“Carl’s been here,” I say.
“Yes. Did you see what happened at school?”
I give her my account of what went down between the two boys. She nods in satisfaction, presumably because Carl’s version mostly agrees with mine. “Life would be much easier if Ben would just move on,” she says after some thought and a drink of beer.
“He isn’t going to,” I say.
“Can you help him along?”
I look at Emily, but she is careful to keep her eyes on her yard, instead of looking back at me. She normally speaks very plainly, and not in inference or suggestion. Especially not when she’s talking to me. She knows the danger in being ambiguous with my kind.
If she’s not going to clarify, I will need to do it for her. “Two vampires slain out here in three months would be too much for them to ignore, or to let go unchallenged.”
“It doesn’t have to happen in my woods, like the other one,” Emily says.
“They’d both have my mark on them.”
“They know better than to go after you. And with Ben, you’d be doing them a favor.”
I find I do not like where this conversation is going.
“If you want me to remove a problem for you, you are going to need to do a proper binding and command,” I tell her.
She finally looks at me. “Oh, sorry, Nathan. Just letting my mind wander out loud.”
“Good,” I say. “In all of the time you’ve known me, you’ve never sent me out to kill anybody. I’m glad that you’re not going to start now.”
“What is it about Ben that bothers you?”
“Do you need to ask?”
“No,” I say. “He’s captured our Ivy’s heart in a way that nobody else ever has. Not any of the local boys – even the good ones, and not Carl.”
“Nor you,” Emily says, smiling a little bit at me.
“Nor me,” I have to admit. “Though, I would think you would rather have her cavorting with a hundred-year-old vampire than with me.”
“It isn’t about your ages. It’s about who you are.”
“Have you even met Mr. Wake?” I ask. The last time she and I had talked about him, she had not even seen the man.
“Not yet. But I am uncomfortable with how quickly Ivy has taken to him. I don’t trust that he isn’t using any of his power to influence her feelings toward him. I know you haven’t. You’ve always tried to win her affection on your own merits, and I can respect that.”
“It would be troubling if Ben were influencing her,” I say. “With the power she has already, he could do a tremendous amount of damage to her.”
“And she would then do a great amount of damage to those around her.”
“But I think it best for me to not interfere with him, unless we can prove for sure that he is influencing her affection,” I say.
Emily frowns at me.
“You know it to be true,’ I say. “Stepping between them will only strengthen their attraction to each other. Else you would have done something yourself already.”
“I know that I would make a mess of it if I tried,” Emily says. “Ivy still thinks of me as a shriveled old prude and resists any attempts I’ve ever made at giving her advice on relationships or more personal matters.”
“If only she knew,” I say.
Emily laughs. “It’s better that she not know. Nobody likes to think of their grandmothers as sexual beings. But I was hoping there was some way you could distract Ben without him or Ivy knowing it was coming from either of us.”
“Intent,” I say. “Intent is always clear for those who know how to look for it. And one of those two has survived the Great War and the clan wars for a century, and the other is your granddaughter. There is no way we could hide our involvement from either of them.”
“So are we back to me binding you?” Emily asks, with a little laugh.
“Do not make jokes about such things,” I tell her.
The next morning. I come into school on my own. Kate has a dentist appointment, so she is not sitting on the front steps with me when Carl arrives and sits down next to me.
“Nathan,” he says.
I nod to him and offer him my bag of granola. I can tell how distracted he is by the fact that he actually takes some and pops it in his mouth. Normally, being almost exclusively a meat eater, he scowls at me offering him ‘wood chips and hamster food’.
I have learned Carl’s rhythms over time. I let him take another handful of my breakfast and wait for him to talk.
“I really shouldn’t have threatened Ben yesterday,” he says, frowning at me and pushing the granola away from him.
“But you did,” I say. “And people liked it.”
“I know. But it’s not what I want them to like about me,” Carl says. “I mean, yeah, I’m big and strong, and always there for somebody that needs some help.” He balls up one of his hands into a fist and flexes a bit. “You know.”
Over the years he’s been in town, Carl has stood down every bully in the school at Stokers Mill, taken care of a couple of boys who’ve roughed up their girlfriends, and has probably helped half the school cut wood, move earth, haul furniture, or anything else that just requires some raw muscle. Even he and I had it out once, a couple of years ago when I had a hard time keeping my nature contained, and was, quite frankly, a bit of an ass to just about everybody. I had pushed things too far, offended too many people close to him, so Carl ambushed me on the way home from school one day and pounded the tar out of me.
The next day, when he saw me walking up to the building, he gave me a tentative wave. The kind that asked if we were cool, or if he needed to meet me after school again. I looked him in the eye when I waved back and nodded, and that seemed to settle things for him. He has never mentioned it since, nor have I, and we are probably stronger friends now than we were before.
I would wonder about his regrets over it, but for the Truce. Carl dealt with Ben in the way that is most natural for him, but it was the wrong way under the circumstances. It is more than that, though.
“Ivy is pretty sweet on Ben,” I say.
