That Touch of Magic (20 page)

I stayed where I was, kneeling down in front of him, looking at his hands, still holding them in mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m okay.”

“I didn’t think…”

“I know.”

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

He put one hand under my chin and tilted my face upward until I was looking at him. He looked worried and tired, but there was that eternal kindness and love that never left his eyes. At least, never when he was looking at me.

“I’m not hurt,” he said again.

“Okay.” I moved away from him and slumped down into my chair, then released a deep breath. “I need to think.”

“Let me get you some water.”

He got up, filled a glass with ice, and poured the water, then returned, setting it down in front of me with a decisive
thunk
on the old farmhouse table.

“You can’t sleep alone,” he said.

I let out a weak laugh. “Congratulations. You’ve hit on a line I haven’t heard before.”

He didn’t so much as crack a smile. “Whatever’s going on here, it happens at night. If you have a dream about…” He met my eyes and stopped; it was clear exactly what kind of dream he was talking about. “Just because your hands are protected doesn’t mean the rest of you is.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought about that.”

“Okay. So, what’s your plan?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Sleep during the day?”

He took a moment, then said, “Yeah, that could work.”

“It’s the simplicity that makes it genius.”

He let out a soft laugh, then said, “Wait here for a minute. I’m gonna go grab some stuff.”

“For what?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “I’m coming home with you.”

I angled my head at him. “Boy, you really have been out of the game for a long time, haven’t you? You’re supposed to work it so I think it’s my idea.”

“You said that your mother got a lot of what she needed, and it gave her control.”

“A
little
control,” I said. “And that’s just a theory. To be honest, I don’t have the slightest clue how all this works.”

“You said I’m your trigger, and I think we’ve got some evidence in support of that. So we’ll go back to your place and I’ll … I don’t know. Set you off. Whatever. Maybe it’ll give you some control, help you figure it out.”

“Wow,” I said. “Don’t make it sound so romantic.”

He made a very serious face. “This isn’t about romance. It’s for science.”

I laughed, then shook my head. “Okay. For science.”

He stood up. “I’m gonna go grab some stuff, and then I’ll be down. Don’t go anywhere without me, okay?”

I gave a weak half smile and for a moment he hesitated, then went upstairs to pack while I stared out the window and tried to remember what it had been like, all those eons ago, when I’d been in control of my life.

*   *   *

By the time we got back to my place, it was past one. I put Nemo back in his glass bowl and went about making us a pot of coffee.

“Really?” Leo said, leaning over the counter to stare at Nemo. “Liv did this? She had magic powers all along?”

“They were latent, apparently,” I said. “Even she didn’t know about it until last year.”

He shook his head and straightened. “Wild, huh? I mean …
life.
”

“I don’t know if I’d call it
life,
exactly,” I said over the coffee grinder. “She’s got a bunny made out of a red ceramic mug. One of those Japanese-folded cranes that flies blind into walls. Betty has a bird made out of a square of sparkly linoleum in her apartment. And of course, there’s Nemo, but…” I dumped the grinds into the filter basket. “I don’t know if they think or feel or anything. Liv treats them like pets, but I don’t know. I’d put it somewhere between a pet rock and a cat. Probably closer to a pet rock.”

Leo watched Nemo swim back and forth for a bit then said, “Whatever it is, it’s a miracle.”

“Yeah. Okay.” I slid into the seat in my kitchenette, and he sat opposite me. We sat in silence for a while as the coffeemaker gurgled.

“So…,” I said.

“So…,” he said.

Gurgle gurgle gurgle.

“Tell me what it is,” he said finally. “You know, that makes you spark the magic.”

I sighed, relieved to have some kind of conversational ground to stand on. “I’m not sure, exactly. It’s an emotion, of some kind, but they’re all bundled together with you.”

“All right,” he said and leaned forward. “What do you feel when you’re with me?”

I closed my eyes, trying to sort it all out. “Pain. Anger. Hurt.” I swallowed. “Desire.” I opened my eyes. “Love.”

There was a tense silence for a few moments, and when he opened his mouth to speak, I held up one hand.

