Love Potion #2. Margot Early

beg to differ. I believe commitment is a beautiful thing, and I said that. And you almost blew our cover flirting with your old flame.”

      “He was never a flame. We were first and foremost friends—not unlike you and I.” And she’d made love with each of them once. But there was a certain spice and bittersweet pain to the memory of the long-ago Halloween night she’d spent with Paul. With Sean—nothing, really, though he had been her first. “Anyway,” she told Paul, “you believe commitment is a beautiful thing for everyone else.”

      “May I beg to point out that I do have commitment in my life? I’m committed to my job and to my music. I’m just not committed to a house on Stratton Street, a wife and three kids and a golden retriever.”

      He pulled up outside the cabin where she lived. Two dogs got up from the porch. Wolfie was feral and didn’t let anyone, even Cameron, touch him, but he sometimes walked in and out of her house and had been known to steal her stuffed animals and bury them in the yard. Mariah was Wolfie’s daughter and was as well-trained as was possible under the corrupting influence of her father, who really did look like a wolf, a black wolf with gray under his muzzle. An old guy who, after being attacked by coyotes, had been darted, castrated and stitched up by the zoo veterinarian, then released to Cameron’s backyard. After that, Wolfie had decided he sort of trusted Cameron.

      “Whatever,” Cameron muttered, pushing open the passenger door of Paul’s pickup truck, an old Toyota 4Runner with camper shell. “Thanks for the ride.” She slammed the door and trod up her flagstone path, a rustic path interspersed with dirt and growing things, wilted away this time of year.

      A moment later, another door slammed. Cameron glanced back. She was greeting Mariah, petting her affectionate dog, while Wolfie kept his distance, still managing to look envious, yearning yet unwilling to be touched. She said, “Hi, Wolfie,” then noticed Paul coming toward her in the moonlight.

      Oh.

      He was coming in.

      She moved toward the door. “Want some tea?”

      “No grass clippings.”

      “I can’t believe your own mother is an herbalist and you talk about nettles that way.”

      “It’s because she’s an herbalist. As a child, I decided that in my adult life I’d never drink anything that tasted like lawn shavings.”

      “You have no adult life.”

      He ignored the jibe. They were walking through the dark hallway and had almost reached the kitchen when he said, “You look like you’ve lost your best friend, and there’s definitely no need. Sean Devlin has arrived, looking romantic, to sweep you off your feet. I remember him as one of the sharper crayons in the box, so your children won’t be cretins.”

      “I will never have children,” Cameron told him sharply, “unless I adopt.”

      “Ah, yes. I’d forgotten your morbid fear of pregnancy and birth.” Cameron had witnessed her older sister, Beatrice, in what she described as “extreme suffering, life-threatening suffering, the screaming-for-hours kind of suffering.” Cameron was convinced that no child could pass through her small hips. Paul kept to the original subject. “What’s making you so miserable tonight?”

      “Never mind. Don’t trouble yourself about it.”

      “Let me guess—you have lost your best friend. You’ve lost Mary Anne to Graham Corbett.”

      “Very funny.” She took two mugs out of the cabinet, checked that there was water in the kettle and switched on the burner.

      “It’s inevitable that your cousin will marry someone.”

      Cameron’s throat knotted. Her eyes felt hot. She wasn’t upset because everything was going to change with Mary Anne, that her being married would change everything. That wasn’t it at all. Anyhow, Mary Anne and Graham weren’t actually engaged.

      Not yet.

      “You okay?”

      The question was far from Paul’s usual joking tone.

      It increased the swelling in her throat. She nodded, jaw taut.

      From her Salvation Army kitchen table, where he’d pulled out a chair, Paul watched her back. His tomboy friend with her two long golden-brown braids was dressed up, for her, wearing high clogs and some kind of longish, lacy tunic-top over her jeans. She’d been at a family dinner when he’d called her and begged her to come to The Last Resort.

      He’d used the groupie as an excuse, but that wasn’t it. He’d known something was up with Cameron, something that had to do with Mary Anne. He also knew that Cameron, for reasons that made no sense to him, was ever so slightly envious of her cousin. She’s got cheekbones! She’s tall! Things like that. He saw no reason Cameron should envy anyone. She was the best-looking and most enjoyable woman he knew, that was certain. If there had been a Best Body category in their high school yearbook, she’d have won, hands down. All his classmates had carried fantasies about her.

      Now, she sounded as if she were about to cry.

      She spun away from the stove and said, “If you tell anyone what I’m going to tell you, I will never speak to you again and I’ll tell that groupie that you want to marry her so she can have your babies.”

      Some small voice in the back of Cameron’s head whispered, Reckless…reckless…don’t do it.

      She ignored the voice. She couldn’t stop, now that she’d started. “I just don’t see why I can’t have a normal relationship with a nice man who is actually an adult—someone who knows his own psyche and doesn’t project his demons onto me.”

      Paul squinted. “Didn’t Sean Devlin beg your phone number tonight, or am I imagining that? Is this going to be another salvo in the Great Crusade for All Men to Have Therapy?”

      “Forget it!” She spun away again.

      Cameron, he knew, didn’t actually believe all men should have therapy. But she seemed to want some kind of fantasy relationship where she and the man in her life talked about everything, had no secrets from each other, constantly shared every emotion. Sometimes he wanted to point out to her that, in a strictly intellectual sense, she didn’t want a boyfriend, she wanted a girlfriend.

      But now Paul suddenly saw, suddenly understood. She wasn’t crying about her friendship with Mary Anne, and she wasn’t crying about the general lack of the uninteresting kind of love relationship she thought she wanted; she was crying because she wanted Graham Corbett. The radio guy who looked like an extra on Sex and the City. Talk about someone totally wrong for tomboy Cameron. And Cameron could have virtually any guy she wanted.

      Paul knew it would be a mistake to say anything. Especially anything on the subject. But he had to try. “Graham Corbett’s just not…” he said inarticulately, unable to say exactly what Corbett wasn’t.

      He thought Cameron might turn around and shout at him.

      Instead, she turned to face him again, dragging her sleeve across her eyes. She said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m getting over him. Bridget gave me something so I wouldn’t like him.”

      All the hair on Paul’s body stood up. Bridget, his sister, was not someone you should accept funny drinks from. She and his mother had uncanny powers which Paul, who had grown up with these females, could not pretend away. He had seen too much to be complacent on the subject. “You drank something Bridget gave you?”

      “A s-s-specific—” Cameron sniffed. “For emotional healing.”

      Paul supposed it could be true. But he also knew that his sister was mad at him. She hadn’t been watching her son beside the duck pond at the zoo. It was dangerous, and he’d told her so. Not tactfully, maybe, but come on! Nick could have fallen in and drowned while Bridget was talking meditation techniques with another mom.

      Cameron moved away from the counter and picked