Spotlight

Having a kid with a wild imagination meant her mom had been dragged down to the school plenty of times to discuss what was appropriate with her teachers or the principal. In her defence, most of the wildest stories had been true – or at least they’d started out with a kernel of truth – it was just that stories shared by drunk Navy SEALs probably weren’t the sort of thing an eight year old should’ve been hearing or sharing. Pffft. Kids could handle more than what parents believed and she’d been a big proponent in believing that kids were less likely to screw up if they heard those little fairy tales of how shit could go really wrong first.

Sadie was sure her dad’s team had seen the seeds of those stories that hadn’t really been for her ears in her earliest books. They’d germinated and grown into wild tales of mythical creatures and hidden societies. With each book she’d raised the stakes and nobody had cared – it was fiction. What had happened tonight wasn’t and as Darcey opened the door, Sadie knew there was a chance he was gonna think she was making the whole thing up. Drunk, overly imaginative, was there really much difference when you weren’t a hundred percent sure you’d seen a guy pull off a magic spell and snap a coyote’s neck without touching it?

She’d been aiming for his eyes. Like a normal person. Someone spoke, you made eye contact. You didn’t almost swallow your tongue as your gaze hit a literal road hump and stopped dead for, God, what she hoped had only been a split second (that was polite right?). Sadie blinked, swallowing hard to make sure her tongue was still in her mouth – throat a little dry, cheeks definitely getting hot and not from the run, but yup, there it was. Shitshitshit, what the fuck was wrong with her brain. She needed not to be thinking about it.

Up, up, up. Stretches of lean muscle, pale skin, and hey, she’d been right, the freckles were everywhere by the looks of things. Gathered thick enough over his shoulders and forearms that she was picturing him as a kid, running wild and shirtless in London in the summer, the spread of them growing every year.

She was ... alright? Sadie’s gaze finally hit his mouth as he rubbed at his eyes. Was she alright? Probably more than she had been with him standing there in front of her. A solid presence despite his slenderness. ”It’s a long story,” she managed with a sigh.

Maybe Darcey wasn’t too happy about it, but he stepped back to let her in. Not wanting to stomp through the place and wake everybody up, she kicked off her boots at the door and padded after him. Glancing nervously at the closed doors, she hoped they stayed that way. Telling him was one thing, explaining it to his brother and sister was another entirely. ”Thanks,” she whispered as he offered a seat. One glance at him had her stopping again though. He’d sounded like she’d just woken him up at the door – he'd either been having one hell of a dream or he was just ..,yeah. Either way she had to pull herself together.

Being polite, she put some distance between them - friend distance. Sadie tangled her hands in her lap, snorting with laughter when he finally asked. She glanced sideways, dragging her gaze up again (brain, behave!) to look him in the eye as she shook her head. ”Unless I’ve really been missing shit on the Discovery channel, that really isn’t normal wild animal behaviour. Animals don’t spontaneously break their necks in mid-air.” Her fingers knotted tighter as she frowned, her gaze started to drift like that would help her remember. It snapped up when she realised it was right back where those sweatpants were clinging, literally, to narrow hips and then snapped up. ”It was Parking Lot Guy.” Back to the beginning, she had to go back or this wasn’t gonna make any sense.

Sadie folded her arms over her chest, hugging herself tight like the chill of fear was finally starting to sink in. ”I went out to the club. OK, I had a five or six drinks, but I wasn’t hammered. I danced a little, got tired and decided to walk home.” Her first idiotic act of night, if you didn’t count going out in tbe first place. ”I went to walk past one of the alleyways that cuts away from the square and I heard something whimpering. It could’ve been a cat or a puppy, so I stopped to see. This guy I’ve seen around my building walks up and we’re talking about it and then the thing starts growling.” And she’d realised she was out of her depth.

The chills settled deeper, her arms tightening like that would do jack shit about the fact that she’d nearly gotten her face torn off by a rabid coyote. ”Then it leaps out of the dark, like some damn horror film. I’m nearly peeing my pants, I go stumbling back. Parking Lot Guy starts muttering something...” She broke off the story and repeated what she remembered of it, turning her hand the same way his had on the sidewalk. ”...and like gesturing in the air and suddenly the thing just stops. Its head twists, there’s this snap and it just falls out of the air. Does that sound like a wild fuckin’ animal to you?” This time when she looked at him it was in the eye, a plea shining in hers to tell her that she hadn’t lost her freaking mind and imagined the whole thing.

