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Flemming
She found herself wondering yet again if it all might just be a dream. A horrible dream, but one that threw the most ridiculous and impossible things at her just to see what she’d do about them.
Seth Taradiddle—she recognized that last name, all right. Her mother spent more than a few conversations reminding Flemming of how perfect her life would be, if she just settled down, put down roots, and got with the program.
When Flemming pointed out that there was a lot of “down” in those downer options, her mother would scowl. They both knew what she meant, though. She wanted Flemming to settle down with a nice witch and make some grandbabies. Specifically, her mother remained hung up on the idea she’d marry Seth Taradiddle, the son of her bestie.
She vaguely remembered meeting him once. The first thing she noticed was red hair, but it wasn’t surprising for a healer. Tall, but then again, he’d been a teenager while she was little more than a kid when she met her “future husband.” A few freckles decorated the bridge of his nose, and he blinked at her with pretty green eyes like rain-soaked moss. Probably a nice enough face, when it isn’t screwed up in an absolutely grossed out expression.
Me, she thought. He’s totally grossed out by me.
The first feeling that the child version of Flemming experienced was embarrassment in regard to Seth Taradiddle. An older, not entirely ugly male looked at her, and the dominant expression on his face was disgust? Yeah, it hurt. But, even as a kid, she recognized the shallowness of her own emotions, and that his response spoke more about him as a person than about her.
She did know one thing. “Hey,” she’d said, waving a single hand. It was the most enthusiasm she could even pretend to drum up about their introduction. She added, bluntly, “I don’t want to marry you.”
The curl of disgust washed away from his face as if it had never been there to begin with, replaced immediately with something like relief. On the heels of his relief, she saw determination and wondered how the boy managed to communicate so much of what he felt without saying a word.
“Consent is important, so I promise to never ask you to,” he vowed.
To marry him? It amused her that he took her declaration so seriously, as most boys his age acted as if she were entirely invisible. Being seen, being heard, by one—even if he was a total jerk—felt kinda nice.
After their meeting, her mother had been all over her for details. “What did he say?” she’d asked.
“Not much,” Flemming admitted with a shrug.
“He’s the key to your happiness,” her mother promised, with the certainty of her magic adding confidence to her words.
“I’m the key to my happiness,” Flemming explained. “No partner can ever give me something, if I’m not brave enough to find it for myself.”
Her mother let it go, but never for long. The topic would pop back up at the most unexpected moments.
Dress shopping for prom? It doesn’t really matter what you wear, since Seth won’t be there, so pick what you like. Figuring out which college she would attend and for what? Seth will love you, regardless of what you choose to pursue. Upset about a breakup? It won’t be like this when you finally get around to marrying Seth.
After years and years of the same, Flemming had it. Her mother had worn her down until it felt like there was very little of her left.
She stopped calling her mother altogether. The weight of her expectations about how Flemming should live her life finally jammed the wedge in their relationship home, causing a split Flemming had little desire to mend.
Right about then, she “met” Leo online. In the present, tears erupted, her mind circling back to a far more concerning matter than Seth Taradiddle. What did I do to make it all go so wrong?
Because it had to be her. Some fatal flaw in her personality, clearly, that caused the breakup. She knew Seth had to be thinking the same thing—what kind of monster deserves to be dumped like that?
Seth awkwardly gave her shoulder a pat. “Hey, still respecting your need for silence, but I wanted to remind you, I’m here. If you want to talk it through, I mean. I know when things like this happen to me, sometimes I’ll just get caught in this spiral that repeats unless I talk it out.”
A hiccup escaped her, and she scrubbed at her raw face again with the shop towel. “I do that, too,” she admitted.
“We’ll circle back to who I am, and why that sucks, but I think for now, you’d rather talk about what just happened to you, am I right?” He gave her shoulder another awkward pat, and his eyes never left the road. She snorted out a little breath of air. Just like when they were kids, she had to give him props for being respectful of her boundaries.
Leo hadn’t respected her boundaries, but even thinking it felt disloyal. Catching herself on that thought, she muttered aloud, “I don’t know why I feel bad about thinking unkind things about him when he’s the one who dumped me.”
“That’s a good start,” Seth said, shooting her a small warm smile. She sniffled, reminding herself she shouldn’t feel guilty for appreciating a handsome man having a nice smile.
