Magic and the Modern Girl (19 page)

We drank our tea in uncomfortable silence. Uncomfortable on my part, anyway. I kept wanting to ask him questions. I wanted to know what he was thinking. What had changed his mind? Why he had been content to sleep with me, but then decided that we’d been wrong?

Was I that lousy in bed?

“Do you really want to give it up?” he asked, as if we’d been chatting away for the past five minutes.

“I’m not sure. I think so. I don’t know if I can.”

“It’s not an easy life, being a witch. You know that. But you don’t have to do it alone.”

“It sure seems like I do. I tried to reach you and Neko for two days.” There. That was apparently what had me upset. I wouldn’t have been sure, if tears hadn’t broken into my voice on the final word.

David sipped from his mug before answering. When he did speak, it felt as if he was plucking individual words from a tree, searching out the perfect ones that were ripe. “I unplugged my phone. I didn’t want to call you, just because
I
thought it was a good idea. I wanted to give you space, time alone. I hadn’t thought through the loss of your power. I assumed that you could reach me, that you could call me as your warder if you really, truly needed me.”

“I did need you!”

“I know. I was wrong.”

The simplicity of his confession stunned me. He wasn’t trying to make excuses. He wasn’t trying to shift the burden. He wasn’t trying to make me doubt myself, question what was what, who was who. He was accepting responsibility.

All of my arguments fled, tumbling into the dark basement corners like dust bunnies fleeing under the sofa.

He stared at me, his gaze painfully direct through the swirling chamomile steam. “We need to find her, Jane. We need to get Ariel back. Once you have your powers restored, then you can make a decision, an informed decision, about what you want to do. Whether you want to be a witch.”

“I don’t know what else I can do to track her down.”

“Whether you want to be one or not, you’re still a witch for now, Jane. Witches are meant to work in covens.”

“No,” I said flatly. “I won’t go back to the Washington Coven.” The thought of approaching that clique of gossiping manipulators made my stomach turn. They were exactly why I wanted out of this magic business; they were the sort of knotted complication that I could avoid completely if I lived as a normal human woman.

“Do you have a better idea?” David said.

I thought of all the better ideas I’d had. I had thought I would be a librarian. I had thought I would be Will’s girlfriend. I had thought I would be Gran’s granddaughter. I had thought I would squabble with Clara forever, begrudging her the poor decisions that she’d made in her youth. I had thought I would live a totally normal life, in a totally normal city, with totally normal friends.

Without a warder to confuse me with a simple six-word question.

I shook my head. “Not yet. But I will. Give me a little more time, and I will.”

“Mabon is in three weeks. The Autumn Equinox. You have to find Ariel by then.”

“Mabon,” I said, and it sounded like a promise.

“Now, let’s see what we can learn here. Maybe one of these books can help us out after all.”

I set aside my tea mug and took a deep breath. I knew how to do this. I knew how to be a librarian. I knew how to track down resources and bring them to an interested patron. Even if my catalog had been destroyed six months before. Even if I couldn’t read the texts on my own. Even if I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be part of the solution.

“David,” I said. “I’m scared.”

“I know,” he replied. “I know you are. We’ll get through this together.”

And then we worked side by side in companionable silence, until long after our chamomile tea grew cold.

10

S
o, it took a week. A week of careful thought. A week of tossing and turning at night. A week of wondering if I had done the right thing, letting Will leave after our dinner at Don Lobos, driving off Neko, working with David. A week—well, every other day—of getting a voice mail message from Will at work, and calling him back, fingers crossed, hoping to get his own voice mail, hoping not to, trembling with relief when I heard his recorded message. A week of telling Kit that I’d be the one to pick up the daily sweets at Cake Walk, so that I could rehash things, each and every morning, with Melissa.

“Jane,” she finally told me. “I don’t have anything left to say. You acted. Now live with it. Or change it. But don’t just keep telling me about it. Call Will when you know he’ll be there, and ask him out. What’s the worst that can happen? He’ll say that you hurt his feelings, and he’ll refuse? From everything you’ve said, it sounds like he’s fine with what happened.”

