by Jade Alters
But I’m not going to let my paranoia about that ruin my happiness anytime soon.
Hope
The next morning, Dylan surprises me when he knocks on my door just as I’m about to leave for work. He’s got blueberry muffins in a bag and a big smile on his face.
“Taxi service,” he says happily. “I thought I’d take you to work this morning if that’s cool? Plus, I’ve been dying to try this one sexy barista’s coffee at Cafe Amour.”
“Oh really?” I take the plate of muffins and wrap an arm around his neck, kissing him sweetly. “Sexy, huh?”
“She has the prettiest mouth,” he says. He sucks on my bottom lip and I hum, a little frustrated that I have to go to work now.
It’s nice to get chauffeured around though. Dylan plays me a playlist he made just for me, and I just about melt when he gives me puppy eyes at each song like he’s nervous about whether I’m going to like it or not.
At the opening of one very old song, my eyes go wide and I swat his shoulder. “That’s Why the Lady is a Tramp?” I laugh, pretending to be more offended than I am. “Now I see what you think of me!”
“No!” Dylan crows. “It’s about how she’s just a cool, good person, but it’s, like, society who would call her a tramp, right?”
“Still.”
Dylan looks mildly chagrined, and I lean over to kiss his cheek. “The whole thing is very cute, Dylan.”
“I actually have playlists for each of the guys too,” he says softly, as we pull into a spot. “But don’t tell them, alright? They’ll tease me.”
“Aw, you should tell them someday,” I say, leaning my head on his shoulder as he wraps an arm around my waist. “They’d tease, but I think they’d like it.”
But Dylan just blushes adorably at the thought. Impulsively, I press him up to an SUV and kiss him deeply. We almost lose track of time, making out in the parking lot at seven-thirty in the morning when Bobbi appears.
“Oh my!” Bobbi says, laughing. We pull apart, embarrassed and giggling. “You must be Hope’s...friend?”
“I’m one of em’,” Dylan says smoothly.
He introduces himself and Bobbi winks at me as we walk in. “Nice catch, Hope.”
Dylan finds a seat with a good view of the counter so he can play with his phone and pretend he’s not just watching me with a goofy smile on his face, and I bring him my current favorite drink at Cafe Amour; the salty caramel latte. When I bring it to him, he pulls me into his lap, and I’m lucky that nobody seems to mind as we canoodle just a little bit before a few more customers come in and I have to get back to work.
Dylan hangs around a bit and finally, he reluctantly leaves, promising me that somebody else will be back later to pick me up. As it turns out, Freddie stops by in the middle of the day too. Somehow, I hadn’t even considered the concept of hot-wizard-pop-ins at work. But it’s certainly a highlight now. I hope they keep it up. Heck, they work from home a lot. They can set their office up at the big table by the window if it keeps their cute faces around me while I brew up coffee for yoga wives all day. Freddie ends up taking me home that day, which really means dinner at their house. Jared makes pork chops and mashed potatoes, and they try to stop me from helping in the kitchen. Not that I can complain. Apparently “not helping” means sipping the spiked sweet tea and dancing with anyone who isn’t cooking. I end up getting home obscenely late though since it’s difficult to leave that bed and go home. That evening, all of us end up naked once again, practically melting into each other after a couple of hours of giving each other pleasure.
It becomes a routine. Apparently, I’m never going to be driving myself to work again. Or maybe it’s because they don’t have big cases this week. This time it’s Jared who shows up to drive me to work, and it’s Max who takes me home. On the third day of this, Jared and Freddie both take me to work and do set up a makeshift office at the big table by the window. We keep distracting each other, but they do get some work done anyway.
In the meantime, I find myself a little preoccupied with worrying about the dark wizard. I keep thinking I’m seeing him places. I even have a couple of nightmares about him. One night, Jared and Freddie come to my place to stay the night; my bed is just big enough to host all three of us. But in the middle of the night, I wake up screaming, thinking Walter is coming for me. It takes a while for the guys to calm me down. Jared spoons up behind me, kissing my shoulder even as I face Freddie and he assures me that I’m safe. I hate being afraid of something I can’t control, especially since Walter hasn’t even managed to hurt me. I’m just afraid that he’d want to, and he is quite powerful. I just keep getting a terrible feeling like he’s going to try something. I try to play it off. I don’t like this anxiety. I tell the guys I’m fine, and it never seems to work, if only because our connection to each other is so strong. Lying to them about my feelings at this point is pretty useless. So I let them comfort me and tell me everything will be alright and that getting everything you want can be as terrifying as it is thrilling. Sometimes I find it hard to believe them.
“I don’t like chai,” Max is saying one day. I’m sitting across from him at the designated “wizard table” (or at least that’s how I think of it now) by the window. The work day has been slow, and I can find absolutely nothing to do right now, so we’re playing Battleship because Cafe Amour has a bunch board games on shelves for people who feel like being playful. Or rather, we were playing Battleship, and then we started talking about this and that, and now Max is confessing that he doesn’t like chai which is a travesty.
“Have you ever had good chai?” I ask him, scowling.
