For Love or Magic

by Lucy March

  Without thinking much about it, I pushed up on my tiptoes and kissed him. I didn’t realize what I was doing until it was done, and his shoulders went stiff under my hands and we just … froze. It wasn’t so much a kiss as two sets of lips touching, with no apparent idea why. Just when I was about to pull back and run out the front door, something changed. Desmond’s lips softened, moving against mine, and I moved my hands up his shoulders to clasp at the back of his neck. His hands slid around my waist, pulling me closer, and our lips opened to each other and it felt like … I don’t know. Music. Communion. A slow, slow dance to which there were no steps, only the crashing waves of … hell, I didn’t even know what. I couldn’t mix another metaphor, I just knew that suddenly, out of nowhere, I wanted this man more than anything I had ever wanted in my life.

  The moment, like all of them, finally ended, and we regained consciousness of ourselves. I pulled back and looked up at him, and he stared down at me, his arms still wrapped around my waist, my fingers still woven into his hair. We were both breathing hard, and I felt like if he let me go, I’d fall for hours.

  “Little more,” I breathed, and he bent his head down and kissed me again, and while the first time had seemed more me than him, his enthusiasm was apparent now. It was like falling into him, through him, only to be restored to myself again. I felt happiness in my toes. I didn’t even know that was possible.

  After a few minutes, I pulled back again, pressed the flats of my hands against his chest, and rested my forehead between them. Unable to look him in the eye, I stared at his chest and smoothed his shirt under my hands.

  “I mean … thank you,” I said lamely. “F-for the tennis ball.”

  We sort of froze there for a while, his arms around my waist, my palms resting against his chest, the thump-thump-thump of his heart growing faster under my fingers. It was like being on the edge of a precipice, and knowing that a single move will send you toppling one way or the other, but the edge is so nice, you kind of want to stay there a while and enjoy it.

  His finger tucked under my chin, urging me to look up at him. When I did, he smiled down at me, his deep brown eyes so soft and so full of … well, whatever this was that was happening between us. He touched my face, his fingers moving hair away from my forehead in this gentle movement, so deliberate, so careful. He didn’t want to topple away from this, either.

  Slowly, he lowered his head and put his lips to mine, softly moving them against my mouth with agonizing deliberateness. I put my hands to his face, pulling him closer in, and at first, I thought the power that surged through us was just sexual excitement gone haywire, but then my eyes opened and I saw the blue light dancing around my hands … dancing around him …

  Dancing through him.

  “Oh my god!” I yelled, and jumped back from him, but it was too late. The light traveled down his shoulders, to his hands, and then he hollered and threw the keys that had been in his hand to the floor, and they skittered across the floor into the dining room.

  “No,” I said, feeling like I was going to throw up. The room spun around me, but I focused on finding those keys. I had to find those keys, and they had to still be keys, because if they weren’t still keys …

  “Oh, god. No, no, nonononono…”

  “Eliot.” I heard Desmond’s voice behind me, but it might as well have been echoing on the end of a tinny phone line for all I noticed he was there. I was focused on the keys. I found them under the table, picked them up, and held them in my hands.

  There had been three of them, attached to the keyless car fob. A house key, I guessed. Something that looked like a post office box key. Something else. It didn’t matter, because they weren’t keys anymore. They had molded into the shape of a potion flask, with the word Kwikset still engraved on one side.

  “No!” I said. “No! Goddammit!”

  “Eliot.” Desmond’s hands were on my shoulders and he pulled me up from under the table, sitting me down in the chair. He left and I could hear the refrigerator door open, but I couldn’t see anything but that stupid metal potion flask in my palm. The stupid metal potion flask he had made, because of me. Because I couldn’t have had the common fucking sense to realize that if there was a chance I might have wild magic, and my magic was so strong that I could turn a doorknob without even trying, maybe I shouldn’t go around kissing people.

  “Hey.” Desmond appeared in my line of sight, kneeling before me, holding a glass of water. “Drink this, okay?”

  “No,” I said, still staring down at the potion flask. My vision blurred, and tears dripped down my face, but all I could see and feel was that flask, cold and real in my hands.

  Desmond put the glass on the table and touched my face, forcing me to look at him.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t send that magic through you on purpose. I would never, ever—”

  “Trust me, I know that,” he said, his voice completely calm. Considering that he’d just had wild magic surging through him, you would have expected him to be a little more ruffled, but he was completely cool. Cucumber cool. He took the potion flask from my hand, set it on the table, and then took both of my hands in his, holding them even as I weakly tried to pull them away.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I feel fine.”

  “So did Del, at first.” I pushed up from the seat, away from him, and started for the living room, pacing back and forth as I talked. “Okay. Okay. You have potions, right? You said you have potions. We can go back to your place and you can take them and then we’ll go to my father. Maybe over the years he’s figured it out, and he has a cure or something. Maybe…” I trailed off, knowing that if my father knew how to give power to nonmagicals without dire consequences, this whole town would be lit up with magic by now.

  Desmond put his hands on my shoulders and forced me to stand still. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with just yet. I’m not going to take potions I don’t need. It could do more harm than good. Right now, I’m more worried about you. You need to calm down, Eliot. Please. Look at me.”

