Love Spells and Other Disasters

by Angie Barrett

  Me writing it down is only the catalyst.

  So this won’t be on me completely if it all goes to hell.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Rowan, honey, could you put in a bit of time today with the fan mail?” My mom catches me just as I’m putting together a snack tray for Luca and the others. She scans the food prep and her eyebrows go up dramatically. “Is that for Mr. Columbus?”

  Heat rises to my cheeks but I nod and keep cutting the cheese up. “Yes, they’ve been working so hard on that room I thought they’d like to take a break for a few minutes and eat something. Is that okay?”

  Mom snags one of the crackers, creating a hole in my display. “Yeah, sure, of course it is. I just didn’t think you paid much attention to what was going on in there.” Her eyes light up. “It’s that boy working with them, isn’t it?” She nods knowingly. “You’re totally checking him out, aren’t you?”

  My cheeks are full-on burning now. “No.”

  She takes another cracker. “I’ve seen him in there. Hard working, polite, attractive…exactly the type of boy I’d have gone for—”

  “Ew!” I snap. “Mom, that’s so gross!”

  Mom stops chewing, the smile slides from her face. “Um…okay…sorry?”

  I feel bad for snapping, I do, but I don’t want to hear about her younger self crushing on my boyfriend. “It’s just that he’s a friend of mine. A guy I know from school, okay? I get that he’s superhot, or whatever,” I add on a grumble.

  “O-kay.” She swallows whatever is still in her mouth. “Didn’t mean to tread on sensitive territory.” She grabs another cracker. “Ro, if there’s anything you want to talk about, something you need to get off your chest, you know you can tell me. I’m always here for you.”

  I keep my eyes on the cheese I’m cutting. I’m a total jerk for lying to her about Luca. “I’m fine, Mom. Really.” But I’m not ready to invite her into my world right now.

  I feel her watching me but I can’t look up. If I look up, she’ll snag me with her empathetic eyes and I’ll feel even worse than I do now.

  She turns toward the door. “I’m going to be doing some work with Zach in the office. Probably won’t be around for dinner. Ethan coming over today?”

  I shake my head. “He’s busy I think.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, if you put in a few hours on the fan mail it’ll make a dent for me.”

  Great, more writing. My hands are ready to go on strike as it is. “I’ll get to it as soon as I’m done with this.” I fill the holes she left with more crackers.

  Mom leaves and I deflate. I feel guilty about not telling her the truth about me and Luca, but I also don’t think bonding over my “attractive” boyfriend will ever be something I’m into.

  I sigh and glance at my phone on the counter. Ethan isn’t responding to my texts. I don’t know what’s up with him. The message I sent at lunch got a reply of, “All good. Having fun.” That’s it. Even though I’ve sent five messages since, he hasn’t bothered to answer. He’s not the best with communicating with me when he’s busy, but I am the only person who knows he’s on this trip. He could at least let me know what he’s up to so I don’t worry.

  Between him and my mom, Abby and baggage, the fact that my love spells work, there’s just way too much drama happening in my life right now.

  I pick up the tray. There’s no drama with Luca.

  I smile. Luca’s starting to feel like a safe haven; someone who doesn’t make me feel weird or bad or guilty. Someone who accepts me exactly as I am, just like Ethan does. It’s nice to have another person who thinks I’m worth their time. I want to be the same for him.

  “Oh hey, I was just going to come in to look for you.” Luca walks through the side door of the long room. He’s got work gloves on and some safety goggles.

  I laugh. “Nice glasses.”

  He grins and slips them up onto his head, eyeing the tray in my hands. “You made this for us?”

  I nod. “Thought you might be hungry.”

  He takes his work gloves off, then slips them into his back pocket. “That’s really nice of you”—he steps closer and my heartbeat drums staccato—“but Mr. Columbus and Samuel left for a bit. They needed to grab something from the hardware store.” He pulls me closer, one hand on my hip. “So…I’ve got time for a break…?”

