Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter four

Raising the Tent

“Hey, I found a tent for you in the attic,” Cooper called from the patio. A green nylon bundle was slung over his left shoulder and he gripped a wooden mallet in his free right hand. He grinned at me, and I felt myself melt.

It was the first time he’d looked genuinely happy since I’d brought him back from his hell. The man had a great smile. Anybody can have nice, straight white teeth these days; it’s what the smile says that matters. And Cooper’s grin told me that, yeah, we’d been having an epic bad week, but everything was gonna be okay, and once we’d put things right, he had lots of delicious plans for making my toes curl.

“Aw, you’re a sweetie!” I hadn’t even realized I needed a shelter; it was one of those things I’d probably have thought of right around the time I was too exhausted to do anything other than crawl into the sleeping bag on the open grass and hope that Mother Karen had an antimosquito charm working.

“Well, I want you to get as good a night’s sleep as you can out here.” Cooper looked at Pal and chewed the corner of his mustache. “Do you want a tent, too? I think I saw a pup tent up there that I could magic up to make big enough for you.”

Pal blinked his four eyes at Cooper; I wasn’t sure, but I thought his expression was slightly indignant. “Please thank him for his kind offer, but I prefer the open air. And also I am quite capable of working my own spells.”

“Pal says he’s good, thanks,” I told Cooper.

Cooper carried the tent over and we opened the big drawstring bag. We pulled out the fiberglass poles, hard plastic stakes, tie-down ropes, then the green nylon tent body, fly, and thick waterproof tarp. We spread the tarp on a nice flat spot in the middle of the lawn and got the poles threaded through the fabric to pop the tent into shape.

“It looks pretty stable,” I said as we set the assembled tent in place on the tarp with the entrance facing the patio. It was basically just a one-person model, though two people could fit in it if they didn’t mind close quarters. “I don’t think we need to stake it to the ground. Unless there’s supposed to be a rainstorm or wind tonight.”

Cooper gave me a look. “With the luck we’ve been having?”

“Right. Better stake it down, then.”

I started tying the ropes through the tent grommets as Cooper stripped off his borrowed T-shirt and began pounding stakes into the lush sod. The muscles in his shoulders and his abs seemed unusually defined; I suddenly imagined myself running my tongue through every hard groove on his belly, kissing his navel, gnawing gently on his delicious hip bones.

Pal sniffed the air. “Jessie, whatever you’re thinking about, please stop thinking it.”

I didn’t reply; I just focused on putting the fly on the tent. Which took a whopping two minutes, so it wasn’t much distraction. Cooper was still driving hard, thick plastic into the moist, yielding lawn. A slight sheen of sweat gleamed on his smooth skin. My knees were starting to quiver.

“Jessie …” Pal warned.

Cooper stood up. “The grass seems pretty springy, but if you think you’ll need an air mattress—hey, what’s the matter? You’re all flushed. And you look so sad.”

He gazed down at me with concern. It was all I could do not to grab him by the ears and stick my tongue down his throat.

“I need a … hug,” I replied. “Can we cuddle on my sleeping bag in the tent for a while?”

“Jessie!” Pal exclaimed.

A look of “uh-oh” realization flickered across Cooper’s face. He scratched his goatee, looking conflicted. “Well, I don’t think that’s a good idea—”

“Please,” I said, as much to Pal as to Cooper. “I nearly lost you, and it feels like it’s been so long since we’ve been able to just hold each other. For all I know I could get dragged off to prison tomorrow and never see you again. Please. I’m not going to have a flaming, gushing orgasm from cuddling, I promise.”

“I suppose there’s no harm in that.” Cooper coolly glanced at Pal, his expression daring my familiar to disagree.

Pal pawed the ground and glared at us. “Just keep in mind that I have a bucket of very cold water out here, and I’m not the least bit afraid to use it.”

Cooper stood before the tent, twisting the much-chewed corner of his mustache thoughtfully. “This thing is really kind of puny, isn’t it? Not much room for more than one person. And not very comfortable for you if you’re going to be in there all night.”

He closed his eyes, raised his arms, and began a chant. I recognized old words for changing size and dimension. The ground and the tent simultaneously began to expand, the earth trembling, and soon the tent was as big as a small bedroom. Cooper winced and leaned forward on his knees as he finished the spell, looking pale and a bit drained. Too much, too soon.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He straightened up and smiled at me. “I’m fine. Check it out!”

