Page 12 of Spellbound

“I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don’t have names.”

~ Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching

When I went back upstairs, I couldn’t stop myself from looking in on him to make sure he was all right.

He was lying sprawled on his back, with one foot, a small one for a man, hooked around the quilt on the bed.

I walked closer to him and let my hand fall to it, turning it toward the light from the hall to make sure of what I thought I’d seen—blue nail polish on the nails of those cute little toes.

I had only realized I liked men as well as women when I reached my late teens, and it took me a while to come to terms with the idea of being bisexual. Asher, on the other hand, was openly gay.

He had painted his damn toenails, for fuck’s sake, and I knew that after seeing them, those dark blue toenails would probably feature in some of my fantasies for a while.

A memory came to me out of nowhere, unbidden and unwelcome.

Years ago, not long after Rosalyn had taken me in when my father passed away, was when I’d first seen Asher MacGregor.

I’d almost forgotten it until just now. It had been the fourth of July, and Rosalyn had people over to celebrate.

The house was full of her friends and family all weekend, and one of those people had been her older sister, Janet, who had brought along her grandson, a boy of around seventeen.

They had come for the all-day picnic and wouldn’t be staying long.

I’d been down at the swimming hole, at a nearby creek at the back of Rosalyn’s property with Rosalyn’s youngest son, Alex.

The women were putting out the fried chicken and potato salad and deviled eggs on picnic tables nearby, while some of the men were grilling hamburgers and hot dogs and making ice cream in an old-fashioned ice cream churn that you had to crank by hand.

Some of the boys and little girls were playing and splashing in the creek.

Asher had been wearing cutoff jeans with nothing on underneath them.

Everyone knew that because the damn things had a big hole in the crotch, showing off things it shouldn’t have.

His cousin Alex had just laughed and shook his head and didn’t seem to think too much of it, because there were only other boys swimming there.

As for me, I had a hard time looking away, and my face had flamed up bright red when I saw him.

He mostly stayed in the water, but after a while, he’d crawled out on a flat rock to sun himself, facedown, thankfully, though he was showing the plump curve of his little ass.

Finally, his grandmother came to spread a towel over his bottom, and she whispered something in his ear that made him sit up and wrap the towel around his slim waist.

I’d almost forgotten that day. I sure tried to put it out of my mind, because he was like seventeen , and I was twenty-one or so, way too old in my mind to be thinking about some teenager.

They’d left soon after that and I hadn’t seen either of them again until earlier tonight on the road.

In fact, I’d forgotten about it until just now.

He’d had hot pink toenails that day, I remembered, and I’d been both fascinated and appalled by them.

Soon after, I started the project to remodel my dad’s old house, doing most all the work myself.

It came along pretty well, but slowly, because I had my real job to take care of too.

I had just started as a magistrate and I was busy learning and studying the laws of the Council, and the language of magic spells, an archaic, obscure language only known to practitioners.

I was going to some classes taught by the Council as well.

Anyway, between the two, I didn’t have a lot of time left over to worry about pretty little boys that were way too provocative for their age and who needed to learn how to put some damn clothes on.

I just realized I’d put that incident completely out of my mind.

I left him sleeping and went back into the room I used on the nights I decided to stay at Rosalyn’s.

I still kept a few things in my old bedroom, in case Rosalyn was having a bad day, and I might need to stay.

About an hour later, after playing around on my phone, I took a shower, turned off the light and went to bed.

I had the windows open for a breeze and the sound of rain on the metal roof soon soothed me to sleep.

Lightning was flashing outside the windows and the old window frames rattled with the thunder of a pop-up storm, and the rain pelted down.

It wasn’t long until I was deeply asleep and dreaming about him.

In my dream, he lay beside me in bed, his face bathed in moonlight shining in the windows, and his long dark eyelashes shadowed his creamy cheeks.

His face was scrunched up, like he was having a bad dream, and a teardrop was caught in his eyelashes.

I caught it on my fingertip and tasted it.

