by K. K. Allen
“What was that?” Johnny’s eyes are wide on me, the energy that just moved through us finally fading away.
“Have you ever heard of a Fated connection between Enchanters? It’s like having a soul mate, but only… magical.” My face heats with my words, which is crazy since I’m still lying bare beneath the man.
His forehead creases, and for a second, I think it’s because he’ll be resistant to our truth. “My parents were Fated. Well, they often said it. I just thought it meant that they were deeply in love, because that’s how it seemed.” His eyes focus back on me. “You’re telling me it’s actually a thing?”
I suck in a breath and release it almost immediately. “Charlotte told me there’s a physical response when two mates connect for the first time, but I wasn’t expecting that to happen.”
“You didn’t expect it?” The creases in his forehead deepen. “You knew we were Fated?”
I bite down on my bottom lip. “I did.”
“How?”
“It all started with our first kiss, when I went faint. The story of Astina’s first kiss with her Fated was so similar, but I still wasn’t sure. But then you told me you couldn’t kill me when you wanted to. My biggest clue was that you were able to take my bracelet that night. There are specific ways that bracelet could have been removed. Either by me to gift to a descendant of mine or by my Fated, my one true love.” I swallow, my eyes searching his, desperate for a response. “That’s you.”
It’s silent for a long while. I guess he’s processing this new major bit of information, but I’m starting to get scared he doesn’t want to be Fated to me. We’re still young. We still have so much to experience.
“I’m sorry.” My voice so weak, I barely recognize it.
Confusion flashes in his eyes. “Why are you sorry?”
I take another sip of air, my body already shaking with a new kind of fear. “You weren’t given a choice.”
His expression relaxes. “I don’t need a choice, Kat. And I don’t need to be Fated to you to know you’re the only one I’ll ever want or need or care for in this way.” He cups my face and presses his lips to mine. “But knowing this does put things into perspective.”
“How?”
“Like how I saw you that first night you came into town. The moment I spotted you through that open window, I felt like I knew you. And the second you were out of my sight, I knew you would haunt me forever. I just didn’t realize how much you would test me.”
A smile lifts my cheeks. “How did I test you?”
“Anytime I got near you, I was both fulfilled and tortured by your presence. I mistook it all for something darker in the beginning, but it didn’t stop me from wanting you. You were a constant in my mind, my curiosity for you making me do things that not even I thought I was capable of doing.”
I swallow, enjoying his confessions way too much. “Like what?”
He lets out a little laugh. “Like sneaking into your bedroom during your birthday party and searching for something, anything to help me make sense of what I was feeling.”
A flashback of that day hits me—of me, sitting by my pool with Alec, right before I blacked out and I found myself on the beach. I looked up, and yes, there was a figure there. How could I have forgotten?
“That was you?” I whisper.
He nods, his face red like he’s ashamed. “But the worst of it was that night on the boat when I had every intention of ending your life.”
“But you couldn’t.”
He nods. “Because you’re my Fated.”
I blink back a fresh set of tears as he kisses me again. It doesn’t matter where we are as long as his lips are on mine. We can shut out the world. Then in one swift move, Johnny lifts me into his arms. He carries me up the beach, onto his back patio, and into his home. I land in a sitting position on the cold, hard surface of his bathroom counter, and he reaches over me to start the shower.
Even though the fear of him leaving is gone, tears continue to run down my cheeks. But not because I’m sad. He’s my everything, and I’m in his arms. Nothing could be more perfect than this moment.
I reach my hand up his neck and into his hair, kneading it to the rhythm of our kiss. As close as we are, it’s not close enough. He feels it too. With a groan, he pulls his lips away, but he doesn’t move away completely. He wraps me in his arms and buries his head in the space between my neck and shoulder.
His breath is heavy against my skin. I squirm, but his grip tightens to pick me up and take me into the shower. Steam billows around us as hot water rains down from the ceiling.
