Love Potion #2

Cameron’s eyebrows drew together. “A what?”

“He’s so—preening. He belongs on cable. With his girl curls, that Jim Morrison do. It’s hilarious.”

Cameron pursed her lips briefly at this unfair description of Graham. She was beginning to enjoy herself. “You sound jealous.”

“Of Graham Corbett?” To Paul’s dismay, his voice cracked.

Cameron picked up the vial and carried it over to the stove. “What if I just put the last drop in your tea?”

“I won’t drink it,” he said, shaking his head.

Cameron rolled her eyes and set the vial near the sink to rinse and reuse for an herbal tincture. A pity that such an attractive man—and Paul was downright handsome—should be hopeless as a mate for anyone. Not because of anything to do with his faith in love potions. Just because he was so determinedly unattached. Which was childish.

A little catch in her heart warned her, cautioned her. But she had nothing to fear from Paul. Not emotionally. Not in any way.

She vividly remembered four or so things about their Halloween encounter back in college. One—her own costume. Two—surprising tenderness, or maybe a tender surprise. Three—the glitter in his bed in the morning. Four—his announcing upon awakening that the sex would wreck their friendship. She knew that excuse was covered extensively in the useful book He’s Just Not That Into You. Because it was a lie. It meant, I don’t want to have sex with you again. Period.

Paul had rejected her. This permanently eliminated him from her pool of men with whom she might have an intimate relationship in the future.

As she was thinking this, he said, “You know what the Chinese remedy for lovesickness is?”

“What?” said Cameron without interest. There was no remedy.

“To make love with someone other than the object of your attraction.”

Cameron eyed him suspiciously. “You’re not propositioning me, are you?”

Paul hadn’t been. He had been trying to goad her as she was goading him about the love potion. As far as he knew, Cameron hadn’t been on a real date in years, and he’d been planning to suggest Sean Devlin as a possible choice. But now they’d entered murky waters. Possibly deep waters.

He didn’t know Cameron’s entire sexual history, but knew she’d done more than her share of fending off unwelcome advances on dates. He thought of her, in a brief unspoken second, more like a breath, of someone innocent and vulnerable, the girl he used to surf with, kick Hacky Sack with, toss a Frisbee with. One night she’d been in his bed, full-breasted, so sexual, so different. Now, suddenly, she was both those things. And he felt protective toward her.

He tried to answer and couldn’t. Sleeping with Cameron… He liked the idea and also thought it was a mistake, not part of his plans. But he felt a curiosity, curiosity about who she was now, what they might be together. And his mouth said, “It’s an idea.”

Cameron almost gasped with the shock of it.

It was unthinkable.

She and Paul were friends, just friends. In any case, she liked sex, but she wasn’t much into the sport of it, and what he was suggesting sounded like sport. Suppose she did it, would this Chinese cure work? She wasn’t in any danger of falling in love with Paul.

A shudder swept over her with her next thought, a thought she tried to suppress.

Cameron was terrified of pregnancy. There were good reasons for this, several. And she knew her fear was irrational. But it was a fear that had many times made her decide not to go home with someone she might otherwise have accepted. Which was crazy. Birth control did work. And she and Paul would use condoms. It would be fine.

That’s always what you think, Cameron, and then the next day you freak out.

But it was nonsense. She’d talked about it in therapy. She could handle that fear. Because it wasn’t rational, and she was a very rational woman. Which left only the question of sex as sport. “I’m not the kind of woman who does things like that,” she said emphatically. She took honey from the cupboard, leaving the door open.

Paul noticed that she had considered.

She said, “Want some toast?”

“Sure. Things like what?”

“Casual sex.” She popped two slices of rye bread into the toaster.

“I wasn’t thinking casual,” Paul said. Though he’d accepted his share of invitations from eager women, the idea of “friends with benefits” slightly offended him. Sex was sex, friends were friends, lovers were rare. “More of a—” he sought for the right words, and found some he thought would appeal to her pro-therapy, talk-everything-through outlook “—healing experience.”

“Like last time,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “when you rejected me in the morning? I haven’t forgotten, you know.”

