Impractical Magic

by M. J. O'Shea

  Praise for

  Newton’s Laws of Attraction

  by M.J. O’SHEA

  “M.J. O’Shea did a wonderful job of telling both sides of the story and making me feel for both of the MCs in this book. This is a definite must read. You will be kicking yourself if you miss it!”

  —The Novel Approach

  “A sweet book about re-kindling an old friendship and love with a lot of pining…. I loved this story and can highly recommend it.”

  —Prism Book Alliance

  “Newton’s Laws of Attraction is a light read, with the right amount of angst. It’s well written, fast paced, sweet and very funny. If you believe in giving love a second chance, get this book… let it warm your heart.”

  —Gay List Book Reviews

  “Yes, buy this book. Read it! I swooned and cried and wanted to scream at and hug the characters. But we get our HEA and it made me so happy! LOVED this book.”

  —Live Your Life, Buy the Book

  “The love story between Rory and Ben is beautifully told without dragging the reader through chapters of preamble and teenage angst. GREAT READ.”

  —MM Good Book Reviews

  “Ms. O’Shea imbued the two men with such heartbreaking emotions they became real—and damn near broke my heart along with their own. Thankfully there’s a happy ending!”

  —Top 2 Bottom Reviews

  By M.J. O’SHEA

  Catch My Breath

  Cross Bones (DSP Anthology)

  Newton’s Laws of Attraction • Impractical Magic

  Stroke!

  LUCKY MOON SERIES (WITH PIPER VAUGHN)

  Moonlight Becomes You

  ROCK BAY SERIES

  Coming Home

  Letting Go

  Finding Shelter

  ONE THING SERIES (WITH PIPER VAUGHN)

  One Small Thing

  One True Thing

  Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Copyright

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  5032 Capital Circle SW

  Suite 2, PMB# 279

  Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

  USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Impractical Magic

  © 2014 M.J. O’Shea.

  Cover Art

  © 2014 Anna Sikorska.

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

  ISBN: 978-1-63216-062-1

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-063-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  June 2014

  Chapter 1

  “B, I know you’re off adventuring in the big bad city or whatever, but why is it you can’t come home to visit more often? Can’t you at least come for the Fourth of July? It’s tradition.” Fenton Keene, or Fen to anyone who wasn’t his student and didn’t want to get kneed in the balls, was still mad. Ben, his best friend in the whole world, had freaking ditched him for an entire year to go live out his dreams of spreading art to the masses or some kind of bullshit like that. Yeah, it was Ben’s dream, and it might be selfish of him, but Fen hated it.

  “I miss you,” he added. That didn’t sound remotely pathetic. Right?

  It had been weird since Ben left, two whole weeks of weird since the last day of the school year and that sad, awkward good-bye dinner they’d thrown him with the other teachers. Weird, yes, and empty and boring and not to Fen’s liking one little bit. Sure, Ben had always had his own place, and Fen had lived alone since he’d moved out to California from Michigan, but they’d spent so much time together in previous summers that they might as well have been roommates. The quiet in Fen’s apartment was deafening.

  Ben had the nerve to laugh. Laugh. Fen would’ve been mad at him for mocking, but Ben’s laugh sounded off. Sad. Fen had a pretty good idea why. “You know I’d fly home every weekend if I could afford to, Fenster. Things are great here, but LA’s too hot.”

  Chico was hot in the summer too. Hell, from what Fen had been seeing on the news, there wasn’t much relief from the swelter anywhere up and or down the West Coast. Fen was pretty sure that wasn’t why he didn’t like it. So Ben was lying. Lying about his lack of happiness and why he was planning to avoid home even on his breaks from his shiny new glamorous job. He had the money for plane tickets. He was just being a chicken.

  “You don’t sound happy, man.” It was an attempt. Not a good one apparently.

  Ben made a grumpy noise. “Fen….”

  “Sorry,” Fen mumbled. “Maybe if you talked to your boyfriend instead of being a stubborn ass, you wouldn’t sound like someone killed your cat, your dog, and maybe even your grandma.”

  Fen didn’t know what was up with Ben and Rory exactly. They’d been teetering on the edge of happily ever after and rings and shared mortgages and shit for half the school year and then all of a sudden, come a month or so ago, Ben froze the poor guy out. Ben wasn’t happy, Rory really wasn’t happy, and as a result Fen wasn’t happy and that needed to change. Being stuck in the middle of friends’ relationship problems sucked. Especially when one of them was too far away for Fen to force him do anything about it.

  “What are you up to today?” Ben asked. Fen let him change the subject. He’d get back to it soon enough, and getting Ben to talk about it hadn’t worked yet.

  “Not much. Going to chill by the pool later with Jeremy and—” Oh, shit. Probably best not to mention him.

  “Rory. You can say his name, dude. I’m not going to let our fucking issues make things weird for you guys.”

  “A bit late for that. But okay. Rory. I’m going to have beers by the pool with Jeremy and Rory.”

  “Hey, maybe there will be some bikini chicks or whatever for you to check out.” Fen nearly felt Ben’s cringe through the phone even though he’d forced a light tone. Nice try on the casual, B. His name gives you an actual physical reaction.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Fen was more worried about his best friend’s happiness than finding a summer hookup.

