Читать книгу Love Potion #2 - Margot Early, Margot Early - Страница 10

Logan, West Virginia

The present

CAMERON MCALLISTER sat at a small damp table in The Last Resort, the downstairs lounge of a Stratton Street hotel, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation. She listened without much interest to Paul Cureux’s final set and tried to look like his girlfriend. She felt desperately sad, helplessly jealous and reckless.

Her first reckless act of the evening had been to attend a family birthday dinner, where the man she most desired had shown up as her cousin’s date. And obviously mad about said cousin. Thus Cameron’s desperate sadness and helpless jealousy.

The second reckless act had been to pour the contents of an innocent-looking vial into her wine glass and drink it. This was supposed to help her get over the man in question.

Her third reckless act had come with Paul’s phone call, his insistence that one of his most infatuated fans was at his gig and not getting the message that he had a girlfriend.

This was hardly surprising; Paul didn’t have a girlfriend. Paul had Cameron. Cameron, who was, she supposed, his best female friend and had been since they were thirteen. Cameron, who was willing to assume the public-only role of his girlfriend. The system worked well enough. The reasons she took part—at parties, gigs and such—were myriad and not something she ever fully examined. Paul’s reasons? Well, she wasn’t wholly sure about that, either, except that he didn’t want a girlfriend and her presence prevented his ever finding one. Though he occasionally slipped away for the night with the kind of woman he believed least likely to ever trouble him again—almost always at out-of-town gigs.

Paul was the son of a midwife who brewed love potions for the occasional desperate petitioner. Love potions that he, at least, believed worked. And his sister, Bridget, claimed to have the same powers as his mother, though the little vial Cameron had bought from her (and dumped in her wine) was not a love potion. Paul held up his sister and mother as examples of the inherent untrustworthiness of the female sex. Because women were like this, he said, half-facetiously, he would never marry.

Nonsense, in Cameron’s opinion. Paul would never marry because he was Peter Pan. He had told her many times that he didn’t want so much as a houseplant; the responsibility of marriage and children was not for him.

Oh, if only Bridget’s concoction to “restore emotional equilibrium” would actually work. Cameron believed in the love potions, believed them to work. But this was a different kind of potion. One that was supposed to help her get over Graham Corbett. And that was absolutely necessary.

Cameron’s cousin Mary Anne was beautiful, talented and her best friend. Local radio host Graham Corbett was the only man who had interested Cameron in at least three years. But Graham was smitten with Mary Anne, the attraction was mutual, and Cameron just wanted to be home with her dogs and a romance novel so she could start getting over it. If anything, anything, could distract her from the burning jealousy she felt…

Cameron was rarely jealous. She made a habit of contentment. Someone had once told her that grateful people are happy people, and she counted her blessings daily. Decent looks, good health, two dogs she loved, her job as director of the Logan County Women’s Resource Center, and so much more….

The girl sitting across from her said over the music, “So…where did you two meet?”

You two. She meant Cameron and Paul, the supposed couple. The groupie was very pretty. Her name was…Ginny? Jenny? No, Genie. Or Jeannie. She was blonde, with fairy-perfect skin, taller than Cameron and skinny like a model, with high cheekbones and a wide mouth. Paul had said this groupie was “clingy,” but why should that bother Paul? What was wrong with having a gorgeous woman infatuated with you?

And there was nothing to stop women from becoming infatuated with Paul. He had a fine tenor voice and made audiences laugh by spontaneously creating songs on the spot on whatever subject they requested.

Now, Paul gazed at Cameron as he sang an original love song called “Years Ago.”

“We’ve known each other forever,” Cameron replied, trying for patience. This woman should give up on Paul. She said, “Look, if you really knew him, you wouldn’t want him.”

Cameron was again being reckless—not to mention sounding unlike a girlfriend—but someone should say something to this delusional young woman. And Cameron thought most women received too little good advice when it came to men.

“You want him,” Ginny-Genie pointed out.

Not really.