“I don’t know if it was good or not,” he says, shrugging. “But I know I didn’t like it. I don’t like those pumpkin spice lattes either.”
“What?” I gasp at that. I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who doesn’t like a pumpkin spice latte. “You definitely haven’t had a good one then. But first, chai.”
“Why are you making me drink things I don’t even like?” He pretends to scowl and leans forward across the table supported by his hand, batting his eyelashes at me. His voice is all husky, and I have a strong urge to pull him into the stock room. The only problem with the guys hanging out at work all the time is that they rile me up and there’s nowhere to fool around. I can’t risk Bobbi walking in to grab cups only to find me getting double-teamed by two wizards. That would be...not ideal.
“Because I enjoy making you suffer,” I whisper. I peck a kiss to Max’s lips and he whines a little as I pop up from the table, leaving him bereft as I head back to make him a chai latte that I am sure he will love. “If you don’t like it, I won’t make you drink chai again!” I holler back at him.
Behind the counter, I find Bobbi who looks like his eyebrows are about to hit the ceiling. “Exactly how many boyfriends do you have?”
I bite my lip as I go about making the latte. Bobbi is just leaning on the counter, watching me. I’ve only told Jacklyne that I have multiple boyfriends. I haven’t even told my family yet. Although I’m not worried about them. They know about shared fated mates and all. But regular people might not always understand. At this point though, I think Bobbi has seen me be affectionate with all the guys, so I’m not surprised he’s asking me questions.
“Four,” I say simply. “You’ve met them.”
“Are you trying to pick one?” He says, looking bemused.
“Nope. I just picked all of them.” I foam the milk and look over at Bobbi seriously. “All four. We’re in a...five-way relationship.”
“Oh!” Bobbi nods and then shrugs his shoulders. “Well. Twenty-first century and all. Congrats!”
I snort at that. “Thanks!”
When I present the chai latte to Max, he takes a ridiculously long time to even try it and somehow ends up with foam on the tip of his nose until I kiss it off for him.
“Just take a real sip,” I say, rolling my eyes. “You might be surprised.”
Max takes a lon
g sip of the latte, keeping his eyes on me. He looks so serious about it that I can’t help but laugh, clapping a hand to my mouth because he’s acting as if this is a matter of life and death. He swallows, sets the cup down, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His face is completely void of expression.
I throw up my hands. “Well?”
Max sits forward and frowns. “It’s good,” he says as if it’s the worst news he’s ever heard. “It’s really good. I really like it.”
“Ha!” I clap my hands. “I knew it. I knew it!”
“You’re so smug,” he says, grinning. “It’s awful.”
I tug him forward by his collar and give him a long, deep kiss, and I don’t let go until he’s moaning into my mouth. “You love it,” I whisper in his ear.
“Yes,” he admits. “But I’m still mad. I really didn’t want to like chai.”
The afternoon passes peacefully, and I practically force Max to try a couple of other drinks he purports to dislike. By lunch, I’m convinced that he just likes watching me make coffee.
We’re eating Pad Thai on my lunch break at my favorite Thai place, which is a block from Cafe Amour, when I keep seeing Max start to say something and stop. He looks tentative—like he wants to bring something up but he’s afraid to. It doesn’t sit right with me. I get insecure too easily, I suppose, and I brace myself for whatever it is he’s thinking about but afraid to say out loud.
“Spit it out,” I finally say quietly. I poke at a shrimp with my fork and Max looks at me, confused. “What is it? Just tell me.”
“Oh, well…” He laughs softly and takes some brochures out of the messenger bag where he keeps his laptop. I can’t see what they’re for because he’s hiding them behind his hands. “We’ve been talking a lot, the guys and I, about a lot of things. And you.”
“Oh my God, Max,” I say, rolling my eyes. “You’re freaking me out. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he says seriously. “It’s just more like—We don’t want to overstep or try to tell you what you should be doing—”
Now I’m just confused and I shake my head, waiting for him to eventually get to the point. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about magic school,” Max says quietly. He slaps the brochures on the table. Each one is for a different school. I’ve looked at schools before. I even have a couple of favorites. But it’s always been more of a pipe dream, if anything. For one thing, I don’t know how I’d pay for it.
“Oh.” My shoulders slump in relief. They were just being sweethearts, like always. Well, that was nice of them anyway.
“When you talk about learning to be a better witch,” Max says slowly, “your eyes light up. We know you really want this for yourself and we want it too. We want you to follow your dreams. We want you to be happy.”
I get a lump in my throat just hearing him talk that way. I can just imagine the four of them looking over websites for magic schools and ordering materials and thinking about where I might go and what I might study. It’s nice to know the men I love really do have my best interests at heart.
“I love you guys for thinking about this stuff,” I say when I manage to compose myself. “But—I mean, I have always wanted to do that and I—I still want to. I really do. But I can’t afford to—”
“Aha!” Max says, actually wagging a finger. “We thought you’d bring up money. But we’ve thought about that.”
“Oh, have you?”
“Absolutely,” Max says, seeming almost offended that I might have doubted their thoroughness. “We’ve worked it all out.”
