Kiss and Spell (Enchanted, Inc.) (18 page)

I rubbed at my temples. Snapping out of the spell had given me a headache. “Yes, and it went just like I told you, only he must have hit me with the whammy when I didn’t fall under his sway. He seemed convinced I’d give up and go back to him. And maybe I should have.”

“What?” It was an outraged yelp.

I hurried to reassure him. “Not for real, but if I pretended to be with him and to ignore you, then he’d never suspect that the spell had broken, and if he’s in on it, maybe I could have learned something.”

He shook his head. “No, it would have been too hard to stay convincing.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, that’s how I rationalized it, too. I’m not sure my stomach is strong enough to pretend to be into that guy. There is one thing I noticed, though. One of those gray guys was watching him, and Josh seemed to consult with him a couple of times. Now I’m sure we’re not supposed to be able to see them. When I went back under the spell, I didn’t see him there anymore, and I don’t think he just vanished. So if you run into one, don’t look at him directly. I wonder if the gray suit is a uniform, like the enforcers in black.”

“It’ll make our lives easier if it is. Do you think Josh will be a problem?”

“Probably not. I still liked you when I was under the spell. I still sent him away after he put me back under the spell. Nothing changed other than knowing who I really am. Maybe they’re satisfied that the spell is holding now that he’s reinforced it. But I wonder why no one’s working on you that way. You’re usually the real danger, and they have to know by now that you’ve got magic back, since this place worked on you.”

He frowned. “Maybe it’s because you’re the one who’s resisting and going against their plans, so they know they have to work harder to keep the spell going. If you hadn’t resisted their plans for you, I don’t think I’d have ever snapped out of it.”

“So losing my powers is actually a good thing. That’s nice to know.” I said it sincerely, but it came out sounding sarcastic. I supposed I had mixed feelings about it.

“Do you feel up to our perfume-commercial recon mission?”

“Should we do it, or should we lie low after that close call?”

“If we do it right, it should look like we’re lying low. They’ll expect us to go on some kind of date. But you may have to prompt me for what I should do.”

We made one last pass through the store and made sure the evening shift was up and going, and then we hurried out the front doors. He surprised me by picking me up with his hands at my waist and spinning me around. I laughed, and then when he set me down, I leaned my head against his shoulder. “I guess you have seen a perfume commercial,” I whispered.

“Nope, but I have seen a few movie trailers.”

“Good move. Very convincing.” Then as I looked over his shoulder, I saw that we weren’t alone, and this time it wasn’t just an elf in a gray suit. It was McClusky, who was harder to spot without his usual black enforcer uniform. “And it looks like we have an audience,” I whispered.

“Another gray guy?”

“No, McClusky. I guess Mac broke the spell on him.”

He groaned. “What do they think I’m going to do, try to take over this world with my evil magic?”

“I don’t see Mac, so maybe it’s just McClusky’s paranoia. You don’t have anything to hide from him. We’re doing what we said we would do.”

He let out a deep breath in a long sigh, and I felt his muscles relax ever so slightly before he released his hold on me. He took my hand, and we ambled down the sidewalk. “So, flowers next?” he murmured. At the next corner store, he paused to buy a bouquet, then presented it with a flourish. I didn’t have to fake my delight. As cheesy as it was, it was also really nice. I buried my face in the flowers and had to fight off a sneeze when I accidentally inhaled some pollen. The near-sneeze made both of us laugh. I wasn’t sure if we were acting out a romantic comedy movie trailer or the opening credits to a television situation comedy.

It sort of killed the mood when Owen then went back into spy mode, whispering in my ear, “Since this neighborhood seems to correspond with the Upper West Side, we shouldn’t be able to walk too far across town without reaching the river. By my calculations, we’ve only got a couple of blocks in this direction before we hit Riverside Park.”

“You know just what to say to a girl,” I whispered back. I was beginning to fear that we weren’t fated to have a time when there
weren’t
life-or-death circumstances. I was already cherishing the romantic moments we had before the spell broke.