  There goes those glittery bubbles again, happily fizzing through me until I giggle. “And you don’t feel like eating?”

  He shakes his head, holding me even closer. He smells like freshly cut wood and spice. I want to inhale him. I want to kiss him.

  “You want to take me up to that attic of yours?”

  Uh, not what I was expecting. “The attic?” It’s musty and dirty up there.

  He leans down and I shove the tray onto the side table. When his lips connect with mine, I literally sigh, like a whole body sigh that makes all the tension I’m carrying slide down to my feet and into the floor. I wrap my arms around his shoulders and press closer.

  It’s not a long kiss but it does the job. I’m dizzy and I swear my heart is lighter, unburdened by all the worries of the day.

  “I’ve got thirty minutes.” He seems a little breathless as well.

  I nod, take his hand, and then lead him to the back staircase. It used to be the servants’ staircase, not that there’s been any servants in this house for decades. It’s a convenient way to bypass the main parts of the house and takes us right up to the floor just below the attic.

  “You and Abby seem to be doing really well with your business.” He squeezes my hand. “You had a huge crowd today. I see those hearts you make everywhere.”

  “I know, right?”

  “All those people wanting love spells.” He chuckles. “Genius idea this time of year when everything is so wet and chilly. Kinda sad, too, though.”

  We’re almost at the top of the stairs and it’s starting to get a little claustrophobic, like the walls are getting narrow. “Sad?” I’m sweating a little and I know it’s not because of the climb.

  “Well, yeah, all those people thinking that a love spell will help them find someone. It’s a little pathetic don’t you think? I mean, I get that it’s meant to be a joke but I was looking at all those people standing around waiting for you to write them a spell today and I got the feeling that they don’t think it’s for fun. Some of them were taking it pretty seriously.”

  “I get that feeling, too, sometimes.” We finally make it to the third floor and I practically burst out of the stairwell. I don’t want to tell him that the spells are real. Not yet. I don’t want to test his feelings for me. If I do, and find out that he can’t handle the truth that the spells are working, I’ll be crushed.

  Luca stops talking about the spells—thank goodness—and instead focuses on looking this way and that, touching things, the wood paneling, the wallpaper that’s some kind of fabric and apparently priceless. “This is all original.”

  I suck in a deep breath and then let it out, releasing the tension that conversation caused for me. “Yep, and impossible to keep clean.” Okay, now I sound like my mom. “We have to go up this way to get to the attic.”

  He hasn’t let go of my hand and the final staircase is too narrow for us to climb side by side so I kind of lead him up, our hands joined in such a way that each step I take forces him to brush up against my butt, which isn’t a horrible thing for me. He doesn’t seem to mind, either.

  There’s no doorway to the attic—the stairs just open into it. It would be a super cool space if it wasn’t for all the dirt and boxes and planks of wood that look like they belong somewhere but are currently stacked in the middle of the floor.

  We just stand there at the top of the stairs for a minute while Luca soaks it all in. “This is a huge space.”

  I nod. It’s the full length of the main part of the house. Dust invades
my nose and I stifle a sneeze. Luca starts to move but doesn’t let go of my hand. “It wouldn’t take us very long to get this room looking livable.” He ducks under a low hanging beam. “The wood is in good shape, no sign of termites or water damage.” He reaches up and knocks on the wall. “This is a pretty cool attic, Ro.”

  “It’s low on my mom’s list of reno projects.” I look around the space with new perspective. It is a pretty cool room. It’s huge, it’s way up and out of the way, there’s even a restroom up here. I mean, sure, it still has a toilet with a dangling chain to pull for flushing but it works.

  If I’m going to stick around with Mom, might as well have a floor of my own.

  “We could work on it this summer. Me and you.” He lets go of my hand and wraps his arms around me. I rest my head against his chest and listen to the thumping of his heart. Imagine if we could do this forever? Imagine if, one day, Luca and I live here together.

  Whoa. That’s some seriously forward thinking going on right there.

