December 7th 2022

Chapter 341
Our Family in Love

It was a complicated sort of situation for them to deal with once Marianne told them what she'd done. Very clearly, she had overheard her mother and her aunt talking, had heard part of their conversation, and run with it without hearing the rest or even discussing it with them. People far older than her had done the same, but they still couldn't ignore the fact that she was only seven years old and genuinely thought she had done something really good… For all they knew, she had. She had told both Nellie and Bobby in turn about the location of the missing witch. And now they had disappeared. Where they had gone, what they were doing, that was the mystery, and the last thing they wanted was for Marianne to think that she'd done something bad. They would try and tell her to be more careful about situations like this in the future, but that was all of it. She was not in trouble.

"What's going on?" Ethan asked when he came to join them, still clueless. Gracie caught him up quick, and his reaction was the same as hers when he learned that the last witch's location had been known for years. He was clearly not unaware of his twin's feelings for his girlfriend's twin, and whether he and Gracie had discussed the Nellie side of it or not, he could guess enough to understand what this could all lead to… if things worked out alright. Just now, it was all that they could do.

There was no way that they could go out there, in good faith, and spy on the pair. They were just going to have to be polite about it all and leave them be. They would continue cleaning up, and they would maybe see about doing some set-up work on the other rooms below to get ahead until they could come back to the attic for the next round.

When Nellie and Bobby did return – nearly an hour after they'd left – everyone had done a great job ahead of the next day, and they were getting hungry enough that they had been this close to losing this patience toward 'leaving them in peace.' There was nothing overtly obvious to tell anyone what had happened between them or if anything had happened at all. They were being very obviously vague though, so all they could take it to mean was that something had for sure happened, one way or the other, but they weren't going to say anything, not here, not now. They could appreciate that… most of them. Marianne was clearly struggling not to say anything or ask anything, but she held it together, nonetheless. They left the ranch, went back to the Friar house for dinner, as promised.

As they were continuing with the painting the next day, doing more than they'd done so far, the Hunter twins had been invited to spend the night at their big sister's house. The Davis boys went home shortly after dinner. Nellie and Gracie's young nieces were very happy to have them there, especially as they participated in their evening routine. After they had gone to bed and it was just Maya, Lucas, the Hart-Lanes, and the Hunters, there was for sure a sense of anticipation among those who'd been at the B&B earlier, thinking Nellie might catch them up. But they just carried on with the evening, and soon the exhausted bunch went to bed, the better to rest up for the next day.

But then, a few hours later…

"Maya… Maya, wake up…" a whisper breached through her dreamscape.

"Go back to bed, baby girl," she mumbled, clinging to sleep.

"You sound just like Mom," the voice went on, snorting. Maya cracked an eye open and was greeted by two identical faces stuck together, staring down at her. She didn't know what this was – because she was half asleep – but she could surmise that this was less about emergency and a lot more about… well… shenanigans.

"Go back to sleep and let me do the same," she protested.

"Tell her," Gracie whispered, insisting.

"I kissed Bobby." Nellie…

"I'm up, okay…" Maya sighed.

She had been very comfortable, but her sisters knew, as well as she did, that they'd just said the one thing to guarantee she would not be able to get back to sleep until she'd been told the rest. Getting out from under Lucas' arm and out of the bed was its own challenge, as her sleeping husband did not wish for her to go either, but she managed to coax him to release her without waking him. Finally, she could follow her sisters down below, bypassing the living room and going to sit out on the front porch.

"So, you were saying…" Maya looked to her little sister. She may have been a whole seventeen, over the halfway mark toward eighteen at this point, but she could still look like a little kid to her sometimes, and this was one of those times. Of the twins, she had been least known to ever come off as shy, but it happened at times, and just now she was right there, brimming with feeling, and memory…

As it had happened, after Marianne had told her about the witch, Nellie had been left to stew on the matter. She wasn't even sure what she wanted to do about the situation yet. The one thing she'd thought of, at least, was to go out to the archive and either confirm or deny that the figurine was where it was said to be. Only by the time she'd come to that conclusion, Marianne had also told Bobby… and when Nellie looked around to spot him before she made her exit, he was already gone. Guessing he'd gone just where she'd planned to go and unsure of what would happen if he got there first, she'd quickly seen to her own sneaky escape from the house.

