Must Love Magic

by Erica Ridley

  “I swear to God, if you say that one more time, I’ll—”

  “Gentlemen? Am I interrupting?”

  Trevor cringed at the censorious tone to Dr. Papadopoulos’s voice. “No. Berrymellow was just leaving. Weren’t you?”

  “Doctor Berrymellow.” He scooted his foot back to let Dr. Papadopoulos pass.

  Ignoring him, Trevor turned to his boss. “Thanks for stopping by. Please sit down wherever you like. Not you,” he hissed at Berrymellow when the unctuous jerk tried to weasel back in through the semi-closed door. “Out. Out!”

  Trevor locked the door before taking his seat, just to make sure Berrymellow stayed on the outside. Two twin objects blocked the thin band of fluorescent light between the edge of the carpet and the bottom of the door.

  Berrymellow’s feet.

  The little bastard was going to stand right there and blatantly eavesdrop on the whole freaking conversation. Unbelievable. Too bad Dr. Papadopoulos’s chair faced his desk instead of the doorway, or she’d see what a nut job that guy was.

  “So,” she said, apparently unconcerned about being locked in Trevor’s office. Probably Berrymellow pulled that kind of shit on her all the time. “My assistant says you were looking for me?”

  “Yes.” He tried to think of some way to phrase his discovery so that she would understand and Berrymellow—that ridiculous snooping jerk—would still have no idea.

  Nothing presented itself.

  “Yes,” he said again, forcing himself not to care whether or not Berrymellow eavesdropped. “I have some news.”

  “Oh?” she said with a polite smile.

  Trevor took a deep breath. “There’s an old legend about a mysterious Scottish adventurer named Angus the Explorer.”

  Dr. Papadopoulos nodded. “I’m familiar with the tale.”

  “You are?” He lifted his brows, impressed. If he’d found the bones pre-Daisy, he wouldn’t have had the first clue what they meant. “Do you know where he went?”

  She frowned. “I thought no one knew where he went. Wasn’t that the whole mystery?”

  “It was… but now we do know. Whether he intended to or not, I can prove he successfully sailed to the Americas. Specifically, Costa Rica.”

  Dr. Papadopoulos leaned forward, her typically unemotional face showing the first signs of true interest. “As in, Guanacaste, Costa Rica? Where you took the students on the senior Anthropology trip?”

  He nodded. “His last stop was Nuevo Arenal. Walking distance from our campsite.”

  Soft choking sounds came from the other side of Trevor’s door. Dr. Papadopoulos didn’t seem to notice.

  Her eyes focused on his. “What would Angus the Explorer have been doing so far inland?”

  “Trading,” Trevor answered. “Possibly to finance his return voyage.”

  “Are you sure you can prove his identity?” she asked. “Publishing-sure?”

  “I just got confirmation this morning.”

  The choking sounds on the other side of Trevor’s door deteriorated into desperate gagging noises, as though Berrymellow was coughing up a hairball the size of a rat.

  “What kind of confirmation?”

  Trevor opened his desk drawer and handed her one of the shards of pottery. “See the markings on the inner curve?”

  She nodded. “I remember seeing something similar on the other pieces you found.”

  “Then you’ll be delighted to see this.” He turned his laptop screen in her direction.

  “Branding, that many centuries ago?” Dr. Papadopoulos’s eyebrows arched at the laptop screen. “I wasn’t wrong about you after all.”

  Trevor’s breath tangled in his throat. As in, she still thought he was a shovel-wielding maniac with an Anthropology degree?

  “It—it’s not a flight of fancy,” he managed to get out. “It’s really real. I’ve spent countless hours calling and emailing and faxing every historian and archivist and curator alive, begging for copies of extant samples, scraps to prove—”

  “I believe you.” She tossed him a “don’t be ridiculous” look. “It’s not you I have to worry about.”

  He blinked. “Who do you worry about?”

  Her eyes fluttered skyward. “Joshua Berrymellow, of course.”

  “Berrymellow?”

  His door thunked as if something large and redheaded had crumpled against it.