Cameron looked at Paul, his dark hark hair waving appealingly, just messy enough, just long enough and no longer. Cameron cut his hair; she did this because he asked her to, claiming that he worried about his mother and sister using pieces of his hair for witchcraft. Because he didn’t simply go to the barber, Cameron suspected he liked her to cut his hair. He was classically handsome, his eyes perpetually alight with mischief. He was tall, lean and broad-shouldered, nothing bulky about him. He looked like a construction worker in a television ad. Or the Marlboro Man. Or an Olympian god.

In actual fact, he was a zookeeper and moonlighting folk singer who lived a self-serving existence and believed lasting marriage did not exist. Cameron had no desire to marry him, so this didn’t matter.

“Look,” she said to Ginny, shouting too loudly over the song Paul was pretending to sing to her, “you’re very pretty, and you seem intelligent.” This might be stretching it, but undoubtedly Ginny-Genie’s low self-esteem was part of the reason the girl considered Paul satisfactory. No harm in a little confidence-building. “There are good men out there who would give their eyeteeth to have a girl like you, to marry her. Men who are okay with commitment.”

Ginny-Genie sipped her own margarita, and there actually did seem to be a look of intelligence—or at least calculation—in her aquamarine eyes.

Knowing she’d said too much, Cameron became intent on watching Paul tune his guitar. His hands were big, long-fingered, work-roughened. He had a bandage wrapped awkwardly around one thumb where he’d sliced it open erecting the new monkey enclosure at the zoo. He’d really needed stitches but had insisted he didn’t and was now, Cameron saw with much satisfaction and little pity, paying the price.

As her eyes again skimmed the lounge, she saw a big, tall man enter the bar with Jonathan Hale, the manager of the local radio station. Cameron squinted through the darkness, and the big man seemed to gaze curiously at her. Hazel eyes, she saw, and those cheekbones. That full mouth.

She smiled, and he broke free from Jonathan, crossed the lounge to her table. Cameron stood up to greet her first lover, who had only grown more fantastic-looking with age. Sean Devlin.

“Cameron?” he said.

“Hi, Sean. What brings you to Logan?”

“Actually, I’m living here. I’m the new drama teacher at the high school.”

Yes, the old one had died suddenly three weeks earlier.

He looked down at Ginny-Genie, and Cameron introduced her, as well, not feeling possessive.

But he seemed interested in her and asked for her phone number, which she gave him before remembering that she was supposed to be acting like Paul’s girlfriend.

At the end of the song, Paul asked for requests, said he hadn’t made up a song yet that night. Now standing beside Sean, the groupie raised her hand.

She was the only one.

Paul lifted his eyebrows.

“Commitment,” she said.

“YOU DO NOT BELIEVE one single thing you said in that song,” Cameron chided Paul on the way home, remembering the song he’d created on the spot to satisfy the groupie.

“I beg to differ. I believe commitment is a beautiful thing, and I said that. And you almost blew our cover flirting with your old flame.”

“He was never a flame. We were first and foremost friends—not unlike you and I.” And she’d made love with each of them once. But there was a certain spice and bittersweet pain to the memory of the long-ago Halloween night she’d spent with Paul. With Sean—nothing, really, though he had been her first. “Anyway,” she told Paul, “you believe commitment is a beautiful thing for everyone else.”

“May I beg to point out that I do have commitment in my life? I’m committed to my job and to my music. I’m just not committed to a house on Stratton Street, a wife and three kids and a golden retriever.”

He pulled up outside the cabin where she lived. Two dogs got up from the porch. Wolfie was feral and didn’t let anyone, even Cameron, touch him, but he sometimes walked in and out of her house and had been known to steal her stuffed animals and bury them in the yard. Mariah was Wolfie’s daughter and was as well-trained as was possible under the corrupting influence of her father, who really did look like a wolf, a black wolf with gray under his muzzle. An old guy who, after being attacked by coyotes, had been darted, castrated and stitched up by the zoo veterinarian, then released to Cameron’s backyard. After that, Wolfie had decided he sort of trusted Cameron.

“Whatever,” Cameron muttered, pushing open the passenger door of Paul’s pickup truck, an old Toyota 4Runner with camper shell. “Thanks for the ride.” She slammed the door and trod up her flagstone path, a rustic path interspersed with dirt and growing things, wilted away this time of year.