  I met his eyes and wanted to burst into tears again. But he was holding me, he was anchoring me, and if he wanted me calm, then I was going to be calm.

  “It’s twenty-four hours, right?” He held my hands in his, comforting me. “Twenty-four hours from initial exposure to…?” He had the courtesy to not finish the sentence with the word I couldn’t hear: death.

  “Yes.” My voice sounded like someone else’s, like a calm person speaking. Inside, I was trying like hell, but I was anything but calm. “About twenty-four hours. First you’ll get powers of your own, and then…” I trailed off, unable to think past that point.

  “All right.” He put one hand on my shoulder and pressed firmly, sending some of his calm shooting into me. “We have twenty-four hours to monitor the situation, and I am not afraid. I think I’m going to be fine, but even if … even if the worst happens, it’ll be okay.”

  “I won’t be okay,” I said. “If the worst happens, I will never be okay again. You know that, right?”

  He put his hands on my face, his eyes so confident and determined that I felt my heart rate slow down just from looking into them. “Then we won’t let that happen.”

  I held his gaze a while longer, taking strength from him until the vise of cold fear that clutched at my heart released its grip a little bit. “Promise me.”

  He kissed me instead, and while I knew he was doing it to avoid making me a promise he couldn’t keep, I took it as a promise anyway. It was the only way I was going to hold it together and be any help at all for the next twenty-four hours.

  Chapter 11

  Desmond drove us to his house in silence, the only sound coming from the backseat where Seamus panted and gnawed on his increasingly gross tennis ball. Once we got to Desmond’s, he tossed my overnight bag and Seamus’s food by the door, and walked me over to the couch, where he sat me down and took my hands in his.

  “We need t
o talk about some things,” he said. “Do you need anything? Water? Tea?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  “When magic manifests,” he said, “it’s usually centered in the limbic system … the emotional centers of the brain. Often a shock, a sudden burst of fear or happiness … those are the things that tend to bring on the first incident. So the first thing we need to look for is my developing any power independent of yours. So far, we just have the potion flask which was made on the burst of your magic. I haven’t felt any other effects.”

  “Really?” I asked. “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”

  He shook his head. “No tingling sensation in my arms or hands, and no evident light phenomena.” He held out his hands and looked at them as if they were some rare artifact he’d never seen before. “Of course, temporal constraints aren’t necessarily transferable.”

  I blinked. “Sorry. What?”

  He seemed distracted by his own thoughts, but then looked up and gave me a comforting smile. “You have day magic, but the magic that each person manifests is contingent upon their individual potential. Some people are day magic, some are night. We won’t know for sure what I am, if indeed I am anything, until evening falls. Which is…” He looked at his watch. “We’re in midsummer, so it will be another seven hours at least.”

  “And you have to have an intense emotional experience in order to spark it?” I asked. “To jump-start the limbic system?”

  He gave a half nod, half shrug. “It’s mostly conjecture at this point, but based on available data, that would be my expectation.”

  “So, how do we create an intense emotional reaction in you? Should we … I don’t know … talk about your childhood? Maybe … did you have to put down that deaf dog of yours or something?”

  Desmond met my eye. “I believe we’ve already tested thoroughly for day magic.”

  It took me a moment to understand, and when I did, my breath caught. “Oh. You mean … when we kissed? The, uh … the second time?”

  “Yes. Also…” He looked at his hands as he spoke. “I want desperately to … for you to not worry or upset yourself on my account. I find it very … extremely, um, well … vexing, for lack of a better word … to be unable to relieve your distress.”

  “Vexing?” I let loose with a light, mildly hysterical laugh. “So, when you get stressed out, you get, like, more British? Is that how it works? If I started pelting you with a BB gun, would your monocle just suddenly pop off?”

  He met my eyes and smiled. “Had I a monocle, yes. That’s exactly how it works.”

  I held his gaze. Desmond’s smile faded, and his eyes lowered quickly.

  “Although I think for the moment, considering how much time we have between now and nightfall, we should both be thinking in terms of stress relief rather than…” He choked a bit on the words and his face reddened a little bit. “What I mean to say is … I’m not suggesting…”

  The silence fell over us, and I let it sit there. There were maybe two feet between us, and suddenly all I could think about was closing that distance and touching him, everywhere, but it was exactly that instinct that had created this whole disaster in the first place. Until night fell and my magic wasn’t active anymore, I didn’t want to risk touching him again, so finishing his obvious thought and bringing up the topic of sex would not help at all.

  “Badminton?” I offered finally.

  “Pardon?”

  “For stress relief,” I said. “You’re not suggesting … badminton, right?”

  “Yes,” he said, meeting my eyes. “I think … badminton … would complicate an already complicated situation.”

  I smiled, amazed at how safe he was making me feel, even given the day I … well, we … were having. “Good, because that may be too British, even for you.”