My arms around his waist, I blink up at him. “I’m sorry I ran when I thought you were leaving again. I should have listened to you.”
He strokes my cheek. “I’ve given you good reason to question my intentions. That night I saw you at the dance, I had every intention of explaining everything then. But I noticed how angry Alec was when he saw us together, and I realized I had no right to come back into your life with such force. You had clearly moved on, and I thought I was too late. Even when I heard you two broke up, I didn’t think I stood a chance, but I had to try.”
As I let out a heavy sigh, I take a moment to collect myself. I close my eyes, open them, then reach up to touch Johnny’s face, caressing his stubble, loving the roughness against his perfect skin. “It’s everyone else who doesn’t stand a chance, because I’ve always been yours.”
I feel like he’s about to say more, but he squeezes his eyes together and rests his forehead against mine again.
“So you’re moving into this big ole mansion, huh?”
He shrugs. “I haven’t totally made up my mind yet. Either way, it needs a lot of work.”
I tilt my head. “You think you can handle fixing it all up by yourself?”
There’s a playful twitch of his lips. “Yeah, but you can always come over and help.” He plants a kiss on my nose. “Although, you might just be a distraction.”
I pout dramatically. “Distractions can be healthy.”
He laughs and slides a hand over my breast. “You make a good point.”
He lifts me into his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist, and covers my hard nipple with his mouth. Then he sucks, eliciting a moan from deep in my chest.
“Johnny,” I sigh.
When we make love again, even darkness can’t blanket the perfect specimen of a man he is. His thick arm muscles bulge as he plants his palms on the tile on either side of me. He thrusts inside and reaches the deepest part of me over and over again. And when his tongue flicks into my mouth, he rocks his hips one last time.
We’re crashing together in an exhale of moans and sighs in a joint release that feels like the start of our forever.
“You haven’t even given me a tour,” I tease as we leave the bathrooms fully dressed.
He stares down at me, looking relaxed and happy. I know I share the same look. Then I swing my eyes around, taking in the exquisite detail of the textured walls and light fixtures. “You’ll need a wife and five kids to fill this house up.”
“Just five?” He chuckles. “After what happened tonight, I think we’re going to need a bigger house.”
I balk at him. “You want more than five?”
He chuckles. “I want as many as you’re willing to give me.”
As I walk around the living room, I stare at the walls, each one filled with family photos. A photo of Johnny and his parents at what looks to be a pizza restaurant catches my eye, and I stop in my tracks. Johnny looks like a toddler in the photo.
“Your parents are beautiful.”
I’m not sure where Johnny is as I speak, but he must be listening, because I can feel him approach then hover over my shoulder to see the photo on the mantel. “That’s exactly how I remember them. My mom, always with a smile on her face. My dad, content, but rarely showing any emotion. He was very quiet.” Johnny smiles. I can’t see him, but I can tell when he smiles by how he enunciates his words. “That pizzeria
burnt down. It was my parents’ favorite place. We’d visit it every time we stopped back into Apollo Beach.”
Frowning, I wrap my arms around his waist. “Erebus needs to disappear.”
“He can’t just disappear.”
“We’ll find a way.” I look up, wanting Johnny to know that he’s not alone in his hatred for Erebus. We’re in this together.
“We won’t.” Johnny’s words are filled with frustration. “Erebus can’t die because his eternal soul is devised of purely dark energy. And energy can neither be created nor destroyed, according to the laws of physics. Erebus will always be slithering around earth in some form, haunting us all. His dark-fated curse is our infinite misery.”
“Since when did physics have anything to do with this?”
His eyes soften on mine. “Physics has everything to do with this. Think about it. We’re descendants of gods who were given powers tied to the elements. Earth, air, fire, water. Our magic is energy—energy that manifests from the elements and is powered by the elements, yet we’re able to control them because we’re all tied together. No different from any Normal besides the makeup of our energy.