  “I think he might be on the edge of a psychotic break. He’s been having increasingly far-fetched paranoid delusions. First, that you’d somehow harmed Katrina, when she was safe and sound in Costa Rica the whole time.”

  “Yep,” Trevor agreed quickly. “Safe and sound the whole time.”

  “Next, that you’d killed that visiting professor in some bizarre murder-suicide. What was her name? Professor Fey? He swore you’d both entered the office and that neither of you came out. That there had been grunting and screaming and then silence.”

  “Grunting and screaming,” Trevor repeated. “Me and Daisy.”

  “Poor Joshua was beside himself. We had to break down your door just to shut him up.”

  Trevor choked back a shout of laughter. “That’s why my door was off the hinges?”

  “I do apologize for that. Maintenance fixed it as soon as they could.” She gave him a what-can-you-do shrug. “The third strike came last week, when Joshua said your friend couldn’t possibly be a professor because she was the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy! And that her mother had beamed down into the hallway right before his eyes, like Captain Kirk exploring an uncharted planet.”

  “Wow,” was all Trevor could think to say. “Sounds… crazy.”

  “Doesn’t it? In my opinion, there’s no way we can award tenure to someone that delusional. It’ll just be up to the rest of the board.” Dr. Papadopoulos rose to her feet and headed to the door. “See you at the meeting.”

  At the sound of the bolt retracting from the lock, the heavy shadow fled from the other side of the door.

  The moment Dr. Papadopoulos stepped into the hallway, Trevor grabbed a manila envelope and the stapler from the top of his desk and dashed for the windowsill. He pushed the shiny silver band into the envelope with the edge of the stapler, just in case touching it was enough to snatch him from this dimension. No way was he taking chances, not when he was so close to keeping his coaching position and his job.

  He licked the flap closed, stapled it five times, and threw everything into the trash. No more ring. No more Daisy.

  No more temptation.

  Chapter 27

  Tuesday morning. Tenure morning. Two hours left to go.

  With his fingers curled in a death-grip around the strap of his laptop case, Trevor pushed through the entrance to the Anthropology building and strode down the door-lined hallway.

  His eyelid twitched. He had to settle down. His muscles tensed and jerked as though he’d been up all night drinking double shots of espresso. Relax. Think calm thoughts. Don’t get ahead of yourself.

  He’d been waiting for this day a long, long time. What was another two hours? After all, Dr. Papadopoulos hadn’t said he was guaranteed tenure. She implied she wouldn’t be voting for Berrymellow’s crazy ass, but that was only one supporter in his corner. He needed more.

  Trevor rounded the corner and stopped short of his office. “Well, well,” he said with a smile. “If it isn’t the socio-eavesdropper.”

  Berrymellow leaned against the doorframe and glared at him.

  Trevor reached around him and twisted the knob. “You want to sob on my shoulder about your impending loss of tenure?”

  “Ha.” Berrymellow made no move to follow Trevor into his office. “I’ve got an ace up my sleeve.”

  “Yeah?” Trevor set his laptop onto his desk, sank into his swivel chair and pressed the power button on his computer. “Cheaters never win.”

  Berrymellow’s eyebrows rose. “Exactly what I’m counting on, joker.”

  “If you just swung by to drop oblique hints and poker playing analogies,
consider your job here done.”

  “Yours is,” Berrymellow said, still lounging against the doorframe. “And I guess you decided not to propose to your girlfriend.”

  Trevor jerked his gaze up from his laptop. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I figured you wouldn’t.” Berrymellow smirked. “No, I knew you wouldn’t.”

  “Spare me the dime store psychology.”

  “Socio-anthropology,” Berrymellow corrected. “I study people. Here’s what I know. I want tenure just as much as you. And don’t worry—I’ll be the one to get it. But unlike a door-buster like you, I don’t come in until eight. Maybe nine, if my first class isn’t until ten. And I’ll leave by five. Maybe four, if my last class gets out early. I’m not here from dawn to midnight, soaking up the fluorescent rays and getting chummy with the janitorial staff.”

