by Mindy Klasky
* * *
“You are totally falling for him!” Melissa’s amusement over the telephone line was so extreme that I looked up to see if any of the library patrons could hear her.
“I am not!” I whispered into the handset.
“You are. You used to talk about Scott exactly the same way. You were going to wear the such-and-such dress to please him, you were going to see the whatever-it-was movie because you thought he’d like it.”
“That’s ridiculous! I certainly didn’t wear my faded plaid pajamas because I thought David would like them.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did. But Melissa was totally, completely, one hundred percent wrong. Jason Templeton was my Imaginary Boyfriend. I mean, Boyfriend. No longer Imaginary. Jason. The man I had watched for the past nine months. The man I had dreamed of. The man I was going to lunch with in less than an hour. Just to clarify my arguments one more time, I said to Melissa, “I do not have feelings for David Montrose. He’s like my boss.”
“And you’ve never heard of inter-office romance?”
“He’s my mentor,” I said priggishly. “He has a moral and ethical obligation to show me the way toward being a proper witch.”
“And he’s really, really hot.” I could imagine her grinning, leaning against the counter in Cake Walk.
Well, that’s what I got for calling my best friend in the middle of the work day. I should have known that she’d give me a hard time. And I did not need to be traumatized today. It was time for me to leave, to meet Jason for lunch at La Perla. I said, “I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.” Melissa only laughed. “I’m hanging up on you now! I’m going back to work!”
I was laughing, too, by the time I returned the phone to its cradle.
Sure, David was a viscerally attractive guy. But he was totally off limits. I mean, it would be one thing if we were peers, if we were walking into the relationship on equal footing, both understanding who we were and how things work.
But he was lightyears ahead of me in the witchcraft department. He understood all of that magic stuff; he knew how to harness powers that I could only imagine. Exhibit A was the healing crystal that he had guided me in making for Gran.
Besides, a nagging voice whispered at the back of my mind, he had changed himself to be with me. The more I thought about that, the more creeped out I was by the information. I mean, how many times had I changed myself to be with Scott? And had it worked out well?
I mean, had I really thought that I was going to develop a love for Italian cinema just because Scott had one? And what had I been thinking when I’d started in on the collected works of Tolstoy? Just because Scott said that they contained the sum experience of the human condition, why had I thought they would speak to me? And we wouldn’t even begin to talk about my professed love of ice hockey. There were some things no girl should ever be forced to pretend.
And yet, things were different with David. He had readily admitted changing himself to be with me—a clarification that I’d never made with Scott. And David actually seemed happy to have done it. He seemed … content.
Before I could twist myself into any more emotional pretzels, I dug my purse out of my desk. A quick check in my compact mirror for makeup flaws, a dash of lipstick, confirmation that nothing terrible had sprouted between my teeth…. I popped a mint into my mouth and headed to the library’s front door.
That was one thing I could say about working at the Peabridge. The pay might be terrible, and I had to listen to way too many choruses of “Marian the Librarian” when I told people where I worked, but I had freedom when it came to my personal life. That morning, I had mentioned to Evelyn that I had an appointment over the lunch hour, and she had merely nodded, telling me to make up the time whenever I could.
And Jason Templeton was certainly worth making up a little time.
I smiled as I got to the doors, thinking of the date that awaited me. I could actually call it that. He had.
I looked down at the outfit that had taken an ungodly amount of time to assemble that morning. Black wool skirt. Form-fitting cashmere sweater (of course, also black.) Black tights. High-heeled pumps. A necklace of chunky green beads that I knew set off my eyes. I tried not to think of the mounds of clothing on my bed, the rejects from the morning’s dressing marathon that would only have to be returned to their hangers.
I also tried not to think of my colonial costume, crammed into a garment bag and hanging over the chair beside my desk. I’d have to change back as soon as I returned from lunch. Even now, I suspected that Evelyn would give me the evil eye if she saw me out of uniform. I took a deep breath and headed out into the autumn chill.
“You look beautiful today!”
Dammit.
“Thank you, Harold.” I had hoped to sneak out without encountering my lovestruck friend, but he was holding the door for me with all the formality of a Beefeater at Buckingham Palace. I slipped outside so that the fallen leaves on the doorstep wouldn’t blow inside the lobby.
“It looks like you have an important meeting,” Harold said.
“I have a d—” I stopped myself. I’d been cruel enough, binding the poor man’s love with that cursed spell. I didn’t have to rub in my lunchtime destination. I searched my mind, frantically trying to find another word that started with “d”, something other than “date.” “A dentist appointment! Yes!”
“You seem really excited about it.”
I did, didn’t I? “Oh, no. It’s just that I thought I was going to forget it, and I’ve had it written down on my calendar for months, you know, since the last time I went. I filled out the little postcard thing, and they sent it to me as a reminder, but it seems like I always have to reschedule anyway.” I heard myself rushing through my explanation, trying to justify my enthusiasm and digging myself a deeper and deeper hole. “I really hate the fluoride treatment, but I love it when I get a new toothbrush. The last time, all they had were orange toothbrushes, so I’ve been stuck with that, but this time, I’m going to get a good color. Like purple. I love purple. It’s my favorite color.”
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 stan
ding 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.