It was salty and bitter on my tongue. I bent to kiss each eyelid and lick the tears away.

I whispered the words of a spell that would ease him.

Then I kissed his lips again … and again.

Those kisses only got me started. I moved down to his cute little nose and his cheeks and back to his luscious lips, and there I lingered a while.

He moved restlessly under me and wrapped his leg around my hips and threw his arms around my neck.

I gathered him close to hold him to my heart, and I realized, in the way of dreams, that he was suddenly naked in bed beside me. I was achingly hard for him.

That’s how I woke up a few seconds later, too, still aching, still feeling frustrated as hell.

Groaning, I sat up on the side of the bed.

And that’s when I thought I heard the echo of a shout inside the house.

I listened intently for a moment but when no sound was repeated, I sighed and put my head back down on the pillow to try to go back to sleep.

A few seconds later, I heard a soft knocking at my door.

“Ben? Ben, wake up.” It was Asher, of course, who couldn’t have come at a worse time.

I could barely hear the soft, muffled voice coming from the hallway outside, but I still recognized the tone.

He was frightened about something, so I went over quickly and swung the door open wide.

He was shivering a little as he glanced at me and then uneasily cast his eyes down the dark, narrow hallway behind him.

“Asher? What’s wrong? Hell, what time is it, anyway?”

“I don’t know. It’s late. But I-I need your help. There’s something outside my window, trying to get in.”

“What? What the hell?”

“Come see for yourself,” he said, pulling at my arm.

He turned and took off back to his room, tugging me along, and I didn’t pull away, but just went along with him.

I knew it was better than keeping my eyes on that little ass in nothing but his underwear twisting down the hall in front of me, especially after the dream I’d just had.

He stopped at the door and pointed to his bedroom window.

“Something was scratching there at the screen and knocking on the window frame, trying to get in.”

“What? No way. You must have been dreaming.”

“No, I wasn’t—I was wide awake, because it was so hot. I opened the window and then I could hear…it sounded like something crying outside.”

“Uh huh. I think you were having a nightmare.” I walked over to his window to pull back the curtains.

It had stopped raining, and the sodden clouds had parted in patches across the sky, displaying a pale, yellow moon.

It was almost full, so the moonlight bathed everything in an eerie, unnatural light.

We were on the second floor, and there was nothing at all outside the window, just like I thought, though the stillness outside did seem different.

It was a listening kind of silence, broken only by the almost constant, distant rumble of thunder.

“Why does that moonlight look so funny?” he asked, standing at my shoulder.

“I don’t know. We may be in the eye of the storm that’s coming through, because there’s more rain to come for sure.”

“It’s been raining all day off and on.”

“Well, that’s why it’s so green here. Because it rains a lot.” I ran my hand over the sill, whispering a little spell to seal the window. “Sule latch domman. Domman latch sule.”

I thought I’d said the words under my breath, but he must have had ears like a bat, or maybe he sensed the magic.

“What was that? You just said something.”

“Nothing, really. Just something Rosalyn used to say at night.”

“But what was it?”

“Just a little cantrip to make sure nothing comes this way. Kinda the same principle as a kid saying, ‘I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’”

“No, that wasn’t any kind of prayer, and you don’t strike me as particularly religious anyway. You said a magic spell, didn’t you? What language was that? Don’t tell me you guys do that shit here too, like my grandma does.”

“Of course, I use my magic, Ash. But like I said, it wasn’t a real spell. More like a cantrip. It’s harmless.”

He snorted. “A cantrip? What the fuck? Like in Dungeons and Dragons? Give me a break.”

“No, the word is from the Scots, actually. Very old. And more or less appropriated by D&D.”

“God, don’t tell me you believe in all that shit? Like my grandma does?” He shrugged. “I don’t believe in that magic crap,” he said, managing to sound scornful and nervous at the same time.

He’d expressed that idea so many times before that I was already bored with it.

“Whether or not you ‘believe’ in it makes no difference.”