Page 12 of The Tea Witch's Promise

That shut Cami up instantly. It was impressive how full-naming worked, no matter who did it.

With everyone quiet and in line, Jasmine handed out the notebooks and delegated the tasks. "Earl andChamomile, you are taking the right side. Katie and Brew, you're on the left. Any problems, call me over and I'll come check."

Hesitation crossed Katie's face, and I winced. She definitely remembered what happened at the tavern. That was unfortunate. The last thing I wanted was to make things awkward between us.

A part of me wanted to suggest a change in the way Jasmine was splitting the teams, but I didn't want to draw attention to what was going on between us.

I cleared my throat as I made my way over to Katie. "So..."

Katie cleared her throat and held up the scales. "I'll weigh, you write? Or I'll write, you weigh?"

"Ah, you know the drill." And she was going straight to making sure that we were on task. I shouldn't be hurt by that, especially when it was my fault there was something hanging between us, but it still stung.

"It's not my first tea stock day," she reminded me.

I nodded, not really knowing what else to say. It was true, both the Fields siblings had been helping out from a young age. That was how things were around here, they helped us, we helped them. That was the delicate balance that Mum was always talking about and it could not be upset.

I twirled the pencil. "I'll write."

Katie nodded and turned her attention to the shelves in front of her, selecting a bag of tea. "A-thirty-one," she said.

I looked down the list and tapped my finger against the page. "It's meant to weigh one pound."

"All right." She dropped it on the scale and added the counterweight. "One pound."

"Great, so this one is rat-free." I put a tick by it while Katie put the bag back on the shelf and picked up the next one, reading out the reference number attached to the tag.

"Also a pound," she said, moving on to the next before I could say anything.

We repeated the process several times over, checking the weight of the bags and noting down whether it matched what was in the log. It was incredibly tedious and monotonous, not helped by the heavy silence between us. I wanted things to be normal between us, but I could feel that she wasn't receptive to me flirting, or even joking, and I didn't want to make her even more uncomfortable than I already had with my revelation that my feelings for her weren't entirely friendly.

"Where's Banjo?" I tried after the latest round of weighing.

"At home. He's keeping Grandpa company," she replied, somehow managing to avoid looking at me.

"Ah."

We lapsed into silence again, but it wasn't comfortable. If anything, it was the complete opposite.

And I hated it. More than I could have ever imagined possible. Oliver might be my best friend, but I was also close to Katie, and feeling as if I'd lost her sent pain lancing through my heart. Life without her just wasn't the same.

I cleared my throat to try again. "How's Oliver getting on? With Howie?"

That got a little chuckle out of Katie, which felt like progress. "Disaster. Either there's something wrong with the boy or the owl because those two are not seeing eye to eye."

"One would think Oliver isn't an owl ward at all," I joked.

"We both know he is, we were there when he bonded with Rocky." Katie smiled fondly. "I was so glad when they bonded because up till then, Rocky's nightly presence had been scaring me a bit."

A smile pulled at my lips at the memory. "Me too. Rocky used to sit on the roof right next to my window and hoot all night. I thought it was there to kill me. I was so glad when Oliver tamed him."

Katie finally looked at me and scoffed. "You don't tame a familiar, Brew."

"So what do you do?" I leaned against a shelf, curious about her answer. I knew the basics of what being a ward entailed, and what she and her brother had told me, but we'd never talked about the real stuff.

She turned around to look at me, a seriousness in her eyes that I wasn't sure I'd ever seen before. "It's a bond that goes deep into your soul." From her expression, I knew she was thinking of Banjo. "It's like there's another living creature that is part of you." She touched her shoulder where her ward tattoo of Banjo sat.

"That sounds intense."