by Lucy March
“How does that help?” she said. “If you tell me not to think about something, of course I’m going to think about it. It’s basic psychology, Easter.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, and moved back a bit to give the birds a wider berth. “Think about…” I flailed for a moment, then said, “Ferris wheels.”
She pulled her hands down and looked at me. “Ferris wheels? Really?” Then her eyes crossed as her focus went up above her forehead, watching the bluebirds in orbit. “Fuck. My. Life.”
“You know, I’ve always kind of liked the end of The Taming of the Shrew,” Leo said, and Ms. Troudt’s focus snapped to.
“What?” she said, her voice suddenly sharp.
Leo smiled. “I don’t think it’s anti-feminist at all.”
Ms. Troudt blinked twice. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.” He met my eyes. “I think it’s about give-and-take in a relationship. Sometimes, the man has to give, sometimes the woman.”
“Yeah, except he starved and tortured her first,” I said. “He made her say the sun is the moon, just to put her in her place.”
“And when she did, he gave her everything,” Leo said. “He gave her himself, everything he owned, everything he was. He did everything in his power to make her happy. Wouldn’t you say the sun is the moon if the trade-off was happiness? Give an inch to gain a mile?”
“Are you kidding?” Ms. Troudt sputtered, throwing her arms out. “The big deal is that he made her sacrifice her integrity, her personality, who she was at her core. He tortures her to make her change, and she does it! That whole speech at the end? Just be pretty and give him whatever he wants? Place your hands below your husband’s foot? You seriously think that’s a pro-feminist message?”
“Kate’s happy in the end, though, isn’t she?” Leo said.
“Yeah, because she was written by a man!” Ms. Troudt and I said in unison, and then we looked at each other, equally incensed.
And that’s when I noticed that the birds had gone. Ms. Troudt saw my eyes flicker upward, and hers did the same. Then she sighed and gave Leo a small, tired smile.
“Well done, North. Glad you learned something in my class, even if it was just how to piss me off.” She finished the rest of her water and pushed up from the table. “I’m going to bed.”
I stood up and walked a little bit with her. “One quick thing,” I said quietly, when we were almost at the back door. “I’m not sure, but I think it’s emotion that triggers the birds. I don’t think it’s anger, though.”
She looked at me, her focus fuzzy. “It isn’t?”
“No, I think … I’m not sure, but I think it’s sadness.”
“Oh.” She nodded. “Okay. I’ll just try to stay good and pissed off until you get this worked out, then. Shouldn’t be too hard. It’s my default setting.”
She reached out, and for a moment I thought she was going to slap my face, but instead she just placed her warm palm on my cheek.
“Please be as smart as you are beautiful.” Then she slipped into the house, slid the door closed behind her, and pulled the vertical blinds, leaving me and Leo alone in the garden.
I walked over to him and crossed my arms over my stomach as I stared down at him.
“Go home, Leo,” I said. “This isn’t your business and it has nothing to do with you.”
He looked up at me, his expression serious. “I think I am home.”
I tensed. “What?”
“I still own my dad’s house,” he said. “Ben and Suzy Berger have been renting it, and they’re moving to Atlanta in August. I was going to find another tenant but … maybe I’ll just stay.”
My throat constricted. “Can’t kick Ben and Suzy on timing, can you?”
He stood up, locking his eyes with mine. “I’m taking it as a sign.”
“I thought you lost your faith,” I said.
“Not all of it.”
He kept up with the eye contact, and I knew that looking away was losing, but I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to win whatever the prize was at the other end of the staring contest, so I turned and started down the gravel garden path to the side door in the fence. “Okay. Fine. You want to stay, stay. But stay out of my way, out of my life, and out of my business.”
I could hear his footsteps crunching on the gravel behind me. I slammed the wooden fence door shut, but it didn’t have time to catch on the latch before he grabbed it.
“What’s going on here, Stacy?”
“Nothing that concerns you, Leo.”
I was almost to my car door when he caught me by the arm and turned me to face him.
“You know what this is. I’m just asking you to tell me.”
“Fine.” I let out a heavy sigh. “It’s magic. You saw it. Remember Liv and the stick-snake? That’s magic. There’s magic in the world, Leo, and I’m hip-deep in it. Will you go now?”
He blinked once slowly, as though mentally swallowing the information. “Magic.” He nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay? What do you mean, okay?”
“I mean … okay. Look, I was almost a priest. I’ve taken crazier stuff than this on faith, and if you tell me magic is real, then magic is real. Okay.”
A wave of affection rolled over to me, but I knew a world of hurt would follow if I allowed it, so I clamped it down. “It’s wonderful that you’re so open-minded. Now go away.”
He stood his ground. “I think you’re in trouble, and if that’s the case, then I want to help.”
“First of all, whatever trouble I may or may not be in, I’ll handle it. Second of all, if my theory is right, you’ll just make things worse.”
His brows knit. “What do you mean?”
I let out a hefty sigh, debating over how much I wanted to share with him. But the reality was, it didn’t matter what I shared and what I didn’t. He was Leo, and I couldn’t hold anything back from him, which was a big reason why I needed him to leave.
