Fire Raiser (11 page)

“Oh, no. No way. Never. Not in a million years.”

Downcast eyes, bitten lip, shamed whisper: “You don’t—I’m not your type—”

“Not my—oh, shit.” Cam sprang to his feet, his chair tipping over behind him with a discourteous clatter. He could feel the stares. “We gotta get outta here,” he said fiercely. “Come on, Jamey. Let’s go.”

“Cam—”

Everyone was being forced to notice them now. And that was the last thing either of them needed. “Let’s
go
!”

A minute later they were back outside. The cold scraped at the skin of Cam’s face and hands, scoured his throat and lungs with every breath. Jamey hurried along at his elbow. Cam didn’t look at him.

It was colder, and there were fewer people on the street. No one passed close enough to hear Cam as he said, “I know what you want to do with your life—and you’re gonna be great. Governor, Congressman, Senator—you can be anything you want, Jamey, but you can’t be this. You can’t fuck it all up by fucking other men.”

A hand locked around his arm. He couldn’t shake it off, so he stopped walking, turned, and glared down the three inches that separated them in height.

“Shut up,” Jamey ordered, scornfully unintimidated. “Just shut up. Do I look that stupid? I know everything you’re going to say, and I don’t want to hear it from you the way I’ve heard it from myself ever since I met you!”

Cam considered those furious gray eyes for a moment, then asked mildly, “Well, whoever was talking, were you actually listening?”

Jamey shoved both hands into his pockets. “No.”

“Didn’t think so.” With a shrug, as if none of this mattered, he lengthened his strides—hoping Jamey would get the idea and just go home or something.

Instead, a soft, wet, freezing load of snow hit the back of his head.

“Hey!” As he swung around, another snowball struck him in the shoulder. Jamey was grinning as if he’d just pitched a no-hitter at Dodger Stadium.

“You really want to bring that to the party, Pretty Boy?” Cam taunted.

“You really want to call me that, Grandpa?”

He sternly reminded himself that he was, in fact, twenty-six, not a hundred-and-twelve; twenty-six, damn it, not eight-and-a-half—

He scooped, packed, and let fly twice before Jamey recovered from astonishment and started retaliatory fire.

When they were breathless and soaked and splattered in white, Cam shook his hair free of snow and glared as fiercely as he could. Jamey’s carefree laughter warmed him more thoroughly than one of his own spells set into his socks.

“You were
way
too serious,” Jamey explained before Cam could even ask. “
Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem: dulce est desipere in loco.
”

Rolling his eyes, he fought a grin. Every law student knew enough Latin to get by; Jamey had taken four years of it in high school and another four at William and Mary. “Okay, who is it this time? Virgil? Livy? Emperor Augustus?”

“Horace. ‘Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans: it’s lovely to be silly at the right moment.’ I had to do it, Cam. You looked like all the Brothers Grimm rolled into one.”

“There were only two of them. And are you calling me a fairy tale?”

“One more ‘Pretty Boy’ in my direction, and you’ll be—” Jamey broke off the threat, shaking his head. “I was going to say you’d be singing soprano for the Whiffenpoofs, but that wouldn’t suit my plans for you at all.”

Before Cam could point out that whatever those plans were, they would require him to be at least marginally cooperative and
that
absolutely wasn’t going to happen, he saw that Jamey was shivering. “Let’s get to my place before we both catch pneumonia,” he said gruffly. And the whole walk back, he wondered why he didn’t just spell Jamey’s coat and sweater and shoes for warmth—as a good-bye present before telling him to go away and never come back.

They sat on the sofa in Cam’s fourth-floor walk-up, right back where they’d started, except that the geophysics had shifted and the laws of gravity—shared or not—no longer applied. Cam sprawled, and Jamey sat straight-spined, and thirty-six inches of upholstery sagged between them—just like earlier, just as if nothing had changed. But there was no balance, no equilibrium between attraction and resistance. It was all wobbly and fluctuating and it scared the shit out of him. Jamey knew, had known forever; it was all out in the open now.