When I pushed the tent fly aside, I discovered that he’d raised the earth into a bed-size platform, the sod beneath the tarp grown thickly into a natural mattress.

Cooper helped me unzip the sleeping bag all the way and we laid it on the grass mattress. We crawled on top and lay down in the dark, sharing my pillow, Cooper spooning me. Through my skirt and his pajama pants, I could feel he had a rubbery half-erection.

“Warlock and I are planning to go to the Costco up at Polaris tomorrow to get some supplies,” he said. “Five babies need a whole lot of formula. And diapers. And everything, really. Hoo boy.”

“They sure do,” I agreed. I wondered if he was talking about his infant brothers because they were the most pressing matter on his mind, or because he was trying to chill his libido. Probably both.

“The boys … wow,” he continued. “I always wanted a bigger family, and now I’ve got it, and that’s extremely cool … but, jeez, babies. I do not know how to take care of babies.”

“Well, Mother Karen does. And there are lots of books you can read.”

“I know, but … I don’t want to screw this up. They’ve been through so much, and I don’t want them living in those shadows. Not like the Warlock and I did. I want my brothers to grow up to be good men.” Cooper rubbed his face and slipped his arms around me, his hand resting gently over my nipple. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it on purpose or not. “Taking care of them properly means we’ll have to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“To have our own baby.”

“Oh.” I laughed, perhaps too flippantly. “Trust me, I’m fine waiting.”

He paused. “You … you do like the idea of us having a kid together someday, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I think so.” I stopped, considering his words and his concerned tone. We hadn’t had this conversation before, and I didn’t really know what to tell him. Babies were pretty far from my mind most of the time; if I had a biological clock, it hadn’t started ticking.

On the other hand, spending time trapped in a hell was sure to put a man in touch with the grim reality of his own mortality. It wouldn’t be that surprising if Cooper had started thinking about his own legacy, magic and genetic and otherwise.

“I can’t honestly say I like the idea of going through labor,” I finally replied. “And the thought of being pregnant freaks me out a little, protective magic or no. It makes you so … vulnerable. But I like everything that leads up to conception. I like that part a whole lot.”

I should have lain there quietly and talked more about the logistics of taking care of his little brothers. Instead, I reached back and eased the itchy skirt up so that my bare ass was pressed against his flanneled groin. Immediately his erection snapped to warm attention. I began to silently grind against him.

His grip on me tightened.

“What the heck are you doing?” he whispered.

“Cuddling,” I replied innocently. I almost said And I’d like to cuddle you balls-deep in my ass, but bit my tongue. I knew Pal wasn’t kidding about the bucket.

Sweet mother of bacon, I wanted Cooper to f*ck me. I didn’t care if it was going to hurt or make a god-awful mess or set the whole blessed planet on fire. It was like I hadn’t even come earlier; my hormones were screaming for relief as if I’d spent the past decade in a convent with octogenarian nuns. Wearing a straitjacket. And a chastity belt. With the key broken off in the lock.

I have never been any damn good at keeping my pants on around a boyfriend; I have also never once cheated on a boyfriend, but honestly? Cooper was the first real boyfriend I’d ever had.

Not that I was some innocent little rosebud when I met him; far from it. I had more than my share of big dumb sex in high school, but avoided serious trouble because I was smart enough to use a condom every time and was able to work a basic silencing spell to keep the boys from bragging to their buddies (usually). In retrospect, most of the rest of the school probably thought I was a lesbian. I vocally despised the rah-rah frivolity of football pep rallies, played grumpy midfield for the field hockey and lacrosse teams, and rarely wore a dress or makeup. I liked all the boys I’d slept with, and maybe I had a little crush on a couple of them, but I’d never been in love with anyone before Cooper.

I lost my virginity when I was fourteen, thirteen if you count oral (I didn’t). Yeah, I know what you’re probably thinking, and at this stage in my life, I’m thinking it, too. But I can’t pretend it didn’t happen, because for better or worse that’s part of what made me the person I am today.

I was eleven when my mom died, and her body was barely cold before my stepfather (at that point we all thought he was my biological father) started dating my soon-to-be stepmother, Deborah. I hated Deb with a sullen passion that only increased after they got married a whole two days after I turned thirteen. As the topper on my birthday cake, we moved to Plano, Texas, away from our old Lakewood neighborhood in Dallas and the friends I’d grown up with.