  “You want to see my bedroom?” I know as soon as the words come out of my mouth that I shouldn’t be taking Luca to see my bedroom. I mean, Mom is busy, sure, but she’s in the house.

  “Yeah, I’d love to.” As we pull apart, he yanks me back, kisses me again, and smiles when he finally lets me go. “But we’re taking things slow, remember? So don’t try to have your way with me in there, okay?”

  My face burns hot in an instant. He laughs, gives me a quick hug, then lets me go again.

  “I’m joking.”

  I laugh, but it sounds awkward because let’s be honest—I totally want to have my way with him in my bedroom. Just the idea of him being in my bedroom has me tingling all over. Luca Russo, my boyfriend, is going to be in my bedroom. Unsupervised.

  Gulp.

  We head back down to the second floor. I don’t see or hear Mom anywhere downstairs, which is a good thing. She’s likely so caught up in whatever her and Zach are working on that she won’t even know Luca was here, I mean, that he stopped working long enough to tour our place.

  I will introduce her to him. At some point. Just not now. I want to keep Luca a secret for a while longer.

  Thankfully I had the sense to clean my room on Sunday so it’s not resembling a trash yard at the moment.

  Luca walks in, does what he did upstairs, looking at the curve of the walls, the beams that are high up.

  “I didn’t realize you were in the turret.” He looks out the window. “This has got to be the second coolest space in this house.”

  I beam, feeling a rush of pride. Mom’s room is on the other side of the hall. It’s considered the master and has its own restroom. I think of my room as a master, too, because it’s a fairly large space, big enough for a king-size canopy bed as well as a walk-in closet and a fireplace. It’s also circular, so the built-in oak shelves actually curve along one wall. Luca is checking them out already.

  He’s running his hands along the wood. “This is incredible workmanship. All the woodwork in this house is amazing but this showcases skill that you just don’t see anymore. My grandpa would have loved this. I don’t see any nails holding it all together.” He bends a little so he can look under some of the shelves, then straightens and grins over at me. “Yep, you definitely have one of the best rooms in the house.”

  “We moved in when I was seven and Mom let me pick whichever room I wanted. There are two on this floor and four more on the third floor.” I sit down on my bed and only as an afterthought realize that Luca could sit there, too, with me. We could even lay down for a bit and cuddle. I soooo want to do that.

  “How many square feet is this place? Four thousand or so?”

  I grimace as I watch him inspect the room some more. “I have no idea, actually. We inherited it from my dad…kind of. I mean, Dad was dead and the only son of the Marshalls. They were estranged, though.”

  “Yeah, I knew that.” Luca turns around, sees me on the bed, then moves to sit next to me. His weight jostles me and I kind of by accident, on purpose, fall into him a bit. He takes the bait and wraps his arm around me so I can nestle closer. “The Marshalls were super old when I was a kid. Scary, too.” He chuckles. “They used to get so mad when kids would come to trick or treat at Halloween. They wanted no part of any holiday. Can you imagine how awesome a house like this could look at Halloween? Didn’t even decorate for Christmas or anything.”

  My mom doesn’t decorate for Halloween, either, but we wouldn’t turn kids away on the holiday. They just don’t dare walk up to the front door for treats. “I was two when Dad died.” I suck in a deep breath, let it out, and with it the sting that comes whenever I think about how he died. “He never got a chance to tell me about his parents. My mom knew, though. She’d tell me the stories that Dad told her. How strict they were, how frugal.” I never wanted to meet them. From the stories Mom told, they were really awful to Dad when he got older. Maybe because he stopped doing what they wanted him to do, that he started to push back at their ideas for his life. Maybe that’s why they did the things they did to drive him away.

  “I heard they died within a day of one another. No one really knows, though. One day an ambulance showed up, no siren when it was leaving, and then the next day, same thing. That’s how the story goes anyway.” He squeezes me closer. “I’m sorry you lost your family like that. Your dad, your grandparents.”

