by Mindy Klasky
At some point, I realized that my arms had clutched at him. I pulled him as close as I could. I curved my fingers against the back of his neck, brought his face down to mine. Just before I kissed him, I could see the magic leap between us.
I don’t know if he moved us out of the office or if I did. I don’t know if he pushed me onto the king-sized bed of the master suite, or if I pulled him down beside me. I don’t know if he slipped off my sandals, or if I made the buckles come undone magically, made them fall to the floor.
He was the one who looked up, though, who saw that Spot had followed us into the room. “Out,” he said hoarsely, but the dog only wagged his tail. “Out!” he said again. “Dammit, Spot!”
The command sounded so much like the famous line from Macbeth that I started to giggle. Maybe the proud lab took offense at my laughter, or maybe he just decided to obey his master, but he sighed like an old man and padded down the stairs to the floor below.
And then David was poised over me, brushing my hair from my face. I thought of the times when we’d been close before, when he’d kissed me, when he’d undressed me after magical workouts that left me too tired to move. I thought about him sleeping beside me—once—with the chastity of a brother.
“I don’t—” he said, but I put a finger against his lips. The motion made the sparks rise in me again, like a new log tossed onto a fire.
“I do,” I said. And then I turned my magic inward for just a moment, wrapped my body in a protective blanket. I used my powers to manage my cells, to guarantee that there would be no lasting repercussions from this long-fated encounter. I’d never thought that I would use that particular magic, harness that particular knowledge from one delicately illustrated volume in my library.
When I felt a perfect understanding, recognized the snick that told me that my spell had set, I turned back to my warder. My fingers fumbled at the towel still—incredibly—tucked around his waist. I tore it loose with a rioting tumble of magical energy. And then I collapsed back on the bed and let David Montrose build another, even more ancient type of magic between us.
5
“It was a mistake.”
“He said what?” Melissa came just short of executing a spit-take with her iced coffee. We were huddled at the local Starbucks, killing time until the torture chamber, er yoga studio, opened up.
“He said that it was all a mistake. That he never should have let it happen.”
“What sort of patronizing, misogynist—”
I had to cut her off. I’d already run through the entire roster of name-calling a dozen times since my overprotective, straitjacketing, strong-willed pig of a warder had sent me packing the night before. “I really don’t think that he meant it that way.”
“What other way is there to mean it?”
“The witch way.”
“The which way?”
“Witch. You know. Magic.” I tried to drown the word in a dip of shaken iced tea and lemonade.
“Shouldn’t he have thought of that before he took you to bed?”
“That’s the thing. I’m not certain that he took me. I think that I might have been the one doing the taking.” I grimaced, shoving aside memories of the second spell I’d ever worked, a love spell that had gone ridiculously astray. “I’m the one whose powers were sparking out of control. I’m the one who was working magic when I had absolutely no right to do so. Those were his papers. It was his job I was interfering with.”
“And the only thing he could think to do was rip your clothes off, to distract you?” Melissa’s scorn was palpable.
I shrugged. I’d run out of arguments the day before. After a mutually satisfying afternoon in David’s bed, I’d treated myself to a cool shower. When I came out of the bathroom, I’d expected to see him still tangled in the 400-count cotton sheets, but the room had been empty. I’d pulled on my sundress and stepped into my sandals, humming to myself as I pinned up my hair. I didn’t realize just how badly things had gone until I came down the stairs, until I found David in the kitchen, surrounding himself with pots and pans, dishes and glasses, anything he could use to put up a domestic wall between us.
He wasted no time announcing his edict: we’d been wrong to give in to the power sparking between us, and he would never let such a mistake happen again. I might have felt better if he’d let me be responsible, if he’d let me step up and say that I had done what I had wanted to do.
Instead, he talked to me as if I was a student, as if I was the naive young witch he had first encountered two summers before. He should have shown more restraint, he explained. He should have set the boundaries. He should have sharpened his concentration, kept his eye on the warding prize. He was at fault, and he was sorry. It was, quite simply and unalterably, a mistake.
