Karaoke Chemistry: A Witchy Small Town Romcom (Sacred River Book 2)

29. Magnolia

“WE HAVE TO go to karaoke.” Riggs already sounds out of breath from getting dressed. He got crutches and a walking cast yesterday, but the stubborn man still refuses to take any more help than is strictly necessary. Which means everything takes him double the amount of time it normally does.

“I’ll be fine,” I insist, pulling on one of my flowery skirts and chemistry joke T-shirts as we get ready for school. I’ve spent the past week at his house, and curse or not, it hasn’t escaped notice that I’ve been here ever since I had that one random thought about wanting to wake up here more. I glare up at nothing. Universe, if you could please not attempt to make my every random thought come to fruition, that’d be good. Some of my thoughts don’t need your attention. Probably most of them. Cool? Thanks.

Riggs bends down to put on a shoe from where he sits on the bed. His shoulder muscles ripple beneath the fitted button-down and the dress slacks he insists on wearing hug his thighs. I bite my lip at the memories of last night, when I was the one hugging his thighs as I edged him mercilessly, knowing he couldn’t move as easily as normal and taking full advantage.

“What’s got you grinning like that?”

I snap back to attention. “Nothing.”

He snorts. “Doubtful.” He stands from the bed and hobbles until he’s behind me, slipping his hands beneath my shirt and kissing my neck as he runs his thumbs along the underside of my breasts. “Looked like you were thinking of something naughty.”

I shiver. “Maybe.”

Licking at the sensitive skin just below my ear and then kissing it, he murmurs, “I would love nothing more than to pull you onto that bed and make you sit on my face until you came.” He cups my breasts and squeezes. “Feeling the way your thighs shake as you come, listening to your moans of pleasure.”

A deep ache settles between my thighs as my nipples harden. He turns me around, kissing me deeply and grabbing my ass so hard I hope it leaves a bruise. I reach down for his belt, and he groans, stopping me. “We have to go,” he mutters, a dose of reality punching through the lust.

“Do we have to?” I palm his dick, and it thickens beneath the pants.

“Fuck,” he groans again, then attempts to pull himself away from me. “We really do. High school waits for no one.”

I drive us again, much to his displeasure, but at least it’s thirty-nine miles per hour. Which is faster than yesterday, and that’s all he’s getting.

As we pull into the lot, he looks over at me. “We’re going to karaoke.”

“I told you, I’ll be fine.”

“I don’t want you fine. I want you better than fine. You’re wearing yourself down to the bone, and it’s just over a week before your Gathering.”

He’s right, and I sigh in defeat. “Okay.”

He smiles happily, and after I put the car in park, he leans over for a kiss. “Aspen would be so proud of me.”

I laugh. “You’re scared of her, aren’t you?”

He pulls a face. “You didn’t see the way she got all growly and mean after she drugged me. You’d be scared, too. I swear to you, Magnolia, I half expected her to extract a blood oath from me.”

“Well, the tea was basically the same thing,” I shrug.

He pales.

I laugh. “I’m kidding.” Sort of, but he doesn’t need to know that. She really did a number on him. I read her the riot act about it once he passed out, and Aspen was unrepentant. Swore it was to ensure all went well at the Gathering, and the way she said it, how deadly serious she was, I let it go. The only good part was that the intention she brewed into it was only to ensure his safety, and nothing else. No messing with feelings or actions.

Riggs eyeballs me. “You’re not funny. Quinton wasn’t kidding—your sisters are a menace.”

“Maybe.” I fight a smile.

He opens the car door. “Let’s go torture some high school kids, shall we?”

We separate at the top of the steps, and Ava finds me in my classroom before the first bell. “You know the secret’s out, right?”

I squint at her. “Which secret? Because it feels like I have a lot of those at the moment.”

She purses her lips. “You know what? Fair. I mean the you-and-Riggs-are-an-item secret. Whole school knows. Kids are buzzing.” She jazz-hands the last word and grins.

“Eh,” I say, straightening papers on my desk.

“Eh?” she repeats. “Eh? Is that all you’re giving me? Woman, this is the juiciest thing that has happened in this school since Mr. Dander and Coach got into a yelling match over whose turn it was to get the profits from the concession stand.”

“That was fun,” I recall. “Wonder if we can rile those two up again…”

“Focus, woman. Besides, you can top it if you and Finlay ramp things up,” Ava says, leaning in and whispering. “Hold hands…maybe kiss?”