“Rejected you?” He frowned, eyebrows drawing together.

“You said it would ruin our friendship or something like that.”

Paul considered. “I do kind of remember that.” What had been in his head? he wondered now. Probably his inherent dislike of denigrating friends to “friends with benefits.” But why hadn’t he wanted more with Cameron, a real relationship? At the time, she would have made an excellent girlfriend.

Now, since the subject had come up, it was beginning to occur to him that he wanted to know Cameron as a lover. Again. He had some memories of the night they’d spent together, but they were mostly visual. “I think it would make you feel better,” he said, unable to keep from smiling. Feeling mischief sweep over him. “If it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll do it again. We’ll do it until we cure—” he found he couldn’t utter Graham Corbett’s name “—your affliction.”

“I’m not afflicted.” Spinning back toward the toaster, she banged into the open cabinet door and cried out. She swore, it hurt so much.

She heard Paul get up from the table and bit down tears.

He turned her around and said, “Let’s get you some ice. Looks like you’re going to have a shiner.”

“Great,” she gasped through the pain.

Spontaneously, he kissed the tip of her nose. But then his lips drifted to her cheek, down to her mouth.

At first, she did not respond, and he was about to move away when she began kissing him back.

He could smell the bread toasting, but he’d lost all interest in food.

She kissed him. She felt his mouth open slightly, and so did hers. She felt the tip of his tongue caress her lips. She whispered, “Okay.”

Paul let her body settle against his, touch everywhere, let her feel what was happening to him because of her. His mind spun, seeing the teenage tomboy she’d been, the vulnerable person she still was inside, the lover he didn’t really know.

I SHOULDN’T BE doing this, she thought minutes later in the bedroom. Abandoning the toast which had popped up, they had gone straight to her bed.

What if this wrecked her relationship with Paul?

Well, maybe that would be for the best. It would be better if Cameron had nothing more to do with any member of the Cureux family—not midwife and love-potion brewer Clare, not her antiseptically skeptical obstetrician ex-husband David, not witch-in-waiting Bridget and not Paul.

But Cameron liked Paul. And he was a friend, a friend who didn’t mind if she woke him in the middle of night to drive Mariah to the vet because she’d eaten a tampon. She sometimes thought Paul would do anything for her. When she someday had a relationship with a man, she wanted it to be someone who would open up to her, talk to her about everything. But that wasn’t Paul. Their friendship wasn’t the talking kind but the being-together kind.

And sometimes she really wished she knew what went on in his head, what he really felt, the unspoken things.

And he wasn’t talking now.

He took off her clothes, and she liked this. It felt strangely…forbidden. Tossing his own T-shirt to the floor beside Mariah, he gazed down at Cameron. “You are fantastically beautiful.”

“What?” Her jaw actually dropped, and she found herself trying to assume a persona, trying not to be aware that she was naked and he was looking at her, clearly intent on only one thing. Having her.

She quavered. The air felt so revealing. It swam between them. She reached up to his jeans, and he gently caught her wrists, placing them back against the sheets. “Slower,” he said, and she felt the power of his intense maleness, his oppositeness from her.

He came down to her, to kiss her lips, to touch her face and her jaw.

Cameron believed herself to be jaded. During the years before Beatrice’s pregnancy and birth, before she’d acquired her own terror of pregnancy and birth, she’d had some wildness. Encounters on the spur of the moment, a live-in boyfriend who’d been not very nice in the long run. Certain words from the mouths of men made her laugh, generally promises that they were going to send her to a yet unknown Eden of ecstasy. They had often made themselves ridiculous to her, and through her work she often found them unworthy of respect, earning only her contempt.

But Paul, in this minute, seemed a fairy-man, a god-man, a pagan creature who was pure desire and impervious to ridicule or derision. She realized, acutely, why they had never done this again. It was too much, too perfect, too close to what-should-be. Too utterly terrifyingly near her ultimate desire in a lover.

His body was beautiful, and she tried again to touch, this time, his shoulders.