  He laughed lightly, and my heart sang at the thought that I had made him happy. I didn’t know what his emotions were doing right now, but mine were in overdrive, and it was best to calm everything down for a while. I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, so we’ve got seven hours to kill, we need stress relief, badminton’s off the table…”

  “I have a bottle of Glenfiddich,” he offered. “And a pack of cards.”

  “Sounds perfect,” I said.

  *

  “Well, we’ve learned one thing,” I said a few hours later, gathering up the cards from the coffee table. “You are the worst spit player in probably the history of the world.”

  “I consider that a positive quality. Spit is a terrible game.”

  “Spit is the best game ever,” I said. “Del and I played it all the time when we had sleepovers.”

  “And thank you for making my point for me,” he said dryly.

  I shifted on the floor, where I sat next to a sleeping Seamus while Desmond stayed on the couch. We’d been slow with the whisky, stretching a few small glasses over a late lunch of brie, baguette, and grapes, and what seemed like endless games of cards. So far, Desmond appeared to be having no response to the wild magic, but then, the sun hadn’t set yet. I glanced out the window, the way I had been every twenty minutes for the last six and a half hours. The sky was pink now, not the bright blue of earlier, but still. Night was coming, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for whatever came next.

  “So, you pick the game, then,” I said, shuffling the cards. “Something British and sophisticated. Perhaps a round of whist?”

  Desmond sighed, and I looked up to see him giving me a plaintive look.

  “Stop thinking what you’re thinking,” I said. “I’m not leaving.”

  “I promise to call you immediately if anything happens,” he said. “Which it won’t.”

  I tapped the deck on the table, twice, punctuating my determination to stay. “Fine. If you won’t make a suggestion, let’s do blackjack again.”

  I started to deal the cards, but Desmond reached for my hand, and I pulled away on instinct.

  “Eliot, stop. You’re like a skittish cat. You’re not going to hurt me.”

  “Right.” I put the cards down. “Because I’ve already hurt you.”

  “No,” he said, his voice firm. “You didn’t. If anything happens to me, which it won’t, it will have been an accident. Please. Let me drive you home.”

  He got up from the couch, walked over to the breakfast bar, and whipped the useless potion flask keys attached to his car fob off the counter. The car fob still worked, and he obviously meant to take me home.

  I stood up, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I’m asking you to go,” he said. “If I ask you to leave, and you refuse, you do understand that’s trespassing, don’t you?”

  I stood my ground. “So, what? You’re going to call the police and have me forcibly removed? Because that’s what you’ll have to do.”

  “Fine.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. I didn’t move.

  He tapped his security code in. I didn’t move.

  He opened his phone app and dialed.

  “Oh, if Roni Kittering answers, tell her that she left her earrings at Happy Larry’s. They’re in the lost and found.”

  “Dammit.” He shut the phone down and looked at me, eyes blazing. “You are the most bullheaded woman I have ever known.”

  “We haven’t even scratched the surface yet, buddy.”

  “I don’t want you here,” he said. “I’m asking you to leave. I don’t understand why you won’t respect that.”

  “Why do you want me to leave? Because you don’t want me to worry? Like I won’t be out of my mind if I’m not with you. Why in the world would you think that would be any easier on me?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me, but if it does—”

  “Then it won’t matter if I’m here!”

  He raised his voice, speaking over me. “But if it does, I don’t want you here to see it! Dammit. Why are you being willfully obtuse?”

  “Because you’r
e being willfully a dumbass!” I said, walking over to him. “I’m here to help. Who’s gonna get the potions down your stupid gullet if you collapse?”

  Desmond motioned toward the kitchen counter, where a line of small, glass potion flasks stoppered with corks sat in a neat row. “They’re right there. If something should happen, which it won’t, I will be perfectly capable of administering the correct dosage, and if I’m not, then you wouldn’t be able to help me, anyway.”

  I must have looked as horrified as I felt at that, because his face softened and I could see guilt in his eyes.

  “You’re upset,” he said. “This is exactly what I wanted to avoid.”

  “Then stop asking me to leave.”

  It took a little while, but eventually, he nodded. I glanced outside; there was still a trace of pink light in the sky.

  “So, you’ve been reading the letters,” I said suddenly, motioning toward the end stand in the living room. “I noticed the book earlier.” He looked at me blankly, so I added, “Sartre and Simone?”

  “Oh. Um. Yes.” There was still tension in his voice, but it was softening a bit. “They’re quite engaging. I think you got it exactly right with those two. A crazy lid for every nutty pot, was that what you said?”

  I smiled. “Something like that, yeah. I think if anyone else in the world called her ‘my dear little girl’ she would have castrated the guy. But when he said it…”

  I trailed off, and we stared at each other for a long while, a new tension building between us.

  “My dear little girl,” he said quietly, and I swear to god, it almost killed me trying to hide how it made my insides go to jelly.

  “So, um … how are you feeling? Emotionally, I mean?” I motioned to the window. It was almost full dark. “Should we start?”

  “Start … what?”

  “I don’t know. Emotions. Stirring things up. Talking about that dog that died, or…”

  I hadn’t realized that we’d been closing the space between us, but now, we were close enough that I could feel his breath swirling in the air between us. It smelled of whisky, and it was intoxicating.