Jacob Michaels Is Not Crazy

by Chase Connor

  “I enjoy messing with you, yes.”

  “Eat your food.” He gestured at my plate. “Mrs. Wagner will get mad if you don’t eat everything on your plate.”

  “You and Oma get awfully concerned with what’s going into my body,” I replied. “For obvious different reasons.”

  “Do you want to go to dinner and a movie yet?”

  I looked over at Lucas as he chewed his bite of food and popped a bite into my mouth as well.

  “Or are you enjoying the chase too much to commit to the next step?” He asked. “Because I think the reason you haven’t accepted an invitation to an actual date is that you enjoy the foreplay too much.”

  My first instinct was to laugh at this statement, especially because of how it was phrased and the words Lucas had chosen to convey his thought. However, what he said actually gave me pause. Was I avoiding moving forward with Lucas because we’d no longer be in a “honeymoon” phase and the magic would be lost that is there in the early days of a relationship? Isn’t the first part of any relationship the best? Where two people aren’t quite in a relationship, but they’re getting used to each other as people, exploring each other’s bodies, experimenting sexually, enjoying the pleasures each body can provide…flirting with danger?

  “No.” I shook my head, suddenly no longer playful. “Of course not, Lucas.”

  “Then…are you going to go have dinner and see a movie with me?”

  “Fine.” I shrugged. “If it’s that important to you.”

  “It is.”

  “Fine.” I shoved another bite of food into my mouth.

  “Fine.” He smiled.

  So, that was done. The deal was made. A gauntlet had been thrown down. And I had accepted the challenge.

  “Do you think I should talk to Andrew?”

  “About what?” He turned up his nose.

  “The other night? How he’s a werewolf and all? I don’t know.”

  “Why would you need to talk to him about that? He’s learned his lesson. You won’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  “Well, he’ll see Oma at the center whenever she goes, so he’ll still be around,” I explained. “I mean, maybe I should at least try to get on an even keel, ya’ know? So that there’s no animosity or tension there.”

  “Why would there be?” He asked. “Just steer clear of each other and problem solved, ya’ know?”

  Looking over at Lucas, the redness in his cheeks, I couldn’t help but grin at the thought that suddenly popped into my brain.

  “Are you jealous that I’ll talk to a guy I went on an actual date with?”

  “Of course not.” Lucas shoved another bite in his mouth. “That’s just ridiculous, Rob.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not what was on my mind, okay?” Lucas grumbled, looking down at his plate as he ate.

  I popped my last bite into my mouth and sat back in my chair and stared at him with a grin.

  “You’re jealous.” I cooed.

  “I am not jealous.”

  “Say it enough times you might believe it.”

  “Why would I be jealous?” He looked up at me. “I mean, do I need to be jealous of some vile hairball?”

  I laughed as Lucas realized what he had said and how it showed his hand.

  “I’m pretty sure you are, regardless of the fact that you don’t need to be.”

  “Why do you want to talk to him, then?” Lucas asked firmly. “Why do you need to talk to him?”

  “He said that my scent was intoxicating.” I shrugged. “Maybe not those exact words, but…and then you said the same thing the other day. I want to know what that means. At least, what it means to him. Does it mean something different to a werewolf than it does to just some guy who finds me sexually attractive?”

  Lucas frowned at me.

  “That’s all.”

  “You’re going to go talk to some guy you went on a date with to ask him about your…smell?”

  “No.” I rolled my eyes. “Just why he said it. Why he said it that way. Why did you say that?”

  Lucas didn’t answer me but he continued to eat.

  “Because I have some suspicions.”

  “Just let it go, Rob.” Lucas glanced up at me, then back at his plate, his mouth full of food. “Don’t get into this.”

  “You said that a lot of people in Point Worth have a monkey in their family tree at some branch or another.” I continued, ignoring his plea. “So, maybe I have a monkey in my tree? I mean, you said Oma is a wit—”

  Lucas looked up at me with pleading eyes, so I stopped myself.

