Six Times a Charm

by Deanna Chase

  Oh my God. I had gone insane. I was standing here outside the Peabridge Library, babbling about purple toothbrushes.

  “Mine is blue,” Harold said.

  “Blue! Great toothbrush color. Second favorite! Gotta run! Don’t want to keep the dentist waiting!”

  Someone should just shoot me now.

  Jason was waiting for me when I finally arrived at the restaurant. He had managed to secure a table in a corner, tucked into the back. I was a little disappointed. I liked the idea of sitting behind the restaurant’s lace curtains, of watching the traffic go by on Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe someone would see us, someone I knew. They would wave and smile as they realized I was on a lunch date. They would call me during the afternoon, to ask about the absolutely gorgeous man who had been eating with me, the one with the blond curls and easy grin, who seemed to be hanging on my every word.

  No one would see me now that I wasn’t sitting at a table in the window.

  When I took my seat, however, I realized that Jason had actually chosen well. Within our little nook, it seemed that we were the only people in the entire restaurant, the only people in the entire world.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, fiddling with the beads on my necklace.

  “Traffic can be bad.”

  “Especially at lunch time.” Great. Brilliant conversation. This was terrible. It was as if I’d never seen Jason before, as if we’d never even spoken to each other.

  The waiter came to take our drink orders. “I’ll have a glass of Chianti,” Jason said. “It’s cold outside,” he justified to me.

  “And a Chianti for me, too,” I said, following my Imaginary Boyfriend’s lead.

  No, I reminded myself. He wasn’t Imaginary anymore. He had asked me out. He had brought me cute gifts (the marshmallows were still inside my desk drawer)!

  Flustered by the seismic shift in our relationship, I gave the menu a ridiculous amount of attention. The entrees were all too heavy for lunch. The salads were too fussy. Pasta, then. Not long pasta, though. I’d never live it down with Melissa if I dripped linguine down my front. (Not to mention the dry cleaning bill I’d get for my cashmere sweater.)

  Tortellini, then. Bite-sized. Self-contained. No hidden dangers.

  “Do you want to start with some garlic cheese bread?” Jason asked.

  My heart exploded in my chest. Garlic cheese bread. You only ordered garlic cheese bread if you really knew the person you were eating with. If you trusted them. A first date could never order garlic cheese bread, but a Boyfriend could.

  “I’d love to,” I said.

  The waiter came back to the table, bringing the blessed fruit of the vine. He took our orders (Jason chose the lasagna al forno) and then he disappeared.

  “So,” Jason said.

  “So,” I echoed.

  An ambulance went by outside, and its siren kick-started my brain. I took a sip of wine and dove in to my story. “You would not believe the weekend that I had!”

  I told him about going to the Natural History Museum with Gran, about how she had collapsed. I somehow managed to make it a funny story, stressing the bits that had not been at all amusing at the time—the way the Cell Phone Samaritan had blinked at the closing elevator doors, the way the ambulance had careened around corners. I told him how Melissa had come to the hospital with her Butterscotch Blessings, and how my grandmother had become the most popular patient on the floor.

  Of course, I left out some parts. I didn’t mention that I was estranged from my own biological mother. I didn’t tell him about my late-night crystal training session with David and Neko. I didn’t say that I had created a healing charm in the privacy of my own living room, and I overlooked announcing that I seemed to have an affinity for crystals that was at least as great as my ability with spells.

  I didn’t tell him that my grandmother seemed to have some sensitivity to magical power—the same as Clara. As I.

  But I entertained my date. Jason seemed intrigued as he dug into our garlic bread with gusto. So much had changed, he commented, since George Chesterton’s time. Health care then was a nightmare of tinctures and ointments. I found myself agreeing, even going so far as to volunteer my time researching treatments for typhus, to learn more about how Chesterton’s son had been cured of the deadly disease. After all, I was a librarian, and if my skills could help my Boyfriend….

  Scott had never asked me for help.

