White is for Magic (23 page)

"Anyway," he says, taking a deep breath to change the subject, "before we begin the spell, there needs to be complete trust."

"Trust?" My head is spinning.

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He nods. "In order to combine our energies on any spell, in order for it to work, we have to be able to trust one another completely."

"Okay," I say.

"Not okay," he corrects. "Because I know you don't trust me completely."

I open my mouth to object, but I can't. Because there is this tiny place inside me that's holding back from trusting him completely. "Trust has always been a tough one for me."

"It's okay," he says. "Because I don't completely trust you either."

What?
I mean, after all this time I've spent questioning him and his motives, reasons why he'd pack up his life and move all the way across the country, it just never dawned on me--the possibility that
he
didn't trust me.

"If I trusted you completely," he begins, "I wouldn't have hesitated when you asked me to do a spell together. I told you spells are private for me. I've never shared them with anyone."

"So what are we even doing here?" I ask. "If you don't think a collaborative spell will work--"

"I didn't say it
wouldn't
work." Jacob sits down beside me on the bed. "I only said it wouldn't work if we didn't trust each other."

"So how are we supposed to trust each other now?"

He motions to the spell supplies. "That's what this stuff is for. Before we do a spell that focuses on your past, we need to do one that bonds us together with trust."

"Spells don't create trust," I say, standing up.

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"This one will." He stands up as well, landing smack dab in front of my face--eye-to-eye, lip-to-lip. He smells like coconut oil.

I feel my lip tremble and I think he sees it, too. The corners of his mouth curl slightly upward, as if to smile.

"Maybe we should get started then," I say, stepping back. I sit back down on the bed and begin fumbling with a squarish jar of some sort. "What do we do first?"

Jacob plugs a hot plate into the wall by his desk. "We're going to make body paint."

"Body paint?"

He pulls a tank top from the top drawer of his dresser and tosses it to me. "So you won't get your clothes dirty."

"I'm supposed to wear this?"

He nods and pulls another tank top out for himself.

"I don't think so."

"This is what I'm talking about," he says. "You need to trust me." He takes a step toward me and reaches for my hand. "I have as much to lose in this as you do."

"Your life isn't at stake," I say.

"No," he says. "But yours is." His slate-blue eyes penetrate mine so deeply I have to look away.

"I'll turn around and you can change over there." He nods toward the corner of the room.

As soon as he turns around, I move in that direction, just to the right of the door, thinking how if I wanted to, I could just walk out.

But of course I don't.

I pull my sweater over my head and slip the tank top on over my bra, reminding myself that I still have a boyfriend,

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that I shouldn't be feeling this way, that there are far more pressing things to concern myself with at the moment.

The tank hangs down mid-thigh and smells like him, like coconut oil and lemongrass incense. It droops a bit low under my arms, revealing the sides of my bra. I tuck the fabric of the tanktop into the spandex and turn to glance at myself in the mirror--at my long, dark hair, at my golden-brown eyes and angular cheeks. The tank top hugs a bit at the chest and hips and makes my skin look lighter in color, almost creamy. And for some inexplicable reason, standing here on a mound of sweatpants mixed with Tshirts, in his clothes, in his room, under these conditions, I couldn't feel more . . . beautiful.

"Okay," I say, almost eager for him to see me, to see this part of me. But instead he just pulls off his shirt and changes into a tank as well.

I look away, feeling a swell of heat move down the length of my spine, thinking how Chad used to make me feel this way, how that seems so long ago, now.

"Okay," he says. 'All set." The tank hugs just slightly around his chest, showing off the tops of his arms, like balls of muscle beneath the skin. I allow him to look at me as well; I wonder how he sees me, what I look like to him--a friend, a girl with a boyfriend, a puzzle he has yet to solve.

"Let's get started," he says, ever respectful, keeping focused on my eyes. He takes the ceramic pot from the center of the scarf and holds it out to me. There's an olive-green powder inside, like colored flour, but it smells more like hay. "Have you ever used henna before?"

I shake my head.

