That Touch of Magic (8 page)

Her eyes narrowed and her lips thinned and for a moment, I thought she was going to slap me, even though she hadn’t done that since I grew taller than her. I waved a finger at her, indicating her face.

“Watch out. Stays that way.” I put my purse over my shoulder and blew her a kiss. “Wow. You really do look
amazing.
”

She turned her attention back to her mirror, and I made my escape. It was the first of many errands I had to run that day, and time was short.

Chapter 5

I picked up my pink satin polka-dotted halter-topped zeppelin dress (and matching clutch bag) at Eleanor Cotton’s and half listened to her many warnings about proper care while trying to inch my foot out the door and take Peach’s multiple frantic calls. I picked up my shoes while calling the caterer to double-check the details, and as I pulled up to my Winnebago, I was so involved with my phone call obtaining Addie Hooper-Higgins’s solemn vow that she wasn’t going to slip tons of flaxseed into the wedding cake that I didn’t even notice my brother’s truck parked in my usual spot until I almost smashed into it.

“Oh, shit!” I said, and Addie said, “It does not! Everyone at Vonnie Peet’s wedding got food poisoning, and that’s what caused all that diarrhea. I swear, it wasn’t the cake!”

I yanked my car to the left, narrowly missing Nick’s truck, and parked the Bug.

“Look, Addie,” I said, “I love you, but these are bacon-eating, beer-drinking, trans-fat-loving people. Introducing flax to their systems is gonna clear them out, and we only have two porta-potties rented for the night. Now swear to me on Julia Child that you didn’t load that thing up with Roto-Rooter.”

Addie sighed. “I’m putting my hand on
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
right now. I swear.”

“Great. See you there.” I hung up and got out of the car, in no mood to deal with whatever crisis my brother was having.

“Nick, I’m telling you, if you’ve got cold feet, you came to the wrong girl,” I said as I reached into the back of my car and grabbed for my dress bag, which was the size of three women. Peach and her damn crinoline. In the other arm, I balanced my shoe box and the matching clutch, wrapped in plastic by a fastidious and paranoid Eleanor Cotton. “I’ve got eighteen things to do and three seconds in which to do them, brother, so there’s no time for sensitive hand-holding. You’re going through with this wedding if I have to hog-tie you to—”

And then I straightened up and saw Leo stepping out of Nick’s truck. My throat constricted in surprise, and regret. Since the Anwei Xing only lasted twelve hours and I didn’t want to be Cinderella on the clock, I’d planned on taking it right before the ceremony. It didn’t even occur to me that Leo might show up at my house first.

Jerk.

“Is Nick okay?” I said, my voice cracking. Damnit, damnit, damnit. He was—had been, I mean—an almost-priest. Didn’t he realize how unkind it was to ambush a person?

“Nick’s great,” he said, tentatively stepping closer, his eyes locked on mine. “I’ve never seen him so happy.”

“Great.” I broke the eye contact and started toward my front door. “Then whatever it is can wait until the wedding’s over.”

“My plane takes off tonight, after the reception.”

I worked hard not to look back at him, although I felt his pull on me, and I moved slower than I should have.

“Stacy…” I could hear his footsteps as he came up behind me. I had my hand on the screen door handle, my keys were out … but I still stopped.

Why did I stop?

“I love you,” he said quietly, and I wanted to cry. Instead, I leaned forward and banged my head lightly on the side of the ’Bago. So close. If I had just taken the stupid drops … if I had just gotten inside faster … if I had just …

But it didn’t matter, because I hadn’t and now the emotion was roiling inside, making me woozy. By the time I turned around to look at him, it was already too late. I was laid open, and getting more and more pissed about it as the seconds ticked by.

“Did you hear me?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, injecting as much steel into my tone as I could, hoping it would cut him. “I heard you.”

“Stacy, I mean it. I still love you. I never stopped.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Do you have a death wish or something?”

His Adam’s apple shifted as he swallowed, but other than that, there was no sign of fear or weakness in him. He was ready to take whatever I gave him, and even though I wanted to kill him, part of me respected that.

“No,” he said simply.