“The potion I gave Ms. Troudt was so she could see if her boyfriend, Wally, is her One True Love, but she saw the aura around her therapist, and that’s when the birds erupted. Then, when she got upset about him today … birds. My mother’s potion was … well, she thought it was about being beautiful, and when she felt beautiful, she glowed.”
I stopped there, trying to figure out how to explain what that all had to do with me. But it was Leo, so I didn’t have to. Something in his expression cleared, as if a sudden understanding had just washed over him.
“You took a potion because of me. That’s why you were so strange at Nick’s wedding.”
I lowered my eyes. “Strangling you at the wedding would have taken the spotlight off Peach, so I took something to make me feel nothing when I saw you. And then, when it wore off…” I swallowed, unable to finish.
So he did. “When it wore off, I was there, and you scorched your bag.”
“I don’t know how it all works yet. And I may be making connections where there aren’t any. When Liv’s magic came in, it happened when things were emotionally heightened, and all of those situations are emotionally heightened, so…” I stopped and looked up at him. “I think it’s the emotion that does it, but not just any emotion. It has to be related to something … really important to that person.”
“And I’m important to you.” It was a statement, not a question, but it had such a strong tone of longing that it made my heart hurt just to hear it.
“Don’t play dumb,” I said, my voice soft. “You know how I feel about you.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
Our eyes locked, and it was like he entered me somehow. The eyes are the windows to the soul, right? I always thought that was crap, but when Leo looked into my eyes, there he was, in my soul, warming the cold, empty space he’d left there, making me whole again. I had missed him so much for so long that I’d stopped feeling it, but now that he’d settled back inside me, I realized that I had never started living again after he left. I’d just kept breathing, and that
was something entirely different.
I couldn’t help myself. I moved closer. It was the pull he had on me; I couldn’t have resisted him any more than the moon can resist orbiting the earth. It’s nature, and it was my nature and his to be together. His hand went to my chin and nudged me to look up at him. Our faces were inches apart, and his breath was warm and sweet on my lips. He hesitated a moment, and I was waiting for him to ask to kiss me, because if he spoke, if something solid passed between us, I might be able to latch on to it and resist.
But he didn’t ask. His lips met mine and I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around his neck, my last bit of resistance overpowered by my need for him. It was zero to sixty in a white heat; his arms went tight and hard around my waist, and my hands went to his shoulders, down his arms, as if I were drinking him in through touch. He felt like happiness and hope, the first day you smell a new season on the air, that first exhilarating plunge on a roller coaster. He was sincerity and truth; love, kindness, and vulnerability; the thrill and danger of being alive in the world—all things I’d been avoiding since the day he left, because they reminded me of how this felt, and remembering was too painful to endure.
He lifted me onto the Bug’s hood and pressed against me, his hands running down my back, to my waist, the feel of his strong touch so familiar and yet so strange at the same time. His mouth opened and his tongue slid against mine, and he still tasted the same: dark and sweet and deep, like chocolate and coffee. Every touch felt like pieces of a puzzle clicking into place. Click, click, click, and the world was back to the way it should always have been.
We pulled apart after I don’t know how many minutes, both of us breathing heavily and clinging for dear life, our fingers digging into each other as though we were afraid to let go. At least I had an excuse: I was sitting on the sloped hood of a VW Bug. If I let go, I’d topple to the ground.
“If that was supposed to be a test,” I said, digging my fingers into his shoulders as I tried to catch my breath, “then I should probably tell you that my power only works at night.”
“It wasn’t a test,” he said. “It was an inevitability.”
I nodded; he was right. As long as the two of us were within touching distance of each other, this was an inevitability, which was why I’d spent the better part of my adult life buying insurance against it. I pushed him away and slid off the car, then stood on wobbly legs by the driver’s-side door.
It was time to pull the trigger.
“Leo,” I said, my voice scratchy, “things have changed.”
He raised one hand and touched my face, smiling. “They haven’t changed that much.”
I closed my eyes and blurted it out. “I slept with Desmond last night.”
Leo froze; I could feel his hands go taut, still on my waist, at the same instant that his shoulders went to stone under my fingers. A moment later, he released me.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and gave a short, shocked laugh. “I forgot about you and Desmond. There’s been so much going on I must have just … I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disrespect—”
“There is no me and Desmond,” I said stiffly. “He’s is just a guy I work with.”
Leo looked at me, his head quirked to the side like a dog who couldn’t make sense of the sound he’d just heard.
“You don’t want me, Leo,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I’m not the same girl you left behind.”
He released a breath. “How do you know what I want?”
“Please, you were a priest—”
“Almost a priest. I’m still a man.”
“Yeah? How many women have you slept with in the past ten years?”
He went quiet. “To be fair, for most of those years, I had taken a vow of chastity and was living in a monastery with a bunch of guys.”
“I’ve slept with twenty-two men.” I shook my head and held up one hand. “Wait. Sorry. I forgot Des. Twenty-three. All of them outside of the sanctity of marriage.” I let out a bitter laugh. “Hell, one of them was Tobias.”