I raise an eyebrow at her. “School just got started. Are you that bored already?”

She lifts a shoulder. “Eh.”

I swat at her. “I see how you are, mocking me. You’re the worst.”

The warning bell rings and she starts to retreat, her smile wide and deep red lipstick fresh. “You know I’m right.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m going to do it,” I shoot back.

“Riggs and Mags…sitting in a tree…” she singsongs.

I jerk my hand along my throat and hiss, “Stop it! I don’t need the drama and the students don’t need the distraction.”

She cackles as she leaves the doorway.

Shaking my head, I turn my attention to the tenth graders filing in for homeroom and get myself ready for the day. Happily, I’ve figured a way to keep my emotions in check while I teach, and mainly that’s simply a matter of refusing to think about the sex god that is Riggs Finlay.

Well, that and a safety pin that I keep in my skirt pocket. Turns out the tiny prick of pain it delivers is just enough to keep me from wandering off-track. And we’re not going to talk about how many pin pricks I have in my fingers. What’s important is that I no longer have a bunch of horny teenagers in my midst.

Well, no hornier than usual.

A mere tenpin pricks and eight grueling hours later, Riggs and I are on the way to karaoke. Or at least, we would be if he would hand over the keys he somehow swiped from my tote when I wasn’t looking. “Riggs. Give them to me.”

He holds them up in the air, well aware that my short self has no hope of getting them. “I can drive, Magnolia. I’m begging you to let me. For one thing, I’m tired of riding shotgun, and for another, I might honestly lose my shit if I have to go under the speed limit anymore. Just because you have silver in your hair doesn’t mean you need to drive like a granny.”

I gasp. “You did not just call me a granny, old man.”

He chuckles. “Then quit driving like one. Now come on.” He opens the passenger door and gestures for me to get in. “Let me drive. We’ve wasted enough time, and I know you want to change.”

With a huff, I climb in. “I’m not happy about this, you know.”

He winks and leans down to place a kiss on my cheek. “I know. But you love me.”

I roll my eyes. “Not really sure about that right now.”

As he starts the engine and begins the hour-long drive to Al’s, I breathe. Because breathing is all I can do. Despite joking around with him, I’m terrified something will happen: a distracted driver, a blown tire that causes us to lose control, an eighteen-wheeler loaded with logs that all come loose and fly toward our car…these are the things that go through my head.

Breathe.

After a tense scrying session with Mom and Willow last night, in which we tried and utterly failed to see what Kera has been up to—which I’m positive was my fault since I’ve never been able to scry—Mom grabbed my hands in both of hers. When I finally met her gaze, she said, “You can’t control everything, Magnolia. We’re witches. Our control only extends so far. What you can do is control your reactions.”

I’d rolled my eyes, because it was a trite metaphorical pat on the head and she knew it. Then she’d jerked my hands toward her, and I swear I felt her palms heat up. It got my attention.

“It was a mistake to let you wander this long,” she said, “focused only on the life directly in your face and ignoring the Universe, but what’s done is done. You need to learn to control your reactions to things, Magnolia. Your emotional reaction. Your cognitive reaction. Your physical reaction. Your spiritual reaction. They all work together. Master your reactions, and your magic will intensify.”

I mulled her words over on the walk to Riggs’s house afterward, and they came back to me now. What she spoke of, the mastery of my reactions, isn’t something I can simply decide on and it will happen. I need to be thoughtful about it. Methodical. But I only have a week before the Gathering, and the more we all work toward figuring out how to lift the curse, the more I understand just how powerful it is, and the amount of energy that it will take to break it.

And in the meantime, I have this beautiful, wonderful man beside me. A man who loves me. Me, the woman who still won’t sing for her family. The woman who still can’t bring herself to change the way she dresses for school even though the clothes are beginning to feel like a skin that needs to be shed. The woman who still goes by Seven at Al’s.

I’m so tired of being scared. And I’m so pissed at Kera for her stupid jealousy. I want to bring the world down on her, to cause her decades of pain and fear the way she did to me. Because what was the point of it all? I can’t believe that she wielded such a strong curse simply out of jealousy. There had to be another reason. Was our family a threat? Was it just me? Fucking Kera. And her mother, Ginger. Because how could Ginger have allowed something like this to happen, let alone continue? She had to know. Kera could not have done something that powerful so young.

“Mags?”

I look over at Riggs. “Hmm?”

He quirks a smile at me. “You’re doing it again.”