  By the time our pasta arrived, I was much more relaxed. I asked Jason how his work was going, about the current semester and the classes he was teaching. I laughed when he told me about one of his students—the one who thought that the colonists should have purchased their arms from the Soviet Union, on the black market, so that they could have overwhelmed the British that much sooner.

  “The Soviet Union?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Well, he knew that the Soviets preceded today’s Russia.”

  “What do they teach in high school these days?”

  “A question that I ask myself every single day,” Jason said, shaking his head. “I’m actually thinking of setting up a new project for next semester. You probably won’t believe this, but I got the idea from the Peabridge.”

  “From us?” I felt a flush of pride. Or maybe that was my second glass of wine.

  “When you started wearing your costume, it really changed everything for me. It made my reading come alive—it was as if the history was happening right then. George Chesterton could walk in the door at any moment.”

  Damn. Evelyn had been right.

  Jason went on. “I’m thinking of having the students put together their own outfits. Use quill pens. Do some laundry the colonial way. Anything to actually experience the time period, to realize how different things were two hundred years ago.”

  “Don’t you think that sounds a little…beneath college students?”

  He smiled at me across the table. “Is it beneath you?”

  “Well—I—” I tried to picture a roomful of college coeds, all wearing hoops and petticoats and sack gowns. I expanded my mental view, imagining Ekaterina the Ice Ballerina in a mob cap, grading essay exams with a quill pen dipped in red ink. “Do you think your grad students would go for it? I mean, I only met Ekaterina once, but she certainly didn’t seem the type—”

  “Ekaterina?” Jason looked surprised. He obviously had not thought through his grand hands-on scheme. Then, he shrugged. “She wouldn’t need to join in. She specializes in nineteenth-century. Early suffrage movements.”

  “Yes!” I was surprised to hear myself say that out loud. Must have been the Chianti. But I had told Melissa that Ekaterina was a proto-feminist controlling bitch the first time I’d met the Russian ice queen. I’d known it from the moment I’d laid eyes on her perfect brow.

  Jason blinked, then smiled slyly. “It wasn’t Ekaterina I was thinking of, when I came up with the idea.”

  I twirled the stem of my wine glass between my fingers, suddenly shy. “Oh?”

  “It was you.” He leaned forward, settling his hand on top of mine. “Jane, I have to admit that there’s something about seeing you dressed up that way.”

  I tried to laugh, but no sound came out. “I bet you say that to all the girls who try to poison you with peanut soup.”

  He shook his head. “I’m serious, Jane.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Jason—my Boyfriend—was attracted to me in my colonial costume. It must be the love spell that I had worked, the words I had read from the grimoire.

  He went on. “You’ll probably think I’m crazy, but when I look up from my research, and I see you sitting at your desk, wearing your stays and that lace bodice….”

  Oh. My. God.

  The waiter came to take away our plates. “Dessert?” he asked. “Coffee?”

  Jason looked at me, and I managed one short shake of my head. Jason said, “Just the check, please.”

  It was my turn to say something. Anything. “Sometimes, the lace itches.”

/>   Oh, that was great. Brilliant. The hottest words that anyone had spoken to me since Scott Randall first told me what he wanted to do in my Barbie pink bedroom, and all I could think to say was that I itched. I deserved to be alone until the day I died.

  “I’ve made you blush.”

  “I just don’t think of quilted petticoats as a turn-on.”

  “When you wear them, they are.”

  The waiter returned with the check before I could stammer out another embarrassing reply. Jason pulled out his wallet and dropped some money on the table. I started to reach for my purse, but he waved my hand away. As the waiter returned, Jason asked him, “The restrooms are downstairs?”

  “Yes, signor.”

  I recognized Jason’s grin. I remembered it from years before, from when Scott still thought about long afternoons of romance. Somehow, miraculously, I matched that goofy smile with one of my own.

