Page 35 of Love Spell (Witches of London #3)

Caleb’s father was also an oil engineer.

Unlike Noah, Caleb had grown up in Texas and moved at fifteen to Alaska when his father took the job.

He could have stayed with his mother in Austin, but Caleb was the kind of teen who thought a couple years in Alaska before college prep would be the adventure of a lifetime.

Despite Caleb’s skill at negotiating the ignorant or openly racist world that faced his mixed-race family, small-town Alaska still managed to shock.

Noah had never been bullied because of his skin colour, but he’d been bullied because of his stutter, then mercilessly since his mother had come out, the guilt-by-association label of “faggot” shouted after him so often since he was thirteen it had become something of a nickname.

He couldn’t pretend to know what Caleb’s life was like, but, at the same age, he knew something of bigotry. Regardless of why, both boys needed a friend the year Caleb arrived. Very soon, he and Noah were spending nearly every waking moment together.

When not in school or working summer jobs on the pipeline, they hiked, camped, played video games, and dreamed of seeing the world. Neither meant to stay in Alaska, but Caleb’s enthusiasm for seeing the great wilderness opened Noah’s own eyes to the adventure he’d been missing.

Almost exactly the same age, Caleb having a late November birthday to Noah’s early October of the same year, they had a combination of matching and opposite interests.

Noah was into reading, Caleb into taking apart anything with an engine or clockwork or battery to see how it worked. Both into swimming and boating.

In summer they went whitewater rafting and lay awake terrified all through the sunny night while grizzlies prowled outside.

In winter they ate junk food by the fire and watched movies while Noah complained about how much better the book was and Caleb neatly laid out 10,000 individual parts on a sheet on the cabin’s floor for the electric heater he was trying to fix.

By the time they were sixteen, they were kissing and making out on their movie nights or game nights. Caleb had initiated, Noah being far too terrified, still living down his mother moving in with Sarah, but also terrified of losing Caleb.

Noah had already been in remote speech therapy for years by then.

He almost never stuttered when it was just him and Caleb.

Nor did he focus endlessly on his tongue placement and enunciation and remembering strategies every moment of the day when he was with Caleb.

Caleb was safety, easier to be around than being alone.

Succeeding around Caleb was as easy as loving him.

By the time they were seventeen, they were more than making out.

Noah’s mom had moved back to Fairbanks with Sarah, expecting Noah to leap at the chance to join them for his final years of high school.

Noah stayed on the pipeline because the pipeline meant Caleb, largely unsupervised with their two single fathers at work.

Caleb’s mother also wanted him to come home to Austin for a “real” school so he would be better placed for college applications.

Instead, Caleb and Noah spent the summer and autumn on their own besides intrusive work and school demands.

Their fathers ate microwave dinners or hit the bars after work.

Their jobs were part-time, school boring, and they had no other friends.

Aside from the painful but also thrilling necessity of keeping the true nature of their relationship secret from everyone in the world, the year of seventeen was perfection.

Noah knew even then he wanted to time-capsule that year, to stay there in Caleb’s embrace forever, to bottle the laughter, bask in the midnight sun, submerge in the sex that was not only an endlessly new discovery but became at times as essential as water or warmth.

Thinking about Caleb meant forgetting the future, or remembering that even a couple of years ago, Noah had been desperate to escape towns with triple-digit populations and pipelines and his own family.

None of that mattered anymore. Caleb mattered and, it turned out, Alaska could be a lot of fun if you had the right person to join you there.

When the breeze was strong enough to drive away mosquitoes, they could lie naked on reindeer lichen in the summer, several miles from the nearest human being, watching distant herds on the tundra, or a fox pouncing for lemmings. Caleb always hoped to see wolves, but that was a rarity.

“They’re the best parents in the world,” Caleb told Noah one day after they’d seen three adults with bloody muzzles and bulging bellies trot silently over a ridge less than 100 yards away.

“The whole pack feeds and protects the pups, related or not. Those three will be carrying meat back to the den in their stomachs for the litter this time of year. They’ll do anything for their pups and there’s always an adult on watch, even if mom and dad can’t be. ”

“Probably why we domesticated them,” Noah said.

“We’re always trying to take over anything that shows us a glimpse of the ideal, aren’t we?