“Don’t take that the wrong way,” I said quickly. “You and me, we are off the table. But if this is going to work, I’m going to need to be honest, so I’m being honest.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Loving you doesn’t mean that all this…” I motioned awkwardly between us. “… is going to be a thing again.”

He nodded. “You got it.”

“As soon as I don’t need you anymore, the second I have control over this thing, you’re going back to South Dakota.”

He watched me for a moment, then shook his head. “No.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“Look, if you don’t want”—he mocked my awkward hand gesture—“
this,
then okay, I accept that. You get to dictate whether or not I’m part of your life, but you don’t get to dictate where I live.”

My body stiffened. “What? Why would you stay? What could there possibly be for you here?”

He kept his eyes on mine. “Home.”

“Yeah,
my
home. You left. I got it in the divorce.”

“I have a house here, I have friends here. You always wanted to get out, go somewhere new.” He made a shooing motion with his fingers. “So, you go.”

I stared at him, incensed. “Exactly where the hell do you get off, telling me where I can and can’t live?”

“Apparently, the same place you get off, telling me where I can and can’t live. If I want to come home, I’ll come home, and you don’t get to say a goddamn word about it.”

I started to sputter, I was so mad, and then the chime dinged on the coffee and Leo’s expression transitioned easily from angry to perfectly calm.

“Cream, two sugars?” he said, and pushed himself up from the table. Before I could answer, he said, “Oh, and I think you can scratch
anger
off your list. I didn’t see so much as a wisp of smoke.”

I blinked twice, trying to make my way back from wanting to strangle him to understanding what he’d just done. I glanced down at my hands, and he was right: There wasn’t a trace of any red, glowy smoke. I took a deep breath and tried to relax as he set the coffee down in front of me, and I stared down into my cup.

“I take it black now,” was all I could think to say. Without a word, he swapped my mug with his.

“No, you don’t have to do that.” I reached to switch the cups back. He pulled his mug away.

“You like it black, take the black,” he said, then took a sip of the one with cream and sugar and cringed. “Fuck, that’s awful.” He dumped it out in the sink, rinsed the mug, and poured himself another cup.

“So, you can say ‘fuck’ now, huh?”

“Hmmm?” He turned to face me, leaning against the counter as he sipped his coffee. “Oh. Yeah. I can curse, I can get drunk, I can fornicate—”

“Fornicate?” I laughed, and he allowed a small smile.

“It’s a church word. Some things get kind of drilled in.” He sat down opposite me, all business. “So, anger’s off the list. We have to try to isolate pain, hurt, love, and desire now.” He sipped from his mug. “Not sure how to do those, exactly.”

“Pain and hurt are very close,” I said carefully. “So are love and desire.”

He met my eyes, then said, “Well, let’s start with pain and hurt, then.”

I felt a twinge of nervousness creep down my back, making me antsy. “Okay, but…” I glanced around. “I don’t want to burn this place down. It’s all I have. That and a garden shed out in the clearing. I can’t afford to lose either of those.”

I got up, pulled open one of the countless little latched cabinets that the ’Bago had for storage, and pulled out a sleeping bag. I went to the front door and stepped off my cement stoop, then knelt and reached under the ’Bago to where I’d tucked the exterior light switch. I hit it, and the string of lights I’d lined the side of the ’Bago with lit up. They were just simple lights, each covered with a tiny tomato paste can that I’d painted and punched with holes myself, but I liked the patterns they set on the side of the ’Bago, and the soft way they lit the front.

“Come on,” I said to Leo as he stared at the lights, smiling. “This way.”

The night air was warm on my skin, and it had a calming effect, which probably worked against where we were planning to go, but still: I liked it. I led Leo to the small clearing of lawn I kept maintained just off the front of the ’Bago. I unrolled the sleeping bag and spread it out over the space, then sat down. Leo waited until I had seated myself, then handed me my coffee mug and sat down opposite me. This was better. There was enough light that we could see each other, but still enough darkness to hide in, at least a little.

“Okay,” he said. “Pain and hurt, then?”

