by Amy Lane
“Who lives in the loft over the workshop?” Bartholomew asked curiously.
“Erin,” Lachlan said, voice dark. “Which is how I know about the cats and the lease. I wrote it. So even though she promised not to come over and visit, don’t take her at her word.”
“She lives there?” Bartholomew squeaked.
“She’s at work right now,” Lachlan said soothingly. “And what would be the worst thing to happen if she comes over? She’ll find you mixing herbs for amulets?”
Bartholomew swallowed. “I just… never mind.” Visions of time spent kissing Lachlan on a couch he hadn’t seen yet died a quiet death.
Lachlan’s throaty chuckle told him he wasn’t fooling anyone. “Don’t worry, Tolly. She won’t interrupt anything. We have a signal. It’s inviolate. You’ll be safe.”
Bartholomew gave him a sour look. “Says you. I think we’ve hit my bucket list of biggest fears today. If your sister walked in on us, uh, getting to know each other better, that would be the hat trick, and I might die on the spot.”
“Hey,” Lachlan said, voice soft. “Don’t stop trusting me, okay?”
Bartholomew nodded on automatic, some of those visions returning hopefully. “Okay.”
They got out and walked across the incongruous lawn. The rest of the grounds around the house included bare dirt under the sentinel oaks and wild grasses cut at six inches and too parched to grow more. In the center of all of that, as an apron to the house, Lachlan—or someone—had laid down sod and lined it with gray paving stones. The result was a little patch of civilization in the middle of what looked to be untouched wilderness, and Bartholomew found the effort reassuring.
“Nice lawn,” he said as they followed the footpath around it.
“I’ve got plans,” Lachlan told him. “I’d like to fence in the house and the woodshed, and landscape a solid half acre around them. And there’s a big field out behind the oak trees that I’d love to mow and plant and lay sprinkler in. Maybe add a porch with a gazebo and picnic tables. I have an internet business, but having a little shop out here, selling hot chocolate and coffee and cookies, making it a little event place in the middle of pretty country—I’d love to do that.”
“Wow,” Bartholomew said as they pushed into the house. “That’s a lot of… oh. Work. Damn.”
The inside of the house was nothing like the outside.
Apparently, Lachlan’s love for woodwork had lent itself to remodeling as well. The entire house was paneled—wood with a quirky grain, most times, stained a deep purple-brown. Any of the walls not bearing weight had been knocked out, and eight-by-eight pillars—also stained—remained in place to hold the house up steady. The resulting living area/open kitchen was vast and warm, with lush throw rugs done in green and cream and rust to match the furniture.
On the ground floor, there were two doors on either side of the space that were probably bathrooms—one of them looked like a big mudroom, and that one seemed to have a door leading to the backyard. A small day bed was pushed up against a wall under a big staircase, and was flanked on either side by books. Although it was still a part of the open area, it had the look of a semiprivate guest bedroom, and Bartholomew thought it was ingenious.
The staircase led up to a loft that extended halfway out over the living room. This part wasn’t closed in either—although there was a door and what was apparently an upstairs bathroom near the giant king-sized bed, so Lachlan had given himself the privacy of a shower and a water closet, apparently. The rest of the room in the loft was occupied by dressers and a wardrobe that probably held his dress clothes.
Bartholomew swung a slow circle, taking in the use of space, the dark paneling that covered the walls, the floor, even the ceiling, and the way the place looked both rustic and modern, spacious and cozy, and very, very Lachlan.
“Holy fucking damn,” he said weakly. “This… this is amazing.”
Lachlan’s smile held more than soupçon of pride. “Well, that year after I lost my teaching job was sort of the worst. I felt like hell. I couldn’t find another job. So Dad kept bringing by lumber, and I started knocking down walls. That was about five years ago, and I got most of this done in the first year. Then my woodworking business took off, and I started working on the landscaping.” Lachlan shrugged. “One of the best things about being self-employed is picking your own projects. Doesn’t mean you don’t work a lot, just means that when I feel like being out in the sunshine, I’m laying sod and sprinkler pipes. When I feel like cranking up the music and singing at the top of my lungs, I’m in my workshop. When I don’t know what to make, I’m sending out orders, and twice a week I sit down and process the ones I get so I know what to work on next.” He shrugged happily. “It’s a system.”
