Girl's Guide to Witchcraft (26 page)

“Any trouble finding us?” I asked.

“None at all.”

“And the traffic wasn’t bad?”

“Oddly enough, at six o’clock on a Saturday morning, traffic is relatively light. Even around the Beltway.” The laughter behind his words made my heart pound, and I tried to shake my goofy grin off my face. This was all too perfect. It couldn’t be happening to me.

“Come on in!” I said, finally remembering that I was supposed to be the hostess. “Most folks have gone out for the day, but there are still a few of us here.”

“I didn’t mean to make you miss out on all the fun,” he said, running a long-fingered hand through his unruly curls.

“I haven’t missed out on anything,” I said. And Jason’s smile absolutely convinced me that I was speaking the truth—as if I ever could have doubted. We climbed the steps to the front porch.

“So, Professor Man really does exist.” Leah barely smiled from the top of the stairs, her pregnant belly thrusting toward us like the body of a malevolent spider.

Jason turned toward me in mock surprise. “And here, I thought that all my years of schooling were wasted. Professor Man! To the rescue!” He slid his left palm to the small of my back, and the motion ran a shiver from the top of my head to my tailbone. “Jason Templeton,” my Boyfriend said, shaking Leah’s hand.

“Leah Stark,” she said reluctantly. I could read her thoughts as clearly as if they were words written on the parchment pages that filled my basement. She wondered how
I
could have landed a catch as perfect as Jason. She gave me another appraising glance before she stepped aside. “Well, I’d better get back to the kitchen. I promised to start the baked beans for tonight.” She whirled back to Jason with all the subtlety of a tabby pouncing on a mouse. “Jane said that you were allergic to clams, but we’ll have halibut and side dishes at the clambake.”

Jason, bless him, didn’t bat an eye. “Jane always remembers my allergies. I hope you didn’t expand the menu just for me, though.”

Leah rolled her eyes. “No. Most of the kids hate clams, anyway.”

“They’ve got good taste,” Jason said with a smile. He reached around Leah to hold the screen door for her as she went back into the house. I could have melted on the spot.

Instead, I remembered that Jason had never been to the Farm before. “Here!” I exclaimed, once the screen door had slammed closed behind us. “Let me show you the upstairs.”

As we clambered up to the attic, I waited for him to comment on his sudden shellfish allergy. Instead, he waited until we were on the upper landing before he wrapped an arm around my waist, pulling me close and nuzzling my neck. It was a good thing that he was holding me; otherwise, I might have swooned like some silly woman in a Shakespeare comedy, tumbling back down to the ground floor.

“So,” he whispered, his lips close to my ear. “Anything else I should know about myself before I meet the rest of your family?”

I squirmed, but his fingers tightened around my waist.

“I don’t suppose you have four brothers, do you?”

“Nope,” he said. “Only child. But maybe I forgot the Wyoming branch of the family.”

“And, um, you’ve always wanted to have three kids?”

“I’ve never really done the math. But three’s as good as any other number. Anything else?”

I shook my head, unable to meet his eyes. I could feel his laughter against my side. “I’m sorry—” I started to say, but he stopped me with a kiss. A serious kiss. A steal-your-breath-away-and-make-you-wonder-where-your-toes-went kiss.

“Don’t be. That’s what this weekend is all about, right? Building up our own fantasy world away from the pressure of work?”

And that’s when I knew that I loved him. Not had a crush on him. Not dreamed that he would replace Scott on the appointment book in my heart. Not imagined that he would sweep me off my academic feet and admire my librarian accomplishments as if they meant something in the world at large.

Love.

Quickly followed by a darting twist of guilt through my belly. I couldn’t help but think of poor Melissa, struggling through her First Date hell. She was working to achieve
this.
She was hoping to experience what I had been lucky enough to stumble upon. All of her strategies, her pools of men, her hopeless, hapless first dates, they were all supposed to lead her toward this warm vanilla rush of comfort, of fun. Of love.

I’d found it, and she had not. Of course, a little voice nagged at the back of my mind, I had the benefit of the grimoire spell. But a girl had to use all the assets at her command, didn’t she?