A moment later, another door slammed. Cameron glanced back. She was greeting Mariah, petting her affectionate dog, while Wolfie kept his distance, still managing to look envious, yearning yet unwilling to be touched. She said, “Hi, Wolfie,” then noticed Paul coming toward her in the moonlight.

Oh.

He was coming in.

She moved toward the door. “Want some tea?”

“No grass clippings.”

“I can’t believe your own mother is an herbalist and you talk about nettles that way.”

“It’s because she’s an herbalist. As a child, I decided that in my adult life I’d never drink anything that tasted like lawn shavings.”

“You have no adult life.”

He ignored the jibe. They were walking through the dark hallway and had almost reached the kitchen when he said, “You look like you’ve lost your best friend, and there’s definitely no need. Sean Devlin has arrived, looking romantic, to sweep you off your feet. I remember him as one of the sharper crayons in the box, so your children won’t be cretins.”

“I will never have children,” Cameron told him sharply, “unless I adopt.”

“Ah, yes. I’d forgotten your morbid fear of pregnancy and birth.” Cameron had witnessed her older sister, Beatrice, in what she described as “extreme suffering, life-threatening suffering, the screaming-for-hours kind of suffering.” Cameron was convinced that no child could pass through her small hips. Paul kept to the original subject. “What’s making you so miserable tonight?”

“Never mind. Don’t trouble yourself about it.”

“Let me guess—you have lost your best friend. You’ve lost Mary Anne to Graham Corbett.”

“Very funny.” She took two mugs out of the cabinet, checked that there was water in the kettle and switched on the burner.

“It’s inevitable that your cousin will marry someone.”

Cameron’s throat knotted. Her eyes felt hot. She wasn’t upset because everything was going to change with Mary Anne, that her being married would change everything. That wasn’t it at all. Anyhow, Mary Anne and Graham weren’t actually engaged.

Not yet.

“You okay?”

The question was far from Paul’s usual joking tone.

It increased the swelling in her throat. She nodded, jaw taut.

From her Salvation Army kitchen table, where he’d pulled out a chair, Paul watched her back. His tomboy friend with her two long golden-brown braids was dressed up, for her, wearing high clogs and some kind of longish, lacy tunic-top over her jeans. She’d been at a family dinner when he’d called her and begged her to come to The Last Resort.

He’d used the groupie as an excuse, but that wasn’t it. He’d known something was up with Cameron, something that had to do with Mary Anne. He also knew that Cameron, for reasons that made no sense to him, was ever so slightly envious of her cousin. She’s got cheekbones! She’s tall! Things like that. He saw no reason Cameron should envy anyone. She was the best-looking and most enjoyable woman he knew, that was certain. If there had been a Best Body category in their high school yearbook, she’d have won, hands down. All his classmates had carried fantasies about her.

Now, she sounded as if she were about to cry.

She spun away from the stove and said, “If you tell anyone what I’m going to tell you, I will never speak to you again and I’ll tell that groupie that you want to marry her so she can have your babies.”

Some small voice in the back of Cameron’s head whispered, Reckless…reckless…don’t do it.

She ignored the voice. She couldn’t stop, now that she’d started. “I just don’t see why I can’t have a normal relationship with a nice man who is actually an adult—someone who knows his own psyche and doesn’t project his demons onto me.”

Paul squinted. “Didn’t Sean Devlin beg your phone number tonight, or am I imagining that? Is this going to be another salvo in the Great Crusade for All Men to Have Therapy?”

“Forget it!” She spun away again.

Cameron, he knew, didn’t actually believe all men should have therapy. But she seemed to want some kind of fantasy relationship where she and the man in her life talked about everything, had no secrets from each other, constantly shared every emotion. Sometimes he wanted to point out to her that, in a strictly intellectual sense, she didn’t want a boyfriend, she wanted a girlfriend.

But now Paul suddenly saw, suddenly understood. She wasn’t crying about her friendship with Mary Anne, and she wasn’t crying about the general lack of the uninteresting kind of love relationship she thought she wanted; she was crying because she wanted Graham Corbett. The radio guy who looked like an extra on Sex and the City. Talk about someone totally wrong for tomboy Cameron. And Cameron could have virtually any guy she wanted.