He let her, briefly, then removed her hands from him again as he kissed her throat, her heart, her breasts…

Myrtle Hollow

CLARE CUREUX sat in her cabin, drinking the herbal infusion that would relax her, allowing her to sleep after the birth she’d just attended. Few people in Logan County chose homebirths these days. It used to be a choice of poverty, but now the indigent had help from the government to go to the hospital.

Ladonna Naggy’s homebirth had been an educated choice. Ladonna had attended Yale, studied biology and was thinking of becoming a midwife herself. Bridget had come along to this birth as Clare’s assistant, and Ladonna and her partner, Michel, had given birth to a beautiful son. Everything had gone right. Bridget had talked less than usual—this was something Clare had counseled her daughter about, because chatter could distract and irritate a woman in labor. Yes, Bridget was learning; after all, she had two children of her own.

Clare knew she herself was unlike other women, though she shared many of their experiences. Sixty-seven years old, divorced, mother of two, grandmother of two. She was a midwife and an herbalist, and some people called her a witch.

Clare was Irish on her mother’s side, of Caribbean descent on her father’s, her paternal grandmother having been white enough to “pass.” Clare was not sure where “the Sight” came from, whether from Ireland or the Caribbean, but she had it, as did her daughter Bridget, her youngest. Clare had received the love potion recipe from her father’s mother but brewed the recipe without the elaborate rituals her grandmother thought vital.

Grand-mère’s view had been that if one did not make a sacrifice willingly, a sacrifice would be taken.

Clare refused to see that anything had been sacrificed in her life. Divorce from David? What had happened before the divorce? Just the price of her vocation—or so it had all seemed at the time.

The children believed that she and David had simply ceased getting along. Clare was content with this interpretation of the story, which had the advantage of being true, as far as it went.

But Paul, she knew, considered the explanation inadequate. And he used its so-called inadequacy to justify his own absurd belief that it was impossible for two people to remain married. Well, he claimed that he could never have such a partnership.

She sometimes wondered if knowing the whole truth would change Paul’s mind. It was academic. He never would know, of course, because David would never tell him and neither would she. It hadn’t been her finest hour; and if her son ever learned the truth, Paul would see it just as David had.

When given the choice, she’d chosen her vocation over her marriage. It had been selfish. But as she shut off the light in the kitchen and made her way through the dark cabin, reflecting on the birth she’d just been honored to witness, she was content.

CHAPTER TWO

CAMERON SOMETIMES thought she was actually insane. She considered her insanity as she crawled beneath her bed to retrieve the third used condom.

Paul had left all three wrappers on her bedside table, from where Mariah had stolen them and taken them to her bed.

Glad that Paul had been forced to go to the zoo, glad that nothing on Earth would come between him and his job, Cameron took her find into the bathroom to join the other two, turned on the water and prepared to make sure that every condom had kept its integrity. It was the kind of fanatical thing that an insane person might do, and Cameron had been told by various people that her fear of pregnancy was insane.

She didn’t care. She had been in the middle of her monthly cycle last night—only peak fertility could have made her behave so stupidly—and she would be happier by day and night if she knew that not one of these three condoms had a hole in it.

Strange, she had not been terrified by pregnancy last night. And maybe she was distracting herself now from something a bit more frightening than bringing forth children in pain. Paul. She remembered every detail of the night before. She absolutely did not want to be cured from her infatuation with Graham Corbett by falling in love with someone so avowedly against commitment as Paul Cureux.

She was trying to talk herself out of actually making sure the condoms had no holes when she heard someone call her name. “Cameron! Cameron!”

Not Mary Anne. Cameron was glad of that. If her cousin had slept with Graham Corbett—and why wouldn’t she have done so—she wouldn’t come around and tell Cameron about it. No, this was the voice of Cameron’s younger sister, Denise. Denise, unlike Beatrice and Cameron, had inherited a normal physiognomy that would allow normal childbearing. She was a student at West Virginia University but home for the weekend.

Her little sister, with no respect for privacy, appeared in the bathroom door. “What are you doing?” said Denise. “My God, who hit you?”

“I walked into a cabinet door.” Cameron tossed the condoms in the trash.