  Trying to pretend that I had just discovered my own need to freshen my makeup, I followed Jason down a narrow flight of stairs at the back of the restaurant.

  Melissa was never going to believe this. She would never believe that I had shared garlic cheese bread with my Boyfriend on our first official date. And she would certainly never believe that said Boyfriend found my colonial dress sexy. And there was absolutely, positively, no possible way that she was going to believe that that Boyfriend had led me down the service stairs toward the restrooms, only to sweep me into an alcove underneath those very steps.

  I didn’t even believe that it could happen to me.

  Until I felt Jason’s hand on the back of my neck. Until I felt his lips on mine.

  Was this what I had missed the other night? The kiss that I had managed to overlook, because I had been stupidly obsessing over the dinner I was about to ruin?

  Okay, so it wasn’t the best kiss in the world. How could it be, with us standing up in a poorly lit alcove beneath the stairs of an Italian restaurant during a busy lunch hour? I worried that I wasn’t into it enough, that I wasn’t leaning against him the right amount. I was afraid that my feet would slip on the linoleum floor.

  But Jason managed to distract me from the flaws in the setting. The touch of his palms on my back did that. And the realization that he was gliding his hands around to my front. That he was slipping his fingers under the straps of my bra. My black lace bra. The one that I had hooked up that morning, chiding myself for wishful thinking.

  A door opened behind us. I heard a woman’s heels on the hard floor, heard her quick gasp of indrawn breath as she saw us. “Well, I never!”

  Well, lady, I never did either. But I sure as hell wouldn’t mind doing it again.

  Jason, though, was stepping away from me. “I’m sorry,” he said, as the woman’s heels clomped above us..

  “Don’t be.”

  He brushed back a strand of my hair. “I shouldn’t have done that. You must think I’m some sort of animal.”

  “I think you’re something, all right.” I hoped that my smile indicated exactly what I thought he was.

  There was more traffic on the stairs, another woman coming down. What was this, Grand Central Station? Trying to find something to do while she walked by, I glanced at my watch. “Ach! I have to get back to work!”

  “So soon?”

  “Evelyn thinks that I’m at an appointment. I need to get back to the reference desk.” I started to sigh, frustrated that I hadn’t managed to win the lottery and retire from my day job forever.

  “I should let you go then.” He trailed a finger along my jaw, and I almost melted into a garlic-fragrant puddle.

  “I’ll be changing clothes,” I said when I could breathe again. I felt more than a little foolish, but I was rewarded by another one of Jason’s wicked grins. “Once I get back to the library. I’ll be wearing my costume.” He actually moaned as he kissed me. I whispered as we pulled apart from each other: “But I’ll think of you as I lace up my stays.”

  And I did.

  Cheeks flushed from the walk back to the office, eyes bright with untold secrets, I pulled the linen strings extra tight. And I thought of Jason’s touch all afternoon, as I researched medicine of the eighteenth century, an obscure founding father, and the father’s even more obscure son.

  Chapter 23

  “Jane, I just can’t get over how wonderful you look without glasses.”

  “Gran, was I really so terrible before?”

  I was beginning to wonder. I’d received nothing but compliments since I’d picked up my contact lenses four days before. Neko had watched as I made faces in the bathroom mirror, inserting the lenses and taking them out until it seemed natural to poke my fingers in my eyes. He’d sniffed when I set aside my eyeglasses. “They were the wrong shape for your face anyway.”

  Now he told me.

  Even David Montrose had noticed—and commented on—the change during our training sessions. We’d met three times in as many days. He had wanted me to focus on crystals rather than spellbooks, once I’d explained that Clara and Gran both seemed to have an affinity for them. He thought that we should explore their magic, try to figure out whether they were the true source of my own power.

  We hadn’t come to any solid conclusions, but I’d learned a lot more about chalcedony, bloodstone, and natrolite than I had ever thought possible. (Chalcedony stimulates maternal instinct among other things. I decided that I might want to make a gift to Clara.)