Tagged: DARCEY REID * Word Count: 953

She might have had a few drinks at the club, but Sadie knew she wasn’t drunk enough to have lost her story telling abilities. The most important details were laid out up front – an animal’s neck snapped without being touched and she was sure Parking Lot Guy was the one to do it. Darcey’s huh made it clear that he wasn’t getting it and the more of the story she spun out, the more certain she was that she’d finally cracked. Too many years of partying, too much time spent in fictional worlds, reading too many of those crazy stories in the newspaper about people going missing and bodies turning up months or years later. If Parking Lot Guy hadn’t turned up, would that have been her?

Her frown etched itself deeper, as though she couldn’t even be sure of the powers of her own memory anymore. Maybe she’d blinked at the wrong moment and her brain had filled in the blanks with alcohol steeped images of what might’ve happened in one of her books. A glance darted at Darcey showed him looking serious again. As a measure of how crazy she was on a scale of one to ten, that was probably approaching the top end. In a second he’d step out and then he’d walk back in with the guys in white coats.

Please, talk. The plea was a silent echo to the question he hadn’t yet answered. Tears blurred her vision – she was not one of those women who turned on the water works whenever she got a little emotional – one breaking over her lashes as Darcey did talk. She wasn’t one of those women who needed to be reassured over everything too, but she felt it anyway as she took his offer.

Sadie scooted closer, wrapping her arms around his narrow waist – all thoughts of what had been going on below it evaporating for a moment. Her head rested against his shoulder, the muscle warm against her cheek, solid. He was like a willow, looking like a strong wind might send him swaying, but right now he was holding her together. ”I always knew there were coyotes out in the woods. We’d hear them when we’d go camping out there when I was a kid, but never in town.” And even if she had, she’d never have thought they were ballsy enough to approach people. Maybe Parking Lot Guy had been right and it was rabid. It’d been long enough since she’d read Cujo that she couldn’t remember the exact symptoms, but she doubted that spontaneous neck snapping was amongst them.

She puffed out a breath at Darcey’s mumbled words, some thin trace of strained amusement in it. ”He didn’t want me to see him break its neck, or didn’t want me to see him pull the Lord Voldemort act?” she asked tightly. No other way of helping. Pressing her lips together, Darcey tried to hold the shudder back. Her grip on his waist tightened until he was easing back an inch. Who was the one talking crazy now?

”You sure? Because I’m pretty sure I might’ve just hallucinated that…” Sadie started. Something inside of her went still as he met her eyes though. While she was freaking out, he’d suddenly gotten eerily calm about the whole thing. ”They’re fiction. I make shit up all day every day.” And fuck, she was good at it. She started to shake her head, but Darcey was pressing on. He called it a spell, he wasn’t saying she’d somehow mangled PLG saying shit into something unrecognisable. ”I don’t think Houdini could’ve pulled that trick off, if that’s what you mean about magic.” Darcey didn’t though. That little voice in her head that was fist pumping at the idea that she’d known was growing louder as she started putting faith in his words.

The words slipped over her skin like a warm breath, soothing, but leaving it rippling like goose flesh had raced along in their wake. Hair that was probably already standing on end rose at the nape of her neck. A flower, an honest to god little pink flower was blooming out of his palm. Houdini could probably have made some fake flower burst out of his sleeve, but this was more than that.

Unfurling her arms from around his waist, she braced herself with a hand on Darcey's thigh. Fingers curling around the lean muscle, Sadie reached out to lightly cup his hand from underneath with the other. It felt like if she touched the flower itself, it would melt away into nothing. Her thumb glided featherlight over his palm though, the tip of her nail stopping a fraction of an inch from one of those pretty petals.

Slowly a smile took the place of the frown that had been on her face moments before. ”It’s incredible,” Sadie breathed. She dragged her gaze away from it to look at him again, eyes lit up with awe. ”You’re incredible. You’re a wizard … holy shit.” Her heart was fluttering in her chest again, but not from fear this time. ”How do you do it?” There was no way on earth Hogwarts was real. This was though and God, she must’ve been blind to it.

The first time they'd met she'd realised that his spare frame was deceptive. Balanced in his lap, patching up the wounds he'd suffered protecting her, she'd felt the strength in it. Now she felt the heat, awareness tingling through her hand and up her arm as she realised she was a hair's breadth away from the part of him that'd been drawing her eye since she'd walked in. A quick glance down proved, yep, his sweat pants were still clinging there as though one deep breath might have them losing their grip. "Thanks for assuring me I wasn't crazy," she said softly. "As far as providing a distraction those sweat pants are really doing God's work." Maybe she'd regret opening her mouth come morning, but she wouldn't regret doing it tonight. She could have just curled her fingers into the waistband, hot skin pressing up against the back of her fingers as she adjusted them one way or another, but she still had a tiny thread of self-control left.