I wanted to protest. I wanted to tell her that she was making things too simple. I wanted to huddle on a stool at her counter, drinking endless cups of Apricot Pekoe and ignoring the Peabridge, and its reference desk and its cottage.

But I wasn’t a complete idiot.

“Can I use your phone?”

She nodded toward the wall.

I glanced at my watch. 8:40. Maybe he wouldn’t be there. Maybe I could leave another witty and entertaining nonreply. Maybe I could get all the “cool girl” points, without worrying about the real world penalties. Ring. My heart started pounding. Ring. My lungs constricted, making me gasp for breath. Ring. My knees started to buckle in relief; I knew that his answering machine picked up after the fourth ring.

“Will Becker.”

That was it. That was my cue. That was the trigger that was supposed to make me reply, make me say something out loud. “Hi,” I finally managed. “It’s Jane.”

“Jane!” He honestly sounded pleased. “I’m so glad that you kept trying to end the phone tag.”

“Yeah,” I said, hoping that he couldn’t hear any silent confession, any whisper of just how hard I had hoped that I’d get his answering machine. Again. “Look, I’m sure that you’re busy. I just wanted to know if we could maybe go out to dinner next week. You know, we agreed that it was my treat next time. After dinner. At Don Lobos. Before you walked me home. Before—” Melissa made a slicing motion across her throat, reminding me that I needed to shut my babbling mouth. I stammered, “W-w-well, you know…” And then I trailed off, tucking the phone against my shoulder and grabbing for my mug of tea like a drowning woman clutching a life vest.

“That would be great,” he said.

“It would?”

He actually chuckled. Chuckled. Like a comfortable, easygoing guy who had no idea that he was dealing with a madwoman. “Did you have anything particular in mind?”

Something particular. That’s right. If I was going to be a liberated woman asking a guy out on a date, I should have something specific planned. Something intentional. Something thought through
before
I asked out the first totally normal guy that I’d met in a million years. I looked at Melissa, panicked, but she shrugged her incomprehension.
What
, I mouthed at her. She screwed up her face, but she clearly had no idea what I was asking.

“Um…” I said, knowing that I’d sound like an idiot, but I was afraid that I’d never breathe again, if I didn’t say
something
. “I thought…” Yeah, right. I thought about nothing. I thought that I’d hated Sadie Hawkins dances when I was in middle school, and obviously nothing had changed since then. I thought that my face was probably about ten different shades of crimson. I thought that I might as well just hang up the phone. I thought that it was absolutely, utterly, completely impossible that teenaged boys were expected to carry on this sort of conversation on a regular basis, if they were going to have any sort of love-life whatsoever.

And somehow, miraculously, magically, I don’t know how, Will stepped into the breach. “Maybe we can go to a lecture at the Smithsonian? It’s on Thursday night, six o’clock. It’s about Greek temples and contemporary architecture—one of my friends is the speaker. She’s going to talk about classic architecture and then lead a quick tour of the Mall. I’ve got a couple of free tickets.”

“Perfect!” I said, and the vise that had constricted my chest suddenly sprang loose. “That would be wonderful! We could go out for Greek food afterward. Stick with a theme,” I said in a flash of sudden inspiration.

“One of my favorites,” Will said, and I was pretty sure I could hear him smiling down the phone line. “Should I swing by the Peabridge to get you? You get off at five o’clock?”

“Yes. But give me fifteen minutes to change.”

“Five-fifteen. At your house, then?”

“I’d like that.” I let my own smile tilt my words. It was actually really easy to ask a guy out. Why had I gotten so worked up over this? I glanced at the clock on Melissa’s wall. “Oh! I have to run! I’m going to be late to work!”

“Have a great day,” Will said. “See you Thursday.”

I hung up the phone and turned to Melissa, beaming. “See?” I said. “I can take some responsibility for my life!”

“Some,” she said, shaking her head, but she smiled. She handed me a pasteboard box of baked goods. “But you really will be late, if you don’t get moving.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“And about the other stuff? The witchcraft?” she said as she ushered me toward the door. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

I shrugged as best I could, carrying the box. “I actually came up with an idea over the weekend. But I’ll have to call David.”