“You left me,” I said, advancing down the steps. He didn’t move, so I had to move around him, and then I was looking up at him, but it didn’t matter. I had the fury. I had the power.
“You
left
me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You’re
sorry
? Are you kidding?”

“No.” He stood calmly, feet braced, ready to face the storm he’d created.

“You slept with someone else, then left me to become a
priest,
you son of a bitch!”

“I remember,” he said. “I was there.”

I advanced on him, my hands shaking. “No, you weren’t. You ran away like a coward and hid behind the skirts of the church. You knew what we had, what we were, and you threw it away.”

He met my eyes solidly. “I did. I know.”

“And now, you’re back for … what? Forgiveness?”

He shook his head. “I’m back for whatever you’ll give me. You can hate me if you want, and I won’t hold it against you, but I’m here now, and I have to tell you how sorry I am.”

I felt like my lungs were caught in a vise. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. And, just like old times, when I couldn’t do something, Leo stepped in and did it for me.

“None of it happened because I didn’t love you,” he said, his voice stiff. “I need you to know that.”

“Oh, I knew that,” I said bitterly. “One of the classic signs that a man loves you is when he runs off and doesn’t speak to you for ten years.”

“I didn’t think you’d ever forgive me. I didn’t think I could ever do anything for you but bring you pain, so…”

“So … you went into the priesthood?” I shook my head. “That is literally the
worst
reason to become a priest.”

“Yeah. Found that out. Thanks.”

There was a hint of a rueful smile on his face, and I almost laughed with him for a moment …
almost
 … and then it all hit me again and the anger raged through me. The shoes started to slip out of the crook of my arm, so I just threw them on the ground. Screw it. The clutch and dress bag followed and, freed from my burdens, I advanced on him. I must have looked pretty scary because this time, he stepped back, eyes wide.

“You son of a bitch!” I hollered. “You
left
me!”

“I know.”

I put my hand flat on his chest, and felt his heart beating under my fingers, and a wave of pain crashed into me so hard that I thought I was going to fall over. How did he do that to me? Still? Shouldn’t that have gone away over the years? But no, there it was, the same as always. I touched him, and my body physically altered. It was like …

…
magic.

“It was
us,
” I said quietly, my voice low and faltering. “You know how many people get this, what we have? No one, that’s who. And you threw it away. How could you do that?”

It took him a moment to answer, and then he said, “I hurt you.”

“You don’t know what I felt. You don’t know what you did to me. You were
gone.
”

“No.” He placed one hand gently on mine, pressing it against his chest. “
Before
I left.”

I stared up at him, my mind reeling. And then, I hit on something that felt like a missing puzzle piece. “What? You left because you slept with that girl?”

He stared at me for a moment, looking confused. “Well … yeah. Why did you think I left?”

The memory of that night flashed through my head. I’d thrown things. I’d screamed. I’d cried. I’d been ugly, the way that my mother had always told me I was ugly when I was a kid.

You may be physically beautiful, Stacy,
she had said, so many times through my childhood that it became like a chorus in my brain.
But you’re vicious and angry and ugly inside, and no one can love that for very long.

“I thought…” My voice cracked and I stared up at him. “I thought you saw me.”

He shook his head. “Saw you what?”

I pulled my hand away from his chest at the same moment that he reached out to touch my face. His hand froze in midair, and I took a step back.

“What do you want from me?” I said.

He took a deep breath. “Nothing. I just…” He blinked. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately. Working through things.” He let out a short laugh. “I have a therapist.”

“About ten years too late,” I said, unable to cut the edge in my voice.

“Yeah.” He nodded, all seriousness. “I screwed up, bad. And you’re right. I hid, and the closer I got to taking my vows, the more I knew I’d screwed up. So I got out, and I got a job, and I worked on things. Now I know who I am again, and I’m not wasting time hiding anymore.”

I took a moment to process this, and then I said, “Okay. Well, good for you. I’m glad you … found yourself or whatever. But that has nothing to do with me, so—”

“It has everything to do with you.”

I looked up at him and shook my head. “What are you talking about?”