  “So, your point is that I’m a dedicated professional and you’re a pathetic slacker?”

  “My point is that there’s no room in your life for a girlfriend. That’s why I was shocked to see—” Berrymellow paused, an odd grin curling under his moustache.

  Trevor’s jaw set. Hopefully that crazy bastard wasn’t wearing a wire, hoping to trap Trevor into admitting his unrequited love for the tooth fairy. He didn’t even like admitting it to himself.

  “To see what?” he asked when the sanctimonious socio-anthropologist just stood there, squinting at him with that weird little smile.

  “To see you make a mistake,” Berrymellow said at last. “I never thought you’d give me an in, but you did. A small one, yes. But that’s all I need.”

  “Again, I say,” Trevor said with an exaggerated yawn. “I have no freaking idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Good.” Berrymellow picked up his briefcase and turned toward the hall. “Then it’ll come as a surprise.”

  Trevor stared at the bulletin board across the hall until Berrymellow’s footsteps no longer echoed down the concrete block corridor.

  What a weird, weird cat.

  Unlike Berrymellow, Trevor was dedicated. Hard-working. Conscientious. Once he decided what he wanted to achieve, he concentrated his efforts on the task at hand and persevered until he succeeded.

  Most people slogged through life half-ass, not knowing what they wanted to have or be, where they wanted to go, what they wanted to do. In fact, the only person he could think of with similar strengths was—

  Daisy.

  Trevor frowned. He had to admit she went after what she wanted with a vengeance. And she had plenty of ambition. Being a neurophysicist wasn’t enough when she could be a fairy neurophysicist. How many people aspired to that? He guessed not many.

  She was dedicated enough to put up with that skank Vivian. Trevor broke out in hives just thinking about that woman. Daisy was the poster child for determination. When she set her mind on helping him, she’d thrown herself into the project one hundred percent. Even though it was his project, not hers. If he asked her to do something, she did. Even when he was surly about it.

  She wanted Nether-Netherlandian respect more than anything else. More than a relationship with him, he’d thought, and maybe that was true, but… didn’t he want to stay at the university more than anything else in the world? Wasn’t making tenure just as important to him as making fairy was to her? It’s not like he would’ve traded baseball and anthropology for a job flipping magicburgers.

  “God, I’m an idiot.” He dragged his fingers through his hair so hard a few strands tugged loose from his scalp.

  When she couldn’t come to him, why hadn’t he gone to her? The school year didn’t last forever. He could’ve offered to spend some quality time on her turf. She’d never asked him to give up tenure for her. She understood it meant his job, his career, his future. Respect.

  So why had he expected her to give up wings for him? Didn’t he understand they signified her job, her career, what she wanted in her future: the respect she’d been seeking since before he’d even met her?

  He’d asked her to choose between him and the one thing she’d never stop wanting. No wonder she’d said no. Who in their right mind would choose a selfish person over their own self-respect?

  She couldn’t have agreed to that and stayed true to herself. Besides, her beauty and intelligence had attracted him to her in the first place. If he’d somehow forced her to stay on Earth with him, away from her friends and family and all hope of ever earning wings, she would’ve resented him for the rest of her life.

  And nothing, nothing, was worth that.

  After all, he hadn’t fallen in love with who he thought she was going to be. He’d fallen in love with who she already was: Daisy, extraordinary ex-scientist and soon-to-be fairy.

  His gaze slid to his trashcan, where he’d tossed the manila envelope last night.

  There was no doubt in his mind that the ring Arabella conjured would take him straight to Nether-Netherland. Where in Nether-Netherland was another story. Maybe it would take him to Daisy. Or maybe it would take him back to Purgatory. Arabella hadn’t exactly been happy with him when she’d conjured it. If so, Trevor couldn’t blame her. Lord knew, living without Daisy had been a purgatory of its own.

  Maybe the ring was a trap and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, Daisy was worth the risk.

  He leaned forward in his swivel chair and scooted closer to the trash can. He should go right now and tell Daisy he’d realized what a moron he was for having waited this long. Beg her to let him prove how much she meant to him. Tell her how much he—

  Wait. He was an anthropologist, wasn’t he?