“So,” Jason said, easing away from me. “I suppose you’d better show me what’s up here, and then we should get back downstairs before your cousin thinks that I’ve carried you away.”

I knocked twice on the door to the Boys’ Room, just to make sure that it was empty. When I showed Jason where he’d be sleeping, he looked shocked. “I
thought
…” He trailed off, but the way his eye roamed over my sweater told me exactly what he’d thought.

My cheeks flushed, and I started to stammer. “I did, too. I mean, I’d hoped. I mean, I wanted…” I took a deep breath and forced myself to exhale slowly. “I’ll see what I can arrange. There are cottages on the grounds. They’re spoken for, but maybe…”

He leaned over and brushed a wayward strand of hair off my cheek. “See what you can do.”

My heart was pounding by the time we got back to the kitchen, and that had nothing to do with the climb down the steep stairs.

Jason was the perfect Boyfriend. As the family troops returned from their morning excursions, Jason met relative after relative. He let himself get roped into a surprisingly brutal game of touch football on the front lawn, managing to capture one of Simon’s twins and hold the boy upside down while a teammate scored the winning touchdown. He helped collect wood for the night’s bonfire, securing a tiny pine cone that he pressed into my palm like a secret token. He sat on the porch with Gran, holding out his hands for her new skein of wool, admiring her knitted shawl and asking intelligent questions about her latest project.

He even carried on a spirited conversation with Clara, about whether our colonial forefathers had been capable of breaking free from their Christian indoctrination to experience a true spiritual awakening in the rugged new land of America. I think that he gained innumerable points when he proclaimed that Plymouth Rock was a symbol of all religious settlement of the New World, and that the stone beneath the pilgrims’ feet was echoed in the crystal around Clara’s neck.

Chalcedony, I noticed at a glance. The stone for motherhood.

If Clara caught my intent gaze, she ignored it.

My contribution for the evening clambake was a giant casserole dish of apple crisp. Some of the cousins had brought back bushels of orchard-fresh apples that afternoon, and I had found myself grinning as I peeled and cut them, slapping Jason’s fingers away as he tried to steal slices. When the kitchen timer beeped its alarm, I excused myself from the porch to remove the bubbling, cinnamon-scented dish from the oven.

And when I turned back to the counter, Gran was standing in the doorway.

“He seems quite charming, dear.”

I let the fluttering joy beneath my heart burst through my smile. “He is, Gran. He really is.”

“I’m surprised that you’ve never mentioned him before.” I heard the hurt behind her words, and I knew that she was asking if I was ashamed of her. She’d always worried about my being different from my friends, growing up without the standard issue of one mother and one father.

I set the hot apple crisp on a cooling rack before looking up at her again. “Gran, it’s not like that at all. This has all happened so quickly. There have been so many changes, just in the past couple of months.”

“Changes?” She sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. Suddenly, I was assailed with déjà vu. I’d had this conversation with my grandmother before. We had talked about Jason, about my job at the Peabridge, about the mysterious collection of books in my basement.

I blinked and realized that we’d never had such a discussion. But we had talked throughout all my painful years of high school. Through the trials and tribulations of my first date, my first kiss, my first agonizing decision of who to invite to a Sadie Hawkins dance.

I took a deep breath, ready to share with Gran, ready to tell her about Neko, and David, and what little I had learned about witchcraft. Before I could get out the first words, though, Leah burst into the kitchen. “Oh, good,” she said. “You’ve got the cobbler out.”

“It’s a crisp,” I said, irrationally annoyed by her appearance.

“Crisp, cobbler, freaking brown betty. The kids are screaming for dessert. If you had children, Jane, you’d know that they really can’t be kept waiting when they’re excited like this. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know how you single women survive.”

My retort was hotter than the crisp in its casserole dish, but before I could spill out a venomous reply, Gran pulled herself up from her chair. “We’d best make sure all the little monsters get more sugar, then, shouldn’t we? At least they’ll work it off running around the bonfire.” I flashed her a smile of gratitude and scrambled for bowls and spoons.

The crisp was declared a success, and everyone adjourned to the back clearing for the evening’s main event.