  “Well, hey, I’ve gotta go teach class. I’ll talk to you in a few days?”

  And now you’re going to escape. Fen sighed. “Yeah. This still sucks.”

  “I know. I’ll see you when you and Finchy come visit me.”

  Fen chuckled at that. “If you call Jeremy ‘Finchy’ again, he’ll probably toss you into the Pacific. You’re awfully close to it now, down in glamorous LA. I wouldn’t tempt him.”

  For the first time Fen got an actual chuckle out of his best friend. “He’ll get over it. He always does. Love you.”

  “Love you too, B.”

  FEN WISHED he felt better when he hung up. He didn’t. He felt unsettled and empty an
d wrong and fucking annoyed by the fact that he was being so mopey and feely in the first place. What the hell is wrong with me? I’m like all hormonal and shit. Yeah, his best friend had fucked off to LA to be part of some fancy art-for-the-people program. It sucked, sure, but he’d be back in eleven months. Fen couldn’t believe that was it. There was a restless moon or something. Made him all itchy and uncomfortable in his skin.

  Shake it off.

  He tried to vacuum—not that his rugs needed it. He’d vacuumed three times already since school got out. He cleaned his kitchen until the granite was shining and he could nearly see his face in the stainless steel panels of his fridge. He made his bed and even organized his shirts. Still didn’t feel good. Fen even thought about decorating. He’d never gotten around to it. His apartment felt temporary—he’d always been the house type, and if it didn’t have a yard and a dog, it wasn’t home. Maybe making his apartment feel more like a home would help. He made it as far as thinking he should drive to the mall, maybe check out some decorations for his place, before he thought, Nah, and didn’t even bother changing out of his flip-flops. Rory and Jeremy would be there soon. He just sighed onto his plain, boring gray couch and tried to get interested in daytime TV, which was seriously massive amounts of crap on pretty much every available channel. Wow.

  FEN DIDN’T feel any better two hours later when his friends and fellow teachers with nothing better to do showed up to hang out at his building’s pool. Jeremy chattered a mile a minute as usual, sunglasses perched on his head and holding his dark hair off his forehead, arms full of coolers and towels and magazines, but Rory hung back, quiet and morose. He looked like Ben had sounded earlier. He’d gotten noticeably thinner, his skin was pale and wan even by winter standards, and his usual bouncy caramel-colored waves looked limp. Fen wasn’t like Rory and Ben, all sad and mopey, but he still slumped in his deck chair and let Jeremy’s happy chatter wash over him. Rory sat quietly too, sipping his beer pensively and staring at nothing.

  “This sucks,” Fen muttered for what had to be the tenth time that day. The pool was clear and blue and pretty, his beer was still cold and deliciously refreshing, he wasn’t even burnt yet, but everything felt off. Like sour milk in his coffee off. Ugh.

  “It’s a nice day, dude,” Jeremy grumbled. “You’re at the pool. Your friends are here to hang out with you. We have all summer away from the kids. Quit bitching.”

  “Not all of my friends are here.” Okay, so he was pouting a little bit. A grown-ass man pouting. Not cute. Rory looked down at his lap, but he still didn’t say anything. Jeremy elbowed Fen in the side and gave him a significant glare. Rory must’ve noticed.

  “You guys can talk about Ben in front of me. I miss him too, you know.”

  Sounded a lot like what Ben had said earlier. Sounded about as genuine too. He looked like he’d rather hear just about any other name, or maybe he was so desperate to talk about Ben, that to hear even tiny things about him somehow hurt. Either way, it was a mess.

  “We just….” Jeremy obviously didn’t know what to say next. Fen didn’t either, especially since neither of them would tell him what the hell was going on. Other than hinting back in May that Rory had rejected him, which was a big joke seeing as how freaking in love Rory was, Ben wouldn’t talk.

  “Can’t you two fix things?” Fen asked. Jeremy wouldn’t ever push, period, and Fen knew better than to push Ben, so that left pushing Rory. He kinda hated to kick Rory when he was already down, but it was time somebody took care of things.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Rory muttered. “I just… I think I fucked everything up.”

  Fen nudged him with a shoulder. “Not permanently. There’s no way. Ben’s so gone for you. You can fix it.”

  Rory looked like his heart had been ripped out of his chest for a minute, then he shook it off. “That’s gonna ruin our day. Let’s just hang, okay? I’m gonna swim.”

  He stood and stripped his T-shirt off before silently diving into the pool.

  “What’d you do that for?” Jeremy asked. He smacked Fen on the arm, kinda hard actually.

  “Owww, what the hell?”

  “We both know something shitty went down between them. They’ll work it out, just leave it alone. It’s not our damn business.”

  Fen grumbled. He might have pouted too. “I just want it fixed already. I hate uncomfortable shit.”

  “Me too.” Jeremy looked at his watch. “But I wanna have a nice afternoon and I only have like three hours before I gotta get home for dinner or Delia will skin me alive. Her parents are coming over.”

  “Ugh, why do you have to be so married?”

