CHAPTER 2: IN WHICH A LIFE IS SAVED
When she walked out of the bathroom which was across the hall from her room, she copped a peek to see whether Leo had stirred. He was standing in the middle of the room, fully dressed to his black alligator skin boots. Leo’s family was in the alligator business – hunting them, raising them, and selling their various components; skin, meat or teeth-whatever anyone wanted. So when he wasn’t wowing the school courtside crowds with his basketball skills, he was at his uncle’s farm, learning the family business, or else canoodling with his girlfriend Charlotte in one of her various family properties and hosting exclusive parties for the ‘in’ crowd at her lake house. His life was pretty much set the way that he liked it; or so it seemed.
‘Do you have what you need now?’ he asked her, his voice slightly huskier than usual. She was startled out of her thoughts by his words. She wasn’t really sure that all this was happening or he was simply a figment of her imagination. Although God knows, if she was going to imagine herself in passionate embrace with anyone, his name wouldn’t top her list. Arrogant, insensitive, alligator-killing son of a...gun, she thought resentfully. ‘Y-yes. I have what I need.’ She replied and turned abruptly away heading for the stairs to the attic where she kept her herbs, and the cauldron sat waiting in the fireplace. Sensation was still shooting through her body in disconcerting aftershocks, and there was something wet running down her legs that she didn’t want to think about too much. She could feel her legs wanting to shake with reaction but she would not let them. At the same time, she had to set her mind to the spell, and try to keep it on the business at hand. He was following her up the stairs. Sigh. Why couldn’t he just go!?She opened the little attic room and crossed straight to the herb drawer. The only way through this was through it, and she would just have to pull herself together and function! She pulled the herbs she needed together and then looked at the fireplace where a fire immediately sprang into being; burning merrily like it had been at it for hours. The water that was in the cauldron began to bubble and she shredded the herbs into it, keeping her mind strictly away from the figure standing silent and still across the room, watching her with eyes that betrayed nothing of what he was thinking. She would not let him unnerve her.
When the last herbs had been added to the cauldron, the concoction was giving off a pleasant smell that reminded her of grassy meadows on a hot summer day and ice cream sundaes eaten on the porch with Grandpa George before he died. She closed her eyes and let herself relive the moment Leo’s lips had touched hers in her bedroom downstairs and said the spell that would transform the concoction before her into the life-giving elixir that Charlotte needed to survive. She wondered if the tumult in her soul would affect the recasting spell but even before she opened her eyes, she knew the spell had worked because the liquid had turned the colour of a glorious sunset and its bright colours were reflected behind her closed eyelids. Leo made a sound, and she opened her eyes and looked at him straight in the eye for the first time since his lips had touched hers. His eyes were wide with shock and awe and she realised that he had probably never seen magic performed in front of him in his life. A part of her felt a little smug and pleased that she’d managed to impress him – but it was a tiny part really, not even worth mentioning. To his credit, he returned her look steadily and for a minute that seemed to last forever, neither spoke. ‘Did it work?’ he asked at last, his voice still a little huskier than it had been when he’d been busy accusing her of not wanting to completely heal Charlotte of whatever was the matter with her, and letting her know what an ungrateful, incompetent bitch she was as well as being completely useless if the one time that Charlotte needed her, she claimed not to have the skill to help.
‘Yes, it worked. She needs to take a spoonful every hour, on the hour, for five days. She must not miss a dose or else she could suffer a relapse from which I cannot save her’. She was decanting the mixture into a flask as she spoke, which she then handed to him, face averted in apparent preoccupation with the residue at the bottom of her cauldron.
‘I’ll keep some on hand in case you need more but what I’ve given you should be more than sufficient’, she continued briskly as she wiped down the spotless surface where she’d gathered her herbs together, so she had a reason to avoid looking at him. There was silence behind her, she dared not turn to see why, and then he spoke;
‘Thank you...Mya.’ He said, and she heard his footsteps as he left the room. It was the first time he had ever said her name. Just because Charlotte had chosen to co-opt Mya into her inner circle didn’t mean that the inner circle was happy to have her. She was an anomaly they did not understand; her clothes tended toward long dresses that buttoned at the front and had no discernible shape, topped with thick woolen sweaters of uncertain pattern and finish. Her jewelery was outlandish consisting of animal bone and bizarre looking stones; to make matters worse there were birds’ feathers poking out of an amulet around her neck and that was topped off with the big hair and feet...she simply did not fit. The girls tended to be catty and the guys to ignore her. Before Charlotte’s accident today, Leo had acted like she didn’t exist, and when he couldn’t do that, they traded polite insults or engaged in increasingly nasty sarcastic banter. Charlotte enjoyed their antagonism, certainly their exchanges never failed to entertain. And if Charlotte was all about anything, it was the entertainment.
Their history made what just happened even more incomprehensible to Mya. She sank into the nearest chair to just breathe and her treacherous mind turned tentatively turned toward the memory that was waiting eagerly in the wings to claim her.
In a heartbeat, she was back in her room, very irritated at Leo’s assumptions and preparing to acquaint him with the sharp side of her tongue. She’d just opened her mouth to do so, when his invaded hers. Invasion was the right word, she’d never had anyone’s tongue in her mouth before...it felt extremely strange. Her whole body had frozen with the shock of it and then his hands were touching her in places she’d never been touched by a man before and she was at a loss of what to do. It didn’t even occur to her to resist, the whole experience was so alien to her that she did not know how to react. The next thing she knew, he was between her legs – hot and throbbing and urgent and something like fear gripped her. She felt her spirit temporarily leaving her body; she knew she left because she was somewhere up on the ceiling looking down at her naked body and his. Her eyes were scrunched shut, he had spread her legs wide, and he was on top of her; with that throbbing hot rod of pain about to enter her. She hadn’t even been entirely sure what was happening and then he thrust into her, and she was back in her body, under him, feeling him stretch her to beyond her limits. He grabbed her legs and wrapped them around his waist and pushed further into her. She felt plundered; conquered by the alien thing that was taking over her without so much as a by your leave. Her body was a confusion of sensation. Pain? Yes there was that, but not as much as she thought there’d be, in fact even as she thought it, it was fading away. He was frozen still inside her, and she did not know why but it stopped the pain. Then he moved, and other sensations were added to the pain. Electric shock type sensations, almost pleasurable although she thought she must be mistaken about that. She found her body responding to his rhythm, going with it, and finally glorying in it and in spite of herself she gave in to the sensation. It grew, and grew like a helium balloon that is blown and blown and blown into a bigger and bigger bubble, until it bursts with sound and fury. Except the bursting of this balloon was not the end but the beginning of new sensation. She felt like she had when her spirit left her body, except that she could still feel her body around her trembling with the force of whatever shook her. He made a sound like his heart was being forced through his chest and she felt something cold and wet flood her insides. The sensation seemed to ignite her again so that her inner muscles spasmed, closing tightly about his shaft like they wanted to milk him dry. She might have made a sound, she didn’t know. She did know that she had never felt it’s like in her life. Her heart was drumming in her chest like it wanted to run out and escape and there was no strength in her limbs. So much tumult in her head, and in the room…silence.
She came back to herself thinking, ‘Is that what love is like? Being ready to violate someone else for her?’ while staring pensively at the scene no one but she could see.