Page 118 of The Witching Hours

Mitch was charming company. Almost every day he’d learned new things to share, and his unique perspectives were often thought provoking. We made a point of trying out one of the top reviewed restaurants in Houston during the week, and another at a distant location of my choice. By distant location, I mean something like a castle near Munich.

I learned to ride horses in Montana and sail at Kennebunkport. Mitch used part of my backyard to build a tiny greenhouse and learned to propagate orchids and fresh herbs. Driving was a skill he had to acquire the old-fashioned way. It also turned out that I’m not a bad teacher. I had him conjure a manual transmission car for temporary use so he’d be able to drive anything in a pinch.

One Saturday morning, as he was telling me about a empanadas class he’d taken in Argentina while I was at work, a stray curl fell onto his forehead. Without thinking, I surprised both of us by reaching over to push it back. His hair was as silky as a Doberman’s ear. I hadn’t intended to make such an affectionate gesture, but my subconscious mind sometimes acts without approval.

As if Mitch could read my mind, in one move he pulled me to my feet and bestowed the fantasy kiss that all women imagine.Oh. My. Gods.

Paddy sneezed. Mitch pulled me into the bedroom and closed the door in his face.

Like all projects Mitch undertakes, he was no less brilliant in bed. A dream lover, one might say. I was riding a euphoric high, but also aware that I’d crossed a line. Being intimate with the jin was never part of any plan, but sharing a bedroom became reality.

One day I couldn’t stop myself from voicing the question that had always been on my mind. “Are you happy?”

“Delirious,” he said. “How could you not know this?”

“I hoped that was what you’d say, but needed to hear it, I guess.”

By the time my forty-first birthday came round, my friends had gotten to know Mitch. I told them we had plans for a romantic trip. That was an understatement. We went to Bora Bora and stayed in one of those huts on the water. As we stood in shallow water one morning, I noticed the slightest hint of crinkled skin near his eyes and gasped.

“Mitch!”

“What?”

“You’re… I don’t know any delicate way to say this. You’re aging.”

He grinned. “I know!”

“You sound happy about it.”

“I am. We’re going to grow old together.”

“We are?”

“Well, yeah.” He laughed softly in that way of his that was so sexy. “Do you need me to spell it out? You made a choice. Me instead of wishes. You never wished out loud, but you conjured a happily ever after. You got what you wanted. I got what I wanted, too.”

“Freedom.”

“Freedom. And Love. I will live out a happy life and die without ever being imprisoned again.”

“I got the best part of this arrangement.”

He shook his head and grinned. “So wrong. I’m the big winner.” It was the best kind of argument. But since you insist that I’m awesome, what do you love most about me?”

A dozen answers sprinted across the screen of my inner vision, but one stood out.

“Your spaghetti.”

We took a transatlantic cruise and dropped the brass vase off where the ocean is too deep for submarines.

CURIOUS GOODS

There I was living my Chapter Two dream of being a resident of the famed Greenwich Village in west, lower Manhattan. I had an eight-hundred-seventy-five square foot studio apartment for a mere five thousand dollars a month. I figured it out. That’s forty-seven cents per square inch.

If I sound cheerful about it, it’s because, well, it’s Greenwich Village. And between working, Starbucks, the New York library, and friends, I’m there mostly to sleep. I’ve learned that, when I’m unconscious, I don’t really care where my body is stashed so long as it’s safe and reasonably comfortable.

You might’ve noticed I called this my Chapter Two dream. The Chapter One dream involved an adoring, devoted husband, kids, dogs, and a yellow clapboard house. No wonderful house worked its way into the picture. We didn’t have kids and the dog died about three months before I found out my husband was cheating with the twenty-year-old hostess who worked at his restaurant. He could’ve at least done something less predictable than shtuping somebody half his age and half my size. My ex had done well as a chef in Cleveland after I’d put him through culinary school and stuck through the lean, very lean, years.

Sigh.