At first, I was embarrassed. Then, I was angry. Then, I was deeply, almost unbearably sad.
And the stew of emotions only continued to boil in the hot August night as he insisted on driving me home. He sat behind the wheel of Gran’s Lincoln while I huddled against the opposite door.
I thought about asking him if his rejection was really about us—about him and me. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t Haylee; I wasn’t his former witch (that was witch with a capital B). I wasn’t the woman he had sworn to protect and fallen in love with and then been hurt by when she found another warder, a man who could help her climb the Coven’s social ladder faster.
I was me, and I was utterly, completely confused.
At least he didn’t try to make small talk. And he dropped me off at the Peabridge before taking the car back to Gran’s by himself. He did say, though, that he’d be back the next night, Sunday night. Tonight. The night that I was supposed to complete my big power-recharging working.
Yea. Rah.
The ironic thing was, I could feel power stirring inside me, more power than I had felt since recognizing my dire witchy straits. The palpitations or power arcs or whatever they were had become almost constant, and my fingers tingled as if I had rubbed them repeatedly with sandpaper. Energy sparked inside me, rounded up by the contraceptive spell that I had worked, by the arcane energy that I had passed to David. That he had passed back to me.
I felt sick to my stomach.
I glanced to the side, eager to find something to distract me from the jangle of magical energy that was keeping me off center. A bulletin board hung on the wall, featuring notices about apartments for rent and dogs to adopt. The bottom half was covered by the poster that Melissa had mentioned the week before, the ad for the high-school production of The Tempest. Empower The Arts proclaimed bold white letters, printed on a diagonal.
Prospero’s face peered out at me above the slogan. Melissa was right. The actor did look like David. It was something about his eyes, combined with the line of his jaw. And his lips….
I forced myself to look at Melissa, to twist my own lips into some sorry third cousin twice-removed of a smile. “Enough about my life of witchy glamour. How are you?” She grimaced and stirred the ice cubes in her milky coffee. That look could only mean another collision on her own personal dating highway to Hell. “That good?” I asked. “Who was he?”
Melissa’s love life read like the Rand McNally Atlas of Dating Disasters. She was determined to find the Perfect Man by the day that she turned thirty, a deadline that was all too rapidly approaching. No one could accuse her of sitting back and letting the world move around her, though, of her passively waiting for action without trying.
She had worked through a pantheon of dating rejects over the years, tallying up more first dates than any girl should suffer in a lifetime. She fit in at least one a week, selecting her endless string of hopefuls from a variety of sources: FranticDate.com was a favorite (although I kept telling her that she was bound to end up with an axe murderer if she kept that up), Washington Today Magazine (where there were more married men looking for a bit of spice on the side than there were good, solid candidates for marriage), Dedicated Metropolitan Singles (a constant source of earne
st young men who weren’t quite ready for a prime-time dating experience). Then there was the great catchall, the collection of “independents” who came recommended by friends and family (where “friends” was a loose category, elastic enough to include such shrewd judges of character as the clerk at the local monolith bookstore who had recommended his cousin one evening when Melissa had taken an inordinately long time to find her discount card in the bottom of her purse. The cousin had turned out to be a Nietzsche freak with a lisp. Man and Thuperman became a tagline for months).
“Which one was this?” I asked, bracing myself for my best friend’s tale of woe. Okay, who was I kidding? I loved her stories—each and every one of them. They made the shambles of my own nondating life seem a little less dire. What was the word? Schadenfreude? I had to admit it—I took pleasure in her misfortune. What else were best friends for?
“An independent.” Even in my emotionally frazzled state, I barely suppressed a grin. The independents were the best. Or at least the weirdest.
“Where’d you meet him?”
“At the wholesale flower mart. I went down there yesterday to buy some herbs.”