Denise’s face filled with alarm. “No, you didn’t. You tell me people always say that when someone hit them.”

Cameron had told her that, basing the statement on her experience working with battered women. “I turned around in the kitchen and whacked the cabinet door. I’d never let anyone hit me.”

Unfortunately, Denise’s acceptance of the truth allowed her to return to her original question. “Were you washing out condoms?”

“Of course not. What do you want?”

“You asked me to join you for your Women of Strength herb walk, if you remember.”

Every weekend, Cameron planned something for Women of Strength, a program she’d instituted at the Women’s Resource Center to help battered women regain their self-confidence through physical activity. Sometimes it was a caving expedition, sometimes a self-defense class, sometimes a bicycle ride or hike.

“I’m sick. I might have to beg off,” Cameron said. She was sick because it was absurd to think she might have become pregnant despite birth control, but it was far from absurd that after such a very interesting—such a truly great night—with Paul, she could hardly think of anything but him. Never, never, had she experienced anything like it.

“You’re never sick,” said Denise.

The herb walk might distract her from Paul—if only any woman but his mother were leading it. Well, there was no begging off. She murmured, “True,” with distraction and hoped fervently that Clare could not or at least would not read her mind.

“IF A PERSON has already drunk a love potion, what happens if someone gives them a different one?” Cameron asked Clare Cureux. Because Graham Corbett had drunk a love potion, and he was now in love with Mary Anne. That he’d never been the intended recipient of the potion was moot. And Graham Corbett would still be a much better choice for Cameron than…

Don’t think about him.

Paul’s mother, her gray-threaded hair in one long braid, glared at Cameron. “Who are you talking about? Not that radio—”

“No one,” Cameron insisted. “It’s just theoretical.” In fact, she still couldn’t help fearing that Clare, who had “the Sight,” might somehow know what had transpired the night before with her only son. These questions were Cameron’s way of trying to distract Clare, to make Clare think that Cameron was focused on Graham.

Which she wasn’t at the moment. She did feel differently about Graham after sleeping with Paul.

“The answer is that nothing would happen. Nothing.” Clare gave her another irritated look. Though Clare sold love potions, she did so reluctantly, always trying to talk the buyer out of it first. Let nature take its course, was her unchanging advice.

Bridget said, “How is it going, by the way, Cameron?”

No doubt she thought her question suitably vague. Cameron made a noncommittal gesture with her hand. So-so.

Now, mother cast an appalled look at daughter, then coldly turned away.

“It wasn’t a love potion,” Cameron interjected.

She hadn’t been thrilled to find that Paul’s sister was along on this walk. Cameron felt edgy enough in Clare’s presence without the danger of Bridget’s sometimes greater perceptiveness.

Cameron was surprised so many women were interested in herbs. Four had turned out for the first herb walk and eight for this one, not including Cameron, Denise, Clare or Bridget.

Bridget tossed her long dreadlocks and said, almost reverently, “Coltsfoot. Look, Mom.”

Cameron stepped back to let the other women, three of whom had left abusive spouses and taken refuge at the Women’s Resource Center’s “safe house,” come in closer to see the plant and hear Clare describe its medicinal properties. Like nearly everyone else on the walk, these women had wanted to know who hit Cameron, if she was in trouble, what they could do, how she could let this happen to her. They seemed skeptical that she’d actually walked into a cabinet door.

Cameron thought she might lose her job over this black eye. She was supposed to be helping women to escape from abusive situations, and now her clients thought she was lying about how she’d gotten hurt.

Clare didn’t suspect her of lying. When Cameron had explained, she’d simply sniffed and told her the sort of poultice she should have applied at once.

Another memory of the night before—more a question—What had Paul really felt?—needled her. She had to stop thinking about the night before. It was nothing to get romantic about. She tried to distract herself with the fear of pregnancy, the illusion of a tiny hole. Surely a meaningful amount of sperm couldn’t get through. There was no way.

Of course, it was Paul’s father, David, a former obstetrician, who had once redefined competition to Cameron, when she was stressing over her chances before a 10K. “My dear, as I am constantly reminding my children, you are the sperm that made it. You’ll never face competition like that again.”

