In Fairy, as long as the request didn't oppose an edict of the queen, the process was quick and easy. In the human realm, coaxing wishes into manifestation took more time than most beings had patience for. Magnus was still working on his ability to wait gracefully, but he knew frustration slowed the magic, and despair shut it down entirely—because what did that emotion represent but a lack of faith?
Magnus couldn't afford to despair over the prospect of losing Zoe's friendship. Yes, his fear would take time to appear. Everything happened slower in the human realm. But feeding it even a little would lead him in a direction he didn't want to go. Far better, and far easier, to stop the dread when it was small.
"I am clever," he said, determined to head off his gloom. "I have wooed many women and won their hearts. Surely keeping one woman's fondness isn't that different. I love Zoe, after all, and love is a good, strong magic, perhaps the oldest magic of all. Caring for her need not lower my spirits, not when it's so clearly an advantage."
His breath came easier with the soothing, and his heart didn't feel so heavy in his chest. Opening his eyes, he noticed a field of energy wavering outside the window, a heatlike shimmer in cool, moon blue. Magnus smiled at the sign that he was making progress. As he did, a tendril licked against the glass. The Will-Be was coming close enough to taste his thoughts.
"Just an idea," he petitioned politely. "A little help getting Zoe to feel easy with me again."
The Will-Be gathered against the glass, taking on a shape Magnus recognized.
"Perfect!" he exclaimed, delight tugging at his lips. "That's even better than I asked for."
Zoe floated naked in the hot tub on the deck behind her adobe house, her arms and neck draped limply over the padded rim. She didn't fear being spied on. None of her neighbors were close, in addition to which, Fairyville had an ordinance against commercial lights shining after ten. Left undisturbed, the stars were twinkling crystals on a field of ebon)'. Coupled with the sea salt she'd thrown into the roiling water, the view of the undimmed heavens acted as a balm. She felt her upsets drain away—at least, as much as they were going to.
No amount of sea salt could tell her what to do about her sexy manager.
It didn't seem she could forget him. Magnus called to her emotions and her body too much for that. Being friends had already proven painful, and yet the thought of not being friends appealed to her even less. At lunch, Teresa had suggested she try to seduce him, just go for it and get him out of her system. On the face of it, this appeared to be her best option. Magnus had kissed her—more than kissed her, strictly speaking—and surely a seduction had a chance of success. The problem was, even if she did succeed, she was far from certain one night with Magnus would put her itch to rest.
She'd heard the wistful sighs of Magnus's former lovers. Although none spoke of him resentfully—an accomplishment she attributed to his sunny charm—she couldn't doubt he was a hard act to follow.
Regrettably, she couldn't convince herself she'd last any longer than Magnus's previous one-night stands. Even ignoring his warning, her history wasn't reassuring on that subject. She hadn't held on to Alex when they were kids, and she wasn't so insecure that she didn't know he'd wanted her quite a bit.
Her toes curled beneath the water at a memory: her and Alex making out in the back of his mother's hideous wood-paneled station wagon. As she recalled, it had been the night before a big game. They'd been dating six months by then, starting a week and two days after she'd been assigned to tutor him in calculus. He'd been a typical I'll-never-use-this jock, whereas she'd been grades ahead. The match had been perfect—in more ways than one.
Other boys before Alex had thought that hanging with a psychic was cool… until they realized she wouldn't, or couldn't, tell them which teachers were going to give pop quizzes. The dead came to Zoe with their own agendas, so hungry to communicate with their loved ones that they'd gravitate to anyone who could hear. Most boys, no matter how brave they thought they were, were creeped out by the idea that Zoe didn't just see ghosts, she drew them—a teenage pied piper to the deceased. Boys like that wanted a normal girl they could take to dances. They wanted a girl they could get to second base with without wondering if their Aunt Ida was watching from the Other Side.
Alex was the first boy Zoe met who was more interested in her than in what she could do. Oh, her gifts were what had sparked his curiosity, but it was
her
he called on the phone each night to talk for hours. All the extras she could do and see he simply took in stride. To Zoe, this was a miracle of the highest order: not to be doubted or viewed as a freak. Alex could have been ugly and obnoxious, and he'd still have earned a friend for life. That he was the hottest boy in school, a championship quarterback over whom Zoe had been struggling not to sigh, earned him her devotion almost before he'd known he wanted it.