“Okay, the thing I keep circling back to is this,” she blurted. “I’m trying to figure out what I did wrong. I mean, it was so perfect, so I must have done something. I want to own my responsibility for what went wrong, and be mature and all that, but I literally didn’t see this coming, so...”
She sucked in a shaky breath, then shook her head. Those were a lot of words to throw out at him, and most of it was just emotional babble.
“Maybe you didn’t do anything wrong,” he offered. When she just blinked at him, he shot her another glance before chuckling and then settling back to explain. “You’re looking at me like you must have done something. I’m not giving you a free pass or saying you don’t hold any responsibility for things falling apart; I’m just saying, maybe you didn’t do anything specifically wrong.”
Baffled, she asked, “How does that work, exactly?”
“Okay, if you tried to build a house out of dominos, and then the cat walked past it, so it fell over, would you blame the dominos? What did they do to cause the house to fall? Nothing. They were being dominos, but without glue, they can’t hold it together.”
“What am I, in this analogy?” she asked. “The cat, the dominos, or the glue?”
He blew out a frustrated sounding gust of air, but he tried again with, “If you tried to bake a cake, but you didn’t add anything to make it rise, would you wonder what you did wrong when you mixed it, or would you know it was because you were missing ingredients?”
She blinked at him. “So you’re saying some relationships don’t work out because they didn’t have the right ingredients to begin with, rather than being caused by something either of the individuals did wrong within the relationship?”
He shrugged again. “Basically.”
When she stared at him for long moments, his lips curled in that delicious smile again. He met her gaze, and it was she who finally looked away. “Based on that theory, it would mean I’d have the emotional capacity to jump right back into another relationship.”
“I didn’t say that,” he said. “That doesn’t sound healthy at all.”
“If I require no emotional growth, then what’s stopping me?”
He flicked on his turn signal and shifted lanes to turn off on the next exit. “Right now, what’s stopping you is my need to use the restroom. Bathroom break. As to what’s stopping you from jumping right back into another relationship, you haven’t processed your feelings about your last relationship. Just because you didn’t do anything wrong, that doesn’t mean you didn’t have feelings wound up in the thing that got shredded, so healing them first would be my rec.”
As he pulled into a parking spot at the rest stop, he shrugged. “Here, you take the keys. Meet you back here in a few minutes?”
She accepted the keys and glanced at them. “Why give me the keys?”
“I’m a man, and I have all of your possessions in this vehicle. I want it clear—I’m not forcing you to ride along nor am I holding your belongings hostage. You can give me the keys when we’re ready to get back in the truck. It’s just the decent thing to do.” He looked confused as to why she’d need the explanation.
A tiny voice in the back of her mind insisted on comparing him to Leo, despite her conscious desire not to do so. Leo wouldn’t ever have thought about her feelings on a matter before his own. Narcissist, wasn’t that what he said all of his exes called him?
She remembered a meme she’d seen online that said something about how wearing rose-colored glasses makes all the red flags just look like flags. Were his complaints about his drama queen exes red flags I missed along the way?
“Thanks,” she said aloud, because Seth still stared at her. “Meet you back here in a few minutes.”
Stuffing the keys in her pocket, she headed to the women’s restrooms. After using the stalls, she stood for long moments over the sink. Splashing water on her face soothed some of the redness from crying and mopping her tears with shop cloths, but her eyes stood out in stark contrast to the unnatural pink puffiness from crying. She could magic the emotional scars away, but she chose to wear them like a scarlet letter proclaiming herself a fool, instead.
What did I do to cause this? she asked herself for the hundredth time.
Deciding to entertain Seth’s explanation, she asked herself if their relationship had the right elements to start, and she realized her favorite element at the beginning was that he lived on the other side of the country from her mother.
She blinked at herself, considering her reflection. Did she want him, or did she just want away?
Easy, she decided. I wanted what every witch wants at her core—to find my true love. The One. Her mother insisted that meant Seth Taradiddle, but if she ignored her mother’s wishes, ignored society’s expectations, what did she want?
She didn’t know.
But The One still sounded like a really good thing.
A wiggle from her pocket had her looking down at her leg. “What?”
Her familiar peeked out of the pocket. “Don’t do it.”
Since they lived in Seattle, she’d shrunk the alligator to pocket-sized. The spell broke with water, so Flemming quickly turned off the sink before the gator got any ideas.
