Spellbound by Cate Tiernan Read Free Book Online

Mary K. suddenly said, almost making me drop my roller. “With Cal?”
    There it was, the familiar wince and stomach clench I felt whenever that name was mentioned.
    “Yeah?” I said warily.
    “So, did you guys ever do it? After we talked?”
    I took a breath and slowly released it to the count of ten. I focused on rolling a smooth, broad line of paint across the wall, feathering the edges and rolling over any drips. “No,” I managed to say calmly. “No, we never did.” A bad thought occurred to me. “You and Bakker . . .”
    “No,” she said. “That was why he always got so mad.”
    She was only fourteen, though a mature and curvy fourteen. I felt incredibly thankful that Bakker hadn’t managed to push her further than she was ready to go.
    I, on the other hand, was seventeen. I’d always assumed that Cal and I would make love someday, when I was ready—but the times he’d tried, I said no. I wasn’t sure why, though now I wondered if my subconscious had picked up on the fact that I wasn’t in a safe situation, that I couldn’t trust Cal the way I would need to trust him to go to bed with him. Yet I had loved the other things we had done: the intense making out, how we had touched each other, the way magick had added a whole other dimension to our closeness. Now I would never know what it felt like to make love with Cal.
    “How about Hunter?” Mary K. asked, looking down at me thoughtfully from her ladder.
    “What about him?” I tried to sound careless, but I couldn’t quite pull it off.
    “Do you think you’ll go to bed with him?”
    “Mary K.,” I said, feeling my cheeks heat up. “We’re not even dating. Sometimes we don’t even get along.”
    “That’s the way it always starts,” Mary K. said with fourteen-year-old wisdom.
     
    We’d started early, so we finished the walls around lunchtime. While I cleaned up the painting equipment, Mary K. went down to the kitchen and made us some sandwiches. Recently she’d gotten into eating healthy food, so the sandwiches were peanut-butter and banana on seven-grain bread. Surprisingly, they were good.
    I polished off my sandwich, then took a sip of Diet Coke. “Ah, that hits the spot,” I said.
    “All that artificial stuff is bad for you,” Mary K. said, but her voice was listless. I regarded her with concern. It really was taking her a while to come out of her depression over Bakker.
    “Hey. What are you doing this afternoon?” I asked, thinking maybe we could hit the mall, or go to a matinee movie, or do some other sisterly activity.
    “Not much. I thought maybe I’d go to the three o’clock mass,” she said.
    I laughed, startled. “Church on a Monday? What’s going on?” I asked. “You becoming a nun?”
    Mary K. smiled slightly. “I just feel . . . you know, with everything going on—I just need extra help. Extra support. I can get that at church. I want to be more in touch with my faith.”
    I sipped my Diet Coke and couldn’t think of anything constructive to say. In the silence I suddenly thought, Hunter, and then the phone rang.
    I lunged for it. “Hey, Hunter,” I said.
    “I want to see you,” Hunter said with his usual lack of greeting. “There’s an antiques fair half an hour from here. I was wondering if you wanted to go.”
    Mary K. was looking at me, and I raised my eyebrows at her. “An antiques fair?” was my scintillating reply.
    “Yes. It could be interesting. It’s nearby, in Kaaterskill.”
    Mary K. was watching the expressions cross my face, and I pantomimed my jaw dropping. “Hunter, is this a date?” I asked for Mary K.’s benefit, and she sat up straighter, looking intrigued.
    Silence. I smiled into the phone. “You know, this sort of sounds like a date,” I pressed him. “I mean, are we meeting for business reasons?”
    Mary K. started snickering quietly.
    “We’re two friends getting together,” Hunter said, sounding very British. “I don’t know why you feel compelled to label