“It’s a good one,” Bartholomew said as Lachlan shut the door behind him. The light from those windows—those perfectly averagely placed windows up in the second story—kept the place from being dark. “What you’ve done here, with this house, it’s….” He smiled, biting his lip. “Magic. It’s magic. You did an impossible thing. Even keeping the outside looking almost exactly like a house from our cul-de-sac is like making the perfectly respectable hat that would contain this sort of extraordinary rabbit. I couldn’t even dream of this—it hurts my brain to even describe it. But it’s beautiful.”
Lachlan’s hands on his shoulders, while not exactly a surprise, gave Bartholomew a happy shiver of anticipation. “That’s one of the nicest things anyone has said about my house,” Lachlan whispered into his ear.
Bartholomew let out a little sigh. “It’s sort of as awesome as you are.”
“Mm….” Lachlan’s lips trailed down the side of his neck. “How long is this whole amulet-spell thing going to take?”
Bartholomew tried to think, but he made the mistake of leaning back, and Lachlan’s powerful body threatened to short out every synapse. “Uhm… if you make the wooden medallions and I cook the potions, we’ll have a couple of hours to let the wood soak in the potion. It’ll help make it… oh wow.” Lachlan nipped his ear. “Powerful. Powerful—it will help make the amulets more… oh!” Lachlan’s hands, clever, clever hands, had thrust under Bartholomew’s waistband, and one was caressing his stomach, teasing with the waistband of his briefs, and the other was cruising his chest. Bartholomew closed his eyes and moaned, letting out a high-pitched squeak when Lachlan tweaked his nipple.
“I’m going to let you go in a minute,” Lachlan whispered, and his voice didn’t stop making Bartholomew shudder. “But I need you to remember how you feel right now.” The hand between his briefs and his jeans got bold, cupping his package gently and kneading.
“Yeah?” Bartholomew whispered.
“Yeah. We’re coming back to this place, okay?”
“Yeah,” Bartholomew agreed. “I want that.”
“How very assertive,” Lachlan purred. “I like it.” He gave a little sigh and pulled his hands back to Bartholomew’s shoulders and then kissed his cheek.
“The kitchen is yours,” he said, wrapping his arms around Bartholomew. “Pots and pans are under the stove. Make use of anything in the fridge or over the stove. Erin and I bake cookies every Christmas, so that shelf to the right of the stove is pretty stocked.” With a squeeze he backed away and turned Bartholomew to meet his eyes. “Now tell me what you need with the wood.”
Bartholomew nodded, missing Lachlan’s arms already, and headed to his kitchen table. “Do you have a pen and paper?” he asked, and Lachlan snagged one from the printer on a little out-of-place Ikea desk set at the end of the counter. He realized that one of the chairs at the kitchen table was an office chair in front of the laptop, and a part of him wanted to chastise Lachlan for putting his office in the kitchen, where the magic might get muddled, but he figured that maybe he should save that for later. Besides, this moment of imperfection here was almost dear. It made Lachlan human, and Bartholomew liked human. He sort of was one.
He took the paper and the Sharpie Lachlan
handed him and bent over the table, steadfastly ignoring the gentle stroking Lachlan kept applying to the curve of Bartholomew’s spine and his backside.
“You’re making it hard to concentrate…,” Bartholomew practically sang under his breath.
“Good.” Lachlan chuckled. “Because I very much have plans when this is over.”
“Which part?” Bartholomew asked, suddenly needing to know—very much needing to know—that this wouldn’t be over when the spell was over.
Lachlan’s smile turned tender. “The part where you’re worried and afraid,” he said. “What about you?”
Bartholomew swallowed. “Yeah. Yeah. I’d like for us to have plans when the worried part is over.” He went back to the paper. “This,” he said, sketching a simple figure, “is a symbol for strength. This one here is the symbol for joy. They’re going on my friends’ amulets. I’m going to make them a potion of chrysanthemum petals, fennel, chamomile, and rosemary for their amulets. That’s friendship, protection, strength in adversity, and remembrance—hopefully of the fact that we’re friends—for them.”