The bonfire was everything that I remembered from my childhood. Flames leaped high against the pitch-black sky, sending up sparks in ever-changing patterns of light. My back grew chilled, even as my face was toasted by the fire. Someone broke out bags of giant marshmallows (Jason and I shared a fond smile), and Hershey’s bars magically appeared beside boxes of graham crackers. The kids tracked down long branches for marshmallow-roasting. One of Simon’s twins discovered a coveted five-pronged stick.

I learned that Jason preferred his marshmallows charred to a crisp. I learned that he liked extra chocolate on his s’mores. I learned that he could lick stray graham cracker crumbs from the corners of my mouth, in the dark, on the very edge of the fire’s light. And I learned that he could protect me from the spookiest ghost stories in Connecticut, his arm hollowing out a perfect circle by his side.

As the kids fell asleep and parents began to make noises about shuffling off to bed, Simon came and sat beside me. “It’s been a long time, Jane,” he said, nodding to Jason, as if to include him in reminiscences.

“Too long,” I sighed.

Simon held out his fist, and I automatically extended my hand. Something brass slipped from his fingers to mine. “Blue,” he said.

The Blue Cottage. The one that Gran had set aside for Simon and Carol, to give them a break from their boys. The one that was nestled on the very edge of the Farm’s property, far away from prying eyes. “Simon, I can’t.”

“Of course you can. I’ll take the couch in the main house. Someone has to make sure that the boys don’t sneak out too late. And Carol will be fine up in the Girls’Room.”

Jason’s fingers tightened on mine. I leaned forward and kissed Simon on his cheek. “Thank you,” I said.

“You look happy,” he replied, and he nodded toward Jason again. “Both of you.”

We waited a few minutes, just for appearance’s sake. Someone called for another ghost story, and there was a good-spirited debate about whether it was time to bring out a bottle of schnapps.

I waited until the singing began before I clambered to my feet. Trying to look innocuous, as if I were heading out to search for a new marshmallow stick, I eased into the darkness. Jason followed behind me, close as a shadow.

My feet knew the path to the Blue Cottage; they’d traveled the walkway often enough when I was a child. I clutched Simon’s key like a good-luck charm. I felt Jason breathing behind me as I worked the lock. When I fumbled for the light switch, his fingers closed over mine, keeping me from springing the cottage into brightness.

The moonlight was enough. It puddled on the queen-sized bed, illuminating the wedding-ring quilt that had been in the family for as long as I could remember.

I barely managed to set the key on the nightstand before Jason was kissing me. These were not the sweet, promising kisses that he had stolen on the stairs. These were urgent kisses, plying kisses. They reached down into my belly, twisted me, arched me against him with an urgency I had long ago forgotten.

We were like animals, there in the Blue Cottage. We were like fairies from the woods around us, Titania and Oberon, come together in desperate forest love. Jason tugged at my sweater, peeled off my jeans. I returned the services, pulling him closer to me.

The air was chilly in the cottage, kissed by the autumn night. We dove underneath the quilt at the same time, pulling it up to our shoulders and giggling like mad children. For just a moment, I wondered what Jason was seeing. I worried that he would feel betrayed by my too-chunky thighs, that he would close his hands around my waist and realize that I was never going to be a ballerina. I was never going to be a sculpted Russian Ice Queen.

But then his hands moved with a new urgency. Even I—a woman who had been left high and dry on the sexual seas for over a year—recognized what pushed against my belly.

“Damn!” I exclaimed.

“What?” He barely pulled back.

“The condoms! They’re back in the house.” I was furious with myself. Embarrassed. Disappointed. Desperate. “Maybe Simon and Carol—” I started to say.

But Jason silenced me with another kiss. And when I’d abandoned the ridiculous notion that my happily married cousin might have rubbers sitting around his weekend cottage, Jason sat up. He fumbled for his jeans in the pooled darkness on the floor. He reached into his pocket and drew out a ring of keys, placing them on the nightstand. He extracted his wallet. He opened it up.

And he displayed a foil packet.

A glorious foil packet.

A foil packet that was ripped open in a matter of seconds. And put to astonishingly good use in the middle of the Connecticut woods.