He couldn't have had that much of a head start on her, and he couldn't go as fast as he once would, so she was confident that she could catch up with him on his way from this side of the property to the other, and she did. She fell in step with him for what became a bit of innocent back and forth between two people who knew where they were going but were trying not to let it show, even as they knew that the other was going to the same place. It all came to a head when they reached the archive… and were denied entry. Here they were, in their painting clothes, clear incidents of splatter on them, and there was no way that Carson was going to let them in like this. They could get paint on the exhibits. From there, they'd become stuck, but also stuck next to one another. It had given way to the kind of banter that had been a staple of their friendship from the days of their rivalry, and at some point… it had made them both break into laughter, dropping all pretense. They both knew that the witch was up there, supposedly. So, what were they going to do about it?

Nellie told him she'd just wanted to see if it was actually there, first and foremost. Bobby told her that he'd wanted to do the same thing, which then left them both to ask the obvious of one another. Why weren't they just planning to go up there and take it, claim it, the better to be the big winner of their years-long search? They didn't even have an answer for that, not right away, but… if they stopped and actually thought about it for a moment, didn't they actually know?

They'd had this impulse, both of them, to just sort of… let the other have it, because at this point being the winner didn't mean half as much as getting to see the other be happy. Once that had been acknowledged, they'd been left with a new silence, new bit of reflection. This then turned into more bickering, as each of them argued why the other should just accept the witch, why they deserved to have it, which was a lot less about bickering and a lot more like them saying 'here are all the reasons why I think you are wonderful, please take the witch.' It had turned to talk of the accident, the year before, and Bobby recalling the split second where he'd seen the bus coming and he'd known that it would hit her if he didn't do anything, and with no regard for his own life he had done his best to preserve hers. Nellie, in return, spoke of the agony she'd felt, seeing him there, broken, in the street, and the time she'd spent believing that he was going to die, and how she couldn't think about it still, even seeing him right there in front of her, standing, without feeling like her heart would have ripped apart…

"It was the look in his eyes, when I said all that, that's when I just reached out and took his face in my hands and… and I kissed him," Nellie recalled, a blush visibly rising in her cheeks even in the dark of night.

"What did he do?" Gracie quietly asked, captivated. Maya bit back a laugh; she was right there with her. Nellie's smile could tell them at least that he had kissed her back, even if that was kind of a given.

"He took off his shoes," she revealed when she did speak. Her sisters blinked.

"Okay…" Maya encouraged her to go on, unsure what this led to.

"Then he took off his pants," Nellie went on, and her sisters stared with wide eyes until she continued. "He took off his shirt, flipped it inside out and put it back on, and he asked Carson to let him in again. He told him what he was trying to do, so he wouldn't think he was just some weird kid in his underwear and socks… I think the crutches kind of helped because he agreed to let him go through. I was this close to just doing the same to follow him. But I waited there, let him get up to the balcony, and I stood back until I could see. When he got there, he found it right away and came back down. He got dressed up again and…" she opened her hand, which had been discreetly closed all along. There sat the witch, colors faded by weather and time. "He said that we could alternate keeping it if I wanted, like shared custody," she told Maya and Gracie. "I told him I would do it on one condition. I would only do it if when we did hand it over to each other, we got to do it over dinner… or maybe a movie…" her coy tone was likely just as it had been when she'd told Bobby this. Her smile here might have been his response. She'd asked him out, and he had accepted. She would give him the witch when he took her out, the following Friday.

"I'm so happy for you guys!" Gracie hugged her twin sister, and Nellie hugged her back just as tight. Maya joined in this embrace after a moment, so Nellie tipped her head to rest against her big sister's, forever a guiding hand in her 'romantic thrills and woes.' "I hope he told Ethan by now…" Gracie reflected.

"You're already thinking about double dates, aren't you?" Nellie snorted.

"Come on, double twins double date? It'll be hilarious," Gracie insisted, then, "But you two should get a few of those on your own first, I get it." The important part was that Nellie was happy, and that Bobby was happy. This was just the beginning, the new chapter, as long awaited as it had been. It was all up to them now to write it together.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners