Do You Believe in Magic? (23 page)

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Authors: Ann Macela

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Magic, #Fantasy, #Paranormal, #Romance, #Contemporary

BOOK: Do You Believe in Magic?
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“Francie, we have to talk,” he said in as reasonable a tone as he could muster, while he fought to keep himself from throwing her over his shoulder and carrying her off to bed.
“No, we don’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Go away!”
“But you’re my soul mate,” he said. “How can you say that? You can’t reject me!”
“Just watch me. And furthermore, you’re crazy. Nobody can cast magic spells. Magic doesn’t exist!” She slammed the door in his face.
“Francie!” he roared and pounded on the door again.
“Hey, buddy!” An older man stuck his head out of the apartment to the left. “What’s the matter? What’s all the racket?”
Clay stopped pounding. “Nothing. I just need to talk to the woman inside, that’s all.”
“Well, it sure doesn’t look like she wants to talk to you, does it, if she won’t answer the door. Now cut out all this noise. I have to work the late shift tonight, and I need to get some sleep.”
Clay stared at the man for a moment, then looked back at Francie’s closed door. The guy had a point. It wouldn’t do any good to break the thing down. It would only make her madder. All he could do was leave before her neighbor—or she—called the cops.
“Francie, I’ll be home if you want to talk,” he said loudly. “And we do have to talk. You know it as well as I do.” He looked at the neighbor. “Sorry for the disturbance.”
“No problem,” the man answered and shut his door.
Clay thought about leaving a note, but he didn’t have a card or pen on him, and he wasn’t sure it would do any good anyway. So he stalked down the stairs and back to his car.
What was wrong with the woman? Why didn’t she believe him? He climbed into the vehicle and headed home. He couldn’t believe her reaction. It was the last thing he would ever have expected.
His gut was hurting, probably from all the stomach acid the argument had churned up, but his magic center was quiet, as though it was waiting for something.
They were soul mates, weren’t they?
Weren’t they?
Damn right, they were.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 
Back in her apartment, Francie sat slumped on her bed, staring into space. Clay must have left, she figured, when the pounding on the door stopped and he yelled that stuff about how they had to talk. She gave a big sigh, but it didn’t feel like one of relief. It felt more like one of emptiness.
He wanted to talk. Oh, God, he’d be calling her. She roused herself and pulled the plugs on the phones in the kitchen and her office, leaving only the answering machine hooked up. Returning to the bedroom, she disconnected the phone by her bed, then took off her shoes and resumed her place on the spread.
What good would talk do now? The man was definitely deranged, mentally unsound. Nutty. Off his rocker. He had bugs in his hardware and was many code lines short of a working program. She was better off having nothing to do with him.
Wasn’t she?
Yes, she nodded and, threading her fingers through her hair, rubbed her scalp vigorously. Yes, of course, she was.
What a fantastic tale he had told! Magic—what did he call them—practitioners? Magic practitioners who applied spells to their jobs to do them better. How could he have thought she’d believe him? Sure, there were very smart people or those with an intuitive feel for their work who produced wonderful ideas and products. She knew several of them. Her fellow gamesters, for example.
And Clay? She had to admit he seemed to take computer programming and manipulation to new heights. She frowned at her last thought. What he did couldn’t be magic.
Magic didn’t exist.
And his explanation! He hadn’t given her the chance to process the information about this so-called magic. He hadn’t let her ask a question—he obviously didn’t want her to since he’d asked her to hear him out first. Instead he had gone from magic to talking about “soul mates,” for crying out loud. If that didn’t sound like a line straight out of a bad sitcom, or an even worse singles bar, she had never heard one. Sort of a someday-my-princess-will-come story. Was the idea, the claim they were “fated” to be together, supposed to make a woman fall into a man’s arms? Or rather, his bed?
His bed . . . How enticing it had looked, up there in his bedroom. She sighed again and rubbed the painful itch— the ache had never let up from the time it flared back at Clay’s house. Now a dull throb accompanied the irritation.
“No, no, no!” she said aloud and shook her head until she felt her hair flying about her face. Thinking about his bed was not a good idea.
Back to his soul-mate . . . imperative. Hah! She was supposed to believe that some outside force, an arcane, magical, mystical coercion, was pushing them together? Or was it an internal chemical compulsion? Or just good old-fashioned lust? Didn’t matter which. It came down to the same thing: All he really wanted was to jump her bones.
She rubbed the aching spot between her breasts. This torment was no ancient force, and it certainly wasn’t an alien. She was developing a real-life, non-pretend ulcer, and no wonder with all she’d been through lately.
Mr. Clay Morgan was quite a seducer. First he kissed a woman until she turned to jelly, then he walked out the door as calmly as could be, and he repeated the pattern until she was a quivering mass of frustration.
Then the coup de grâce:
Guess what? We’re soul mates. Magical soul mates. Don’t fight it. I want you.
Why on earth he’d thought he needed such an unbelievable story about practitioners and then the soulmate idea to get her into bed was beyond her. At least he hadn’t uttered the horrible ancient cliché, “It’s bigger than both of us.”
In all of his preposterous explanation, he had not said one word about caring about her beyond the physical. Not one word about love.
No, be fair
, she chided herself. He had used the word once, but in “making love,” not as in “I love you.”
I love you.
Oh, God. Did she want him to say that? Did she want to say those words back to him?
No, she couldn’t be in love with him. Not when all he talked about was sexual attraction and this weird “imperative” to be soul mates.
But, oh, she did like the man. Liked looking at him, talking to him, being with him, touching him, kissing . . . No, don’t go there! She shook her head again and concentrated on the opposing argument to her reflections.
What she felt was just an infatuation, that’s all. She hadn’t been involved with a man in so long her hormones had finally rebelled and taken over her mind for a while.
She could get over Clay. She
would
get over him. She simply had to stay away from him. They had nothing left to talk about. There was nothing to “get over.”
The pain in her chest intensified to a true heartache, and she collapsed back on the bed and curled up in a ball. With an immense feeling of loneliness settling in her bones, she fought tears until she fell asleep in the late afternoon.
She opened her eyes Sunday morning feeling like her system had totally crashed, her usual morning grogginess infinitesimal compared to this mega-headache and feeling of immense exhaustion. She looked at the clock: ten in the morning. She had slept, if she could call it that, over fifteen hours. Carefully, she extricated herself from the tangled bedspread, groaning as her stiff body protested.
She stumbled into the bathroom and almost gasped when she saw her reflection in the mirror over the sink. Her hair was a tangled mess, her makeup was smudged, and large black circles hung under her swollen eyelids like the curtains on the stage at Jones Hall. She vaguely remembered waking up from time to time to a wet pillow, so she must have been crying in her sleep.
As she removed the clothing she had slept in, memories returned of the dreams that had caused her tears. She and Clay making love, an act so beautiful she had to cry. Clay standing naked before her, looking like Desire Incarnate, holding out his hands to her, but try as she might, she couldn’t move to meet him. Clay saying, “If you won’t believe me, then you can’t have me,” and her wailing, “I want to, but I can’t!” Clay, his face a mask of pain, stating, “You’re my soul mate. Of course, I love you.”
Francie doubled over in anguish as the last recollection flashed through her mind and pain radiated from her middle. Laboring for breath, she somehow collected herself and stepped into the shower. The hot water rushing over her body didn’t restore her equilibrium completely, but the heat helped to soothe her too-tightly-wound muscles. Finally somewhat refreshed, she shut off the spray and toweled herself dry. After swallowing some aspirin, she ran a comb through her hair. She put on her robe and slippers and shuffled toward the kitchen, determined to go about her usual chores and put all the rest out of her mind.
The doorbell rang.
The sound practically threw her against the wall. Oh, God, what if it was Clay? Heart racing, she clasped the robe tighter around her body, tiptoed to the door, and peeked out the peephole.
“Thank you, Lord,” she whispered. It was Tamara. Only Tamara.
Francie opened the door. “Hi.” The single word came out in a croak.
“You look awful,” Tamara stated after giving Francie a fast once-over.
“I know,” Francie replied.
Tamara looked like she always did, well put together in a crisp bright blue shirt and pressed jeans. “I broke up with Kevin,” she announced with a cheery smile.
“I broke up with Clay,” Francie responded with no smile at all.
“I brought Oreos and ice cream.” Tamara held up a large grocery bag.
“Come on in.”
Francie stepped back, and Tamara headed straight for the kitchen.
Francie put on the coffee while Tamara gathered plates, silverware, napkins, and two large dishtowels—their usual ritual for commiseration when Tamara broke up with a boyfriend. This was the first time Francie found herself in total sympathy with her friend.
“I bought pints of Chocolate Fudge Brownie and Cherry Garcia for you, and Phish Food and Uncanny Cashew for me, as usual,” Tamara said. “Which do you want first?”
“Cherry Garcia.”
“Fine. I think I’ll start with Phish Food.” She put the remainder of the ice cream in the freezer and placed the bag of cookies on the table.
They both sat down at the table, wrapped the pints in the dishtowels, took off the lids, dug out one spoonful, and held the spoons up to each other.
Together they repeated their standard litany: “Here’s to the only men who truly understand us. Ben and Jerry.” They ate the ice cream.
After several moments of savoring the creamy goodness, Francie asked, “So, what happened with Kevin? You don’t seem to be very upset about it.” With any luck, she could keep Tamara talking about him and not asking any questions about Clay.
“Remember how I said the zing was gone from our relationship? Well, the zing turned into a thud. I finally had it up to here with him.” She waved her spoon in front of her throat. “First, he once again didn’t take me to dinner, but I told you about that on Friday. He was acting strangely at the club, too, first excited and talking big about his prospects at work, then anxious and worrying about money over some deal he has going. He never asked me how I was, or how the shop did last week, or even about my new computer. We hardly danced at all.”
Tamara stopped to eat more ice cream.
“Did he explain why he was excited or anxious? About either the prospects or the deal?” Francie put in, hoping they wouldn’t go into
those
subjects.
“No. He acted really mysterious about both. As I sat there and listened to him, I realized this was one of the few times we’d been at one of the clubs without seeing someone we knew to sit with and talk to. Without somebody to run interference for him, you know, carry on the conversation, Kevin is boring. Booorrrring.”
She shot a glance at Francie over the top of the ice-cream container. “I know, you’ve thought it from the beginning. At the start, he was so attentive to me, and I was looking for nonserious companionship, so I didn’t pay any attention to the negatives. The more I think about it, however, the more it looks like he was using salesman tactics on me. You know, let the prospect talk, find out what she likes, what she needs, say what you need to close the sale. All men do it to some extent, I know. Kevin carried it to an extreme. He seemed really interested in the shop until recently and even gave me some good suggestions about making sales. I was perfectly willing to fill in any conversational gaps that developed. And then, he is a good dancer, I’ll give him that, and I do like to dance.
“But lately, we’ve had less and less conversation about anything but him. He’s been drinking more and dancing less. Friday night the reality of the situation finally hit me. So, I decided to think about it and him and us. When he took me home and wanted to stay the night, I pleaded exhaustion, a busy day coming up at the shop on Saturday, and I don’t know what all to get rid of him. He wasn’t happy about it, but he left with good enough grace.”

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