Paul knew it would be a mistake to say anything. Especially anything on the subject. But he had to try. “Graham Corbett’s just not…” he said inarticulately, unable to say exactly what Corbett wasn’t.

He thought Cameron might turn around and shout at him.

Instead, she turned to face him again, dragging her sleeve across her eyes. She said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m getting over him. Bridget gave me something so I wouldn’t like him.”

All the hair on Paul’s body stood up. Bridget, his sister, was not someone you should accept funny drinks from. She and his mother had uncanny powers which Paul, who had grown up with these females, could not pretend away. He had seen too much to be complacent on the subject. “You drank something Bridget gave you?”

“A s-s-specific—” Cameron sniffed. “For emotional healing.”

Paul supposed it could be true. But he also knew that his sister was mad at him. She hadn’t been watching her son beside the duck pond at the zoo. It was dangerous, and he’d told her so. Not tactfully, maybe, but come on! Nick could have fallen in and drowned while Bridget was talking meditation techniques with another mom.

Cameron moved away from the counter and picked up her purse, which she’d slung onto the table. From within she retrieved a small vial that she skidded across the table to Paul.

Paul didn’t want to touch the thing. Bridget could be really treacherous.

Cameron noticed that he didn’t pick up the vial. It was empty but for any last drops that might remain. Abruptly, she laughed.

“What?” said Paul.

“You. You’re so afraid. Everybody in the world laughs at love potions and thinks they don’t work.” Though Cameron also believed in the efficacy of the potions, she didn’t find them to be a big deal.

“Everybody in the world didn’t grow up with two witches,” said Paul emphatically.

“It’s not even a love potion,” Cameron needled him, unable to resist. “Maybe you should see if there are a few drops in there for your emotional equilibrium.”

“I’m not the one bursting into tears over a—” He stopped.

Cameron’s eyebrows drew together. “A what?”

“He’s so—preening. He belongs on cable. With his girl curls, that Jim Morrison do. It’s hilarious.”

Cameron pursed her lips briefly at this unfair description of Graham. She was beginning to enjoy herself. “You sound jealous.”

“Of Graham Corbett?” To Paul’s dismay, his voice cracked.

Cameron picked up the vial and carried it over to the stove. “What if I just put the last drop in your tea?”

“I won’t drink it,” he said, shaking his head.

Cameron rolled her eyes and set the vial near the sink to rinse and reuse for an herbal tincture. A pity that such an attractive man—and Paul was downright handsome—should be hopeless as a mate for anyone. Not because of anything to do with his faith in love potions. Just because he was so determinedly unattached. Which was childish.

A little catch in her heart warned her, cautioned her. But she had nothing to fear from Paul. Not emotionally. Not in any way.

She vividly remembered four or so things about their Halloween encounter back in college. One—her own costume. Two—surprising tenderness, or maybe a tender surprise. Three—the glitter in his bed in the morning. Four—his announcing upon awakening that the sex would wreck their friendship. She knew that excuse was covered extensively in the useful book He’s Just Not That Into You. Because it was a lie. It meant, I don’t want to have sex with you again. Period.

Paul had rejected her. This permanently eliminated him from her pool of men with whom she might have an intimate relationship in the future.

As she was thinking this, he said, “You know what the Chinese remedy for lovesickness is?”

“What?” said Cameron without interest. There was no remedy.

“To make love with someone other than the object of your attraction.”

Cameron eyed him suspiciously. “You’re not propositioning me, are you?”

Paul hadn’t been. He had been trying to goad her as she was goading him about the love potion. As far as he knew, Cameron hadn’t been on a real date in years, and he’d been planning to suggest Sean Devlin as a possible choice. But now they’d entered murky waters. Possibly deep waters.

He didn’t know Cameron’s entire sexual history, but knew she’d done more than her share of fending off unwelcome advances on dates. He thought of her, in a brief unspoken second, more like a breath, of someone innocent and vulnerable, the girl he used to surf with, kick Hacky Sack with, toss a Frisbee with. One night she’d been in his bed, full-breasted, so sexual, so different. Now, suddenly, she was both those things. And he felt protective toward her.