“I went on-line,” Cam said abruptly, “and looked into programs like the one Morgan’s parents checked him into. It’s called ‘reparative therapy’ or ‘conversion therapy.’ One place is kind of an Onward Christian Soldiers thing, waging spiritual warfare against homosexuality. Another of them says that it’s akin to the whole experience of being ‘born again’—that you have to die before you can be reborn as a heterosexual. What they do—nine times out often they’re not even licensed medical or psychological practitioners, they’ve had no training except in religion, and it’s not just the Evangelicals and the Mormons, it’s Catholics and Jews and—”

Jamey was shaking his head. “I don’t want to talk about Morgan. I’m sorry for him, and I hope his parents decide they love him more than they’re scared of him, but he’s not me. My parents know—they knew practically before I did. It took a while, yeah, but they’re okay with it. They didn’t disown me or tell me I’m going to hell, and they sure as shit would never send me to rehab—”

“All hail the Great American Liberal,” Cam snapped. “Your parents, my dad, almost all my relatives—”

“Almost?”

“A few of them are kind of hysterically religious, and we don’t have much to do with them anyway except when somebody gets married or buried—but that’s not the point,” he interrupted himself impatiently. “Our families aren’t society at large, Jamey. With all the talking you did with yourself, did you ever ask if it’d be worth it to you?”

“With you, it would be,” Jamey replied quietly.

“You can’t say stuff like that,” he admonished, feeling dizzy as the gravitational constant of the universe shifted again. “You really can’t.”

“I really can,” he answered with a tiny smile.

“Yeah? So I’m worth your whole life being about being gay? Because that’s what happens. You become the token queer, the faggot in the corner office that shows how enlightened the partners are—hell, maybe even you become the Gay Congressman. And anything else you are gets subsumed and you get defined by one thing only.”

“It has to be that way, does it?”

“Two choices.” Two only: give in to the attraction and smash into each other to their mutual destruction, or continue to resist and somehow survive this. “Come out, live openly, maybe find somebody and maybe even be happy. And everything else you want to do with your life, you can kiss it all good-bye. The
only
thing anybody will see about you is that you’re gay.”

“And the second choice is to live a lie.”

He nodded slowly. “And if you find somebody you can love, you both have to be careful every minute of every day.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped between them so they wouldn’t shake too much. “But, Jamey, that way you still get to do all the rest of it! You get to live the other parts of your life, do the work you were meant to do, have people look at you and see a man, a human being, instead of—”

“I don’t have to ask which decision you made.”

“Yeah. And for now, I’m gonna make the decision for you.”

“How noble. How generous.”

He ignored the sarcasm. “For now, during law school and while you figure out your future, you have to keep your mouth shut. Because once you’re out, that’s it. All other choices and all other definitions vanish.” He hunched forward, feeling his finger bones grind together. “Dammit—you’re smart, good-looking, articulate—”
—with the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen and a mind that works at hyperdrive—
“—you’ve got charm to burn, but you’ve also got something better than that—charisma. You’re funny, you think fast on your feet—”
—you’re proud and honorable and your smile ought to be declared a National Treasure—
“—you’ve got so much going for you it’s scary. You’re Luke fucking Skywalker, only you wouldn’t know the Dark Side of the Force if it introduced itself and bought you a beer. I’m not gonna let you screw up. Especially not over somebody like me.”

“Like you? What do you mean, like you? Goddammit, Cam, don’t you
know
? You think I’ve been hanging around because I want a head start on my third year when I haven’t even finished my first? What’s wrong with you? If I’m gonna screw up—and may I remind you here that it’s
my
life and if I want to screw it up, I can goddammed well screw it up however I want and with whomever I want and I don’t completely accept your premise anyway, but what we’re talking about here is—is—”

He’d gotten lost in his own sentence. Cam felt a tiny grin tug one corner of his mouth. “You want to start that one over?”

“Fuck you!”

“You have no idea how much I wish you would. But it’s not gonna happen. Not with me. I’d never be able to live with myself.”

“So your answer is no.”

“I’m not even gonna let you ask the question.”

Jamey stared for a moment—and then lunged across the threadbare sofa cushions and kissed him.

Nothing imploded. Nothing smashed into a million pieces. He wondered why he had thought they’d crush each other with the force of this thing between them. Whatever had happened at the beginning, the impulse that had started a spin of matter and energy and spirit that had coalesced into their two separate beings, they had found their center of gravity. It felt entirely natural, completely right.