  “I was married when you met me,” Jeremy said with an ironic smile. “Kind of what happens after you propose and walk down the aisle.”

  “Still, doesn’t she understand that my Ben is gone and I need you?” Oh yeah. Whining now. I couldn’t get any hotter.

  Jeremy snorted. “Always nice to be appreciated.”

  “I appreciate you. I just….”

  “Miss him. Me too.” He gestured at the pool. “And I miss him too. I miss the regular Rory, I mean. We’ll get them back. Rory first, after we deal with whatever the problem is between them, and then Ben when his fellowship is over.”

  “In a year.” Those months still felt like they stretched out into eternity. If a few weeks of summer sucked without his best friend around, he couldn’t imagine a whole school year with some rando right next door squatting in Ben’s classroom.

  Jeremy rolled his eyes and took a long swig of his beer. “You’ll survive. Rory will survive. Ben will survive. Maybe.” He leaned back into the deck chair and closed his eyes. “Now, no more stressing during pool hours. It ruins my tan.”

  Fen took the liberty of dropping a few lovely wet ice cubes from their cooler right onto Jeremy’s belly. He probably shouldn’t have been surprised when he ended up tossed in the pool, sputtering to the soundtrack of Jeremy and Rory’s cackles.

  “HEY, MA,” Fen said into the phone later that night when Rory and Jeremy had both gone their own ways. The weird feeling was back, after having been pushed down for a few hours while they horsed around in the pool. He didn’t like it. He’d been all over his apartment again, not able to stay in one place for more than a few minutes at a time, but ended up in his bed with a book. Like that was gonna happen. He’d tried to read, though, for a few valiant minutes, before he broke down and called his mom. Again.

  “Fenton, darling?”

  He smiled. “Seeing as though your other child is a girl with a much higher voice, I’d go with a high likelihood of it being me. Especially since I called your cell and cell phones have the convenient feature of caller ID.”

  “No need to be a smart-mouth,” his mom chided. “I could always hang up.”

  He decided to ignore that. His mom wasn’t gonna hang up on him. She’d never do that. “I was just calling to see what you were up to.”

  “Not much different than yesterday. Or Monday.”

  His mom sounded perplexed. He probably would’ve too. Fen hadn’t called his family so often since he was a freshman in college with a bad case of homesickness.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Perceptive, that one.

  He kinda wished Michigan wasn’t so far away. Maybe he should pick up a plane ticket and go visit. Or maybe not. It would be great to see his family, but there wasn’t much to do at home either. Once he did the obligatory rounds of his high school friends, he’d be pretty much out of distractions other than the mountains of yard work that always seemed to come with rural property.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Just feeling a bit restless. This summer’s a little weird.” He didn’t know how to explain it without sounding like a five-year-old.

  “You miss Benjamin, don’t you?”

  His mom always seemed to get to the root of things. She’d met Ben a few times, when Fen’s parents had flown in for a visit and when he’d brought Ben to the family reunion on Lak
e Michigan the previous summer. One of his cousins had started calling them Bert and Ernie that summer. He’d had to explain to his mother what that meant and that yes, Ben was gay; no, they weren’t a couple; and they really were best friends. It was pretty awkward. If he happened to peg his cousin in the head with a football during a night game later in the week, well, oops. The little shit deserved it.

  “Yeah, I miss Ben. It’s weird without him around to do stuff with. Jeremy’s married, and Rory, you’ve never met him, but he’s kind of sad right now. I see him too, but it’s not the same thing. Ben and I just get each other.”

  “I know, sweetie. Maybe you should go visit him,” his mother suggested. “Get out of town for a few days.”

  “Jeremy and I are going down later this summer when he has a week off. He’s so busy that even if I go down there, I’ll just be hanging around alone.” And feeling sorry for myself. Which I’m clearly doing right now. Fen shook his head a little, as if to clear it. “Sorry, Ma. I’m being dumb. I need to snap out of it. I’ll find something to do with my summer, and when school starts I’ll be busy again myself.”

  “That’s a good idea.” She was humoring him. Fen’s mother had never understood why he’d moved all the way out west and away from Michigan and his family and friends. He didn’t even know what his reasons were, other than he just needed a change. He’d never considered going back for more than a visit. It was nice of her to listen to him moan and groan, though, like he was getting over a breakup or something.

  “Hey, I’ll let you go, Mom. It’s probably getting close to bedtime for you and I need to make myself some dinner.”

  “Okay, sweetheart. Take care of yourself and call me any time you need to.”

  FEN TRIED to decide what was wrong with him. Yeah, he missed Ben. He did. But they hadn’t become friends until he was twenty-five. He’d have thought he could survive a few weeks without his bestie without feeling like he was lost at sea. It had to be something else, some different force brewing its weird tea in his blood, making him all antsy and not right in his skin. He decided to drive down to 24 Hour Fitness and go for a run in the pleasantly air-conditioned gym instead of sweltering in the still, hot evening. It probably wouldn’t help much with the weird feeling, but at least it would work off the beer and chips he’d eaten with the boys earlier—and maybe a bit of his pent-up energy too.