  “Is that it?”

  He glanced at the kitchen doorway.

  “Don’t.” He whispered lowly. “Please.”

  My head tilted to the side of its own volition as I looked at him.

  “Mrs. Wagner will be upset with me, Rob.” He said simply. “Please don’t start this right now.”

  “I’m not—start—anything, Lucas.” I chewed at my lip. “I just want to know what’s going on.”

  “Later.” He said firmly. “Please?”

  Why was Lucas so bothered with talking about this stuff in general, but even more so when it was possible that Oma would find out about it? It was almost as if he was scared of her.

  “Fine.” I sat back. “But we will talk about this.”

  He nodded. “Thank you.”

  I was exhausted with everyone in Point Worth being so damn weird. But, when I looked at Lucas, I didn’t really care. When it came to Lucas, I had my qualms about him—but all of them were my own hang-ups about dating and guys in general. That didn’t keep me from wanting to do very naughty things with him every time I saw him. I didn’t even care if he was weird, too. However, he would have to be pretty severely weird to curb my appetite for him. Of course, I didn’t want him to know that.

  Examining the situation, I knew that I would eventually have to know what, if anything, was weird about Lucas. I would have to face that—just like I had to face the fact that I went on a date with a werewolf and Oma was a witch—which was still hard to swallow. Because, if I did get my mind and my body into alignment, and that meant I wanted to make Lucas a permanent fixture in my life, it couldn’t be built on lies or even half-truths.

  “Should we just spend this lovely, sunny day enjoying each other’s company?” I suggested.

  Lucas chuckled. He pointed to the window over the kitchen sink that looked out over the backyard of Oma’s property. I turned my head and saw the snowflakes immediately.

  “Well, shit.” I sighed. “I knew I was being facetious, but still.”

  Lucas popped the last bite of his food into his mouth and grinned at me.

  “Wanna go help Mrs. Wagner build her fire?”

  “Absolutely.” I smiled at him.

  First, though, we did the dishes from breakfast. Then we joined Oma in the living room. She already had a roaring fire going and had her feet kicked up on the coffee table, roasting her feet, which were covered in big, fluffy, mismatched socks, a wide smile on her face as she lounged on the sofa. She just smiled at us as we took the other end of the couch. Lucas and I kicked our shoes off and kicked our feet up on the coffee table, setting our feet to roast as well. At first, things were odd, especially when Lucas laid his head against my shoulder and wrapped his arms around me. Finally, though, we all settled into easy conversation and reminiscing.

  Maybe things didn’t have to be weird all the time.

  Chapter 8

  “Jesus,” I whispered. “When they call for snow they aren’t fucking around are they?”

  I didn’t know why I was whispering. Of course, it was night time and we were outside and something about being in the dark underneath the moon in the stillness of the night made me feel that I had to be quiet. Reverent, even. Lucas and I had decided, once the snow stopped, that we would take a walk down to the lake. The snow had started right as we were finishing up breakfast and had continued on at a fairly steady rate until
just after dark. Oma guesstimated that we had gotten a foot of snow, and when the six o’clock news had come on, with the three of us still huddled in front of the fireplace, she was confirmed to be almost on the nose with her guess.

  All day long, the three of us had taken turns adding logs to the fire, stoking it, keeping it blazing warm, as we sat and shared stories and just talked. When lunch came, Lucas and I had gone in and made all of us lunch to take into the living room. At dinner time, Oma had gone in and heated up leftovers from the day before and brought it into the living room as well. All we had really needed was for it to be Christmas time so we could have a lighted tree and it would all have felt as cozy as possible. But, since it was late March, we had to settle for things such as they were.

  Oma had regaled us with tales about growing up in Ohio—when the winters were really awful. Obviously, Lucas and I knew nothing of a really harsh winter. Lucas told us about going to NYU and studying in the city. After much prodding, I shared stories of acting gigs and performances and maybe a few insider pieces of gossip about certain celebrities. I didn’t have much else to share, story-wise, that the two wouldn’t have known already, so celebrity insider stories it was.