Only then do I realize that the entire car is vibrating, and not simply because Riggs is driving too fast. “Oh.” I shake the emotion off, and immediately the vibrations cease.

“What’s going on in that beautiful head of yours?” He sends a pointed glance to where my hand clenches the center console.

I force myself to relax, easing my fingers off the hard plastic and leather one at a time. I guess I need to work on my unconscious reactions, as well.

He reaches over and lays his palm, heavy and grounding, on my thigh. I lace my fingers through his and inhale. Hold. Exhale. Close my eyes and do it again. Inhale. Hold. Exhale.

“Magnolia?” he prompts.

I reach for my makeup bag and grab a navy pencil to line my eyes. I pull the visor down, studying myself in the rectangle of light. Who are you?

You know who you are, the voice says.

I’m not so sure.

Yes, you are.

Well, maybe I am, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less terrifying. Trying to reconcile Seven with chemistry and Magnolia with karaoke, for one thing. And then there’s the witch part. It grows with every passing day, where I wake up and find some new, previously unrealized power is within me. How am I supposed to make sense of all of this and break a curse in a week?

Finally, I answer. And since he asked a direct question, the answer is one hundred percent truthful. “I don’t know if I’m prepared to be who I am, Riggs.”

He squeezes my leg, and after a moment, he says, “I do.”

I choke out a noise that’s half-sob and half-laugh, then look over at him. “Yeah? Wish you’d let me in on the secret.”

Outside, the sun sets to our left, bathing his profile in a golden haze. I will myself to remember this exact moment: the confident set of his jaw, the outline of his muscular arms in the maroon Henley he’s wearing, his full, kissable lips. He glances at me, his gaze lingering a little longer than I’d prefer given that he’s driving, then turns into the parking lot. Once he parks, he kills the ignition and angles his body to me. He holds his hands out for mine, and when I clasp them, the comforting rush of power moves between us.

The sun’s rays are still behind him, like his own solar-made aura, as he looks at me. “You are so strong, Magnolia. And brave, facing this curse head-on the way you are.”

I want to wave him off, but he tightens his grip. Beaten, I mumble, “I don’t really have a choice but to face it.”

His voice is gruff when he speaks. “Yes, you do. You’re making choices every day, whether you see them or not. You’re Magnolia Rowan and you’re Seven. You’re fiercely protective of your family, and you’re a champion for your students. You’re incredibly sexy. You have a voice fit for the angels and devils, and you’re ridiculously smart. But it’s your heart that I know best.”

I swallow, barely able to take a breath.

Riggs simply smiles. “Your pure, effortlessly beautiful heart. I’ve already felt the way you’ve changed me, Magnolia, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt. So yeah, I think you are absolutely capable of becoming who you’re meant to be. Because you’re already her. You are a treasure. A wonder. An absolute force of a woman. And it is my undying honor to be yours.”

I can’t speak as he raises my hands to his mouth and kisses my knuckles. His gaze travels over my face, and lingers on my lips before finally settling on my eyes. With a gentle smile, he lets go of a hand to push my hair behind my ear, sending a knot of emotion into my throat.

I blink quickly to keep the tears at bay. “You really think that?” I manage in a hoarse whisper.

He nods. “With all my heart. Magnolia, Seven, witch, chemistry teacher, sister, bed hog. I love every part of you.”

I choke out a laugh. “I do not hog the bed.”

He shakes his head sadly, placing a hand over his heart. “Oh, my love, you most definitely do. I have the bruises to prove it.”

“Whatever,” I mutter, but I do it with a smile.

He laughs, then tips my chin up with his fingers. “You ready to sing, Seven?”

“Yeah,” I rasp. I clear my throat and speak clearly. “Yes. Let’s do it.”

We make our way a little slower than usual to the door, thanks to his crutches and the gravel of the parking lot. I wave to Carol once we’re inside, then take care of putting our names on the list while Riggs gets us drinks.

“How many songs you two singing tonight?” Carol asks, holding an unlit cigarette in her hand.

“Bad day?” I nod at the cigarette.

“Bad week,” she answers, then forces a smile. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

The words sting, and I know it’s because we’ve never shared anything personal. I look at her, really look, and she looks much more frail than normal. And I can’t take it. I can’t take being scared and worried and never letting people know the real me. All of me. So after I write our songs down and toss a couple of twenties in the jar, I hold my hands out.

“Can I help?”

She looks at my palms like I have snakes in them, then flicks her gaze up to me, suspicious. “What are you doing?”