The early-morning sun woke me up, slanting through the window shade. For one confused moment, I thought that I was back at home. I pulled my comforter up closer to my chin, only to realize that it was not my comforter.

It was a quilt.

And I was lying under it, naked.

And I was not alone.

I rolled over to find myself looking into Jason Templeton’s eyes. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning.” I barely got the words out, as my heart started jackhammering away, and I regretted them immediately. What was I thinking? I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet! Here, I had finally lured Jason to bed, and I was going to drive him away with clambake-and-s’mores morning breath.

Before I could figure out a way to sneak out of bed, to redeem my breath by stealing Simon’s toothpaste and rubbing it on my teeth with my finger, before I’d reconciled myself to showing Jason my bare rear end as I ducked into the bathroom, the decisions were taken away from me.

Jason’s hands were firm as he pulled me close. His fingers clutched my hair. His lips found mine, as if it were perfectly natural for two people to kiss without the aid of minty fresh breath.

Which, I supposed, it was.

And I didn’t regret that lesson. I didn’t regret anything, as his fingers began to massage my scalp. His hands moved lower, smoothing over my bare back. I wriggled even closer to him, relishing the feeling of our bodies awakening, tangling, finding each other beneath the quilt.

Scott had never been one for morning lovemaking. He’d never wanted to linger between the sheets—he’d had too many important things to do, too many exciting people to see. I’d once proposed an entire “Pajama Weekend,” where we’d do nothing but stay at home, make love and eat disgustingly fattening food, and he’d looked at me as if I was mad before laughing and “getting” my so-called joke.

But Jason…Jason was a different man entirely.

When he came up for air, he said, “And here I thought it might be strange, coming to your family reunion.”

“I knew you’d fit right in,” I said. And the double entendre in my innocent words made both of us laugh. “Seriously,” I said, when I trusted my voice again. “I don’t know what possessed me to invite you. I know it can be overwhelming to meet so many people at one time.”

“At least Leah set out a welcome mat.” We both laughed again. If only my spiteful cousin could see us now….

Jason leaned back on his pillow, pulling me on top of him so that my head rested against his chest. His surprisingly well-muscled chest. His perfect chest. I mean, the man was a college professor! I hadn’t expected him to have the body that he had, hidden beneath his long-sleeved shirts, and his impeccable khaki pants.

As I listened to his heart lub-dubbing beneath my ear, I spread my fingers against the curve of his ribs. “This is too perfect,” I sighed. I hadn’t actually intended to say those words out loud. Nevertheless, they seemed right, drifting to rest in the morning cabin, settling in with the dust motes that sparkled in the sunlight. I closed my eyes as Jason started drawing designs on my back with his fingertips. “Tell me something to make it real,” I said.

“What?” His voice was as lazy as his hands.

“Tell me something bad about you. A secret, or something. Something so that I’ll know this isn’t some fairy-tale dream.”

“Something bad? You mean, other than the fact that I’m married?”

I froze.

He was joking, of course. He was teasing me. I had practically
asked
him to tease me. “Married?” I sounded stupid, but my question freed me to sit up, to gather the quilt across my chest like some censor-conscious heroine on a TV show.

“You know, Ekaterina? Marriage? I do, and all that crap?”

I knew all the words that Jason was saying, but I couldn’t make sense out of them. I couldn’t make them apply to my Boyfriend, to the man I’d just slept with.

“Ekaterina?” I’d lost the ability to form sentences, to string together subjects and predicates, nouns and verbs. Even as my belly twisted, even as my fingers and toes flamed red-hot then fell icy cold, I tried to remember how to speak, how to ask what I was suddenly terrified that I did not want to know.

Jason went on, before I could piece together a coherent sentence. “You met her, remember? At Five Guys? At the Harvest Gala?” He was sitting up now, too, leaning against the bed’s headboard and staring at me warily.

“I met her,” I said, finally managing to make a sentence. “I met her, but you never said anything about being married.”

“I told you that she was going to Historical Politics this weekend,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“But you left out the tiny fact that you’re her
husband!
”

I was such an idiot.

