Chapter 9

She watched as he faced the mirror. Part of Mindy’s mind appreciated how perfectly his hand made the wand move through the circle/zee. He’d never seen it done by Batiste, or at least couldn’t remember seeing it, but he apparently had some affinity for the thing. He hadn’t had to think about it to get it to work on her.

Did the wand want to be used by a man? Was it made by some sorcerer, hundreds of years ago, for some man to use to get what he wanted? She blinked. That was insane. There were no sorcerers. There was no magic. Whatever the wand did, it wasn’t magic. She’d rather believe it was alien technology than magic.

Her eyes watched as Bobby tried several more times to do whatever he was trying to do. It obviously wasn’t working. He finally stopped and turned to her.

“Nothing. And I really meant it.”

“What did you try to do?”

“I tried to forget that you said you wanted to seduce me.”

She took the wand from him.

“Okay, here’s what we’ve learned. It doesn’t work when you try to do something to yourself.”

“Maybe it does, but we’re just not good enough to do it yet,” said Bobby.

“No. When you willed me to stop worrying, you weren’t even trying, and it worked perfectly. That’s something else we learned. The wand works better for you than it does for me.”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure of it,” she said. “When I undid the curse on you, it took everything I had.”

“It wasn’t a curse!” he insisted.

“I’m just calling it that,” she said. “Let’s not get hung up about semantics.”

“It’s not just semantics,” said Bobby. “The word ‘curse’ carries firm connotations, all of them bad ones. What happened to me wasn’t bad. It just let me say what I was thinking about.”

“You mean like I just told you I want to jump your bones? That I want to fuck you senseless? That I want to spend all day in bed with you, and then spend all night in bed with you? You mean speaking freely like that?”

“Um...” he looked shocked.

“You see, what we do has consequences, Bobby. What we say has consequences. When you said all that, it unlocked something inside me that got out of control. And when I said what I just said, what did it do to you, Bobby?”

He reached to cover the lump his zipper was still trying to subdue.

“What we say and do affects other people, Bobby,” she said. “That’s why we have to fix this!”

It was desperation that drove them to using the wand on each other again. Nothing else had worked. Mindy had literally pushed Bobby into the bathroom to masturbate because she wanted to do it for him and knew that was unacceptable. She wasn’t worried about it, but she still knew it was wrong.

When he came out, he stood, just looking at her, groaned, and then went back in. He didn’t have to say out loud that just looking at her gave him a boner.

And Mindy thought back to the sexual stamina a young man has.

So she went to the guest bathroom, locked the door, and masturbated, while he masturbated in her bathroom.

Desperation brought them together again, in the dining room, sitting across from each other, with the wand on the table between them.

“I want you to go first, so I can be clear-headed when I try to deal with your problem. We have to be smart about this,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied.

“It’s important that we control our thoughts as we do this.”

“Definitely,” he said.

“Tell me what you’ll be thinking as you do it,” she said.

“I’ll be thinking that I want you to worry again.”

“You don’t want me to worry. You want me to be able to worry,” she said. “You see the difference, right?”

“Yes!” he said. “That’s what I meant.”

“Then it’s critical that that’s what you think about when you try this,” she said.

“I get it.”

“Do you? Because if you make a mistake, all that’s going to do is compound the problems.”

“I get it!” he insisted. “I have to think carefully.”

“Maybe we should discuss and agree on what you’re going to think.”

“It has to be real,” he said. “We can’t take a chance that some rehearsed thought will work.”

“I still want to know what you’re going to try to do - exactly what you’re going to try to do. We have to agree on that,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “That makes sense.”

It was harder than either of them imagined. He suggested that he wish she’d forget about him, but that was too broad.

“Okay, how about if I wish you forget about my penis?” he suggested.

“It’s not just that that’s affecting me,” she said. “It’s your whole personality. You’re just adorable.”

“Gee, thanks,” he said. “I’m like a puppy.”

“You know better,” she said. “I don’t just think about sex. I adore you. I wish you were old enough that I could go out with you. I’d snap you up in a heartbeat.”

“You’re no hag, yourself,” he said, grinning.

“This isn’t funny, Bobby.”

“Okay. How about this? What if I wished you thought of me like you used to, before you found the wand?”

She ruminated on that. That might work. She’d always thought he was a fine young man, but she hadn’t had such blatant sexual thoughts about him, back then.

“Okay,” she finally said. “Remember, you’ll have to really mean it.”

“Maybe you should fix me first,” he said.

“I told you I want to be clear-headed when I try that.”

“I get that. I need to be clear-headed, too. How can I mean it when I wish you to go back to the old Miss Middlesex, when I kind of like the Miss Middlesex you are right now?”

“Bobby!”

“Okay, okay. I get it. No sex for Bobby.”

“Not with me,” she said, heavily. It was obvious, even to a callow youth, that the idea of no sex with Bobby didn’t make her happy. Oddly, that made him happy.

It was with that happiness suffusing him that he picked up the wand. He focused his thoughts, thinking back to a particular rehearsal for the music rodeo. It had been the first time the music all came together, and the mads felt really good about it. He remembered her standing there, her hands weaving a spell of a different kind.

“Be her,” he murmured, as he performed the circle/zee.

He had been looking at the tip of the wand. Now he looked at her.

She looked terrified.

“What are you doing here?” she gasped. “You’re in my house! How did you get here? What’s going on, Mister Pendleton? Why do you have that baton? Where did you get it?”