  The training sessions had been intense, all the more so because I was constantly distracted by thoughts of Jason. My Boyfriend had not phoned during the week, and I’d constantly fought the temptation to dial his cell. I’d hoped that he would add a research session or two to his library schedule during the week, but I’d been sorely disappointed. I kept reminding myself, though, that the university was hurtling toward mid-terms. Jason was probably busy counseling students. Still, I sulked for the second half of the week, reading and re-reading the research notes I’d prepared.

  Maybe that was why I was so determined to make the Harvest Gala a success. Perhaps I was depressed over Jason’s failure to phone. Or I was just desperate for a break from studying crystals with David. Or, just possibly, I wanted everything to be perfect for Gran.

  She had been released from the hospital two days before, but she was still on strict instructions to get plenty of rest and limit outside activities. It had taken every ounce of my persuasive capabilities to convince her to stay home during the Gala. In the end, I think that it was actually Uncle George who made her believe that the possible risk of a relapse wasn’t worth it. He’d said that he wanted to spend many more Harvest Galas with her.

  Gran’s eyes had teared up, and she’d finally agreed to stay in bed. Somewhat surprisingly, Clara had offered to spend the evening with her. Now, I stood in front of both of them, feeling for all the world as if I were about to head out to my high school prom.

  Earlier in the evening, I’d started to force my newly trimmed hair into some sort of updo for the grand event, but Neko had talked me out of that. Just as he’d convinced me that I couldn’t wear my classic little black dress, as I’d long intended.

  Well, if I hadn’t wanted his advice, I probably shouldn’t have told him that the event was black tie. He had immediately decided that I simply must wear autumn colors. I’d assured him that there was not a single shade of orange or yellow that would complement my coloring, and he’d reluctantly agreed. But then, he’d dragged me into some little boutique, a tiny hole in the wall that he’d apparently discovered during his daily neighborhood rambles.

  I had to admit that the dark green shantung sheath he picked out was stunning. It was shot through with a hint of gold, just enough to make the eye take notice. I’d never had the courage to wear a strapless gown before. (I won’t even bother explaining the lingerie lessons I was given by my familiar. Suffice to say that Victoria’s Secret can accomplish miracles. Even on short notice.) Fortunately, Gran had already agreed to foot the bill for my finery.

&nbs
p; “Now, don’t forget to place my bids at the silent auction,” Gran reminded me for the four hundred and thirty-second time. “And try to mingle with the new people. Make them feel at home.”

  “And don’t forget to be home by midnight, or your coach will turn into a pumpkin,” Clara added in a grave tone.

  Gran frowned at her, momentarily distracted from her list of dos and don’ts. “Do you need money for a cab, dear?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, brandishing the little gold hand-bag that Neko had insisted I buy, to complete my outfit. “But I really should be going.”

  I still needed another fifteen minutes of grandmaternal advice, including instructions on the frequent re-application of lipstick and a reminder to keep my hair brushed. By the time I finally escaped, I wondered if I should just give up and head home. After all, it was the getting dressed up part that had been fun. The event itself was bound to be a disappointment, as I tried to remain vivacious and witty with the over-seventy crowd.

  But I knew that Uncle George would report back to Gran. And I had promised to place her silent auction bids. Not to mention the fact that I felt pretty wonderful wearing my ball gown.

  Ball gown. Who would have ever thought that Jane Madison, Librarian would own a ball gown? Whether I was lucky or the green sheath did its job, I had no trouble hailing a cab right outside of Gran’s apartment building.

  The Gala was being held in the St. Regis Hotel, just a couple of blocks from the White House. As the taxi pulled into the small circular driveway, a shiver tiptoed down my spine. I paid the driver while the uniformed doorman waited to assist me out of the cab. Fairy lights reflected off the lobby’s turquoise and gold coffered ceiling, and I blinked, trying to figure out where I was supposed to go. Another uniformed attendant glided to my side. “May I help you, Madam?”