He’d let me make a fool out of myself. He’d let me declare my interest in him. He’d flirted with me and joked and made me think that we had a future. But he would never, ever be there for me. He would never, ever be mine. Because he belonged to someone else. To have and to hold. Till death do us part.

I was such a total idiot.

I’d seen him with her twice. I’d watched her crying. He’d talked about her research. I’d forced myself to believe that she was a grad student, that she meant nothing to him, that she was just another woman among the hundreds of women that he saw in his professional life.

I was such a complete and utter idiot.

I threw myself out of bed, tugging the quilt with me, so that Jason was suddenly exposed. Bare. Silly.

He stared at me in astonishment. “Jane, you had to realize I was married!”

“And how was I supposed to realize that?” I said, as I scrambled for my clothes. “You don’t wear a wedding band!”

“I told you that I couldn’t make dinner on a weekend night.” He honestly sounded aggrieved, as if
I
were the one who had lied, who had pretended to be something I was not. “I told you that I couldn’t get up here to Connecticut until Saturday. I gave you my
cell phone
number.”

I tugged on my pants. My bra was tangled around itself, and there was no way that I was going to stand in front of him long enough to tuck myself into its cups and clasps. Instead, I jerked my sweater over my head, slashing at my hair to free it from the tight-knit neck. By the time I had finished that maneuver, I could trust my voice with a few more complete sentences. “You never told me you were married. You never gave me any reason to believe that you were. You lied to me, Jason. You lied, and you took advantage of me.”

I shoved my feet into my tennis shoes, deciding that socks were as unnecessary as my bra. Jason took a deep breath, and stood up in front of me, completely naked.

“Jane, you’re being completely unreasonable!”

“I’m—” I started to say, but he cut me off.

“Come on! You had to know Ekaterina was my wife. You’re the one who brought her up in half our conversations.”

“But what—” My voice broke, and I needed to swallow hard before trying a second time. “What was
this
all about?” I gestured toward the bed.

“This was a break,” he said. “We’ve both been working so hard—me, writing my articles, you, doing my research….”

Doing his research. My so-called Boyfriend thought I was nothing more than a research assistant. Well, a research assistant and an easy lay. A research assistant, an easy lay and a willing partner in adultery.

My anger was hotter than our passion the night before, hotter than the bonfire that had blazed in the back clearing, hotter than the greasy flames that had shot out from my oven on the night that Jason first kissed me.

I needed to do something, needed to move. My arms rose up, and my fingers stiffened. Power pulsed inside me, building with every heartbeat. The thrumming energy of spell-work rippled down my spine. My hair crackled, and I knew that it must halo my face.

The magic was strong, stronger than anything I had summoned before. It was greater than my fumbling efforts when I awakened Neko, greater than my mastering simple kitchen flames. I opened my mouth and heard a terrible sound, a grating laugh, a murderous glee.
I
was making that noise;
I
was gloating over this power, this strength.

Part of me was mortified, horrified, afraid to even look at Jason’s aghast face. But part of me reveled in his terror. He was remembering. He was thinking back to the fire in my kitchen. He was making himself see the magic that he had denied, the power that he had convinced himself was nothing.

Nothing.

He thought that I was nothing. He had been playing me from day one. Plying me with marshmallows and Italian lunches.

I closed my eyes, but I could no longer control my rage. It spun me around, crashing my thoughts against each other. I needed to ground the force; I needed to store it away. Even thinking of dampening it, though, only made the magic surge higher. I panicked, and
that
adrenaline rush folded into the maelstrom.

My mind was moving faster than light now. Jason was frozen before me—naked, frightened. The anger, the rage, the sucking, spinning power—

“Neko!” I sent the call across space, across time. It echoed inside my skull, and yet I knew that I’d said nothing aloud. “Neko!” I called again. My familiar had been awakened under the light of a full moon; he could leave our books, leave the home we shared. He could come to me here, where I needed him. “Neko!”

“Oh, my,” he said, and under other circumstances, I might have laughed at the expression on his face as he studied the naked Jason. “I know they
say
that size doesn’t matter, but—”

“Help me!” I cried as the tremendous forces inside my body, inside my soul, began to rattle my teeth.

