“Looks like Seliah’s on board,” Adah said.

  Her voice was half-muffled on account of holding half of a croissant between her teeth. Her hands were preoccupied with typing a reply to Ami’s text message on her phone, but she was enjoying the pastry too much to set it back down on her plate. Rika reached across the small circular table between them and yanked the croissant out of Adah’s mouth, tearing off a chunk of pastry in the process which Adah then quickly chewed and swallowed.

  “Your manners are worse than Ami’s sometimes,” Rika said, placing the remaining croissant back onto Adah’s plate.

  “I was taught that showing enthusiasm for the food someone’s prepared for you is the most polite way to eat,” Adah said. She finished up her reply to Ami and then stashed her phone in the handbag she’d put under the table.

  “If that’s true, then you forgot that lesson when we were at Ketzia’s,” Rika said.

  “That wasn’t food—it was a weapon.”

  The girls were seated inside a small patisserie located in the same shopping center in which Ami had fought the ibex Cruelty with Seliah. The fact that the twins were going to visit the solo magical girl today had inspired Adah and Rika’s visit. Ami had mentioned meeting a sweet clerk at one of the boutiques here, and had noted how much delicious looking food she’d seen in shop windows. You could always count on that girl to be peeking in on whatever the local restaurants were serving.

  Since this promenade was a little farther from the agency office than Adah and Rika usually ventured, it sounded like an ideal place to get away from the routine of magical girlhood for a bit. On top of that, because they had come here on a chillier day in the middle of the work week, they avoided any kind of crowd. Anyone the girls did encounter was in a rush to get where they were going so that they could escape the winter chill.

  Despite the lack of a crowd, the two of them did get recognized almost immediately. This patisserie was the first shop they’d entered, hoping to grab a quick snack to start their date off on a sweet note, and the young woman behind the counter had called out to them by their magical girl names as soon as she saw them. She’d insisted that the girls take some pastries on the house, and more or less commanded them to take a seat while she grabbed a couple fresh croissants for them.

  Adah and Rika tried to refuse the freebies as politely as they could, but the woman had already set two plates down on one of the shop’s tables before the girls could get a word out.

  Though, maybe she’d simply been a shrewd businesswoman. Now that Adah had tasted one croissant, she was absolutely going to buy a couple more on top of whatever the pastry chef tried to give them for free.

  “Anyway,” Adah said after chewing through another bite of her snack, “This just leaves DreamRise. I want to check in on Ekki for his own sake anyway, but we should probably give them some space for now. Although, if they aren’t sure what their next move should be, maybe we can give them some direction. Despite everything else, Iris did do a good job when we—”

  “Stop!” Rika said, kicking Adah’s foot under the table. “You’re not allowed to talk about work for the rest of the day. Ami gave us an update on Seliah, and that was your one exception. The rest of today is dedicated to having fun.”

  “But talking about work can be fun!” Adah said. “It’s not like I’m actually doing any real work. It’s just another topic of conversation.”

  “You’re scheming. I can tell—you always start to grin like a serial killer when you get going like this.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You need to practice relaxing,” Rika ignored Adah’s objection. “If you keep thinking about when to talk to who or how to convince them to join us, your brain’s going to fire itself up like it always does. You need to not think for a while, like meditation. Let your mind clean itself out.”

  Adah finished up the last of her croissant, then leaned against the top of the table, propping her head up with her palm.

  “If I try not to think about anything, my mind’s going to wander toward work,” she said. “It’s got a gravitational pull on me. Maybe you could distract me? It’d probably be easier to think about nothing but you than it would be to think about nothing at all.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Rika leaned forward and propped her own head up similar to Adah. She looked Adah straight in the eyes, surely all too aware that this was her best means of overwhelming her partner. Adah was always guaranteed to be enraptured.

  “And how, exactly, am I supposed to distract you?” Rika asked.

  “Ah, I mean, Lina called us lovers, right?” Adah said, suddenly fumbling her words a bit. “How would one lover tend to distract the other?”

  Rika smiled. Then stomped on Adah’s foot.

  “There’s a time and place,” she said before sitting up straight in her chair again. “You’re usually so much cooler when you flirt, too. Maybe this is another sign your brain is malfunctioning from overuse.”