Happily for her, his attraction hadn't taken long to match hers. The three-year age difference had bothered him from the first, but he hadn't been able to resist her bumbling overtures. Naturally, him having to fight his honorable intentions had made the relationship all the more romantic to her.
He'd been very careful not to "despoil" her, as he'd put it. They'd kissed—a lot—and he'd touched her breasts under her bra, but the closest they'd come to actual sex was grinding against each other with all their clothes on. This had gotten them so excited, they'd both been able to climax, a feat Zoe could only marvel at today. None of her partners since had managed anything like it.
That night, though, like most nights when she was fifteen, Alex was the only male in her world. That night in the beat-up Ford Country Squire, she'd made up her mind to touch his penis with her bare hand, a decision he was trying to argue her out of between their usual deep and desperate French kisses.
"It's too much," he'd gasped, his lower body pressing hers insistently into the station wagon's thin carpet. "If you take it out, I'll want to put it inside you."
"I won't let you," Zoe promised, though when his teeth scraped lightly over the skin beneath one ear, she wasn't quite as sure.
"You're wearing a skirt tonight. That's only panties between you and me."
"I'll stop you," she said more firmly. "I just want to see it. I want to feel what happens to it when you come."
Alex groaned into the neck of her pink-and-white-striped spandex halter, the one she'd worn to persuade him to go along with her idea. It clung to what breasts she had with formidable faithfulness, but so far it wasn't living up to the hopes she had for it.
"I probably shouldn't before a game anyway. The coach said we should refrain."
"The coach isn't you. Remember what happened the last time we 'refrained?' You fumbled twice on important plays."
She wasn't certain Alex heard her. He was licking her nipple through the halter's stretchy cloth, which instantly hardened it. Then—as if this evidence of her responsiveness was too much for his control—he groaned and sucked most of her breast hard into his mouth.
It was a rough thing to do, and not his usual style, but Zoe couldn't have loved it more. Her back bowed off the cargo area's floor as she thrust her hands into his sun-streaked hair. A line of fire had ignited between her nipple and her sex, tightening the sensations welling there. He groaned again and tugged at her more fiercely. What he was doing felt so good that, for a startled second, she thought she was going to come from that.
When he let her go, her moan of protest was sincere.
"I didn't refrain that night," he panted in his dark, rough voice, the voice that made him sound like a full grown man. "I got so crazy not doing it with you that I jacked off five times in a row as soon as I got home."
Fresh heat flushed through her to her toes. She had to swallow before she could make her own confession, and that was only in a whisper. "I've done it five times in a row myself, but I didn't know boys could get off that often."
Alex's breath caught at her words. Clearly, he hadn't thought about her needing release, too. He stared at her, his eyes burning in the soft illumination of the dome light.
"Jesus," he finally said, forgetting she'd asked him not to curse in front of her.
The bulge in his jeans pressed snug against her panties, so huge it frightened her. She was more excited than afraid, though, and she laid her palm gently over it. She'd never touched him that directly before. He jerked, but didn't jerk away.
"Let me take it out," she coaxed softly. "Aren't you tired of driving home with sticky underwear?"
"Zoe…"
She heard his resistance crumbling. "Who else is going to let me? All the other boys think I'm weird."
His face went hard as steel. "You stay away from other boys."
"Make me. Prove you want me more than they do."
His jaw ticked at her dare, and then he practically tore his zipper open, shoving her hand inside his briefs. He moaned with pleasure the instant her palm touched skin, a sound that made her go liquid. She'd never felt anything so silky, so hot and alive and hard as his bare penis. She tried to explore him, but when he rasped "tighter" in a pleading tone, she strengthened her grip.
It took four squirming thrusts through her inexpert hold to bring him off.
"No fair!" she remembered crying. "I didn't have a chance to pay attention!"