“So call him.”

“I can’t. It feels strange.”

“What is it with you and phones? This is a magic thing, right? Not related to the other thing.” The other thing. The bedroom thing.

“Well, they’re all tied up together.”

“No.
You
tie them together. To anyone else, they’d be totally separate. Think of it like working together, you know, in an office building. If you had to ask the vice president of Special Communications a question for your job, you’d just go ask him.”

“Not if I’d slept with him once, and then he’d tossed me out on my ass.”

Melissa frowned. I didn’t know if she didn’t approve of my language, or if she accepted the flaw I’d found in her analogy. “Okay. So, sexual harassment in the workplace probably doesn’t apply here. But, wait! It sort of does! David is
your
employee. Your own employee can’t harass you.”

I suspected that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would have some argument to the contrary. I sighed heavily, but I didn’t bother to argue. Bottom line—no pun intended—Melissa was right. I needed to call David. I wasn’t going to get this whole disappearing-anima-loss-of-power-what-is-the-purpose-of-my-life-as-a-witch thing under control without him.

“I’ll call him from the Peabridge. First thing.”

“Brew a pot of coffee, first thing. Don’t let Evelyn catch you shirking too badly.”

I laughed and hurried through the morning streets of Georgetown. I wasn’t actually sure
what
Evelyn would do if she caught me shirking. Both of us had come to rely on Kit more and more to answer basic reference questions. Evelyn had taken advantage of my supposed free time to give me more and more management work—analyzing our budget, preparing reports for the trustees. I appreciated the recognition of my advancement, but it wasn’t what I really wanted, what I enjoyed. It wasn’t what I’d signed up for when I became a reference librarian.

Even if my work at the Peabridge
was
part of the white-picket-fence-happy-happy-home-life that I imagined every time I thought about cashing in my witchcraft chips for good.

That was the problem with me. I was never happy.

At least I followed Melissa’s advice when I got to work—the coffee was brewed and the Cake Walk treasures were nestled beneath their crystal domes by the time Evelyn walked in the front door. I smiled breezily and crossed to my desk, picking up my telephone like a woman on a mission.

Why was it so damned difficult to phone David?

We were working together on a problem. I had come up with a possible solution. This was all a business proposition. If he didn’t answer, he didn’t answer—my ability to speak to him was not a referendum on our entire relationship. I cleared my throat and punched in his number.

He answered on the first ring, snapping his name out, as if it were a two-word spell.

I stammered for a moment before telling him what I needed. At first, he was skeptical; I thought he was going to refuse. But when I explained, he listened, and then he finally agreed. “You’re going to need Neko there to make this all work out,” he said.

“I know.”

“Good luck getting him to join us.”

“I’m his witch!” I said, reciting the justification that I’d come up with while I was trying to bolster my courage.

“Good luck,” David repeated, and the click as he hung up seemed to have a note of finality.

But I knew Neko better than anyone.

I dialed his cell phone, but he didn’t answer. I glanced at the clock. Who was I kidding? He had to be home, still sound asleep, most likely. I punched in his home number and let it ring away. Forty-seven times.

“What!” he finally snapped.

“Hunan shrimp. My place. Tonight. Seven o’clock.”

“I’m busy,” he said petulantly.

“I’ll order it with extra shrimp.”

“I can’t just drop everything—”

“And ask them to hold the vegetables.”

“Jane—”

“And an order of shrimp toast, as an appetizer.”

“And a side of crab shumai,” he said.

What were a few dumplings between friends? I grimaced and agreed, “And a side of crab shumai.”

“Seven o’clock,” he said, and then he cut the connection.

Gran and Clara were easier to bring into the loop. They would have agreed to see me without the bribery of food; in fact they both sounded delighted to hear from me. Pork fried rice was just an extra benefit. I glanced at the locked drawer where my poor, suffering wallet waited, credit card unsuspecting.

If my plan worked, a Chinese feast was worth it.

David arrived first, carrying two large boxes, one in each hand.

“How much trouble did you have finding them?” I asked as I closed the door behind him.