The new neighborhood was a dusty grid of particle-board ranch houses with miserable stick trees in the front yards. I was pretty eager to spend as little time in the new house as possible, and my stepparents didn’t much seem to mind me being gone. Deb got pregnant with the twins right away, and she was definitely not in the humor to deal with a strange, moody teenage girl.

A couple of days after we moved in, I was slouched on the front porch reading one of my Sandman comics when a boy in his midteens pulled into the driveway next door in an old VW Beetle. I remember he was wearing clothes that were just a bit too formal and too heavy for the spring weather, and he had a fresh black eye. My interest was significantly piqued when he lifted a shiny new Alienware tower out of the passenger seat and started to carry it toward his house.

So I went over and introduced myself, probably by saying something profound like, “Whoa, that’s a sweet computer.” He blinked at me from behind unfashionable glasses, and we exchanged awkward geekeries until he asked if I wanted to come inside and help him set it up in the rec room.

His name was Edwin Chong, and he lived with his grandmother; she’d been his guardian ever since his parents died in a car crash near the Texas Instruments headquarters where they both worked. Even though he was sixteen, he was skinny as a skewer and not much taller than I was. He played first chair violin in the orchestra at Plano Senior High and worked as a projectionist at a movie theater on the weekends—thus his new computer purchase. Various fine young Baptist rednecks regularly kicked the shit out of him because he was half Chinese, half Jewish, and 100 percent nerd. Worse, he was fussy enough to come across as utterly gay to everyone but the actual gay kids. So, like me, he didn’t really fit in anywhere.

When I started asking my stepfather if I could hang out next door at Eddie’s house, he probably took one look at the boy and mentally filed him under “Completely Unthreatening.” The kid’s grandmother, on the other hand, dimly sensed that in his bony chest beat the same hormone-charged heart that every other teen boy possessed. And so Grandma Goldstein would haul her arthritic bulk down the half flight of stairs into the rec room every hour … and find us putting together a spaceship made out of Legos, or playing video games, or watching whatever new sci-fi or horror flick he’d surreptitiously recorded at his job. And she’d just sigh at the vast expanse of dorkiness on display before her, shake her head, and go back to her armchair in the living room.

After a couple of months, she stopped checking up on us. And that’s when we started watching descrambled satellite porn. If I’d flipped out or acted disgusted the first time I came down there to find naked boobies on the TV, it probably would have ended there, and we would have gone back to platonic geek pursuits.

I could tell you that we started fooling around because I was achingly lonely and desperate for human touch. Or because my stepmother was conservative and ultrafeminine and I was in full-on rebellion against her and everything she stood for, be it cosmetics or Christianity or chastity. And I had all that going on in my head, sure. But the fact was, I’d been jilling off two or three times a day since I was twelve and was drowning in my own wave of hormones. So when Eddie finally got around to making his first fumbling pass, I was happy to catch.

At first it was just awkward groping, the awkwardness compounded because Eddie was more than a little squeamish about bodily fluids. It’s tough getting laid if you’re a teenage neat freak, but at least it means you’re all for condoms. Eddie finally decided to read the f*cking manual and found a copy of The Joy of Sex. Consequently, he figured out how to get me off, and like good little geeks we started trying everything in the book. Sex became my favorite hobby, and he was a willing horse. If I had a crappy day at school—and, let’s face it, at that age they’re pretty much all crappy—I’d sneak out at night and hit Eddie up for a booty call.

We continued sex on the sly until my magical powers started to manifest. I got crazy-moody; it was like a whole second puberty on top of the one I was already trying to cope with. I got mad at him one night (I don’t even remember why now) and his beloved PlayStation 2 blew up; it was your typical budding-Talent pyrokinetics, but I had no idea what I’d done, or how I’d done it. Afterward, he didn’t want anything to do with me, and I spent a miserable angst-ridden month that climaxed in me waking from a nightmare to find my bedroom on fire.

My stepfather sent me to Columbus to live with Aunt Vicky. There wasn’t room for me at the regular Talent school, so she enrolled me at Upper Arlington High, where I and a few other students got covert magic lessons (I think the classes showed up on our transcripts as Esperanto). Once I’d regained some equilibrium (and learned a silencing charm), I looked around for quiet, geeky guys with pretty eyes and graceful hands. And started deflowering them, one by one.