My heart began beating faster as we neared the next intersection. There was the park across the street, and on the other side of it should have been the river. There wasn’t an easy way across the river from this point, so I suspected the river worked as the wall to our prison. The trick would be testing that wall without going for a really nasty swim.

When the light changed, we crossed the street and hurried through the park, attempting a romantic frolic. I tried for a lighthearted giggle, but it came out as more of a mad cackle, so I decided to be romantic in silence. We reached a point where we should have been able to look out over the river, but we kept going through more and more park. “I don’t get up to the Upper West Side that much, but is Riverside Park this wide?” I asked.

“Not here, I don’t think,” Owen said, “but there’s something about this that looks familiar.”

“I think it’s supposed to be Central Park, but it’s whatever green space plays Central Park in movies and TV shows that aren’t actually filmed in New York.”

“Yeah, while I haven’t explored every inch of it, this is one of the parts of the park where I’ve been a lot, and none of this is quite right,” he agreed.

We kept walking through the not-Central Park, then suddenly we came out of the park and into the city, as though we were leaving Central Park and heading into the Upper West Side. We stood on the sidewalk with traffic whizzing past us as we tried to get our bearings.

“Okay, that’s weird,” Owen said. “It’s like we’re in a loop instead of having clear boundaries. Which makes sense—if we bumped into a barrier, we’d notice it, even if we were under a spell, but while under the spell we might not notice that we keep coming back to the same neighborhood, no matter how long we walk.”

“Which means we can’t get out of here,” I said with a sinking feeling.

Chapter Twelve

“We haven’t tried going up or downtown,” Owen said, sounding like he was trying to reassure me as much as himself. “Maybe that’s where the entrances are.”

We crossed the street and kept going, back into the Upper West Side. When we hit the Broadway-like street, we turned and headed up it. As we walked, we paused every so often to look at the menus posted outside restaurants and acted like we were having trouble deciding where to eat. We made it past the street where my apartment was and kept going uptown, but then somewhere around Ninetieth Street we found ourselves back around Lincoln Center—or a vaguely Lincoln Center-ish complex with a fountain in front of it.

Owen proved he’d listened to my description of romantic things to do by giving me a playful splash from the fountain. I played along by squealing and running, but he caught me and pulled me close to him.

“So we’ve got a prison that’s around twenty blocks by maybe four blocks,” I said into his ear. “How depressing.”

“But it means we have less ground to cover to find that portal.” He tensed momentarily, then said loudly, “So, in all that walking, did you find a place you wanted to eat?” I saw an elf in gray lurking nearby and forced myself not to look directly at him. McClusky was also there, but I wasn’t worried about him since we weren’t up to anything evil.

Leaning against Owen and snuggling under the shelter of his arm, I sighed and said, “Don’t hate me for insisting on all that walking to look at every restaurant in the neighborhood, but that first Italian place we saw looks good. It’s a nice night. Maybe we can get a seat on the sidewalk.”

“Okay, Italian it is.”

“But I do have a list of other places I want to try later.” I attempted a flirtatious eyelash flutter. “There were a couple of interesting-looking spots for breakfast.” His blush made me smile in spite of the tense circumstances.

We got a sidewalk seat at the restaurant, and at first I wished we’d sat inside because Mr. Gray stood on the sidewalk right next to our table—pedestrians moving past him without apparently seeing him—but then I realized that had been Owen’s strategy. Sitting outside made it look like we didn’t think we had anything to hide, but it meant we were onstage the entire time, playing out the scene of a first real date.

The acting was kind of fun, though, and before long, I was able to make myself forget my role. It was a rare chance for us to have a semi-normal date. Since the elves were probably controlling just about everything and maintaining the illusion that this was a world without magic, the odds were slim that there would be any magical chaos. As long as we could forget Mr. Gray and McClusky, who’d taken an adjacent table, we could enjoy a rare romantic meal with no worries. We leaned on the table and stared into each other’s eyes, sipped red wine, fed each other tidbits from our plates, held hands under the table, talked, and laughed.

