Neve leaned in with an arch of her eyebrow. “Then convince me.”
His grin deepened without broadening. He had striking eyes—hazel, with light enough brown that it created the illusion of a golden glow. They were bright against his darkened skin. If he insisted on spending his time half-naked even in the dead of winter, it was no wonder he was so sun-kissed. Strangely, despite the fact he looked at least ten years older than her, that much sun hadn’t yet translated into dark spots, freckles or the leathering of his complexion.
“Yes, ma’am. Well then, you’re not the eldest of the four children in your household. Despite—or perhaps because of—the chaos you grew up in, you’re far happier when it’s quiet, which was why you chose a profession where you work alone, albeit with other people near you, and where you don’t need to speak often.”
“No way.” She grinned. The corners of his eyes showed smile lines that reminded her of Joseph, although his were not as pronounced. “You don’t even know my name, and I’d swear Joseph didn’t say it, so you couldn’t have googled me beforehand.”
“Do you see a computer in here? Where would I put a phone in these pants?”
“Touché.”
“I should say so. I take it you’re a fan of the eldritch and weird?” He nodded to her stuffed Cthulhu, who she’d set next to the phrenology bust.
“Lifelong. My parents figured it out early when I started digging up worms at four and searching the woods behind my grandparents’ cabin for wendigo, witches and werewolves when I was six. Lord knows what I would have done if I’d found one.”
“You wouldn’t have done anything. The witch might have found you charming enough as a ginger…”
“Hey, I have a soul,” she said playfully.
“Our Bearded Lady is the closest we have to a redhead, and she has more heart than the rest of us, so you’d be hard-pressed to convince me of her lack of soul. But regardless of beauty, charm or soulfulness, the wendigo and werewolf would have swallowed you right up.” He still held her hands, although he wasn’t even looking at them anymore. She liked the familiarity of the contact, the comfort of it.
“Are you telling me those are real, too?”
“Have you not met my werewolf yet? Of course not. You planned to visit the funhouse afterward. But you will meet him. And I’m employing dark arts just by reading your palms, love. That makes me a witch, doesn’t it?”
“I meant ‘crone’, but I suppose when the supernatural becomes natural, it tends to lose its mysterious appeal.”
She was already feeling so much better. The reading was worth it for the conversation alone. As he’d pointed out, she didn’t speak much at work, but preferring silence most of the time didn’t mean she didn’t have plenty to say. And it often seemed easier to say it with a stranger than with friends. It wasn’t until she’d met Joseph that she’d realized she could be talkative with people she knew, too.
“I hope not, my dear. There’s still wonder to be found in real magic.” He pulled away from her palms, leaving them deliberately on the table to indicate she should keep them there.
“I’m often awed by nature. No mystery needed,” she said. “Walking through Oddity Row awed me. Even if just the insects, spiders and snakes are real, that’s enough wonder for me right there.”
“Oh, many of them are quite real.” He straightened from where he’d been rummaging through one of the sideboard drawers. His smirk was gone, replaced with a quiet seriousness that sobered her. “I may sometimes embellish, but I rarely counterfeit. In fact, if I were plainer about what was real and what isn’t, many of my guests would experience far more discomfort than they’d enjoy. There’s nothing wrong with a dramatic flourish to soften the blow.”
He brought two short, white candles to the table and placed one in each of her palms then bent her fingers up to hold them. He blew on the candle in her right hand. A dancing flame burst to life on the clean wick. He maintained his more solemn expression, but he gave her a wink before he blew on the second to light it as well.
“Cool.” Sometimes it was the littlest things that impressed.
“Thank you.” When he spoke, everything he said seemed the epitome of sincerity. Even the humor had an undertone of absolute truth. Like the rest of Arcanium, one didn’t expect greatness, but Neve was surprised she kept encountering it.
“How very kind of you,” the fortune teller added, with enough of a pause between that and the previous thanks that it seemed to be about what she’d just thought rather than said. “Now, I’m nowhere near the open flames in your hands, am I? Nothing up my sleeves.” He spread his bare arms. “There’s nothing under the table, because your hands would block any mechanism I might use to manipulate the candles.”
“I’ll take your word for that.”
“You shouldn’t take my word for anything.” He leaned back in his chair in a display of casual bravado, showing how far away he was from the table and the candles. A mere flicker wouldn’t convince her of anything, because even a focused blow from a distance could influence flame. But she thought he wouldn’t limit himself to that, impressive small magic notwithstanding.
“Your right hand represents your head. Your left hand represents your heart. If I lie, nothing will happen. I’ll make every effort not to lie, but if I do, neither flame will change. If I speak the truth, the flames should change. Often, both will change, but you do not always recognize the truth in both head and heart, as I’m sure you understand.”
“We’re talking metaphorical heart here, right?” Neve said.
“Metaphorical heart,” he agreed. “Are you ready for me to begin?”
She nodded. The warmth in his voice was mesmerizing. She wondered whether he did hypnotism.
“I do private sessions now and then. I’m not averse to using the skills in my fortune telling.”