Tagged: DARCEY REID * Word Count: 856

Where the snarling furry beast and its unexpected demise had seemed like a nightmare, this felt like a dream. Those soft words out of Darcey’s mouth, the tiny pink petals unfurling. She could’ve been imagining the whole thing, and it wouldn’t have left her thrashing her way clear of the sheets as a cold sweat left them pasted to bare skin. He probably could’ve picked anything to demonstrate his power to her, but Darcey, a man she’d seen fight with relish, one she’d mopped blood off of afterwards, had picked something tiny and delicate and sweet. It looked enough like it would melt at her touch that Sadie couldn’t bring herself to do it. She shook her head slowly, keeping her touch on him instead.

As a kid it must have seemed like the best thing ever to know that at some point you were gonna get this big burst of power. She’d played at being a superhero, leaping off of the top of the jungle gym, a pillowcase tied round her neck like a cape, or stalking through the woods after Jenk and the rest of her dad’s team, dark stripes of camo paint on her cheeks, a red bandana tied around her forehead Rambo style. Getting to kick ass and save lives had seemed like one of the best jobs in the world. Darcey hadn’t just had whatever he’d seen on TV to try and emulate, he’d had a warlock right there in his house.

Snorting softly, she studied his face as he went full Hagrid. ”I bet you hated hearing that after the first time.” Harry Potter had left every kid wanting to hear those words. Darcey had to have been a teenager when they’d come out, maybe too old to get all enamoured with a story that’d probably gotten most things wrong. As a kid she’d loved them, but, then again, she hadn’t been born with abilities or bitten by a radioactive spider or any of that cool shit she’d wished would happen to her in this sleepy little town.

Just watching a flower bloom in Darcey’s palm had left her breathless, feeling that power rush through yourself for the first time must have been practically orgasmic. Her brows rose as Darcey shrugged at the question. Or was it just another Tuesday? Sadie grinned as he nudged her. ”Practice makes perfect huh? You definitely got better results out of the genetic lottery than I did. Freckles and magic.” She’d ended up with her dad’s dark hair and blue eyes, but that was about as good as things got. Maybe other things would show themselves as they got older, but it wasn’t going to be this.

Sadie looked back at the flower, a quick flick of her gaze before the amazement gave way to awareness again. Like the pink had flushed through the petals it bloomed in her cheeks now, the heat mirroring what was working its way through her stomach. What self-control she had left dragged her gaze away from where the grey cotton was doing nothing to hide what was beneath. She could’ve drawn its dimensions with a finger, described each line that was revealed so clearly. The heat kicked up another notch as Darcey looked up and met her eyes, his flaring wide at her comment. He laughed at least, extinguishing the flower by closing his hand. She let hers slide down to his wrist, fingertips picking up his heartbeat.

The apology for turning up almost slipped out, but screw it, she wasn’t sorry. ”You didn’t have to bother on my account,” Sadie said breezily, her tone absolute innocence. They might not have gotten as far as the big reveal if he had arrived at the door – how did they say it? Stark bollock naked? Her brain would’ve short circuited the way it’d kept trying to even with that layer of fabric between them. Fear? Don’t know her. Parking Lot Who? It was probably better all around that Darcey had taken the time, keeping his modesty and that wall up between the two of them. Every time they’d gotten close to sending it toppling things had gotten rough between the two of them and she didn’t want the third time to be the charm.

Talking of short circuiting. Like the air had developed invisible hands, Sadie felt a ripple of sensation work its way over her legs, her skin tingling in its wake. She sucked in a breath, her hand clutching at his thigh. It was her eyes going wide this time, the colour brightening in her cheeks as the feeling slipped back up her inner thighs. Everything seemed to coalesce right there between her legs and he was smirking right at her as he did it. Sadie was silent for a moment, just basking in the feeling before she puffed her breath back out. ”Hoooly shit. That ... that’s my favourite so far.” She tried to force herself to breathe normally, but that last thread of self-control had snapped. ”Do it again,” she begged, knowing she was gonna end up saying those words over and over.

Her hand had shifted as she’d startled, her little finger curling over him now. All polite distance was lost, not that it had done much when one of them could reach out magically anyway. Asking to play with his wand was probably like sacrilegious to a wizard. It seemed like a pretty decent way to say thank you for telling me the truth in her drunk mind though. Slowly, deliberately, Sadie curled her whole palm over him, her fingers dipping into his waistband. Skin and muscle silky and warm against their backs, the soft cotton snug at their front. Like she could tow him in with it, she gave a faint tug as she leaned in. It was all slow, enough time left between her stepping over a line they’d started to erase again and her mouth finding his for Darcey to pull away again. This could all blow back in her face, he could already have been in love with another woman, but if there was a time for her to make a move, it felt like right now.

Tagged: DARCEY REID * Word Count: 977