In the middle of my sophomore year, I experienced a nearly catastrophic charm failure. I’d done both the guys in the school orchestra’s bassoon section, and each boy had jumped to the conclusion that he had been my special first time. I didn’t put the ideas in their heads, but since I wasn’t forthcoming about my sexual history—in my teen brain, I figured since I’d never done it without a condom, they weren’t in any danger of disease so it wasn’t their business—I didn’t dissuade them, either. Stupid.

And at the time I didn’t realize the fatal flaw in the low-grade silencing charm I was using: it stops working if the enchanted party is around someone else who knows about the taboo subject (in this case, sex with me). So, take two previously virginal guys I’d gotten busy with and put them in the same room every afternoon … well, bragging was inevitable.

Of course, the bragged-to boy got pretty upset, and before anyone else realized what was going on, they were throwing down right there in the practice hall, screaming, skinny fists swinging, the whole nine yards. The fight ended bloodily when one kid stabbed the other with his bassoon’s curved metal reed piece. It was mostly just a flesh wound, but the kid had to go to the emergency room with the three-hundred-dollar silver-plated bocal sticking out of his chest like a faucet. Luckily the school principal made some phone calls and convinced both boys’ parents to declare the fight an “accident,” and it stayed out of the papers.

I tried to visit the stabbed kid in the hospital afterward, then tried to call him, but he didn’t want to talk to me. Weeks later, he sent me an angsty text in which he called me a “Jezebel” and “spawn of the Devil” and claimed I’d “seduced him into perversion away from the love of Christ.” I had significantly mixed feelings about his message; on the one hand, okay, I probably deserved it, but on the other hand, what? My “seduction” had pretty much amounted to “Hey, ya wanna …?” He’d never seemed the least bit religious when we’d gotten biblical together. And, perversion? Really? I’d remembered it all being vanilla enough to flavor a vat of Dairy Queen soft-serve.

So I sent him a message back expressing my regret over the incident, and reminding him that while Christ would surely turn the other cheek, if he started spreading rumors about me, they’d be pulling another bocal out from betwixt both his. I didn’t hear anything else from him.

Although I kept my own mouth shut about the whole thing, Vicky pretty quickly clued in to what had happened. But instead of grilling me or giving me any repressive lecturing, she just encouraged me to have too many extracurricular activities—convincing me to try out for lacrosse and field hockey, for instance, despite my previous disdain of sports—to have much free time on my hands. More important, she casually handed me a brand-new Hitachi Magic Wand (“I got this in a gift exchange at work, but I already have a back massager, so I thought you might want it”). And that rubbed the edge off, to say the least.

But I’d still developed a certain compulsion about sex that kicks in once I become intimate with a guy. And that leads back to me doing the Bad Idea Grind on Cooper in a flimsy tent in Mother Karen’s yard.

“I’m not sure this qualifies as cuddling,” Cooper whispered. “What’s gotten into you today?”

“Sh,” I whispered back. “Don’t say anything. Don’t move a muscle. And don’t. Make. A. Sound.”

I turned around in his arms and pushed him back onto the sleeping bag. Putting a finger to my lips, I pointed in Pal’s direction; Cooper nodded silently. I eased his pants down to midthigh so his cock bobbed free.

“Great Goddess, I’ve seen heat-addled moose with more self-control than you people!” Pal exclaimed inside my head. “I’m getting the bucket.”

My middle finger doesn’t double as a *, I thought back to him, irritated. So back off unless something starts smoking in here. And by “back off,” I mean get out of my head and step away from the tent until I’m done.

Pal blew irritated-sounding chords, but I heard him moving across the lawn toward the patio.

I turned my attention back to Cooper. Even if I couldn’t get off, he certainly could. Sometimes it really is just as much fun to give as to receive.

So I lay beside him, my gloved hand hot beneath us, whispering delicious filth in his ear as I worked his long, lean flesh with saliva-slick fingers. To feel him shudder beneath me, watch his face open and vulnerable beneath mine when he finally came … it was beautiful.

When it was over, he blinked, stunned, at the goo splashed across his chest: “Ew, I got some in my beard!”

So much for tender moments.

He snapped his fingers, extended his hand, and commanded, “Nex!” A box of facial tissues materialized on his palm, pilfered via an enchantment he’d set up one night in the Giant Eagle near our old apartment after the manager refused to refund the balance on a demagnetized gift card. It was a petty revenge, perhaps, but certainly handy at times like this. I helped him mop up and then took the spooged tissues out onto the grass to burn them.

Pal just shook his head at me.

When I came back into the tent, Cooper was curled up fast asleep.