“Arcanium likes multiple skills.” She sounded distant from herself. She didn’t think she felt especially suggestible. Just…relaxed. Open to suggestion, but not enslaved by it.
“Exactly. Now, my dear, do I speak the truth? You’re a newlywed, just half a year.”
The flames in both hands neither flickered nor guttered. Each flame lengthened to nearly longer than the candles themselves.
“Wow.”
“Wow, indeed. Your husband is older than you by more than five years. True or false?”
Both candle flames lengthened once more.
“While I’m being honest, I cheated off of your conversation. You’re a mature, even-keeled, steady young woman who wouldn’t enjoy someone juvenile or thoughtless. And I extrapolated based on the sound of your husband’s voice.”
The candle flames remained long for a few additional seconds, so it must have been true.
He stood up from his chair and began to pace near her—just another way to show that he wasn’t directly manipulating the candles in any way. She trusted her experience that the candle magic was a trick, but he was really good at driving her crazy trying to figure out how it worked without anything in his hands or connected to him.
She also found herself fascinated by the way his muscles played underneath his skin. When she looked at people, she saw their cross-section—skin, muscle, organs, bone. It didn’t freak her out like it would some people. The human body was a fascinating thing. If she hadn’t been afraid of accidentally killing someone, she would have become a doctor rather than work as a research lab tech. Rats were less of a moral dilemma for her than people.
“Your love of horror was what first drew you to your husband, yes?”
She nodded after the candle flames lengthened, but mostly on her heart side. “I was at a Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight party with friends. I went as Magenta. He came as Riff Raff with another group of friends. Then he asked me out to a haunted house. When he wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve with Nightmare Before Christmas and Krampus, I knew we were in it for the long haul.”
“You didn’t incorporate it into the wedding, because you
wanted to keep it traditional, but you’ve planned to incorporate a chestburster theme to your first pregnancy announcement.”
Neve nearly threw the candles away, but the head candle’s flame was too high for her to trust that it wouldn’t set something on fire. “Okay, how could you possibly know that? I’m not pregnant right now, am I?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m just amused by the plan.”
“There’s literally no way you could know that. I haven’t written it down anywhere. We haven’t discussed it with anyone else.”
“I am exactly as advertised, love. I can see your past, your present and your future. Far be it from this flimflam artist to advertise falsely.”
Now he was repeating things she’d thought but hadn’t said. Neve finally felt safe enough to set the candles on the table. One of them dripped wax onto the velvet.
“It’s magic,” the fortune teller said.
“But how?”
He laughed. “Science has not yet determined how this nature works. There’s much left for it to discover. After all, it took till almost the end of the last century to realize that a woman’s clitoris was much more than what they saw on the outside—a gross oversight after studying the human body all these decades and centuries. Was it because they feared female pleasure or because they deemed it irrelevant?”
She shook her head. “Shameful is what it is.”
“But irrelevant to you.”
“Okay, now we’re heading into personal territory. I’m sorry we fought outside your tent, but it was supposed to be private. Why are the candles flaring like that?” She started to stand, but the fortune teller placed a hand on her shoulder to urge her to stay. She slowly lowered herself back down.
“Your heart and head know what I said was true. You believe yourself incapable of enjoying pleasure the way other women do.”
Neve narrowed her eyes, trying to detect any trace of mockery—or worse, intent. She wasn’t used to a man talking with her about sex without his gaze crawling over her breasts and mentally undressing her. She didn’t understand it, but she recognized when it was right in front of her.
Instead, the fortune teller was solemn once more, neither pitying nor suggestive, and his attention merely passed from the candles to her face—nowhere else. It was strange to her, as weird as his oddities. For a moment, she wondered if he was gay, except gay men seemed to get distracted by her boobs, too, so she wondered next if he was like her. Except she remembered his thumbs on her palms…
Even his smile was somehow serious this time, as though he’d again heard the whole thought progression.
“Why not ask me for the truth, Neve, and let the candles confirm? It’s no coincidence you and your husband exploded outside my tent, nor is it a coincidence the problem escalated here in Arcanium. I know you want answers—answers that all your other advisors couldn’t give. You’ve tried psychologists, a marriage counselor, a sex therapist, an endocrinologist. Everything came back normal, and every experiment failed.”
Neve stood again. This time he let her. The candles blazed as though they were torches, but he didn’t look at them. He faced her, and somehow she couldn’t storm away, storm out. She couldn’t tell if he was just that good at cold reading or whether it was all real.
It can’t be real. She had an open mind, but when most magic was merely a collection of clever tricks, what were the odds this wasn’t? Was she really supposed to believe Arcanium was the circus with the real thing?
But he’d called her by name, and neither she nor Joseph had used it.
“You needn’t look so spooked, love. I’m just a humble fortune teller, and it’s all for entertainment, isn’t it? I’ve seen your love lines. Romance is in my wheelhouse, so to speak. I’ll be honest, but you don’t have to take me so seriously.” He nudged her chin, a sweet, sexless gesture that reminded her of her older brother at the wedding. That just left her more confused than before.