“What about me?” Lachlan asked soberly.
Bartholomew swallowed. “Well, yours is complicated.” He fingered the pentagram Sheila had given him, as it hung from its white ribbon at his throat. “And if you have one of those jewelry loops, you may want to join your pentagram to it—like an overlay, okay?”
“Okay. Here, give me yours too.”
Bartholomew frowned, still concentrating on the spell. “What for?”
“To play with,” Lachlan said, nudging his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I won’t distort the metal.”
“Okay.” Bartholomew trusted him. He had to. “So, your amulet—mark one side for protection like with the others, but the other side….” He bit his lip. So many opportunities to mess with someone using magic, but he didn’t want that with Lachlan. “Well, the other side could be this one—joy. Or it could be… well, a simple X is a partnership, and if you, uh, well, if you want that with me, you could… see, it would look like this.” He made the X on the paper. “Anyway, so, you choose. Joy in general, friendship, which is nice and more than I deserve or—”
Lachlan kissed his shoulder. “What do you want me to put on the amulet, Bartholomew?”
Lachlan deserved honesty, right? After a year and a half? “I’ve dreamed about us,” he said, his voice high, thready, and embarrassed. “Showing up at cons together, setting up next to each other, talking—kissing—like nobody could ever imagine us apart.” He wanted to talk about the house too, about how the interior, stunning and surprising and magical, had felt familiar, like favorite jeans and sneakers, like the song he’d loved in high school, like his leather-bound copy of Lord of the Rings. But this, this secret dream, the thing he’d kept buried so deep in his chest that he’d needed magic to rip it out of him, this was the most important dream. “Of course I want you to put partnership,” he finished. “I… I have no right. But I want it. I want to earn the right to say, ‘Yeah, nobody else is kissing him in the morning but me.’”
Lachlan nodded thoughtfully, looking a little sad. “Did you ever think that maybe now we just have that right because we belong to each other?”
Bartholomew didn’t like him sad. He stroked Lachlan’s cheek and shook his head. “You deserve everything,” he said throatily. “But at the very least, you deserve a say.” He swallowed. “If you don’t like those options for yours, put something dear to you—a pictograph or an initial—something you’d recognize and you care about.”
“What’s your middle name again?” Lachlan said, so transparent Bartholomew had to smile.
“Crosby.”
“After Crosby, Stills, and Nash?” Lachlan asked hopefully. Old people liked that group, right?
“Oh, you wish,” Bartholomew snorted. “My dad? It was Bing Crosby, which was someone his dad apparently loved.” And then he shuddered. “Like my name, which, by the way, was a complete fuckup.”
Lachlan smiled at him with big anime eyes. “Oh, do tell!”
God. So adorable. And looking at him, Bartholomew Crosby Baker, like that! Unbelievable. Anyway…. “So, there’s this terrible story by Herman Melville—”
“Bartleby, the Scrivener?” Lachlan sounded appalled—and so he might. The story was about a guy who just gave up, said, “I prefer not,” and then died of complete apathy.
“I hate that fucking story,” Bartholomew said, passion in his voice he very rarely let out. To distract himself he started unloading the groceries, stacking them on the table in groups. “But the thing is, apparently Grandpa was a big Melville fan—my father’s name is, I shit you not, Ismael.” And there was the baking group. “Anyway, Dad never got along with Grandpa, and naming me after the damned story was going to bridge the father-son gap and my father was going to get all the love his father deprived him of as he was growing up.” And there was the group for the friends’ batch of amulets.
“Oh dear God…,” Lachlan said, and his dawning horror was, in a way, gratifying. Bartholomew had needed to grasp and regrasp the appalling magnitude of his father’s boner every minute of his life.
“Yeah. So, Dad fucked up the name—because, remember, all the humanities were bullshit, so why actually read the story your father is telling you holds the secret of life. Anyway, Dad presents his father with Bartholomew Crosby—because Crosby was his father’s favorite singer, and his too, because his heart was old when he was born. But the point is, it was not Bartleby Crosby, and his father said, ‘You are the fuckup I’ve always believed you to be,’ and my father learned from this?”