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"It's perfect for body paint." He pours a small pitcher of liquid into the pot. "Rainwater," he explains. And then he adds in a couple tablespoons of instant coffee, a few squeezes of a lemon, eucalyptus oil, honey, cardamom, and a cinnamon stick.

He mixes it all up with a wooden spoon and then sets the pot on the hot plate. "It'll only be a few minutes," he says. "Heating it up this way just allows the paint to darken."

I look inside the pot as he stirs, watching the liquid swallow up the greenish powder. The ingredients fold into the mix like watered-down cake batter, turning everything a darkish-brown.

"It almost looks good enough to eat," I say.

"That means it's ready." He takes the pot by the handle and sets it on a ceramic dish.

"What are we going to do?" I ask, like it isn't obvious.

"First," he says, "we need to focus on what we already know about the impending danger, and then we need to ask ourselves what we'd
like
to know."

"The what-we'd-like-to-know part seems pretty obvious," I say.

"Is it really, though?" He continues to mix the body paint with the wooden spoon and then dips his finger into the center. "Just right."

"Of course it's obvious," I say, getting back to the subject. "I want to know who's been sending me stuff, who's watching me, and what's going to happen to me exactly."

"I'll bet you already know the answers to some of those questions." He holds up his index finger, an ample helping of thick, brown body paint on the tip. "Are you ready?"

"For what?" I ask, leaning back.

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"If we're going to build trust, we need to paint on each other. We need to physically show one another what we know, what we desire to know . . . We need to be vulnerable to one another."

"You're kidding, right? Since when will painting on another person's body parts make one vulnerable to anything?"

Jacob looks a bit dejected by my response, which makes me feel like a megabitch. I don't know what is wrong with me sometimes. I've had Amber and Drea engage in plenty of seemingly bizarre spell stunts. Plus, wasn't it me who buried a potato just the other day? Who made a wax doll and slept with him under my pillow? So why should I have a problem with this?

With his muddied finger, Jacob draws a spiral in the center of his palm--one with five layers and that extends toward his wrist.

I dip my finger into the body paint as well and draw a spiral that matches his. I hold my palm out to him as a peace offering. "Shall we start over?"

Jacob hesitates but then places his palm up against mine, the heat from his hand penetrating right into my own. "There's just one rule," he says.

"What's that?"

"Henna stains big time, so you have to be sure about the images that you draw--purposeful about them."

"Deal."

I pull up my hair in a rubber band, and we spend the next several minutes drawing down each other's arms, at the back of each other's necks, and, pulling up the tanktops, 261

26l
on each other's backs. I draw the noose on his forearm; the letter M where the back of his neck meets his shoulders; the words I'M WATCHING YOU down his left bicep; and the weathered gray basement door from my nightmares on his back, just above his waist.

Jacob does the same on me. I can feel lines and swirls being formed along my shoulders and at the nape of my neck as he parts my hair. Triangular shapes and checkered patterns under my arms, tickling me, giving me goose-bumps. I wonder if he can see my bra, if he notices the heat I'm sure is visible all over my face.

Jacob turns me around so that we face one another, his finger raised high to draw. He takes a step inward; we're standing so close now I can feel his breath on my forehead. Jacob looks at me so intensely that I almost want to make a joke, release the tension around us. I feel myself swallow, feel my lower lip quiver, just inches from his mouth. He lowers his finger to my front, right beside one of the tank straps. He looks at me to make sure I'm okay and then draws something that extends across my collarbone, just below my neck and close to the opposite shoulder. At first I try to figure out what it might be, but then I sort of lose track of the lines.

'Are you ready to go on with the spell?" Jacob asks. "Do you trust me yet?"

"Do you?" I ask.

Jacob leans in even closer, still looking at me, into my eyes. His breath is warm on my skin and smells like cinnamon sticks and honey--like the paint. "Do you really have to ask?"

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I shake my head slightly and the tips of our noses touch. I close my eyes and lightly rest my forehead against his. Jacob runs his hands down the length of my bare arms; I do the same, moving my fingers along the nape of his neck, enjoying the smell of the paint on each other's skin, the way the stickiness feels under my fingertips.