His reptilian eyes rolled up to meet hers. “Bitch,” he muttered, verifying her speculation that he’d been thinking about a little dunk-a-roo.
“I’m not going to try to explain why I’m road tripping with a six-hundred pound alligator,” she said. “You stay pocket-sized.”
“I repeat,” Colby said, snapping his jaw together impressively, if in miniature. “Don’t do it.”
“I haven’t done anything,” she said, turning her lips into an innocent moue.
“You’re thinking about it,” he muttered.
“What, casting a true love spell, because if I’m looking for love, I should find it before I’m back in range of my mother’s constant barrage of Seth-adoration?” she asked, fiddling with her hair in the mirror. She loved the pink color. It made her feel young, fresh, and ready for adventures.
“Love spells aren’t allowed,” Colby the gator reminded her.
“Casting a love spell on a specific person isn’t allowed,” she clarified. Reaching in her purse, she dabbled a little concealer on her fingertip and touched up some spots on her face before applying a light lip mask. “Casting a general spell of attraction, however, is totally allowed.”
She offered Colby a couple of snacks from the baggie in her purse, and after eating them, he asked, “Did you hear what the driver said about processing your feelings about the last relationship? You know, the one that ended a couple of hours ago out of the blue?”
Stuffing more snacks in his mouth, she ended the conversation by filling his face. Wand in hand, she closed her eyes and focused her powers.
To cast a spell to draw her love, The One, the meaning to her life and the thing that would fulfill her... She summoned all of her magic into a fist and hurled her intention into it.
Immediately, her skin crawled as if a hundred million tiny fire ants all bit her at the same time. A gurgling noise escaped her mouth as her fingers flexed convulsively, and the sound of her wand as it clattered to the floor echoed through the empty women’s restroom.
“Shit,” she heard Colby mutter as she collapsed to the floor twitching. “Don’t crush me.”
She didn’t want to crush him—she wanted to peel her skin off her body. Everything itched.
Once the flaming skin settled down to a somewhat manageable level of misery, or she acclimated to it, she stood and again considered her reflection in the mirror.
“I’m so glad I put on concealer,” she muttered, since now all of her skin was covered with a furious red rash. The spots of concealer stuck out like white patches against her irritated flesh.
“I told you not to do it,” Colby muttered, staring up at her with his usual expressionless maw. “Do you remember me saying, not moments ago, not to do it?”
Furious with herself, the situation, the spell—all of it—she snagged her wand and stuffed it back in her purse. How could sending out a love spell meant to attract The One result in a body covering skin inflammation? Was she allergic to true love?
Snickering, she remembered her mother insisting Seth equaled happy ever after. Being around him hasn’t caused a rash, so there went that theory.
She did need to face Seth again, though, and that meant he’d see her like...
This.
“Great,” she muttered as an older woman with a small child entered the bathroom, took one look at Flemming, and then retreated while the child protested. “Well, great way to squash my mother’s dreams for my romantic life in one giant dumpster fire. First I jump out in front of the guy’s truck, then I sob all over him, and now he gets to see me looking like hamburger. What guy wouldn’t run out and buy a gal a ring, after a day like that?”
“He promised he’d never propose,” Colby reminded her.
“He probably doesn’t remember that,” Flemming shot back.
She headed back to the truck, not trusting her own magic to fix whatever she’d done to her skin. Maybe she could have him stop to get some chamomile or something? It wasn’t like she could ask any magic users for help—explaining that she’d just been trying to cast a love spell, which weren’t allowed, would only serve as a confession, which could result in time in the pokey.
The healer took one look at her and reached for his wand. “Stop,” she said to Seth before tossing him his keys. “This is my own fault, and if anything, it at least serves as a distraction from my broken heart.”
“What did you do?” he asked, fumbling a bit but managing to catch the keys and unlock the truck. His eyes scanned every bit of flesh visible past her clothes—but not in a sexy, I’m checking you out, because you are irresistible kind of way. No, his gaze seemed worried rather than enchanted by her beauty.
“Stuff,” she replied. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Your call,” he replied, getting behind the wheel.
“How many days will this take, anyway?” she asked, fastening her belt.
“About four? That’s if we only briefly stop overnight.”
As Flemming gazed out the window and tried to resist scratching every single inch of her flesh, she figured four days wasn’t long, not in the great grand scheme of her life. What else could possibly go wrong?