“Oooohhh…A man who knows flowers!” I put all my energy into being fake-impressed.
“Yeah. But I’d never seen him there before. He pulled up in a dusty Chevy truck—one hundred percent baseball, mom and apple pie. Big guy—he looked like Grizzly Adams’s more athletic brother.”
At the mention of the pickup, my heart twinged, but I continued gamely, “So you fell for his outdoorsman’s soul?”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
“Can they now?” I tried not to sound too pitiful, thinking of the deception I’d experienced the day before.
Unaware of my momentary mental retreat to my own dating disaster, Melissa shuddered and plucked at the loose shirt she had donned for our yoga class. “At first, I didn’t think anything was strange. He left his truck at the flower mart, and we took the subway over to Chinatown. When we got up above ground, he whipped out a bottle of gel, you know, that antiseptic stuff?”
I nodded, wondering where this was headed. Melissa had a very low tolerance for kink, and I didn’t think Purell was going to make any great hits with her. She went on. “He said, ‘Gel up?’ and I thought, why not? I mean, we had just been pawing over all the greenery at the market, and the subway is, well, the subway.”
I nodded and said in as careful a voice as I could manage, “So you’re rejecting this guy because he offered you hand gel?”
Melissa glared at me and swirled her coffee before saying, “I didn’t mind the gel after the subway.”
“But?” I prompted.
“But the subway wasn’t the end of the story. We decided to eat at Tony Cheng’s. You know, Mongolian barbecue? The restaurant that has those heavy glass doors?”
“I love that place! It’s got those giant fu dogs outside, protecting the world from disaster.”
Melissa sighed. “Those fu dogs apparently aren’t enough to protect the doors from infection. Kevin had to gel up after opening the outer doors.”
“Well,” I said, perversely forced to carve out some explanation. “Hundreds of hands touch them every day.”
“And the inner doors,” Melissa deadpanned. “The ones that actually go into the dining room.”
“Gel up after those, too?” I asked, trying not to laugh.
“And after unrolling his silverware from his napkin. And after collecting his barbecue ingredients in a bowl. And after the chef handed back his cooked food.”
“You have got to be kidding,” I said.
“Do I look like a woman telling a joke?” Melissa grimaced and drained her iced coffee.
“That gel stuff is nasty,” I said. “It’s got to be ninety percent alcohol. Murder on the cuticles.” Neko had told me that once.
Melissa rattled the ice cubes in her cup then stretched her hands out in front of her, studying her nail beds as if they held the secret to the universe. “Yep,” she confirmed. “Murder on the cuticles.”
“You didn’t,” I said, staring at her hands with a queasy twist of horror rippling through my belly.
“I did,” she confirmed grimly.
“You gelled up every time?”
“What was I supposed to do?” Melissa yelped. “He kept offering me the bottle, with that same little smile each time. ‘Gel up?’ I mean, I could see the concern in his face. If I’d passed on the offer, he would have thought that I was some sort of heathen. Or worse—he might have called the CDC and announced that he had found the vector for every disease in North America.”
“But what was that?” I asked, still grappling with disbelief. “Five doses of gel, in less than fifteen minutes?”
“I won’t even mention his paying the bill. Do you have any idea what they do when they take your credit card to that back room?” She shook her head. “I grabbed a cab as soon as I could—I figured it was worth it to pay the fare, just to escape with some of the skin on my palms still intact!”
“Let me guess—Loverboy didn’t give you a kiss goodbye.”
“I wasn’t about to test the waters. I’m sure he would have made me brush, floss and rinse with Listerine first!”
“Another one bites the dust,” I said, draining my tea-and-lemonade in a sisterly affirmation of our sorrowful tossing on the dating seas. “I don’t know how you do it,” I said, shaking my head.
“Hey,” Melissa said, as if she’d just thought of something brilliant. “I’ve been meaning to ask you…”
“What?”