“At some point over the centuries, Erebus learned to hate not only Enchanters, but all of us—all descendants. His own powers were never strong enough for him because ours have always been stronger.”
Throughout my endless hours of reading in the Summer library, nothing has ever made more sense than what Johnny is explaining. “I guess that’s what I don’t understand. If we stop recycling, we die. Why wouldn’t the same thing happen to Erebus?”
Johnny frowns. “Because he’s been eternalized. His dark energy is locked inside his body, and it can never escape.”
Rose and my father have already beat this into my head, but I still find it so hard to comprehend because I don’t want to believe it. “So we really can’t kill Erebus.”
He shakes his head, slowly, allowing it to set in.
“How do you know this for sure?”
“I learned a lot throughout my time away. I spoke to scientists who explained how our magic works.”
The combination of this conversation, my overwhelming emotions, and my feeling of helplessness evokes a rage that comes close to what I felt on that first Fourth of July in Apollo Beach.
“Then how can we ever move on when he’s lurking somewhere out there?”
Johnny wraps his arms around me and lowers his forehead to mine. “That’s what we’re going to figure out together.”
I love everything about my treehouse. It’s exactly what my dad dreamed it would be for me. A home away from home, a safe getaway where I can escape to whenever I want or need.
I’ve already taken to the windowsill that faces the bay. My knees are tucked up close to my chin while Primo Levi’s memoir, The Periodic Table, lies between them. I’m sucked into the prose and his metaphors of how the elements relate to human nature and his own life. Perhaps most interestingly, he illustrates conflicting morals in reference to zinc. Although pure, zinc resists other elements, which is unfortunate for the sole reason that, as he puts it, “for life to be lived, impurities are needed.”
It’s hard not to think of my own makeup. Half Enchanter, half Equinox. One would think the combination of our energies would react like zinc, two purely opposite beings. Then again, they say opposites attract. Erebus is attracted to our light, but that’s also what he hates about us, because he envies it. And although history has changed the way we see things, making Enchanters despise the Equinox, there was a time when we were equals.
I’m pulling my eyes back to the next section of text when I hear something outside the treehouse.
“Surprise.”
Hearing Johnny’s voice is a surprise. I wasn’t expecting company today. When I see him, my pulse quickens as it always does. He looks good in jeans, even better since he’s holding up two reusable grocery store bags, the only type of bags allowed in Apollo Beach.
My mouth practically salivates at the sight of fresh fruit peeking through the top of the sack. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until now. “You brought food.”
He chuckles and sets the bags down on the table. “Yes. All kinds.”
I scramble to my feet and begin digging through the bags. “Didn’t you have to work at the plant today?”
Johnny shrugs. “There was some emergency meeting for the Elders, so Paul shooed the rest of us out. Fine with me. I can spend some time with my girl.”
My girl. The words set every fiber of my body into a buzzing frenzy. Is it possible that after all this time, we’re actually having a normal relationship?
I fix us a plate of crackers and cheese and invite him over to my oversized bean bag chair. He grabs a bunch of grapes on the way and tosses them into his mouth, one by one, as he sits and slides over to me. We laugh at the waves he creates with his movements.
“Welcome to my treehouse,” I say proudly.
“I’ve been here, remember?” He winks.
I haven’t forgotten about his part in building this for me. I’m certain he’s responsible for the stargazing room. “That’s right. You’ve become my father’s right-hand man, haven’t you?”
I’m surprised when he doesn’t give me his usual overconfident response. Instead, his face turns serious as he looks me straight in the eye. “I thought he’d never give me a chance after I came back to town. I see how much he cares about you and wants to protect you. When I first met him”—Johnny shudders—“I knew I’d have a lot of making up to do. Not just to you, but to Paul. He didn’t know me, but I didn’t want to just be the guy who broke his daughter’s heart, you know?”
“Who says you broke my heart?”