As a species, I mean. Then we turned on them, villainised wild wolves, the ones who couldn’t be tamed, and made myths about werewolves and Little Red Riding Hood — which are only manifestations of human evils projected onto animals as metaphors.

People are so petty and stupid and hateful. ”

“You know what I love about talking with you?” Caleb crawled on top of him, pressing Noah back into the sunbaked bed of lichen and not so welcoming permafrost below.

“Hmm?” Noah had to shut his eyes against sunlight as he faced up and Caleb kissed him.

“Your optimism. You’re a real inspiration.”

“Yeah.” Noah grinned. “I know. I’ve kept you coming back for more. I should charge for motivational speeches.”

“A dollar a head. I’ll be your manager.”

“Not with rates like that, you won’t.”

“Shhh — listen.”

They turned their heads, Caleb still stretched on top of Noah, to watch in breathless silence while a fuzzy lemming popped out of a tunnel not two feet from their faces.

“They’re everywhere this season,” Caleb whispered.

“They breed in cycles.” Noah again turned his face up and shut his eyes to kiss Caleb. “We’ll get many owls, wolverines, and foxes with the lemmings thriving, then they’ll die out again and we’ll hardly see any for a few years.”

“Do they really throw themselves off cliffs?”

“No. Disney started that myth for a film stunt. They just have cycles of abundance and scarcity — like nearly everything.”

“It’s fitting, isn’t it?”

“What?” Noah squinted at him, holding Caleb’s grinning face.

“This is a year of abundance.”

“This is a perfect year.”

“Now you’re talking.” Laughing, Caleb leaned into the kiss.

They got away with it by sheer scarcity, staying clear of town or hiding inside, never forgetting to be careful at school, where they were buddies like any other teenage buddies. The bullying aimed at both was suspicious but mostly generalised.

They got away with it, at least, until that winter.

Until the night that the only three senior boys at the local school saw them through the snow on the trail to Noah’s tin house.

The Shack, as Noah and his father referred to it, the latter with affection.

Smoke drifted from the chimney, lights on, Noah’s father home from the bar early.

So they’d not been able to go in. They’d slunk off along the trail for a final good night, kissing and giggling at their own eagerness yet unwillingness to undress even to the point of removing gloves.

“We could still go in,” Caleb whispered. “Your dad doesn’t care if we’re in your room. I’m over all the time.”

“If he’s already home, it means he’s not drunk. We don’t need him hanging around. Go home.” A long kiss, holding onto each other. “But I’ll see you at the junction in the morning.”

They were going out on the snowmobiles, assuming Caleb’s was in working order. Sometimes it was, sometimes it had bits detached for improvements.

“Come over to my place first,” Caleb said. “Breakfast.”

“Only if you’ll make pancakes.”

“I promise.”

Their final goodbye was prolonged and silent, Noah having to stop Caleb from opening their parkas.

Caleb, despite struggling every winter to cope with the cold, also wouldn’t take it seriously.

It was only -28°F that night, dangerous for exposed skin, but nothing too bad.

Once it got to -50°F your spit would freeze before it hit the ground.

Caleb had yet to live through a winter like that, though he eagerly claimed to want to perform this trick.

Laughing, Noah had to shove him away from zippers. “Keep your gloves on, you goof. Run home. You’re shivering.”

Caleb saluted and set off, Noah, still laughing after him, turned up the path where the outside light reached him through new-falling snow.

Noah had no more time to watch Caleb off or take in the dance of light as a noise to his left made him spin around, thinking a moose was charging from the trees.

This was almost too far north for moose, but they did stray this far and they were terrifying, far more dangerous and unpredictable than bears or anything else that roamed the Alaskan wilderness besides humans.

A bull moose could weigh almost as much as a small car and move seemingly as fast.

In the next second, Noah smelled beer fumes and felt the blow to his knees blast out of nowhere. He hit the snow with a stifled yelp, instinct from so much secrecy keeping him quiet when he should have been yelling for his dad, fifty yards away in the warm shack.

“Who the fuck was that?” Trevor Feldman loomed over Noah in the dark.

Noah scrambled to get up, bogged down by layers, panting with the pain in his knee. He only had to reach the door — not engage.

“Brant, get the other one,” Trevor barked. “And we’ll have caught two fags for the price of one tonight.”