She chuckled at the memory now, because he'd let her do it again—grudgingly at first, and then with all the groaning, gasping, curse-laden enthusiasm she could have wished. Going once had barely made a dent in his need. She'd felt like a goddess when he exploded that second time, an honest-to-goodness woman coming into her power.
He'd dragged her panties down her legs not thirty seconds later, ignoring her embarrassed protests to sink sweet, tonguey kisses into her sex.
"I can do this now," he explained, his mouth wet and hot against her. "It's safe for me to do it until I get hard again."
He hadn't taken long to figure out what she liked, or to demonstrate just how spine-wrenchingly good an orgasm could be. He'd also known not to leave it at just one, sucking her clitoris even harder between his lips and tongue for the second peak.
"Where did you learn that?" she remembered asking once she'd caught her breath. She should have been jealous, but was too stupefied that an eighteen-year-old boy could be so uninhibited.
"I learned it from you," he'd said, seeming surprised that she had to ask. "Your body told me what I needed to know."
Her amusement faded as she remembered what had happened two short weeks later. Yes, indeed, Alex had wanted her. She simply hadn't been the only one he was on fire for.
She sighed, and as if on cue, one of Rajel's junior fairies popped into existence on the edge of the hot tub. It was a boy fairy, dressed like Robin Hood in forest green. He wasn't really a boy, of course. Fairies only looked like children. For all she knew, this one was hundreds of years old.
"Whatcha doin'?" he asked, his little tighted legs swinging in the steam. "Trying to make Zoe stew?"
Zoe laughed, which was probably what he'd intended. "Better be nice, or I might decide to make fairy stew instead."
"I'm too quick," bragged the fairy, fluttering off his perch before she could pretend to nudge him. "I'm Samuel the Swift, fastest fairy in Arizona!"
He whizzed around her to prove it, a jet trail of green fairy dust twinkling in his wake.
"Why did the chicken walk across the road?" Samuel demanded, moving so rapidly the question sounded like it came from both sides of her head at once. "Because he was too slow to fly!"
Zoe was about to tell him this was the lamest chicken joke she'd ever heard, when Samuel came to a hovering, midair halt. His tiny body quivered with attention as he peered down the quiet road that led to her house, his wings beating so quickly they were nearly invisible.
Zoe saw nothing but the shapes and shadows of the night.
"Oh, no!" he gasped, both hands pressed to his mouth in horror. "Anything but a k-k-kitten!"
Zoe assumed this was another joke, but Samuel let out a tiny shriek, disappearing so abruptly that his fairy dust was left hanging in the air. Zoe could only wonder what had set him off.
But the fairy's eyes and ears were sharper than hers. It wasn't long before two bright headlights appeared over the gentle rise of her street. The distinctive throaty purr of the engine told her whose car it was.
The arrival of Magnus's red 4Runner felt like a sorrier joke than the chicken one. Her manager would drop by tonight while she still pulsed with thoughts of all she'd never gotten to do with Alex, while she was—conveniently enough—undressed for a seduction she hadn't yet decided she should attempt.
What was it the women of Fairyville said? Better to have loved and lost Magnus than to have never had him in your bed.
She scowled to herself as Magnus parked his vehicle in her driveway. Magnus used it for his weekend adventures—white river rafting on the Colorado, hang gliding in the Grand Canyon—trips he took alone and came back glowing from. Zoe was no daredevil, but she wouldn't have minded camping out with him if he'd asked. He hadn't, though, and now the car's door opened and shut. She heard him whistling a passage from
The Magic Flute
. Magnus loved music almost as much as he enjoyed exploring Mother Nature's more dangerous corners. He was a man who grabbed life with both hands, and his incessant happiness was an undeniable aphrodisiac. Against her will, Zoe's body tightened on itself.
He must have heard the bubble of the hot tub, because he didn't try her front door, but came around the walk to her deck in long, sure strides.
Every footfall made her sex tense more.
"It's an Irishman bearing gifts," he called, holding up a bottle and two glasses in his right hand. His left was cradling something dark against his chest.
Whatever Zoe was going to decide, she knew she'd better do it soon. His eyes went a little wider, his smile and his footstep faltering when he noticed her bare shoulders. Tonight, there were no bathing suits in this tub.