What Dante saw made him frown.
The player for October was showcased, and there were x’s through little squares representing days—the first two weeks of October were crossed out. This was not something that Dante and Cully did. Under each x was someone’s initials. BB was Bartholomew. JH was Josh. And so on. All of the gang had, at one time or another, come in and put an x on the calendar to… to what? To show Dante and Cully that they were lost in time? That they weren’t part of the world anymore? Dante frowned. There were even other people’s initials here. Who in the hell was LS? And SR?
Dante’s breath came short, and he stood abruptly, grateful for the clamminess in his pants, the smell of come on his hand.
These things were as real as his thoughts—his memories—and his sensory input was not. Three weeks. That’s what the calendar was saying. Three weeks had passed since the night of the heart’s desire spell. Three weeks. Not one night. Not two. He and Cully had been wandering around this house—their home—lost in some sort of magic fog.
Why hadn’t the others told them?
Anger burned away some of the vertigo. They were friends. Why hadn’t their friends told them they were lost?
Yeah, Dante. How are they supposed to do that?
He thought about Kate’s broken voice when she’d talked about the amulets, and Alex’s and Simon’s tight jaws and wide eyes as they’d spoken to him and Cully.
About the times he’d heard Cully talking to the others—Jordan, Barty, Josh—and suddenly he’d been talking to them and Cully had been nowhere to be seen.
It was almost as though the things they saw scared them so badly they were afraid to tell Dante and Cully about it.
Oh, this was bad. This was so bad. What were the birds doing out—
Dante jerked himself back to his thoughts with a headshake so savage it made him nauseous. Fuck the fucking birds. He had more important shit to sort!
He clasped the amulet in his hand hard enough to leave an imprint on his palm, and forced himself to walk to the little secretary that held their landline phone and a drawer full of pens and paper. They were both fully digitized—Dante’s entire life was on his phone—but Cully had found the secretary at a garage sale, and while Dante’s wood skills were questionable, Cully had looked at him with such faith that he’d stripped it down and painted it pale pink to match the rest of the kitchen. He’d done a shit job of it of course, but Cully still set it in the corner and made it useful and swore he’d never part with it.
“I’M sorry, Cully. Man, we should have asked that guy Barty keeps seeing at the woodworking booth. He’d probably be much better at this.”
“No, Donnie.” Cully gave him the radiant smile that usually only came out when he was using that nickname. “You went out of your comfort zone. You pushed yourself for me. And it’s going to look great. It’s like you were trying to read my mind.”
Dante accepted the compliment and let the blush heat his ears. His hands were crusted with paint, and he’d completely wasted a pair of cutoffs and an old T-shirt, but as he looked at the wooden monstrosity on the newspapers they’d laid out on the back porch so they wouldn’t stain the concrete, he felt a certain satisfaction. It was the same thing he got when he worked on his secret project, the one he hadn’t even told Cully about—but it was also better.
He wished he wasn’t covered in paint. Cully’s excitement, the way he danced on the balls of his feet, made Dante want to sweep him up in Dante’s arms, made him want to kiss that soft mouth until even the smell of paint disappeared and it was only Dante being a knight in shining armor and Cully telling him he’d done good.
DANTE stood at the table, clutching the back of a chair with one hand and his amulet with the other. That was a true memory, he thought desperately. It didn’t matter if he and Cully ever made good on that kiss or not; stripping the damned secretary down and repainting it—that had been real.
Using that knowledge, Dante took three more steps until he was at the little cabinet and started rifling through the top drawer. He pulled out a pad of Post-it Notes and started writing.
Breadcrumbs
CULLY stared dumbly at the pentagram pushed into his palm. For a bare moment, he’d felt… normal. Not dizzy, not preoccupied, not carried away with a project.
Normal.
Fuck, he missed the dog. He missed watching television with Dante on the couch, the dog between them. Yes, he wanted the kissing and the passion to be true, but he missed the times without it. He missed Dante’s face.
The kissing and the passion, though…. He prayed that was a real thing. He yearned for it. He could remember their first time so clearly: that first trip they’d taken to Monterey as a group.
THE rooms were tiny—miniscule—but the one he and Dante had been assigned had a cracker-box-sized “kid’s room” attached, an anachronism, a shoebox with a cot.
Dante, with his broad shoulders and larger-than-life frame, had offered to sleep in the shoebox room, to give Cully his space.
“I’m not that fragile!” Cully snapped, hurt. “You don’t need to pander to my every whim!”
“Princess, relax!” Dante said, that easy grin keeping Cully’s snit from growing too dire. “I know you were hoping for a room of your own.”
“I was not!” Cully protested. “God, you’re dense.”
For a moment Dante looked hurt, and Cully could have kicked himself. Dante’s weakness—his one weakness—was that he counted himself a meatloaf, a slacker, a man with no distinguishing intelligence. He never saw what the others saw in him: someone whose heart was so pure and whose logic was so sound that the rest of the group would be sad and flat and soulless without him. Sure, they’d still follow Jordan, but Jordan got so intense! Without Dante’s softening influence, their world would be a lot less fun.
“I’m sorry,” Dante said, all injured dignity. “I’ll take my dumb ass to my tiny cot—”
“Stop!” Cully grabbed his arm and swung him around to face him. “Don’t you like kissing me?” he asked into Dante’s shocked silence.
“Well, yeah,” Dante said, lowering his voice as though they could be heard. This tiny seaside hotel was so old—and the walls were so thin—it was possible they could be. “But I didn’t want to assume—”
“Assume!” Cully all but begged. “Assume away! Please, Dante. Please.” He gave a smile even he knew was crooked. “Don’t you want to be lovers? I thought we should be lovers. All the way lovers. Not because we’re roommates and we’re good at it. Because I want to keep kissing you whenever we stop!”
The smile that lit Dante’s face that day… it spread a slow warmth of joy, of desire, through Cully’s stomach, through his skin. It would be, forever, the standard for which he measured lovemaking. Not the act, but the willingness to be loved.
CULLY wiped his eyes with his palms. Another memory. Another fucking memory that he wasn’t sure was real. He wasn’t sure what his sin had been, but it seemed bitterly unfair that he should be tortured with seven years of memories he wasn’t sure were his.