“What would you think of…” She caught herself and looked away.
“What?” I asked again.
“It’s a stupid idea.” She was blushing. Melissa White was blushing. My strong-willed, straight-shooting best friend in all the world was blushing.
“What?” I asked again, with enough force that the tattooed hipsters at the next table turned to stare.
Melissa fiddled with the empty sugar packet she had used in preparing her coffee. “What would you think if I dated…” She swallowed hard, and I tried to imagine what she was thinking, what could be so terrible that she could not even complete her sentence. A prisoner from the local penitentiary? A married millionaire who wanted to trade his fortune for sexual favors? An admitted pervert who wanted her to dress up like Minnie Mouse but promised a ring on her finger and a wedding that she could invite her great-aunt Gertrude to attend?
“What!” I exclaimed, pounding a fist on the table with enough force that the hipsters gave me dirty looks and moved to a different table.
“A customer.”
“A customer? Like from Cake Walk?”
She nodded her head, but she refused to meet my eye.
“You mean a paying patron? Someone who comes into your place of business and conducts a retail transaction like a totally normal human being? A man who has the good taste to recognize the best bakery in all of Washington, D.C., and who thinks to pay you the compliment of asking you out to dinner or a movie? That sort of customer?”
“Well, when you say it like that…”
“Is there some other way to say it?”
“It’s just that it feels scummy. Sly. Like I met him under false pretenses or something. I hate to think that the only reason he’s been coming in for the past year is because he thinks he’ll get something on the side.”
“For the past year! Melissa, you’re practically engaged to this guy already!”
“I hardly know him.”
“What’s his favorite coffee?”
“Anything with caramel. He gets one every morning.”
“What’s his favorite cookie?”
“The Almond Brick Roads. He gets them in the afternoons.”
“What’s his favorite cake?”
“My grandmother’s Apple Cinnamon Cream. But he only gets that on special occasions.”
“Where does he work?”
“Down in the Harbor. He’s a lawyer.”
“Do you think so?”
“Hello! Melissa! You just described a dream man! What’s his name, and why didn’t you say yes, the instant he asked you out?”
“Rob Peterson. And I just couldn’t. I don’t want to mix work with play. It seems cheap. Besides, if things don’t go well, I’ll lose a customer.”
I gaped at her. All of her years of shopping around, all those First Dates from Hell, they’d melted her brain. Or maybe it was the fumes from all the hand gel she had absorbed the day before. “Melissa White, if you lose a single customer, the world will continue rotating on its axis. But if you pass up this chance—this chance to go out on a date with a perfectly normal guy, who has stopped by to see you at least twice a day for God knows how long…” I trailed off, running out of enough words, enough threats to make her see sense. I finally settled on “Please, Melissa. Just this once. Date a customer. Say yes.”
She squared her shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “I can sort of see that you’re right.”
“Sort of—”
“I’ll say yes. If he asks me again.”
“You’ll ask him! You’ll say that you’ve reconsidered!”
“I—”
“Friendship Test!” She looked flustered, but she raised her chin as I went on. “I Friendship Test this. You have to go out with him. At least once.”
“Friendship Test,” she finally conceded. And then she glanced at her watch. “Oh! We’re going to be late!”
No such luck.
We got to the yoga studio in plenty of time. Everyone was still rolling out their spongy mats, finding the perfect pied-à-terre for the torture session that was to follow. After a winsome smile at me, Melissa laid out her own mat in the front row, closest to the instructor. I nodded in approval, being perfectly content to set up in the second row, slacker heaven, away from the direct oversight of the Vinyasa dominatrix who masterminded these classes.
I settled into a Half Lotus position in the center of my mat, familiar enough with the drill to know that I was supposed to be centering myself, finding my core, understanding the peace and harmony and balance in my body. Instead, I used the time to replay the horrific embarrassment of the day before, the instant that I realized just how wrong everything had gone between David and me.