He tried to answer and couldn’t. Sleeping with Cameron… He liked the idea and also thought it was a mistake, not part of his plans. But he felt a curiosity, curiosity about who she was now, what they might be together. And his mouth said, “It’s an idea.”

Cameron almost gasped with the shock of it.

It was unthinkable.

She and Paul were friends, just friends. In any case, she liked sex, but she wasn’t much into the sport of it, and what he was suggesting sounded like sport. Suppose she did it, would this Chinese cure work? She wasn’t in any danger of falling in love with Paul.

A shudder swept over her with her next thought, a thought she tried to suppress.

Cameron was terrified of pregnancy. There were good reasons for this, several. And she knew her fear was irrational. But it was a fear that had many times made her decide not to go home with someone she might otherwise have accepted. Which was crazy. Birth control did work. And she and Paul would use condoms. It would be fine.

That’s always what you think, Cameron, and then the next day you freak out.

But it was nonsense. She’d talked about it in therapy. She could handle that fear. Because it wasn’t rational, and she was a very rational woman. Which left only the question of sex as sport. “I’m not the kind of woman who does things like that,” she said emphatically. She took honey from the cupboard, leaving the door open.

Paul noticed that she had considered.

She said, “Want some toast?”

“Sure. Things like what?”

“Casual sex.” She popped two slices of rye bread into the toaster.

“I wasn’t thinking casual,” Paul said. Though he’d accepted his share of invitations from eager women, the idea of “friends with benefits” slightly offended him. Sex was sex, friends were friends, lovers were rare. “More of a—” he sought for the right words, and found some he thought would appeal to her pro-therapy, talk-everything-through outlook “—healing experience.”

“Like last time,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “when you rejected me in the morning? I haven’t forgotten, you know.”

“Rejected you?” He frowned, eyebrows drawing together.

“You said it would ruin our friendship or something like that.”

Paul considered. “I do kind of remember that.” What had been in his head? he wondered now. Probably his inherent dislike of denigrating friends to “friends with benefits.” But why hadn’t he wanted more with Cameron, a real relationship? At the time, she would have made an excellent girlfriend.

Now, since the subject had come up, it was beginning to occur to him that he wanted to know Cameron as a lover. Again. He had some memories of the night they’d spent together, but they were mostly visual. “I think it would make you feel better,” he said, unable to keep from smiling. Feeling mischief sweep over him. “If it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll do it again. We’ll do it until we cure—” he found he couldn’t utter Graham Corbett’s name “—your affliction.”

“I’m not afflicted.” Spinning back toward the toaster, she banged into the open cabinet door and cried out. She swore, it hurt so much.

She heard Paul get up from the table and bit down tears.

He turned her around and said, “Let’s get you some ice. Looks like you’re going to have a shiner.”

“Great,” she gasped through the pain.

Spontaneously, he kissed the tip of her nose. But then his lips drifted to her cheek, down to her mouth.

At first, she did not respond, and he was about to move away when she began kissing him back.

He could smell the bread toasting, but he’d lost all interest in food.

She kissed him. She felt his mouth open slightly, and so did hers. She felt the tip of his tongue caress her lips. She whispered, “Okay.”

Paul let her body settle against his, touch everywhere, let her feel what was happening to him because of her. His mind spun, seeing the teenage tomboy she’d been, the vulnerable person she still was inside, the lover he didn’t really know.

I SHOULDN’T BE doing this, she thought minutes later in the bedroom. Abandoning the toast which had popped up, they had gone straight to her bed.

What if this wrecked her relationship with Paul?

Well, maybe that would be for the best. It would be better if Cameron had nothing more to do with any member of the Cureux family—not midwife and love-potion brewer Clare, not her antiseptically skeptical obstetrician ex-husband David, not witch-in-waiting Bridget and not Paul.

But Cameron liked Paul. And he was a friend, a friend who didn’t mind if she woke him in the middle of night to drive Mariah to the vet because she’d eaten a tampon. She sometimes thought Paul would do anything for her. When she someday had a relationship with a man, she wanted it to be someone who would open up to her, talk to her about everything. But that wasn’t Paul. Their friendship wasn’t the talking kind but the being-together kind.