  Once the snow stopped, shortly after dinnertime, Lucas asked if I wanted to take a walk down to the lake. Of course, I didn’t want to walk down to the lake in the freezing cold in nearly knee-high snow. However, I really wanted to put my mouth on Lucas’—and I really didn’t want to do that in front of Oma. Even though she would have thought nothing of it, I just didn’t feel right doing it. No one wants to kiss the guy they’re involved with while their nearly seventy-year-old grandmother looks on.

  “When it rains it pours,” Lucas responded in a normal tone.

  Obviously, he wasn’t intimidated by the haunting silence of the snowy night around us.

  “You’re using that wrong,” I replied in a sing-song voice as we trudged through the snow.

  Suddenly, Lucas’ fingers were sliding between mine and he was holding my hand in his as we made our way through the woods towards the lake. I looked down at our intertwined fingers, wondering if I should take issue with this or not. I decided that it was a perfectly acceptable thing for two guys in a situation like ours to do and just went with it. We trudged through the snow and the woods for a few moments, our hands keeping each other’s warm for several long minutes before I couldn’t take it any longer. I turned and pulled Lucas into me and lowered my head to shove my mouth over his.

  Lucas’ mouth responded to mine as he pushed the length of his body into mine and his hands went up to my face. His fingers were ice cold but I didn’t care. I just wanted to kiss him and I would have taken that at any temperature I could have gotten it. The whole situation was so surreal for me. I never wanted to kiss and have someone be so close to me as much as I wanted that of Lucas. Running my fingers through the silky waves of his hair, I let myself melt into him as we kissed in the snow and the dark quiet of the woods and let myself just be in that moment, not worrying about what it all meant. If it had been warmer, and there wasn’t snow on the ground, I know I would have pushed him to the ground and done other things. Instead, I found myself finally pulling away from him, a smile growing easily on my face.

  “That wasn’t half bad.” Lucas smiled up at me.

  He slid his arms inside of my coat and around my middle, his body pressing up against mine. It was if he was trying to crawl inside of me, to join the warmth of our two bodies. To become one being. Under the darkness of the inky, early spring sky, within the cocoon of quiet that the snow-laden woods provided, we held each other and dreamed of a life that hadn’t quite developed in our imaginations yet.

  “Do we talk now?” I asked softly, obviously having to ruin the moment.

  “About what?”

  “Don’t do that, Lucas.”

  He sighed and gently pulled away from me, his arms sliding from around my middle hesitantly.

  “What do you want to know, Rob?” He looked at up at me with a placid expression.

  “What are you?” I asked the first question that came to mind.

  “I already answered that.”

  “Not fully you didn’t.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You saw me coming,” I whispered. “That’s what Oma told me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I just stared at him. He sighed again.

  “Okay.” He shrugged. “So, maybe I have premonitions. So what?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged back. “That’s not normal though, right?”

  “I guess not.”

  “How long have you had premonitions?”

  “Long as I can remember.” He replied evenly. “But I didn’t recognize what they were, or that I was even having them until I was in college. So I’m still adjusting to it myself.”

  “What does that make you?” I asked. “Clairvoyant? Psychic?”

  “Why does it make me anything?” His brow furrowed. “You seem awfully concerned with the arbitrary characteristics of everyone around you.”

  “I wouldn’t call that arbitrary but a very big part of who you are and what makes you who you are, Lucas.”

  “What are you?” He actually snapped.

  My neck jerked back.

  “Sorry.” He looked down.

  “I don’t know who I am,” I said evenly. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you who I am, Lucas.”

  With that, I turned and continued the journey towards the lake. After a few moments, I heard the shuffle of other footsteps through the loose snow and I knew Lucas was following. We didn’t speak again on our journey through the snowy woods, but once we exited the other side, the shore less than ten yards away, Lucas came to stand beside me.