“Okay.” I cross my arms on the table and raise my eyebrows at him. “And how am I paying for magic school? They don’t have scholarships for this sort of thing.”
“Actually, there is one scholarship that I’m happy to tell you, you’ve already won,” Max says happily.
I shake my head, utterly confused. How could I have won a scholarship that I definitely didn’t apply for? I haven’t even known the guys long enough for them to have applied for me, as sweet an idea as that is. “What scholarship is that?”
“The wizard boyfriends scholarship,” Max says.
“What? Oh.” I feel stupid now, and I rub my eyes, shaking my head. “Of course.”
“We want to pay your tuition,” Max says, looking very hopeful.
“Yeah, I understand,” I say, nodding. “And absolutely not.”
“Hope—”
“Nope.”
“Hope!”
“No!”
“Why not!” Max looks more frustrated than I’ve ever seen him. “Just let us do this for you. We want to and we have more than enough money—”
“It’s a couple thousand dollars a month,” I say, hissing the words.
The first time I found out just how expensive it was to properly learn magic, I almost fainted dead away on the floor. Although, I have heard it’s a lot more expensive in America than it is in the rest of the world.
“Yeah, we know,” Max says, nodding. “And our business brings in good money. Plus, we bought that house as a real fixer-upper. We did all those renovations ourselves. Trust me, Hope. We have the money.”
“Nope.” I smile simply. I sip on my Thai iced tea and wink at Max. I understand that they want to help me, and I really do appreciate it, but they just don’t understand.
Max just glares at me. “Why not?”
“Because...this is something I’ve always wanted to do,” I say, slowly. “I’ve dreamed about it for as long as I can remember. It always seemed too far off to be possible. I can save the money eventually, but it will take me awhile. It would take me...a long time—”
“Then why—”
“Because I want to do it,” I say fiercely. “I want it to be something I do for myself, that I earned. And when I have the funds, it will feel so good to know that I worked so hard for it. It will make it...special. If you just give me the money, it’s not the same. I know that sounds stupid—"
“It doesn’t sound stupid,” Max says, sighing.
“I really appreciate that you guys want to do this for me,” I tell him. “But I’m not doing it that way.”
“Right.” Max nods and rubs his lips, squinting at me thoughtfully. “We did think you might say that actually.”
“Oh really?”
“Absolutely,” Max says again, laughing this time. “We have a different proposal.”
I’m guessing I’m not going to like this one any better than the first, but I shrug and wave a hand. “Alright. Hit me.”
“Right.” Max takes a deep breath. “The other guys wanted to be around to present this idea to you together, but now that it’s come up…”
“What?”
“Well, we want you to move in with us, like, now,” Max blurts out. That makes me suck in a breath, and I sit up straight in my seat. “I think that’s something...that we’ve all thought about. We just haven’t seriously discussed it yet.”
“Well, it just seems so soon,” I say softly. I’m only saying that because I feel like I should say that. I don’t care at all that it’s soon. I’ve been daydreaming about the cozy little turret room for ages.
“Is it too soon?” Max says, blinking dumbly at me.
“No,” I tell him, blinking dumbly right back.
“Okay, so!” Max grins from ear to ear, as if finally getting to his point. “You move in with us, you rent out your nice house that you already own, and you pay tuition with that income. It’ll be more than enough. Then it’s your money. I mean if you’re going to move in with us anyway…”
I sit back and my mouth drops open. I’d only dimly thought about renting out the house and somehow this hadn’t yet occurred to me. There’s been so much excitement lately, and I’ve been distracted with just getting to know the guys better (not to mention the sex).
“That...sounds okay,” I say, a slow smile spreading across my face.
“Now that’s more like it!” Max says, cl
apping his hands. He looks just as smug as I was when he ended up liking the chai. “Eat your Pad Thai, woman.”
The thought of going to magic school is making me really excited. I was already anticipating living with the guys, but now I’m particularly impatient to if it means I can also start magic school. It’s something I’ve been dreaming about for so long.
Max sticks around all day, working from the table by the window. Apparently, he’s doing some hardcore online sleuthing for some client. Or at least, that’s what he’s supposed to be doing, but he keeps making eyes at me instead. By the end of the day, I’m ready to get him, and at least one of the other guys, alone in a room. It doesn’t help that on our way out, once we’re out by the car, Max takes the opportunity to press me up against his car and give me a kiss; hot and slow and deep. He starts mouthing at my neck, and it’s seriously turning me on.
“Unless you’re about to finger me right here in the parking lot,” I say into his ear. “We’d better get home before this goes any further.”
Max growls in my ear, and as I’m about to walk around to the passenger side, I stop cold.
I can smell Walter before I see him. I’ve gotten used to his scent by now. It’s pungent to me and very unpleasant. I know it’s mostly the bad associations that I have with it. Maybe his scent is as normal as anyone else’s, but to me, it’s something like spoiled milk and something chemical. My heart starts pounding immediately, and I feel the bitter taste of adrenaline in my mouth. I’m standing there, frozen in the middle of the parking lot. It all happens very quickly, this realization. I don’t even know where he is yet, and Max hasn’t even noticed that something is off.