I shrug. “Something I should have done years ago. I’ll start with this: my name isn’t really Seven. It’s Magnolia. Magnolia Rowan. I live in Sacred River, and I’m a chemistry teacher at the high school there.”

Carol blinks twice. “Okay,” her voice raspy as always. “You a serial killer?”

“Um, no?”

“Plan on confessing any sins?” she continues.

One side of my mouth hitches up. “Definitely not.”

“Then seriously, Seven, what are you doing?” Her aura is dim and is the palest I’ve ever seen it. Normally a bright yellow, this evening it’s a soft white, as though the yellow is too tired to appear.

“Helping you,” I reply. “If you’ll let me.” Even though I’m pretty sure I could have made her feel better already, I don’t want to do anything without her permission. It feels wrong otherwise.

She rolls her eyes, clearly over me and this conversation. “Sure, whatever your name is. Tree?”

I laugh. “Magnolia.”

She puts her hands in mine. “Well, let’s get this moving, Magnolia. Two minutes and it’s karaoke time—and you know we start right on the dot.”

So I try. I close my eyes and pull the Universe’s attention to me, and ask it to bring its healing powers to Carol. To make her feel better and to help those around her as well. To give her a sense of well-being, and contentment, and to smooth out any complications in her life. If she has family, I want them to be close and happy, to connect and remember how much they love each other. And above all, I want Carol to find peace and happiness and love for herself, no matter what that looks like.

Squeezing her hands one last time, I open my eyes and peer at her. “You feel any better?”

She frees herself from my grip and gives me another once-over. “No, but honey? It’s awfully nice of you to try.”

I study her, attempting to catalog whether she looks any different than before, but there’s nothing. Her aura remains unchanged. Everything about her remains the same.

Maybe I did it wrong. Or maybe I’m not as powerful as I think I am.

“Pretty sure Riggs is waiting on you.” She gestures to where he sits. “Y’all want to go first tonight?”

I shake my head. “Somewhere near the beginning is fine.” I turn away, then swing back when Carol calls my name.

She grins ruefully. “Seriously. Thank you. I don’t think it worked, but whatever you did, I appreciate it.”

When I join Riggs at the bar, he pulls me to him in a tight hug, and I turn so that I’m tucked between his legs as he sits on the stool.

“Everything okay?” he murmurs in my ear.

I shrug. “Yeah. I think I was being silly.” It’s hard to shake the disappointed failure, and it’s far too similar to the way I felt growing up for comfort.

Carol kicks the evening off with a soaring rendition of Adele’s “Rolling In the Deep” before calling the first person up. I lose myself in the songs and the feel of Riggs’s comforting arms, and after half an hour, Riggs goes up.

“This one’s for Seven.” Riggs gives me a salacious wink as something starts up that I don’t quite recognize. It’s a laid-back, groovy track, and I finally realize what it is when he starts singing. It’s Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” and my stupid heart swells as he sings.

Riggs pulls off some serious moves up there, sliding across the stage despite his cast, like he might have practiced in his room a lot more as a kid than he’d be willing to admit, and straight-up croons to me, singing how he knows exactly who I could be. The lyrics are deceptively simple, but they’re powerful, and perfect for this exact moment. He pulls the crowd in to help him on the chorus and gestures for me to join him on stage.

Obviously, I get up there, smiling and laughing as he turns to me and gives me everything he’s got, hamming it up for me and the crowd. They love it, and so do I. And when the song is done and he hobbles off the riser, suddenly half-lame again like he didn’t just Smooth Criminal all over the damn place, it’s my turn.

“This one’s a little on the nose,” I admit to the crowd. “Sing with me anyway.”

Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” begins to play, and the whole place sings the la-la-la part with me as I shed everything out of me except the song. No worries about the curse, no sadness about not being able to help Carol, no terror about Riggs or anyone in my family getting hurt. Just me, my voice, and the music. The relief is palpable and cool as the bass thumps in my chest and I sway my hips back and forth, channeling Kylie and singing about being unable to get a certain boy out of my head. My eyes are closed for the first verse, and as we all launch into the chorus, I open my eyes.

It’s stunning.

The entire place is lit up with happy auras. Pinks and purples and oranges and yellows, sparks of glitter shooting into the air with giggles and bad falsettos as we sing the song, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world. To know that I’m the one doing it, pushing my delight into everyone, and getting it right back…it’s amazing. I could do this forever.

Which is why it’s a real drag when I black out.