Johnny looks embarrassed. “I didn’t mean it that way. Just that maybe that’s how he saw it. That’s all.”
The look on his face is crushing. I should put him out of his misery. “You did kind of break my heart, but since you’ve been back, you’ve made me happier than I’ve ever been.” My honesty surprises me. “We simply don’t make sense apart, Johnny Pierce.”
Johnny’s stare is intense as he locks eyes on me. My breathing grows heavy as I stare from his eyes to his lips then back to his eyes. The man is a god in every sense of the word.
He moves the plate from between us and sets it on the floor, then he scoots in closer to me. Even though he doesn’t touch me, I can feel tingles in the places he scans with his eyes. He leans in so that his mouth is beside my ear. My eyelids press together tightly, waiting for his lips to caress me.
“Not a single day went by where I didn’t dream of doing this.” His lips find the soft spot between my collarbone and my neck. Then he drags his lips up my neck until he’s kissing my earlobe, tugging it gently with the suction of his lips. When his mouth finds mine, I’m already soft in his hold, letting him guide me with his mouth, allowing his passion to fill my soul. I belong to him. Nothing has been clearer to me in my whole life.
We make love and hold each other for hours like we’re making up for lost time. Then we read passages from The Periodic Table until we fall asleep in each other’s arms, only to wake up a couple hours later, ravenous for food—and each other—again.
As I fix us something to eat from Johnny’s bag of goodies, he explores the space. “Have you done any stargazing?” he asks from the back room where my telescope sits.
“Not yet. It’s going to be a clear night tonight.” I grin at him.
He nods, eyes wide. “I’ve been dying to get under a telescope again.”
Astronomy just became my new favorite hobby. The thought of lying beneath the stars in his arms as we trace the constellations with our eyes sends a welcome chill through every inch of my body.
To distract myself, I make us peanut butter sandwiches with a side of our leftover cheese and crackers. When I approach him, he’s at the shelf filled with a bunch of my mom’s things, and he’s touching my dad’s trunk on the floor. “What’s this?” he asks, eyeing the binding of one of
the notebooks with my mother’s name and the year of the entries.
“Those are my mom’s old journals. I still need to sort through the rest of that trunk. It’s just a bunch of jewelry, photos, and trinkets. My dad and I found them in my mom’s storage locker in North Carolina.”
Something in his eyes tell me he’s more curious than I am to inspect her things. “Have you read them yet?”
I shake my head. “No. I don’t know if I will.”
“Really? You’re not even curious?”
I shrug and shove one of the plates into his hands. “I am. It just feels like an invasion of privacy, you know? Those were her thoughts, her fears.”
Johnny runs his palm in circles on my back. “You’re a good person, Kat, but I don’t think being curious makes you a bad one. It might help to fill in some of the gaps of your mom’s life.”
I eye the spine of one of the notebooks. A new sense of curiosity overwhelming me, I bite down on my lip. “I’ll think about it. Will you help me sort through the box first?”
“Of course.”
We sit beside each other on the floor, eating our sandwiches and sorting through my mother’s things. I pull out the jewelry box and place it to the side. There’s nothing here I want to look over now. That’s more of a job for Rose, who will understand what all this jewelry is and what possible value my mother saw in it. Maybe she’ll know why my mother hid it away and never wore it.
“Wow. Is this your mom? You look just like her.” Johnny holds up a photo of my mom, a close-up that my father probably took of her. She looks happier and more carefree than I ever witnessed in the years we spent together.
“That’s her. Rose and my dad both say I’m a spitting image of her. Sometimes when my dad looks at me, he gets this dreamy, faraway look in his eye. I think he kept loving her through all these years.”
Johnny looks at me, and I see a flicker in his eyes as if he’s just thought of something. Then he shakes it away and goes back to thumbing through photographs. I look over at the row of journals and pick up the first, dated back to the summer of 1996, the summer my mother landed on Apollo Beach with no memory of who she was or where she came from.