  “My dad died in a car accident. The car was totaled. Mom hasn’t ever told me the details exactly but I found pictures of the car after the wreck. They were in some paperwork I found with Mom’s stuff when I was cleaning up some things in her office. The car was barely a car. I mean, it was all crumbled in on itself. The passenger side worse than the driver’s. Mom said that the doctors told her that Dad died quickly.”

  After she did the past-life regression on me and I had that awful nightmare of the car accident, I woke up screaming. Mom had come rushing in to find out what was happening and when I told her what I’d experienced in my dream, how vivid it was, she’d explained it as contact with Dad. Normal moms would have chalked it up to imagination but not my mom. No, she believed that somehow I’d opened myself to him enough to live through his trauma. She’d been super excited that Dad had reached out, but I had been horrified. In my dream, he definitely didn’t die quickly and he totally knew what hit him.

  If what Mom said was true, which I didn’t believe, why would my father want me to see that? She didn’t know I’d been snooping through the photos of the accident just before she did the past-life regression, so she didn’t know that what happened had nothing to do with Dad reaching out and everything to do with being traumatized by another one of my mom’s experiments and by my imagination and fear taking over after what I’d seen in those photos.

  I never did tell her. Not that I’d been snooping or how much her past-life obsession freaked me out. How do you tell your mom that you wished with all your heart that she was normal? I wanted a mom who would console me, cuddle me, make me feel safe. Instead, her eyes were sparking with a look I knew intimately and she barely patted my back before she was off to brainstorm ideas that involved more experiments.

  “I’m so sorry, Ro.” He pulls me onto his lap then and I wrap my arms around him so I can lean my head on his shoulder.

  I like being here. I like smelling him, touching him, having his big, strong arms wrapped around me. I like how his calm, steadiness washes away my panicky thoughts and fears so that I can focus and breathe.

  “Anyway, we didn’t find out about this place until five years after he died. By then my grandparents were dead, too. And yes, the lawyer did tell us that they died within a day of each other, the same year as Dad died, actually.” Which I will admit is an uncanny coincidence.

  “And that’s when you moved here,” he says as he nuzzles the top of my head. “Lucky for me.”

  I get that thrill of excitement, the buzz of wha
t-if. The sweet words he says… They make me want to say all kinds of things to him. But I don’t because I don’t want to come off as infatuated, even though I kind of am. Who wouldn’t be, though?

  “My mom was supposed to go with him that night,” I say instead. “If she’d been in the car with him, she’d have died, too.”

  He runs his fingers up my arm. “Weird how things happen in certain ways.”

  “Yeah, she says it was some kind of divine intervention or something. That there’s a reason she’s alive now.” I say it was luck.

  “So, what stopped her from going?”

  “Rowan did, actually,” my mom says from the doorway. Her arms are crossed, her expression none too pleased. “Just a friend from school, huh, Ro? I’d say it’s time for you to introduce your boyfriend to me, isn’t it?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Luca is super smooth where I’m in full-blown panic mode.

  He shifts me to the side, gets up, and holds his hand out for Mom to shake.

  Mom, although clearly angry, is too polite to refuse. I think she’s also a bit impressed that Luca obviously has the guts to face her.

  “Sorry, Ms. Marshall, this isn’t the way I wanted to introduce myself.” He shakes her hand. “I’m Luca Russo.”

  “Luca goes to Fern County,” I blurt.

  “Luca Russo? Aren’t you the boy they’re always gushing about in the local paper? You’re really good at football, right?”

  It surprises me that Mom knows a detail like that.

  “Used to be.” He clears his throat. “Got injured, so now I’m done with that.”

  “I’m sorry.” And Mom does sound sorry. If there’s one thing she a number one fan of, it’s doing what you love. “And you and Rowan are…” She looks at me then and the weight of guilt drop back onto my shoulders.

  “I should have told you,” I say which is an echo of the look she gives me. “I just wasn’t…ready.” Which is the truth.

  “You should have been honest.” Her voice sounds angry but her eyes look hurt. “Let’s keep the bedroom off-limits, okay, Luca?”