  Adah was so often the one bullying Rika that she sometimes forgot that the girl could dish it back with her own vicious style. Over time, Adah had learned that the best response wasn’t to back down, but to fawn over Rika. If Adah could overwhelm her with adoration, she’d return to that cute, embarrassed version of Rika.

  “If only we had gotten the photos back from Neil already,” Adah said, sighing with a theatrical flair. “You were so cute in that outfit. If I could stare at those photos all day, I wouldn’t have a single thought in my head. Well, maybe just one.”

  Adah had thought that attack might break Rika’s defenses, but it appeared her partner had come to this date prepared for a duel. Without hesitation, she fired off a retaliatory shot.

  “When it comes to your outfit, I think I’ll prefer my memories to the photos,” Rika said. “You showed me a lot of cute sides of yourself during the shoot. Especially some sides that will probably be edited out of the photos.”

  Huh? Did she mean…?

  “Wait,” Adah said. “What exactly did you see?”

  “Nothing weird,” Rika answered, though her eyes had drifted off toward a display cabinet full of teacups that stood against the wall of the shop. “I’m just saying, you showed me Heartbreak has no limits.”

  Adah leaned on the table again, but this time with both hands planted on top of it like she was a bad cop interrogating a suspect.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. “Was it bad? Like super obvious?”

  “Of course not,” Rika said. “Like I said, accidents like that never show up in photos.”

  “I know that!” Adah said, positively flustered at this point. “I’m asking about what you saw!”

  Rika simply shrugged and said, “It’s not a big deal. Let’s just say you did a good job of distracting my mind. I haven’t been able to think about work at all since then.”

  Adah collapsed back into her chair, slumped over and drained of all will to fight. What was this conflicted emotion? She didn’t have a reason to be embarrassed—not when it came to Rika—and yet, she felt like she’d suffered a humiliating defeat. What Rika was saying was technically a compliment, technically flirting. But rather than feeling giddy, Adah couldn’t even bring herself to look the girl in the eyes. Despite all the conflict and confusion, the feeling still made Adah’s chest warm.

  “Is this how you feel whenever I tease you?” Adah asked.

  “I don’t know how you feel right now,” Rika said. “Unless you’d like to describe it to me?”

  Adah shook her head. “I think I’ll pass.”

  Rika laughed the same kind of accomplished chuckle Adah was sure had come out of her own mouth in the past. She reached over and gently ruffled Adah’s hair, which Adah was sure she had done in the same way to Rika plenty of times before.

  It was simply a masterful counterattack on Rika’s part. Adah made note to tread more carefully in the future.

  Luckily, Adah didn’t have to suffer in defeat for long. A few moments later, the young pastry chef walked over to their table, holding in her hands a white box tied up with string. In a smooth motion, she collected the two plates from their table and replaced them with this box.

  “I packed as much as I could fit in there,” she said. “It’s got a little bit of everything we made today. Please share it with your teammates, as a gift from us. Especially the Zerker and the little witch—I’m sorry to say I forget her name. I never got a chance to thank them for how they saved everyone here.”

  Adah and Rika exchanged a look, then nodded to the young woman. If she’d already packed the treats, they couldn’t turn the box down. While the two of them didn’t feel like they deserved free food simply for being magical girls, they had no issue passing along the chef’s gratitude to Ami. That girl had done something amazing here that day, and this gift was a gesture that keep her connected to this place.

  “Absolutely,” Adah said. “And next time, we’ll bring the whole team back to buy more of their favorites.”

  “Although the witch girl isn’t actually part of our team,” Rika added.

  “Well, if you see her again, let her know she’s got a box of her own waiting for her here!” the woman said.

  That much, Adah and Rika could certainly do.

  After some more thank you’s from both sides and a final goodbye, Adah and Rika left the shop and braced themselves for the cold awaiting them. As they stepped outside, Adah looked up and down the promenade, scoping out their options.

  “Where to next?” she asked. “Ami said we’d probably like the clothes at that boutique she’d stopped at.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Rika said. “Maybe they sell cute underwear.”

  “Please, have mercy.”

  Rika laughed again and grabbed Adah’s hand, leading her down the promenade. They almost jogged along, eager to get out of the cold and into the next shop.

  Adah didn’t realize until they got home that evening, but she hadn’t thought about work once since Rika had started teasing her.