Slowly, he felt himself begin to change. Hands moved over him, not exploring in the way of a new lover but shaping, polishing, and he responded helplessly as those hands made of his previously ordinary body a work of art. He forgot to remember why all this couldn’t happen. He didn’t feel as if anything were happening at all—nothing new, anyway, nothing that wasn’t true and inevitable and preordained, like middle C and light speed. Not even the most eloquent magic had such power as this man had over him.

The panic was minor, compared to the grief. Neither interfered with what he did next. Very deliberately, he sought out the marker in his brain that very talented Witches had taught him to find and use. He directed that peculiarity to the amber nestled near his heart and bespelled every stitch Jamey wore with bitter, bone-chilling cold.

The younger man lurched back. Cam followed him with his eyes, as if trying to memorize the path he would need to take to return to that mouth, those hands. But he needed to forget that there even was such a place as Jamey’s arms. Jamey snagged up the afghan crocheted by Gary’s grandmother and wrapped himself in it. Cam Worked on that, too, casually, instinctively—taking bleak satisfaction in his own expertise. Jamey would tremble and shiver until Cam unWorked the magic.

This was the only sin his faith acknowledged: doing harm to another. Hurting Jamey was inevitable. Like gravity. Like magic.

His magic, that could delicately mend a tattered heirloom quilt or subtly deflect raindrops when he’d forgotten to wear his coat—his magic could bind and his magic could repel. He could use it as the opposite of gravity, and he could fend off Jamey as if Jamey was nothing more than inconvenient rain.

Cam looked him right in his innocent, troubled gray eyes. “Something wrong?”

He huddled, shivering. “Don’t you feel how cold it is?”

“Maybe you’re coming down with something. Maybe you ought to go home.” He felt cold, too. Ice water in his veins, wasn’t that the cliché? Holly would kick him into the middle of next week if she found out he’d even thought it. Holly would kick him into the middle of the next millennium if she found out what he’d just done. “Yeah, I think you should go home and we won’t talk about this again.”

“Cam—” He was still clutching the thick wool to him, all previous experience stubbornly insisting that it could warm him, would warm him, if only he waited long enough. “Cam—please, I don’t know what’s going on—”

If Cam had his way—and the magic pretty well ensured that he would—Jamey would never know. A glancing thought rescinded the unnatural chill. Jamey caught his breath and let the afghan drop to the floor; Cam saw the colors bunch around expensively scuffed loafers. Instinct made him grab Jamey’s discarded coat and toss it at him. So easy, it was so damned easy—he finished a new spell while the thing was still in the air. Just the lining, just the thin silk within thick wool, so that when Jamey put it on he would feel the revulsion Worked into it. That had been particularly easy: all it took was redirection of what Cam felt about himself. Just the lining, so no one touching Jamey would sense anything; just for an hour, until he got back to his own place fully convinced that all he felt for Cam was disgust. He had only to put the coat on, and feel what Cam wanted him to feel, and he would be gone within minutes.

But Jamey stood there, fists clenched around his coat, staring at Cam with wide, startled eyes. “I’ve never known anybody as terrified as you are. It’s as if this was the Middle Ages, and the Inquisition would throw you in jail and you’d be burned at the stake like a witch or a heretic—”

“YOU FREAKED RIGHT THEN and there, didn’t you?” Holly asked.

“Well, being both a Witch
and
a heretic—twice over, seeing as how I’m a deviant from the One True Faith of Catholicism
and
the One True Faith of Heterosexuality—”

“Stop it.”

“Yeah,” he said wearily. “Okay. So I took the pilgrimage to Salem a little too seriously right after Mom died. Dad wanted to visit the cousins, and how was he to know a couple of ’em had gotten religion and renounced the ancestors?”

Thereby scaring a ten-year-old boy half to death. Unlike Holly, Cam descended from several New England lines of Witches. A perceptive if not actually prescient forefather had fled Salem for Virginia a few years before the hysteria of the 1690s. Among those of the Craft, Pocahontas County had always been known as a safe haven.

Their slow walk while Cam told the story had taken them around to the back of the Inn. A hundred yards or so from the kitchen entrance was a dormitory, windows on both floors blazing as the staff enjoyed a night off. The other buildings—conference rooms, offices, and so on—were dark but for some security floods.