“I don’t want to burn it,” Alex said, and they all shuddered. Burned pictures could indicate bad things—and they were all still leery of that black candle.
“Maybe place it at twelve o’clock,” Bartholomew suggested. “We want them together, in time, in space. That’s our high noon.”
“Or midnight,” Josh muttered under his breath, and they all sent him glances that could have been either recriminating or begging.
“I’ll settle for midnight!” Alex told him in exasperation. “God, anything so I don’t have to tell them I lost their dog last night!”
“You didn’t lose her,” Jordan reminded him. “She just… ended up at your boss’s house. Did we figure out why that happened, by the way?”
“I have no idea,” Alex muttered.
“Oh, I have some,” Jordan said under his breath, and Alex sent him a sharp look.
“Want to share with the class?” Because Alex really was curious.
“Have you told everybody your actual heart’s desire?” Jordan asked, his face doing that Nordic god thing that indicated he was putting on the mantle of leadership that seemed to fit him so very well.
Alex’s entire body flushed. He knew it. He was a green-eyed ginger; he had no choice but to turn into a tomato when he was embarrassed.
“Sort of,” he said, remembering their night walking the dog. “You were there.”
Jordan nodded thoughtfully. “But there was more to it than that. I thought you might have come to terms with all the things you weren’t saying.”
“Have you?” he countered weakly. He respected Jordan’s reasoning—that he couldn’t articulate why the word was so powerful, so he didn’t want to put a voice to it yet. But he hated being put on the spot.
Jordan just arched an eyebrow, and Alex crossed his arms and rolled his eyes, feeling childish and flustered. In the middle of his uncomfortable pout, though, he heard Simon’s words about being an absolute mess and working hard to overcome it, and he remembered that painful, awkward lunch. And still, Simon had put himself out there, risked what he assumed was Alex’s scorn. He’d tried again, and Alex admired the hell out of that.
Alex needed to follow his example.
“Fine,” he muttered and then turned to his friends. “And Kate and Josh already heard part of this too. What I wrote was that I wanted to be able to bike farther so I could transfer to the Orangevale branch of my firm—you knew that. What you didn’t know is that what I really wanted was to get away from the embarrassing crush I had on my super-hot boss who’s the nice man who brought back our dog and kissed me stupid. But what I really really wanted, like, the thing that was ripped from the center of my being, was passion, which, yes, is embarrassing as hell to tell you all again, and you’re welcome for it. So, uhm….” He looked at Jordan, who nodded encouragingly. “What I think the magic wanted—why it sort of abducted the dog—was to, uhm, maybe point me in the right direction. Possibly because it was tired of hearing me dance around the subject, which, you know, damn.”
The silence was deafening, and Kate was the one to break it, her arms crossed suspiciously in front of her.
“So, uhm, let me get this straight. What you really wanted was to bone your boss, and what you asked for was to get as far away from him as possible. Is this what you’re telling us?”
Alex wondered if there was a shade deeper than tomato. “Uhm… yes?”
They all stared at him in varying combinations of horror and curiosity.
“But… I don’t understand!” Bartholomew said at last. “I… uhm, everyone wants love, Alex. Why would you be afraid of that!”
Alex glared at him. “Really, Barty? You’re going to ask me that? You accidentally fed a love potion to over a hundred people because you wanted Lachlan to love you!”
“But I wasn’t afraid of it,” Bartholomew argued. “I was afraid to talk to Lachlan, but I certainly didn’t ask to go in the opposite direction!”
“Just the bathroom,” Lachlan muttered, and Alex cast him a sympathetic look. Apparently over their two years of awkward courtship, every time Lachlan had gotten even close to the shy Bartholomew, Barty had claimed he had to pee.
“It’s two different things!” Bartholomew maintained, and Alex sighed and conceded, because if Bartholomew was going to be this stubborn about it, that probably meant it was important enough for Alex to talk about. If nothing else, for the spell, but also because these were his friends and you tried not to lie to your friends.
“Yeah, okay,” he muttered, too embarrassed to even look anyone in the eye. “Look, it’s, you know, falling in love. All that emotion. The drama. I’m… I’m not a fan. And every time I’ve tried to date, the kiss would happen, and I’d either laugh or sort of back away. I….” He rolled his eyes to the heavens. “Jordan, you fall deeply in love about once every six months, get drunk and mourn your outcast state in love, and then you pick yourself up and throw yourself into your next crush. Kate, I once watched you beat Josh over the head with a rolled-up newspaper before kissing him senseless. He didn’t even know what he’d done to either piss you off or make it up to you, but he was so glad you were paying attention to him he was okay with all of it!” He grimaced at Bartholomew and Lachlan. “You two assholes made complete idiots of yourselves for two years with all of those yearning glances and then running away. And Dante and Cully have been the loves of each other’s lives since we were in school—they’re just too stupid to know it. And I wanted that. I wanted to get carried away by that, to be so in love it would feel like I’d die if this other person didn’t kiss me. But….”
He swallowed and shuddered, remembering Simon’s kisses and how they’d grown and grown and grown. And how scared he’d been, during that terrible awkward lunch, that Simon would reject him out of hand—too average, too plain, too weird, too ginger, too environmental, too whatever.
“It’s scary,” Bartholomew said softly, and Alex met his eyes gratefully.
“It is,” he said, voice gruff.
“What if you make an ass of yourself?” Bartholomew helped to fill in.
“I felt like I was tripping over my own tongue whenever he walked into the room,” Alex agreed. “I-I wanted passion, but all of the pain that went along with it—that I wanted to avoid.”
His friends—his coven—gave a collective snort.
“Good luck with that,” Jordan said, not quite under his breath.
“I’m just so afraid of looking like an idiot!” Alex all but wailed, and Josh, bless his big himbo heart, was the one to address this head-on.
“Too fucking bad.” He’d stood from his perpetual lounge on their recliner, Glinda in his arms. “Buddy, falling in love makes you a complete doofus. There is no way out of it. You make cow eyes at your girlfriend or boyfriend on a regular basis. And don’t get me started on how completely dumb sex is.” He made the outrageous face of someone who was either falling off a building or had his balls in a vise. “Fuck faces are the dumbest things in the world! See? But it doesn’t matter, because your dignity gets flushed down the toilet when you fall in love. And good riddance! I mean, what the fuck is dignity? It’s like, this stupid piece of tape you put on your face so it doesn’t do this!” And he made the fuck face again.