And sometimes she really wished she knew what went on in his head, what he really felt, the unspoken things.

And he wasn’t talking now.

He took off her clothes, and she liked this. It felt strangely…forbidden. Tossing his own T-shirt to the floor beside Mariah, he gazed down at Cameron. “You are fantastically beautiful.”

“What?” Her jaw actually dropped, and she found herself trying to assume a persona, trying not to be aware that she was naked and he was looking at her, clearly intent on only one thing. Having her.

She quavered. The air felt so revealing. It swam between them. She reached up to his jeans, and he gently caught her wrists, placing them back against the sheets. “Slower,” he said, and she felt the power of his intense maleness, his oppositeness from her.

He came down to her, to kiss her lips, to touch her face and her jaw.

Cameron believed herself to be jaded. During the years before Beatrice’s pregnancy and birth, before she’d acquired her own terror of pregnancy and birth, she’d had some wildness. Encounters on the spur of the moment, a live-in boyfriend who’d been not very nice in the long run. Certain words from the mouths of men made her laugh, generally promises that they were going to send her to a yet unknown Eden of ecstasy. They had often made themselves ridiculous to her, and through her work she often found them unworthy of respect, earning only her contempt.

But Paul, in this minute, seemed a fairy-man, a god-man, a pagan creature who was pure desire and impervious to ridicule or derision. She realized, acutely, why they had never done this again. It was too much, too perfect, too close to what-should-be. Too utterly terrifyingly near her ultimate desire in a lover.

His body was beautiful, and she tried again to touch, this time, his shoulders.

He let her, briefly, then removed her hands from him again as he kissed her throat, her heart, her breasts…

Myrtle Hollow

CLARE CUREUX sat in her cabin, drinking the herbal infusion that would relax her, allowing her to sleep after the birth she’d just attended. Few people in Logan County chose homebirths these days. It used to be a choice of poverty, but now the indigent had help from the government to go to the hospital.

Ladonna Naggy’s homebirth had been an educated choice. Ladonna had attended Yale, studied biology and was thinking of becoming a midwife herself. Bridget had come along to this birth as Clare’s assistant, and Ladonna and her partner, Michel, had given birth to a beautiful son. Everything had gone right. Bridget had talked less than usual—this was something Clare had counseled her daughter about, because chatter could distract and irritate a woman in labor. Yes, Bridget was learning; after all, she had two children of her own.

Clare knew she herself was unlike other women, though she shared many of their experiences. Sixty-seven years old, divorced, mother of two, grandmother of two. She was a midwife and an herbalist, and some people called her a witch.

Clare was Irish on her mother’s side, of Caribbean descent on her father’s, her paternal grandmother having been white enough to “pass.” Clare was not sure where “the Sight” came from, whether from Ireland or the Caribbean, but she had it, as did her daughter Bridget, her youngest. Clare had received the love potion recipe from her father’s mother but brewed the recipe without the elaborate rituals her grandmother thought vital.

Grand-mère’s view had been that if one did not make a sacrifice willingly, a sacrifice would be taken.

Clare refused to see that anything had been sacrificed in her life. Divorce from David? What had happened before the divorce? Just the price of her vocation—or so it had all seemed at the time.

The children believed that she and David had simply ceased getting along. Clare was content with this interpretation of the story, which had the advantage of being true, as far as it went.

But Paul, she knew, considered the explanation inadequate. And he used its so-called inadequacy to justify his own absurd belief that it was impossible for two people to remain married. Well, he claimed that he could never have such a partnership.

She sometimes wondered if knowing the whole truth would change Paul’s mind. It was academic. He never would know, of course, because David would never tell him and neither would she. It hadn’t been her finest hour; and if her son ever learned the truth, Paul would see it just as David had.

When given the choice, she’d chosen her vocation over her marriage. It had been selfish. But as she shut off the light in the kitchen and made her way through the dark cabin, reflecting on the birth she’d just been honored to witness, she was content.