Neko glided to my side. He leaned in, barely stifling a yelp as he came into contact with my scarce-pent magic.

“No time for spells,” he muttered, and he grabbed one of the sheets from the cottage floor. “Here,” he said. “Bleed the power into this.” He took my hand, and I felt him pull off the worst of the heat, the core of the pressure. The power seeped into the fabric fibers, dissipating through the warp and weft. Then, there was a concussion, short and sharp as a car backfiring. The sheet flashed into brightness, every thread illuminated into instant brilliance, and then it simply disappeared.

“Again,” Neko said, and he sacrificed the wedding-ring quilt. That bulk siphoned off a little more of my rage, but there was still too much for me to control alone.

“Again.” The bed’s fitted sheet. “Again.” Pillows. “Again.” The towels in the bathroom. “Again.” The shower curtain. “Again.” Jason’s tangled clothes still strewn on the braided rug where I had flung them the night before.

“And again.” The rug itself.

Finally, I was able to breathe. I was able to look around the cottage. I was able to see Jason, freed also, trying to cover himself with trembling hands.

“Jane,” he croaked.

“No.”

I swept his keys off the nightstand before he could react, and I sailed out of the Blue Cottage, letting the door swing wide so that the freezing air shriveled the lying, cheating bastard I’d thought of as my Boyfriend.

Neko followed in my wake. He was silent as we thrashed along the wooded path, but I watched his eyes dart toward a flash of bird wing here, a shimmer of insects there. I only paused when we stood on the edge of the lawn, looking at the Farm’s sturdy wraparound porch.

“So,” Neko said. “I take it he wasn’t any good in bed?”

I burst into tears.

Neko folded his arms around me, and I buried my face against his black T-shirt. He let me cry, making a soft sound deep in his throat, which might have been a purr.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I said, when I could finally speak. But even I couldn’t say if I was referring to sleeping with Jason, or to the magic disaster. Neko just made noises of agreement. “I didn’t know. And David told me, and I didn’t listen, and now he’s going to show up, and I’ll have to explain, and Leah will watch, and I’ll be an idiot in front of her again, like always.”

“Well,” Neko said reasonably. “She can’t watch if you aren’t here.”

“Just where am I supposed to go?”

Neko looked pointedly at the keys in my hand.

“But I can’t just take his car!”

“Why else did you grab them? Besides, it didn’t seem to bother you much, taking his clothes.”

“But David will—”

“Oh, he won’t be pleased. But taking the car isn’t going to make
that
any better or worse. It’s the magic he cares about. Not grand theft auto.”

“David’s going to kill me.”

“Give him some time to calm down, then. Drive home.”

“But won’t he just materialize inside the car?”

“He may be a warder, but he’s not a complete idiot. Would
you
try to pick out a few square feet of vehicle cruising down the highway? And attempt to materialize inside it?” I still felt dubious.
“Go,”
Neko insisted. “I’ll deal with him here. I’ll explain. You can talk to him later, when he’s had a chance to calm down.”

“And Jason? He’s going to be ranting like a madman. He’ll tell everyone I’m a witch.”

“Not that I’m sure your family would care…Don’t worry. I’ll blur his memory of what happened. I’ll make sure he remembers
why
you were so upset, though. Knock a little shame into him.”

“Can you do that?”

“Have I failed you yet?”

Gratitude swelled in my chest, and I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands. “Thanks, Neko.” He walked me over to the Volvo and watched me climb in on the driver’s side. “I owe you one.” I jammed the key into the ignition.

“Just remember you said that, after you get home.” He closed my door and knocked twice on the roof before stepping back to let me drive away.

It was Sunday morning; there was no traffic on the rural Connecticut roads. By the time I got to the highway, I was reliving every moment that I’d ever spent with the bastard Jason, every time that I’d looked at him in the Peabridge, helped him find a book, ordered a rare pamphlet for his studies. I remembered every word we’d ever exchanged through the long, long months when he was only my Imaginary Boyfriend. I remembered speaking the grimoire spell, and the short six weeks when I’d thought that there was something real between us. Something more than my being a tool. A research slave. And a cheap thrill besides.