  “Do you ever feel like Robert Wagner and Jacob Michaels are not all you are?” Lucas asked gently. “But you can’t put your finger on it?”

  My head turned of its own accord to look at him.

  “Yes.” I shrugged. “And no.”

  “Explain. Please.”

  “I’m Robert Wagner. Robert the youngest.” I said. “My parents are gone. My Oma raised me. I grew up in a household with weird shadows and weird happenings. I ran away at sixteen to join the circus, essentially. When I don’t know who I am—it’s a developmental thing. A personality quirk. I don’t know how I feel about relationships and love and sex and whether or not I know the people nearest and dearest to me as well as I thought. I don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life. I don’t wonder if there’s a hyphen at the end of ‘human’. That’s what I mean.”

  Lucas looked out towards the lake, thoughtfulness and concerned etched on his face. Maybe he was starting to get a hint at the mess of a guy he was trying to build a relationship with. Was he concerned that he was making a bad choice in trying to make our relationship into something more—or was he just concerned for me? I didn’t know. And I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know. Nothing would have upset me more in that moment than knowing that he had changed his mind about caring about me in that way. I didn’t want my own hang-ups to make Lucas run away. I wasn’t sure that I cared for Lucas in the same way that he said he cared for me—but I didn’t want to lose him either. Which was crazy. I barely knew him, after all.

  “Why can’t you just accept that you know who I am, Rob?” He asked softly, his face still turned towards the lake. “I mean, why does it matter if I have some weird premonitions? I don’t turn hairy at the full moon. I’m not going to try and attack you. I don’t have any ulterior motives. I’m not some creature of the night. I just have some quirks. Just like everyone else.”

  “Because I haven’t lived with this knowledge for as long as you have, Lucas,” I replied. “I didn’t know werewolves were real. I didn’t know that Oma was a witch. I didn’t know that one day I would say those words so casually and not mumble incoherently at the craziness of it all. I’m trying to adjust. And the only way I can do that is by asking questions. Trying to
quantify and validate all of this new information.”

  “I suppose so.” He sighed.

  “Staying with me…I mean, doing this…is not going to be easy for me.” I shivered at the feeling of being nearly knee deep in snow as we stood there. “Or for you. You seem to have knowledge about a world I’ve only just discovered. It’s normal for you. It’s not for me. It’s going to be confusing and weird for a while. If that bothers you…”

  “What is that?”

  “I just meant that—”

  “No.” He interjected. “That.”

  Looking over at Lucas I saw, even in the low light that the moon provided, that he was staring off west along the shore of the lake. With a frown, I followed his gaze, looking for whatever it was that he was seeing. Finally, my eyes landed upon a figure standing out all alone on the shore, on one of the higher overlooks over the lake. It was about twenty yards away from our position on the shore. All alone and cast in shadow, the figure seemed to be doing a weird jig of some kind or thrashing uncontrollably. My eyes grew wide as I watched the gangly figure doing its weird dance on the overlook, wondering who in the hell, besides Lucas and me, would be out by the lake on such a cold, snowy night.

  “What is he…”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas whispered back.

  We both watched with morbid fascination as the figure “danced” a few moments longer, then seemed to lose its footing. As if in slow motion, the figure tumbled off of the overlook and plunged towards the water as Lucas and I both yelled out. The figure hit the icy water with a resounding splash and then Lucas and I were running through the snow towards the overlook. Snow pulled at our feet but we ran as fast as we could until we were standing on the overlook, looking down at the dark, glassy water—which was surely just shy a few degrees from freezing over.

  My breath was caught in my throat as we gazed down at the water in horror, wondering who had fallen into the water and if they could swim. The water surface was still rippling, but there was no sign of the person who had literally danced off the side of the overlook. Lucas and I glanced at each other before looking back down at the water below us. We both gasped as a shockingly white arm breached the surface of the water, flailing, as though begging for help.