“Not a goddamned thing,” Lachlan said, still horrified.
Very carefully, Bartholomew separated the rose, the clove oil, and the amaryllis, making sure the witch hazel, the fennel, and the chamomile rode the line of both groups. “Nope. And apparently neither have I, because I’ve been so afraid of making mistakes, I almost made the biggest one of all by letting you get away.”
“But you didn’t,” Lachlan said, and now that Bartholomew was still again, that hand at the small of his back resumed the gentle stroke. He kissed Bartholomew’s cheek. “And maybe you can break the terrible family cycle and not judge others for their mistakes as they shall not judge you.”
Bartholomew leaned his head briefly on Lachlan’s shoulder. “Maybe,” he sighed, hoping. “Anyway, let’s get a move on.”
“Sure,” Lachlan said, although he made no move to dislodge Bartholomew’s head. “But first, what’s the vanilla, butter, sugar, and flour for?”
“Shortbread,” Bartholomew said, straightening up again so maybe Lachlan would miss his flush. “I… I make better spells when I’m actually baking.”
Lachlan was just looking at him, the silence so thick Bartholomew finally had to turn his head and look back. “What?”
“You’re so awesome.” A quick, hard, hungry kiss later, Bartholomew was panting for breath and Lachlan was—dammit!—pulling away. “Meet back in an hour. Break!”
And with that, he practically danced out of the house, leaving Bartholomew smiling goofily at the door as he left.
He thought Bartholomew was awesome. Yay!
Making Magic
AN HOUR later, Lachlan carefully sanded the last piece of wood he’d been working on, liking the silky finish of the small chip.
Like he’d promised, he’d made six small discs with a hole drilled near the top, and had then used his wood burner and etched the symbols Bartholomew had shown him. He remembered what Bartholomew had told him about intention and elements, and thought carefully of what he knew of Bartholomew’s friends as he did so, respecting each one their right to be Bartholomew’s family since his own seemed so terribly fraught with strife. When he was done sanding them and marking them, he gave them one more rubdown. He usually used linseed oil to give the wood a matte sheen, but he had no idea what that element would do to the spell. He hoped maybe Bartholomew’s potion would have the same effect.
H
e’d already seen that these things weren’t to be trifled with.
For himself, he’d put the rune for joy on one side, like he’d promised, and then a small pictograph of a slice of bread—puff top, square bottom. He thought of the complicated recipe that made up Bartholomew Crosby Baker with every line. And in the center, the X, because he hoped Bartholomew would be around for a while, hoped for that partnership Bartholomew had dreamed about and didn’t want to let him down. He used a jewelry loop to connect the pentagram over the side with the joy mark on it, because he wanted to protect the happiness he had with the gray-eyed witch currently baking shortbread in his kitchen.
When he was done with his own amulet, he made an eighth. He put the joy rune on this one too, but on the other side, he put a tiny saw, one of the tools of his trade. And he put a tiny little X in the center of that one too.
Theirs.
Bartholomew wearing his rune, Lachlan wearing Bartholomew’s. It wasn’t just for high school students, not really.
The thing that came after amulets was rings—he was very much aware.
He took Bartholomew’s disc and pressed it to his lips, feeling a little foolish, and remembering Bartholomew’s elegantly spoken spells, he added his own. It had been playing in his head as he’d worked, and he hoped maybe his intent would outweigh the sad elements of his words.
I had faith from the moment I laid eyes on you.
Please, baby, please believe in me.
With that, he gathered the amulets up in premade velvet bags he used for merchandise and headed for the house.
And oh my God, he could smell Bartholomew’s work before he even walked in through the door.
The shortbread was cooling on the stovetop, perfect little golden-brown cakes of it, the world’s simplest—and most fattening—cookie. On either side of the stove were two cheap pots on hot pads, both of them emitting a different floral, tea-like smell, which made sense because they each had flower petals floating around in them—as well as one hemorrhoid pad apiece.