  His entire field of study proved how much louder actions spoke than words. He should do something to show her how he felt. Something visible. Something symbolic. A gift, maybe. But what did you give a woman who had anything she wanted at the wave of a wand?

  Everything… except wings, of course.

  Trevor leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair in the process. That was it!

  She’d spent time and effort hand-making fake wings, hadn’t she? And what had he done? Destroyed them within moments of meeting her, that’s what. Grabbed her to him with complete disregard for her lamé creation, crumpling them to nothingness like some horny Neanderthal. No wonder she’d stopped wearing them.

  He should make her some new ones.

  They would suck of course, because he lacked the artistic ability of the average four-year-old, but surely then she’d see he really meant the things he said. Not the old, shitty ultimatums he’d given, but the new, eye-opening truths he’d finally realized.

  The Creative Arts department was just around the corner, maybe a five-minute hike. He glanced at his watch. An hour and a half until the tenure meeting. Plenty of time to pull together a symbol of eternal love.

  He raced across the campus to the Creative Arts complex and grabbed the first art student he saw.

  “Where do I go to make something arts-and-craftsy? Is there some kind of supply room with—with—construction paper or something?”

  The student stared at him as though he had an extra limb growing from his forehead. “This is college, not kindergarten. You’ve got to buy your own materials.”

  “Please.”

  Her head tilted to one side. “Well, there is the Scrap Closet. That’s where everybody leaves their leftover bits. You know, reduce, reuse, recycle.”

  “Thank you.” He took another quick glance at the time. “Can you show me? I’m sort of in a hurry.”

  “In a hurry for the Scrap Closet. That’s a first.” She led him down the hall and into a small room brimming with color and texture before sprinting off down the hallway.

  He stood and stared.

  Discarded paint tubes. Used poster board. Chunks of paper of all shades and sizes. Bins filled with rhinestones and beads. Buckets loaded with buttons and tiny mosaic tiles. Rubber cement. Markers. Glue guns. Half-filled box of crayons.

  Now that he was here, he didn’t know what to do. He’d never a
ctually made wings before, lamé or otherwise.

  He yanked two pieces of poster board from the pile. One bore the life history of Abraham Lincoln, and the other depicted the infant development cycle of marsupials. Nothing said “Please Forgive Me” quite like a wallaby in embryonic diapause.

  He snatched a pair of scissors from an overstuffed coffee can and set to work cutting out two large B-shaped “wings”. Once he had the base ready, he lined the edges with the aid of a glue gun and covered the perimeter with random, colorful buttons.

  He choked when he saw the time. How had half an hour gone by already?

  With sweeping, hurried strokes, he covered the interior of the wings with pungent rubber cement before upending a plastic container of jewelry beads and rhinestones over the sticky surface.

  Beautiful.

  Okay, not beautiful. Tacky. He was never going to have an exhibition in the Louvre. But he didn’t need the Louvre. He needed Daisy. He put them beneath a fan to dry. As soon as they were ready, he stapled two swatches of discarded fabric to the undersides for arm straps.

  He slid them over his hands to test and grimaced when they wouldn’t slide up past his wrists. He’d made the strips too short. Great. Now the would-be wings looked more like Roman shields for a flamingly gay foot soldier. With an aggravated sigh, he burst out of the Scrap Closet and raced back to his office, earning well-deserved stares from the few students milling about between the buildings.

  After setting the gaudy wings on his desk for safekeeping, he knelt in front of his trashcan to fish for the manila enveloped ring.

  Empty.

  Empty?

  How could the trashcan be empty? Trevor chucked the plastic bin across the room and slapped his hands to his forehead. He’d lost the ring because he’d left it in a freaking trashcan for the overnight janitorial staff to empty.

  How could he have been so stupid? Trevor slumped against the closest wall and slid to the floor. The edge of the windowsill dug into the back of his head. He felt like puking, and he deserved it. After all, he hadn’t just lost a ring.

  He’d lost Daisy.