“I came back because I thought … seeing you…” He released a breath. “Dr. Roth said that when I saw you, I’d stop thinking of you as … well. Mine. He said you’d be different. He said those feelings would go away, and I’d be able to finally let it go and move on.” He let out a bitter laugh. “He was wrong.”

“I can’t do this,” I said, my breath coming in short as my heart rate kicked up. “I have to…” I turned around, saw my shoes and clutch and dress on the dusty ground, and was grateful for Eleanor Cotton’s plastic-wrapped paranoia. “… the wedding,” I mumbled.

I numbly went to pick up my things, and Leo talked behind me.

“I love you, Stacy,” he said, “and I think you love me, too.”

I grabbed the shoes, almost dropping them again, my hand was shaking so much. “Oh, really?” I said, trying to keep my voice strong even as I was unable to look at him. “You’re a cocky little man of God, aren’t you?”

“I was twenty-one. My father had just died, and I was away at school…”

I shook my head. “I told you not to go back for finals.”

“… and I screwed up. I hurt you and I wasn’t man enough to face that, so I left. Maybe I don’t deserve a second chance, but wearing a hair shirt for the rest of my life isn’t going to fix anything, either.”

“Nothing’s going to fix this,” I said. “It’s broken.”

He stared at me. “You really believe that?”

I lowered my head, unable to meet his eyes. “Yeah.”

He went silent for a while, and then he said, “For ten years I’ve tried to convince myself it was my imagination, this thing between you and me, but it isn’t, is it?”

I gathered my stuff in my arms and climbed up the cement stoop to my door. All I had to do was open it and go inside and hide until he went away. But I couldn’t pull the door open. I couldn’t shut him out. I just stood there, frozen, listening as he moved closer.

“Tell me it’s my imagination, Stacy. Tell me there’s nothing special between us, and I’ll go away. I’ll get a better therapist, check myself into some kind of … I don’t know … rehab for delusional people.”

I rested my forehead against the door frame, willing myself to go inside. I couldn’t move.

“Stacy,” he said, his voice low. “Is it my imagination?”

Before I realized what I was saying, I’d already said it.

“No. It’s not your imagination.”

Even without looking at him, I could feel the tension releasing from him, as though I’d just done him a favor. I hadn’t. Lying to him would have been the kindness, but long ago, we’d promised each other we would never lie to each other.

And at least one of us was a man of her word.

I managed to turn myself around and look at him, and my love for him was still so powerful it almost knocked me over. I wanted to throw my arms around him, kiss him until neither of us could see straight. Bring him to my bed and keep him there forever.

But that was weakness, and if loving Leo had made me anything, it wasn’t weak.

“It’s not your imagination,” I said, my voice gaining strength. “If knowing that matters to you, if it makes a difference, then great. Have it. I still love you, and I always will.”

His eyes reddened, and my heart cracked at the sight of his pain. I could always handle my own pain, but his just wrecked me. That night when he’d told me about the girl he’d screwed in his dorm room on the last night of finals, just eight weeks after his father’s death, half of my misery was in seeing how much he’d been hurting. And then he’d walked away, and I’d wanted to go after him, but I didn’t because I thought it would be easier on both of us to give it some time, to tell him I forgave him when he came back.

Except he never came back.

I looked at him now, and he was beautiful and I wanted him for my own again so bad, I felt like I was cracking down the middle. But I couldn’t have him. I didn’t work that way anymore. The part of me that knew how to be with someone was broken, and there was no point in pretending otherwise. No way was I taking him inside only to have no place for him to stay.

“Loving you isn’t something I did for a while, Leo. It’s something I
am.
I can’t change it any more than I can change the color of my eyes.”

His jaw tensed and his lower lip quivered, and I knew what was coming. In two minutes, we’d both be blubbering helplessly like a couple of stupid kids, and this was all going to get to be too much very soon if I didn’t put a stop to it now.

“I love you.” I felt the relief in the words for just a moment as I said them; then I pulled myself together and pushed through the rest of it. “But that matters so much less than you’d think.”

His face froze, and it took a moment, but he nodded.

I swallowed, willing the tears back.