Without thinking, Carl grabs another handful of my granola and tosses it into his mouth. “Everybody liked what I did yesterday, except Ivy.”
“At least you stuck to just words instead of laying him flat out on the floor.”
“Oh, I wanted to,” Carl says. He balls his fist again, briefly, then very self-consciously relaxes it. “Lots of reasons why it’s a good thing I didn’t. But I embarrassed myself in front of Ivy. That’s the one that hurts.”
“She was upset at him herself. Maybe the restraint you did show will matter to her. Look,” I say, pointing to Ivy walking toward us.
She comes up and sits down next to me, reaching around my back to touch Carl’s shoulder quick.
“How are you two this morning,” she asks, looking more at him than at me.
I cannot completely figure out the look on her face, her body language. She is clearly interested in how Carl is, but also has set herself with my body in between them. I suspect that her working in her circle last night had a lot to do with Carl, but that she did not find any clarity.
“Sorry about yesterday,” Carl says.
“About time you apologized for that,” Ivy tells him. She tries to make her tone sharp, but I can feel some softness in it.
“You know I’m not always all that swift on these things,” Carl tells her.
“I know.”
All three of us look to the parking lot, as we hear Ben’s motorcycle pull in. Carl looks to Ivy, who very carefully keeps her eyes off of Ben as he parks the bike and locks his helmet to it, still keeping his dark glasses and scarf on. For his part, Ben needs only a glance at the three of us to decide to just walk straight into the building instead of approaching.
I keep an eye on Ivy as he walks past, carefully watching where she is looking. By the time Ben passes us, I am greatly relieved to see that she had just given him a quick glance and a small sm
ile, and that was it. If Ben had been using his powers to influence her, she would have had to work to keep her eyes off of him. I still don’t have to like him, or his attention for her.
“Are we still on for tonight?” I ask Ivy, to break out of that line of thought.
“You and Kate, yes? Grandma left way more food than I’d ever eat while she’s gone. Carl, you’re welcome, too, for dinner.”
“No thanks,” he says. “Working late tonight, and I have been slacking pretty hard on homework.”
“You sure?” Ivy asks, reaching around me again, to poke him playfully in the ribs. She has a smile on her face, but it still looks conflicted, as if she both does and does not wish him to take her up on the invitation.
“I’m sure,” Carl says. “Maybe tomorrow night, if I get caught up some tonight.”
“We can make sure you study,” I tell him.
“Please, Nathan. Kate, Ivy, and you together? There’s no way the three of you will be able to focus on keeping me focused. Remember the last time we all hung out and Grandma didn’t leave us food? Took us what, ten minutes to figure out what we wanted from ‘Nics, and more than two hours to actually place the order?”
I remember that night well. Carl does have a point. When the four of us get together, there is a certain energy that builds up and does a whole lot of going nowhere very fast.
“We need to do that again some time,” Ivy says, shouldering me right into Carl.
“I’ll call ‘Nics before I leave my house.”
“Good call,” Ivy says.
“Well, me and food. You know how it goes,” Carl laughs, playfully butting me with his shoulder hard enough that I almost knock Ivy over.
“How did I end up in the middle of this?” I stand up quickly, just in time to miss Ivy trying to shove me back at Carl. She loses her balance and ends up with her head in his lap. I think she lingers there just a little longer than she thinks she intends to before getting back up. “Come on,” I say. “The bell is about to ring.”
Chapter Five
Ivy Sparks
For the hundredth time, I type ‘[email protected]’ into the address line. For the hundredth time, I erase it. But I don’t erase the body of the email itself. I save it back to my drafts folder and look up. Kate, Nathan, and I are up in my room on a stormy Friday night. We weren’t planning on making it a sleepover, but when a strong wind and heavy rain rolled down the mountainside into the valley, the other two decided to not brave the twisty roads home. With all of the soil in the area still sodden from snowmelt, the storm is certain to cause at least a few mud slicks across the dark, wet roads.
I open the email back up again. Type [email protected] again. Erase it again. One hundred and one times.
“What are you so focused on,” Nathan asks Kate.
I see that Kate is even more wrapped up in her phone than I am. She seems to be actually writing something instead of just pointlessly dithering. The smile on her face, though, the way that she’s curling up her toes as she lies on her stomach, feet up in the air, tells me everything I need to know. “You’re chatting with Steve…” I say.
She blushes. A lot.
“Oooooooh…” Nathan says, giving her a huge smile.
Kate buries her face in a pillow. It appears to be official. Kate is the first of the three of us to have had sex.
“Last night?” I ask.
“This morning,” she says, with a huge smile on her face.
“At the dentist office?” That was supposedly the reason she didn’t get to school until 10:30 today.
“The dentist cancelled on me at the last minute. And since I already had the tardy excuse and my parents were at work, it didn’t take much to convince Steve to skip out of his first few classes.”
We both look at her incredulously.
“Anyways, he’s got detention tomorrow and Monday now.”
“I hope it was worth it for him,” Nathan says.
“The last half hour has been him asking when he can do it again,” Kate says, waving her phone at us.