And there it was, exactly what I’d been looking for: a hint of distaste, just a quick flash on his face, but it was there, and I saw it. I didn’t mention that the thing with Tobias was years ago, when he first came to town, way before he and Liv ever got involved, but it didn’t matter. The girl who had saved her virginity for marriage to him had given it up for pretty much everyone else in town, including her best friend’s true love. Surely that would be enough to make him understand that whatever we’d had didn’t matter. Things were different now.
I’d made sure of it.
Except then, his face cleared and he shook his head. “I don’t care.”
I pushed myself away from the car in frustration, moving closer to him, making sure that every word made it through his thick skull, so he could finally understand what a waste of energy this thing between us would be.
“That’s just the number of guys I’ve screwed. Don’t even make me count the number of guys I’ve fooled around with. Remember Frankie Biggs, from high school? I made out with him on the pool table at Happy Larry’s last year, and crazy Amber Dorsey almost killed him over it.”
Leo blinked. “Wait. You used to hate Frankie Biggs.”
“I still do. He’s an ass. This is what I’m trying to tell you. Get it through your head, Leo. You’re the good boy, the almost-priest, and I’m the town slut. You still want me now?”
He stared at me for a moment, and then understanding washed over his face. “Oh, I get it. This is the part where I’m supposed to place judgment on you, right?”
“I like sex, Leo, and I don’t think you need to be in love or married to enjoy it. I’ve never been pregnant, and I’ve never had a disease, but I know how to have a good time and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m in control of my life, and my body, and there’s no way in hell you’re ever going to be okay with that, so don’t … just … don’t tell me…” I sputtered to a stop, unable to remember how I’d ended that speech in all my fantasies about the day Leo finally came back. Not that I thought it would ever actually happen; if I had, I would have done a better job preparing.
He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “So, you did all that so I’d never want you back? Is that it?”
“I did it because I like sex, you jerk!” I said, feeling the fury rise in my gut. “Jesus. Don’t you listen?”
“Yes,” he said, quietly. “I’m listening, and I heard it all, even the stuff you didn’t want me to hear.”
I threw my hands up in frustration. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means what I heard sounded practiced, like you’ve been saving this up to push me away if I ever came back. It also means that for someone who knows me better than anyone else, you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“How could I?” I said, my voice going shrill. “You were gone, Leo. Gone. And I had to find some way to protect myself from ever feeling the way I felt…” I swallowed against the lump in my throat and swiped at the tears on my cheeks, then took a deep breath before looking him in the eye again. “I’m never going to let anyone make me feel like that again, okay? Not even you. Especially not you.”
“So … what do you want?” he asked, his voice soft. “You want me to judge you, to hate you? To go away and just forget about you?”
Unable to answer, I simply nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
“You can go away,” I said. “I know you can. I’ve seen you do it.”
And then I got in my car on shaky legs, and I drove off.
Chapter 9
I made my way out to my shed on autopilot, almost running down the wooded path to get there. My mind darted all over the place like a frightened hamster trying to get out of an unfamiliar maze. It went from Leo and the way he’d looked at me on the side of the road today, to my glowing, delusional mother and the four messages she’d left on my phone bugging me to bring her more potion, to Ms. Troud
t and her flying crown of bluebirds, to Desmond and the awkward aftermath of sex and how that was going to affect my magical supply. Then I’d cycle back to Leo, and the whole thing would start over again.
I needed to think about something else, and the only shot in hell I had of doing that was to work. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to make potions for any of my waiting clients right now; they’d have to wait a little bit longer, at least until I figured out what was happening, and what I might have done to cause it. Today’s work was going to be just for me.
I cranked the generator—this time it took four pulls, I was really going to have to get that thing replaced—and went inside, flicking on the twinkle lights. I swiped at my face, pushing away the stupid tears with shaking hands. I needed him out of my mind, out of my body, out of my life, and this was the only way I’d get respite. I shook my head violently, trying to use the velocity to shake him out of it, then went to my workbench and turned on my MacBook. It was still open to the recipe I’d tried last time, and I re-read my final note on the failed experiment.
What went wrong this time? Leo North.
I closed my eyes and breathed in and out, trying to find my inner calm. It took its own sweet time, but I found it eventually, and managed to shut down thoughts and feelings about Leo. I was at work now. This was where I needed to be.
I opened my eyes and went to work assembling the various ingredients, got an Edison vial ready, then went to grab a fresh Erlenmeyer flask and …
That spot on the shelf was empty. I glanced around, in case I’d misplaced it, but there weren’t any. I thought there’d been at least one more on the shelf before, but I couldn’t swear by it, and this kind of thing wasn’t without precedent. When I was in that space, my focus on the work was complete, and sometimes the mundane details, like reordering supplies, would get past me.
“Shit,” I said, and then glanced to the next space on the shelf, where the open-topped beakers with the pour spouts sat. Then I thought for a moment; that was one thing I hadn’t varied from the original recipe. I’d always used the flask. And what the hell, right? It was probably going to fail anyway, but I needed to stay busy. I grabbed a beaker and set it on the counter, then went into my MacBook and started typing.