I held the coffee mug in my hands. “This thing is microwave-safe, so … it should be okay if I start to burn it, right?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s all going to be okay.”

“Don’t comfort me,” I said. “Comfort isn’t on the list.”

“Right.” There was a long moment of silence, and just as I was about to give him a nudge, he said, “I don’t think I can do this.”

“It’s gotta be done,” I said, my voice cracking a little.

“I just … I want to tell you that I’m sorry, not make you feel worse.”

I took a breath, and thought of it like the dentist. No one likes it, but you suck it up and push through because it needs to be done. I cupped my hands around the mug and spoke.

“You have nothing to be sorry for.”

I could see enough to know that Leo raised his head to look at me, but not so much that I could decipher his expression. I didn’t need to; I heard the tension in his voice.

“What are you talking about?”

“I was awful to you.” I lowered my head, staring at the mug. There was definite pain, but so far, no smoke. Of course, we’d barely gotten started. I took a deep breath and pushed at my own soft spot. “I was … mean. I screamed at you. I threw things at you.”

“I deserved it.” His voice was quiet, and while he might have been working the moment to bring me back to all that pain and hurt, I didn’t think that was the case. If I had money to bet, I would have put it on the fact that he was right there with me. “Stacy, I swear, there is nothing in my life I regret more than leaving you like that.”

“You should have left,” I said, verbalizing the thought for the first time. “You saw me for what I really was.”

His head tilted a bit to the side, but his voice came out steely, not confused. “You said that the other day, that I saw you. What does that mean?”

I swallowed against the lump forming in my throat. I hated this, hated every moment, mostly because it was all stuff that wasn’t going to get better for talking about it. Shit is shit, and no matter how much you talk about it, you’re not going to make it into anything but shit. Still, I had to woman up and keep going.

There was science to be done.

“It’s … me,” I said carefully, working hard to keep my voice even. “I’m ugly.”

“Stacy, what the…?”

“Not physically, okay. I know I’m pretty physically. But
inside,
where it matters. I’m an ugly person.”

He huffed in the darkness. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh, come on. You saw me. When I was screaming, when I was throwing things at you … I saw the look on your face.” My voice caught, and I took a breath to keep things steady. I knew I was supposed to give in to the emotion, that was the whole point, but you had to ease into these things.

“I was upset,” he said, “but not at you. At me.”

“But a little at me, too, right?” I said, meeting his eye. “I scared you.”

He went silent, and I could see from his expression that I was right, so I kept talking to keep him from trying to make me feel better. The point of this was specifically
not
to make me feel better.

“When I get angry, I get ugly. I know that. And once someone has seen that … I mean, how can I expect them to want to be around me?” I blinked hard, squeezing the tears out silently but not swiping at them. Leo would have seen me swipe. It was possible that in the darkness, I could get away with the tears alone if I just didn’t let them seep into my voice.

“You’re wrong.” Leo’s voice was soft, but with steely undertones. “I didn’t leave because I saw you for what you really are. I know exactly what you are. I’ve always known.”

“Stop it,” I said. “Don’t try to make me feel better. You’re ruining the science.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel better,” he said. “I’m trying to make you hear the damn truth.”

I looked up at him, surprised by the harshness in his tone.

“I did a terrible thing to you,” he said. “I was confused and drunk and I slept with her and it was awful. I wanted to talk to my dad about it, so he could tell me what to do, but I couldn’t. So I talked to you. And yeah, there was something honorable about confessing and living with the consequences of what I’d done, but there was also something incredibly selfish about it, too. It made me feel better, and it made you…”

“A monster,” I said.

“No,” he said firmly. “Listen to me, please. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I swallowed again, took a deep breath. All I had to do was keep my voice even, under control. “I saw your face, Leo. I remember it, every day, the way you looked at me…”

My voice squeaked.
Goddamnit.
I swiped at my eyes.

“Stacy.” Leo moved across the space between us to sit by my side. “Look, your hands are fine. There’s no smoke. Let’s pull up from this a little, okay?”

“I don’t blame you,” I said, leaning my head on his shoulder. “You were right to leave me. You should have left me.
I
would have left me.”