“How was it for you?” Nathan asks.
“Oh, how do I even describe it? It was like more than I expected and less. It was daytime, so my bedroom was bright and could see everything. I was more than a little self-conscious completely naked in front of him for the first time like that. In good light, too! And on the other hand, he was just so sexy. And I know I’m not his first, so he was a lot more relaxed about it. Completely unashamed, totally casual about me seeing him. But the look on his face when I first turned around after getting undressed. It was as if he’d never seen anything so beautiful before. But then when we were actually doing it, I kept thinking I was going to bust out laughing at him, because it just… It just seemed like we must have looked so ridiculous.”
I can’t help it. I really can’t. I burst out giggling at the mental image of her trying to keep a straight face while going at it with Steve. That gets Nathan going.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “We shouldn’t laugh at you.”
“It’s Ok,” Kate says. “I mean, it is kind of funny now that I think about it.”
We all collapse into another fit of laughter. When we stop to catch our breath, Nathan asks. “Was it good, though?”
Kate bites her lower lip and grins like you wouldn’t believe. “A-plus-plus-plus. Eleven of ten stars. Did bang again.”
“You did it twice this morning?” I ask.
She nods, bright-eyed, kicking her feet in the air above her.
“You guys were careful, though, right?” Nathan asks.
“Steve is a perfect gentleman on that count,” Kate says, then sighs. I know that she hates being the center of attention, so I’m not surprised when she deflects the conversation. “How about you, Ivy? I never suspected I’d give up the V-card before you.”
“Oh, you know,” I say, shaking my head. “I haven’t found my Steve yet.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see a look on Nathan’s face, as if he wants to remind me of how attractive he finds me, but doesn’t want to be disappointed. I’m glad he holds his tongue – he’s a rather handsome and wonderful man, despite his rough edges, but I don’t really think he moves me in that way.
“What about Carl? You’ve been texting him all night, haven’t you?” Kate asks.
I suddenly become very aware that my phone is laying on the floor right in the middle of the three of us. I am so thankful for my habit of always clearing back to the home screen before I set it down. “You realize that Carl thinks of my grandma as his.”
“Yeah, but he certainly doesn’t think of you that way,” Kate says.
“Well,” I say, wincing a little bit. Ever since Grandma got home the other night Carl has somehow kept his attraction for me out of sight, and I’ve really liked it that way. The last thing I need right now is for Kate and Nathan to be bringing it up again. “He just doesn’t light that particular fire for me.”
“For as much of a hard time as we give him, he really is a good guy,” Nathan says, still with that winsome look on his face.
*****
The next morning, I drive Kate to school, following Nathan in his car. Part of life in Stokers Mill is that you always keep an outfit or two at your best friends’ houses, because you never know when the weather is going to keep you there overnight.
Ben is on my mind – has been on my mind nonstop since the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that. Pretty much back to when I read that poem he left me in my locker. Hearing Kate tell us about her first time with Steve, I’m definitely feeling a particular fire I’ve never felt before. The one that Carl and Nathan have never really lit for me, the one that no other boy has ever kindled. Not even the couple that I’ve made out with. I guess that’s why Kate got to be the first of us to go all the way. It’s only in the past twenty four hours that I’ve felt that delicious urgency inside of me. Perhaps it was just sleeping until I was able to attach it to a particular name?
Ben Wake, what have you done to me?
As if thinking his name summoned him, I hear the rumble of his bike. I look into my rear view mirror and see him behind me, approaching at a much more respectful rate than on our first encounter on the road. I also notice that we’re at almost the exact same place, just a couple of curves shy of the passing zone where he’d almost gotten himself killed.
“Hey!” Kate says. “What’s on your mind?”
“Sorry,” I say, taking another glance into my mirror at what’s on my mind. “Nothing much.”
Kate side-eyes me and shakes her head ever so slightly. Her way of telling me she knows I’m lying since we were in elementary school.
“Romance,” I say.
She smiles and nods.
“Just wondering why I’ve never met anybody that moves me the way Steve moves you.”
“Probably because he doesn’t live in Stokers Mill,” she says. “Five months from now, you’ll be at college in San Diego. A lot more options there than here.”
I look into my mirror again. Ben gives me his little twisty salute. “Maybe,” I say.
I am so relieved that Kate doesn’t look behind us to see who is back there. When we arrive at school, Steve wastes no time intercepting Kate. Nathan and I try give him that look that lets him know we know, but he never notices. He only has eyes for Kate. The way he takes one finger and tenderly brushes a stray lock of hair from her cheek as he goes in for the kiss gives my heart a little flutter.
A week ago, that moment of tenderness would have made me wonder what was wrong with me, that I’d never yet wanted that with someone else. This morning, it makes me turn my head to look for Ben. I catch sight of him just walking away from his bike. I had always considered black leather gear to be the ultimate biker uniform, the epitome of masculinity. It always conjures up images of a man’s man, tall, broad-shouldered and muscular with graying goatees.
A Witch's Fate_A Reverse Harem Romance Page 4