“Was marrying Joseph a mistake?” That faraway quality to her voice had returned. Thoughts swirled a few inches higher than her head, but she didn’t think the fortune teller was hypnotizing her anymore.
“No.”
The rush of pure relief left her shaky. Neve nearly collapsed back into the chair.
“Why do you believe it was a mistake?” He slid back into the chair across from her, the lengthened firelight only increasing the impression of glowing eyes.
“I’ve been worried we’re on the brink of a quick turnaround divorce. Silly to be so relieved because a fortune teller told me it was okay, I know.” She dabbed at the corner of her eye to catch the tear before it smeared her eyeliner. “Might as well read my horoscope for advice.”
“You misunderstand me, my dear. Just because it wasn’t a mistake to marry your husband doesn’t mean it was meant to last.”
Following the same chemical path as relief came the sickening, sinking feeling that the ride was dropping too fast. But this was no ride, and now that she’d started, she wasn’t certain she could stop—or that she should.
“My dear, a feat that fails is not failure in itself. A mistake would have been marrying your sweetheart in spite of hating him. Or if he’d hurt you or cheated and you thought marriage would protect you from those things. You married for love. That is not failure.”
“Do I love him?” she asked softly.
“Do you?”
“Do I really love him if I can’t…” She had trouble saying it with someone who wasn’t Joseph. She gestured vaguely to her hips.
His eyes sparkled with mirth. “There are many facets to love. But you never questioned the depth and sincerity of your love for him until he did.”
She reached across the table to cover his hands, which were loose fists on either side of the truth candles. He raised his eyebrows but didn’t withdraw.
“We’ve done so much to figure out how to make it work, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to make me… What’s wrong with me?”
“Neve, they couldn’t find anything wrong because there is nothing wrong with you.”
She pushed her chair back away from the table, where the head candle had remained the same but the heart candle’s fire burned so high and hot that the bottom half of the flame was blue. Wax dripped down the side of the heart candle like blood. She blew both candles out. The tent was suddenly silent.
“What do you mean there’s nothing wrong with me? Of course there’s something wrong with me. We wouldn’t be searching for solutions if there wasn’t a problem.”
He stood and stepped around the table. “Oh, there’s a problem in your marriage, but its source is not your lack of interest, nor is that a symptom. Your asexuality is innate, inherent, genetic, irreparably bound to your mind and body.”
“Even if it’s coded into my DNA, sir, rather than a hormonal imbalance or benign tumor, that doesn’t change that something’s wrong. Sexuality is part of being human. Sex is what keeps our species going, growing, changing, mutating—keeps us variant and strong. Without it, what does that make me? Less than human?”
“What poison have you been listening to, love?” He stroked her hair back from her face, tucked a stray lock behind her ear. “If you want to make a scientific argument, there are plenty of biological and anthropological reasons for a person to be celibate and absent average sexual desire, just as there is for the opposite. And as you’ve already noticed, I abhor normal the way nature abhors a vacuum.”
“I don’t mind being weird, but is it so wrong to want to be normal in some ways? This is my marriage we’re talking about, marriage to someone I love, but I don’t know if I love him enough to even call it love anymore. And if I can’t love him enough, I’m going to lose him.”
“You’ve already considered many other options than fixing what isn’t wrong,” the fortune teller said. “Has he considered any other options other than fixing you?”
Neve racked her brain for some sort of answer for him, some way to defend Joseph from what seemed like unfair t
argeting on the fortune teller’s part. He couldn’t understand why this was so important to her—that it was part of her job as a wife to make her husband feel at his best whenever she could, that her deficiency contributed to his own sense of deficiency, that she wanted to please him with her pleasure more than anything, just as he wanted to give her pleasure with his. A certain disconnect between timing and preference was to be expected, but they hadn’t anticipated such a profound disconnect, and there was no way he could have known in the beginning that none of their experimentations would bear fruit.
“You think I don’t understand, but I understand so much better than you know,” the fortune teller said. “I’ll admit, though, that I’m biased toward those who believe themselves to be freaks.”
“Is that what I am?” Neve asked.
“You’re not average. You are uncommonly lovely, intelligent, articulate and you aren’t driven by the same lust that fuels the rest of us, which some would call a blessing. There are much fewer entanglements in the name of love than there are in the name of lust. You’re not normal, but you’re far from a freak. But whether you’re a freak or not, you feel like one, and he does nothing to assuage that feeling. He blames you for his sense of inadequacy, and you blame yourself for something over which you have no control. There is no reason why you and your husband can’t be happy that you found each other without this matter getting in the way, but I’m afraid such reconciliation seems unlikely.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because you and he have done everything you could think of to change you. You’ve done nothing to try to change him.”
“But I’m the one who’s wrong.” Her throat felt thick, as though a prickly seed had lodged itself in the center.
“No, you’re the one who isn’t normal. He’s the one who’s wrong.”
She dabbed again at the corner of her eye with her fingertip, willing herself control over her emotions. She had to endure a certain amount of turmoil from her husband, but she didn’t have to pay the fortune teller for the displeasure. She’d already humiliated herself in front of him enough. No need to add crying to the list.
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