The Witch Is Back by H. P. Mallory

five million shades of gray? “You and I are from completely different worlds, Sinjin,” I started.
    He looked surprised—like I’d unwittingly figured out some deep dark secret. “Elucidate, please.”
    “That’s just it,” I said with a half smile that wasn’t really a smile at all because it was sad. “You use words like
elucidate
. I don’t. You drive a Ferrari and you have houses in three countries. I have a cat that doesn’t like you, I drive a Jetta, and I’m nowhere near getting my mortgage paid off.”
    “These are mere trivialities that do not concern me. I am quite a bit older than you and, therefore, have had many more years to build my empire.”
    I frowned, shaking my head at how he described his business as an “empire.” But what baffled me more was that he couldn’t have been a day over thirty-five. Where was he getting off saying he was so much older than I was? “Sinjin, you’re what … thirty-four?”
    “Close enough.”
    “You’re barely older than me.”
    “Than I,” he corrected me with a little smile.
    “Ugh,” I grunted and shook my head at his cocked eyebrow. “Age isn’t what matters anyway.”
    “Was not that the point you were just attempting to make?”
    “Well, now I’ve changed my way of thinking,” I said in an irritated voice.
    “Then what does matter, poppet?” Sinjin asked, his tone trying to hide the fact that he found this whole thing extremely entertaining. Well, it was good that he was trying to mask it, because I found it anything but.
    “This is never going to work, that’s my point,” I finally said. “You and I are just too different and as I said before, I’m not looking for casual sex.”
    He studied me in a detached sort of way for a couple of seconds, then took a few steps away before turning to face me again. His lips were tight, his jaw even tighter. Gone was that look of amusement. “Insecurity does not suit you.”
    “Suit me?” I repeated, surprised. Yes, I guess I must have been at the end of the line when God was handing out self-confidence, but insecurity not suiting me? I had no idea where that came from.
    He narrowed his eyes as he studied me, crossing his arms against his great expanse of chest. “It does not suit you because it is not who you are.”
    Why was it that Sinjin sometimes did or said things that made me feel like he knew me—that I knew him? That we’d known each other forever? “As if you know the first thing about who I am.” I started stirring the spaghetti sauce again, needing something to focus on other than the fact that I was definitely destroying whatever there was between us. I’d come this far, though, and I couldn’t back down now. Not when he was professing to know me better than I knew myself. I mean, that was ludicrous!
    “I know you better than you might imagine.”
    “And how the hell is that possible?” I demanded in a small but angry voice. I stopped stirring and glared up at him. “You’ve known me for all of a week!”
    “Time is a mere insignificant detail where you and I are concerned,” he retorted, and when I made the mistake of looking at him again, I noticed that his eyes were hard, determined. They were the eyes of someone who rarely lost an argument, someone who had gotten his own way for a very long time.
    “Is that so?” I started, wondering how we’d gotten into an argument so quickly. He hadn’t even been here for five minutes! Was this really how our relationship, for lack of a better word, was going to end? Was this really how it was going to go down (to paraphrase Justin Timberlake)?
    “Yes, that is so,” Sinjin said in a serpentine sort of way. I could feel him right behind me. Refusing to turn around, I started cutting up the sausage to go in the spaghetti sauce.
    “I know you are capable of many astounding things,” he whispered into my ear, and I felt my heart stop. He was so close that the iciness of his breath fanned across my neck. And suddenly I