Conversation was the hard part. We couldn’t talk about anything that might give away the fact that we knew who we were, so we couldn’t talk about work the way we normally did when we went out. There was the store, of course, but since we’d supposedly met there and spent all day working there together, that was only a starting point for the conversation. Instead, we had to talk about ourselves in a way that Owen and I never really had before, as close as we were—no mention of work, of magic, or of the strange things we’d been going through.

“What did you want to be when you grew up, when you were a kid and before you had to think about practical things?” I asked him.

“I wanted to be a professor, like my dad. I thought that meant reading books all day and talking about them. I was the weird kid who liked doing research in school. What about you?”

“I wanted to work in a business. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I wanted to do something where I would wear a nice suit and carry a briefcase to work in an office with a view in the city. I wasn’t sure what people like that did all day, other than talk on the phone and sound important, but that was what I wanted.”

“Wasn’t there anything you liked doing, though?”

“I don’t know.” This was getting as uncomfortable as it would be on a real date, but if I couldn’t talk about it with Owen, I might never work out my career issues. “I never thought about it that way. I was so busy, I didn’t have time for things other than school, chores, and helping my parents with the store. I was in the band in school, but I never wanted to be a musician. I liked reading books and seeing movies, but I couldn’t think of any jobs doing that. I mostly just liked helping a business run well. This may be why finding the right job for me has been so challenging.” That was true in both this reality and in the real world. My real-world struggles may even have provided the fake world’s situation. Romantic comedy heroines were seldom on top of the world, doing exactly what they’d always wanted to do.

“But you did have some music in your background. What do you like to listen to?”

I groaned. “This is so embarrassing. Yeah, I played the flute, but I don’t really listen to music. I’ll have the radio on in the car, but since I don’t drive here, I don’t listen to music all that much. I’m guessing, based on what you play in the store, that you like jazz.”

“Yeah, when I listen to music. I usually prefer silence, but jazz can be restful and complicated at the same time. I don’t play music at home very often, but I sometimes like going out to listen to jazz.”

“Then we should go do that sometime.” That was, if we ever got back home. Or did this world have jazz clubs?

“We should. It’s a date.” His smile made my heart flutter. I was so used to him that it was easy to forget how cute he was. He was just Owen. Him smiling at me that way reminded me all over again of the first time I’d noticed him, when I’d mentally called him “Mr. Right.” This conversation was also showing me how little we knew each other. I knew who he was as a person, having seen him through all kinds of dire situations, but I didn’t know any of these basic things about him that usually came out in early dates. We’d already fought a magical battle together before our first date, which made small talk seem beside the point. Now, Mr. Gray’s lurking presence was forcing us to go through the “getting to know you” phase.

I took a sip of wine and asked, “What’s the best vacation you’ve ever taken?”

“My parents were very big on educational travel. We went to historical sites and museums in the area and around the world.”

“That sounds like your idea of fun.”

“It was. But the best one was when my dad was doing research at a museum in England when I was about ten, and he took me with him as his assistant. He treated me like a peer, and though we didn’t see much outside the workroom in the bowels of the museum on that trip, it was probably the most fun I’ve had on a vacation.” He grinned. “I bet your vacations were a lot more normal than that.”

“We didn’t take a lot of vacations when I was a kid. When your family has a business, there isn’t much time off, and the summer break was our busy season. We went to San Antonio during Christmas break a few times, and my friends and I did it again during college.” There hadn’t been many details, and of course no magic, but otherwise my romantic comedy character’s background had been a lot like my real one, so I hoped nothing we said raised any red flags for the gray guy.

Owen didn’t say anything about taking a vacation together, since supposedly he and I had only just met and that would be rather premature for a first dinner date, but he looked into my eyes and gave me a slight smile, and I knew he was thinking about the way he’d been promising that we’d go on vacation when everything settled down, only it never seemed to.

He drank some wine, then seemed to pull together his courage and asked, “Have you ever been in love before?”