Jacob stops a moment to move my hair off my shoulders. He looks at me and I close my eyes, feel his mouth on mine, sending a million tiny tingles all over my skin. His kiss is like warm honey and mocha on my tongue, only better, like nothing I've ever quite tasted.

I wrap my arms around him completely, feeling his shoulder blades through the tank top, the shaved hair at the nape of his neck.. I open my eyes for a moment and glance over his shoulder at the white candle sitting by his bed and a gush of emotion comes over me all at once--how I've never felt this way before. I mean,
this
way--the way my heart has swelled up inside my chest, like it couldn't get any bigger, the way Ld love to just crawl up inside his skin and breathe his breath.

The way I'd give anything right now to light that white candle.

'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" he asks.

"I think so," I say.

That's when the door flies open, breaking the moment, slicing through our embrace.

I let out a gasp.

It's Tobias.

"What's going on in here?" he asks, his left eye twitching at us.

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"This is my roommate," Jacob explains, taking a step away from me.

"Sorry," Tobias says, "didn't mean to interrupt anything scandalous. Just wanted to pick up a couple of my things." He looks about the room, picks a baseball cap off the floor, and sets it on his head. "So, what
did
I interrupt, exactly?"

"You live with
him?"
I say, turning to Jacob.

"Maybe I should go," Tobias says. "Don't want to get in the middle of anything . . . sticky."

"No," I say, "I'm the one who's leaving."

"So soon?" Tobias asks. "Why? Is Chad waiting for you?"

"Don't go," Jacob says.

I can't believe this is happening. I glance at myself in the mirror, at the picture of what Tobias is seeing. That's when I notice--what Jacob has drawn at my front.

"I have to go." I grab my sweater and bullet for the door before either of them can stop me.

"I

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forty-orx.

When I get back to the room, no one's there. I pull off my sweater and stand in front of the mirror, looking over all of Jacob's drawings--a moon, a set of keys, a giant X (the rune for partnership), and a smallish structure of some sort, maybe the tool shed from my nightmare since there's a hammer just below it. But the drawings that disturb me the most are the ones on my chest--a crudely drawn car, a tree, and a stick-figured girl jumping rope.

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I sit down on the edge of my bed and try to piece it all together. It's all becoming clear now--just like my mother said. The answers to what I need to know are in my past.

When Maura told Miles that she wanted to get out of the car that day, he got angry and started driving faster, taking more turns, making Maura more nervous, more sick, ft wasn't long before the car crashed into a tree. Maura flew through the windshield. The doctors said she didn't die right away. Miles, with barely even a scratch, panicked and ended up carrying her body through the woods, just a couple blocks from our neighborhood. He locked her up in a tool shed instead of taking her to the hospital where she could have been saved.

It was a few days before her body was found, and by that time it was too late. She was already dead. Without any past criminal record, Miles was charged with motor vehicle homicide, the kind where they say negligence is to blame, and sentenced to seven to ten years in prison, eligible for parole in four.

Four years ago last month.

I clasp my stomach and massage my throat, feeling the sensation to get sick as well. To vomit, just like Maura, just like my nightmares.

I fish into my spell drawer for a rag and a bottle of olive oil. I douse the rag with the oil and then wipe the henna stains from my neck, chest, shoulders, and arms. The designs begin to lift and lighten a bit. 1 pull on a turtleneck sweater to cover it all up and then grab the bowl of lavender pellets by my bed. I rub them between my fingers, breathing the scent in, trying to soothe myself.

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I wonder what all of this means, if Miles is already out. Or maybe someone knows about all of this; maybe someone, even Jacob himself, found out all these pieces of my life--researched all my old ghosts--and is using them to try and drive me insane. There are certainly plenty of losers around here who have researched the events of last year, who have tried to pry into my life. But is that even possible? Could Jacob have found out all the details of Miles' trial? Is he maybe working with Cory and them?