple eyes, waiting to see if I would look away first.

I didn’t.

She smiled. Just barely. The curve of her lips was so slight it might have been imaginary.

"Now go make coffee." She opened her book and disappeared behind it, the cover rising like a wall between us.

"Harlow is putting cinnamon in the espresso machine and I can hear Vivienne’s eye twitching from here."