She didn’t care. It was a silly fear. And if she got pregnant, it was only what women had been doing forever, what women’s bodies were made for.

Had she been crazy to sleep with Paul? She could not afford to feel this way about him. She needed to be normal with him. If he thought she felt romantically toward him— She almost winced at the thought of it. Being in love with Paul would be a hundred times worse than being in love with Graham.

Chief Logan State Park Zoo

PAUL HAD FOUGHT as hard as anyone to get the pair of pale-faced saki monkeys to the zoo. What was more, he’d managed his fight the old-fashioned way, schmoozing with wealthy individuals who might become zoo benefactors. He’d wanted no part of his boss’s “Hold A Baby Snow Leopard” money-making scheme.

He was, at this time, head keeper of primates. In the past, Paul had worked in reptiles and with the felids, but for the past four years he’d worked with the zoo’s ring-tailed lemurs, black howler monkeys and chimpanzees. He found it difficult to go home at night sometimes because he was attached to these animals.

A grad student named Helena Ruffles was doing research with one of their chimps, a three-year-old female named Portia. Paul loved to watch Portia learn words. Portia loved Paul, who had known her since she was a baby. In fact, he often said that Portia was his favorite female.

But not at the moment.

What he wanted most of all was to make love with Cameron again. She was an astoundingly good-looking woman. He’d always thought so. Her face didn’t have Mary Anne’s model’s bones, but her smile melted his heart. Seeing her gave him the same feeling as diving into the river in the summer, going barefoot in damp grass, picking up his custom guitar…. However, what he’d always felt for her was friendship, and now he wondered why. It bothered him that Cameron had drunk something Bridget had given her, but he hadn’t accepted a drink from Bridget lately, not even a glass of water.

His father, long divorced from Paul’s mother, was an utter skeptic when it came to the love potions. Paul wished he could be a skeptic.

Paul did not want to be married. Women were treacherous and powerful, and he preferred a bachelor’s existence. So he wasn’t sure he should make love with Cameron again. Cameron was…sensitive. The local perception of her was of a man-hating champion of women’s rights, directing the Women’s Resource Center. Paul himself sometimes accused her of being that way. But on some subjects, she had the heart of a marshmallow. And her favorite reading material was pre-1960 romance fiction.

Paul found saki hair below the trees. Was the male still pulling hairs out of his tail? He glanced up, hunting for the primates, and found the male doing just that. Paul slipped back into the keeper area and returned with several dog toys. He particularly liked the flying monkey toy that screamed when you shot it up into the trees. He sent it flying upward so that the male could go retrieve it.

The female got it instead.

The male pulled more hairs out of his tail. Paul threw a dog’s Kong toy on the ground and also tossed out a plush gingerbread man, who promptly began singing, “Run, run, as fast as you can…”

He should at least go by Cameron’s after work. Just to…reestablish normality.

CAMERON HAD RIDDEN her bike to the trailhead for the herb walk, and she rode her bike home afterward. During a brief stop at the grocery store, a patron of the Women’s Resource Center asked, suspiciously, what had happened to her face.

She went home and found Paul’s quarter-ton pickup truck in front of her house beside her own ancient Datsun. As she began adjusting to the fact that Paul was inside, Wolfie and Mariah met her on the porch. Cameron petted Mariah, and Wolfie and Cameron looked at each other, the dog as wary as always.

She went inside, and Paul said from the kitchen, “I fed the dogs.”

He was at the kitchen table, reading her newspaper and eating pesto straight from the jar.

“Are you going to save me some of that?” she snapped.

“Your eye looks horrible.”

Cameron found she was shaking. She was shaking because she’d made love with Paul the night before and now he was in her house and she didn’t know how to behave around him. She found it terrifying that her most recurring thoughts of the day had been of him—nothing else. The minutiae of Paul and of the night before. Every single word and touch exchanged. It was absurd.

So now she didn’t say “What are you doing here?” because she was slightly glad that he was there, although she didn’t want to be glad. She’d barely thought of Graham all day. She’d thought of Paul.