Page 22 of Made to Be

Classy.

As we walked, I swore I felt the hand in my jacket stir. When it happened again only moments later, I knew I wasn’t imagining things. The fingertips grazed my collarbone and I shivered,

“Um, Cam?” I asked hesitantly. “Can you maybe keep your hand still? It’s kind of...” I paused toclear my throat as it gripped the collar of my sweater, “distracting.”

His voice was slightly rough as he apologized, but the hand in question didn’t still in the slightest. If anything, it grew even more restless, fingertips tracing lazy patterns over the skin just above the neckline of the fabric.

This cheeky devil, I thought, suddenly realizing that maybe Cam wasn’t so shy after all.

“The stitching must have come loose in ski ball,” he commented casually, tone so at odds with the way his hand was grazing me.

“Uh, yeah. Probably,” I said absentmindedly. I supposed that was the problem with using too much magic at once; the results were less than thorough.

When I caught sight of the red exit sign, I steered Cam toward it. With a quick, sneaky look over my shoulder, I pushed the door open and we slipped outside. The cold air nipped at my nose, and a gust of that chilly October wind whipped my hair into my face. I batted it out of my eyes and spotted a dumpster over to my left. We had popped out in the alley behind the theatre between it and some unknown brick building to its back. To the right I could just make out the edge of the parking lot and, besides the large green dumpster bin, a pile of cardboard boxes, and a few empty wooden crates, the alley was empty.

I gently guided Cam to sit on one of the upturned crates and pulled out his arm from my jacket.It seemed unwilling to part as it clung to my sweater. I gave it a few tugs and let out an awkward bark of laughter,

“Really... attached, aren’t you?” I said to the arm.

Cam let out a rumbling chuckle and reached over to pull the appendage free. His smile was a little guilty as he looked at it, then me with a one-shouldered shrug.

I gave it a stern look. “It’s not me you’re supposed to be attached to. Why aren’t you sticking to him?” I gestured to the arm's rightful owner whose smile had turned lopsided as he watched me scold his arm. My cheeks flushed, but I shoved my embarrassment aside.

Had the magic not set it properly? Maybe I’d messed up somehow. Or perhaps it needed more time. Either way, this was going to be a real problem.

“Will you take off your jacket for me?” I asked.

Cam dipped his chin with a slight, almost shy smirk, and I shook my head good-naturedly.

Once he had slipped it off and folded it neatly over his lap, he was left in his simple, black t-shirt. I knelt next to him and examined the stump of his arm just below the elbow and the poor quality of the thick black stitching that had, indeed, come loose. In several spots.

“I didn’t bring a needle and thread.” I gnawed on my lip. Then, noticing the way he was staring downat me, I teased, “So, looks like I’ve ‘gotta bring you home with me.”

My voice came out a little rougher than expected but before I could think to be self-conscious, the door beside us burst open. Where I expected to see a random theatre staff member stepping outside with a bag or trash or for a smoke, I saw a familiar face. An annoyingly bothersome familiar one.

It was jerk-face from the bathroom.

And his expression clearly showed that he absolutely had not been expecting to walk out into this alley – probably following me, I was a realist – and see me kneeling before a man holding a severed arm.

His eyes went comically wide, mouth opening and closing like a fish as he stopped in the doorway. The hand holding the doorknob fell and before he let it close, he fumbled to grab for the handle to run back into the building. Cam and I both jumped to our feet at the same time.

“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, grabbing a stone from the ground and throwing it at the door with a burst of magic. It tinged off the metal and slammed it shut, nearly taking the man’s fingers off.

He plastered his back to the door dramatically, eyes wide, and gave me a shocked look bordering on pants-shittingly terrified.

“The fuck?” he gasped. “The fuck is that?”

His eyes darted to the arm in Cam’s hands then back to me, as if afraid to look away from me for too long.

I glanced to Cam holding the arm before he rushed to hide it behind his back. As if the man hadn’t already seen it. In doing so, he dropped it once more and this time it managed to hit the wall. Slowly, so very slowly, I turned back to the stranger,

“It’s an arm,” I said carefully, fully intending to make him feel stupid. “No wonder you try to pick up guys in a theatre bathroom.”

“He what?” Cam asked, gaze whipping to me and forgetting about the arm he’d just tossed aside.

“Unimportant,” I smiled up at him and patted his shoulder. “Now...” I looked around and, finding what I was searching for, I strode over to the stack of boxes and pulled a loose wooden board free. Holding it like a baseball bat, I swung it forward to test its weight.

“Time to induce amnesia.”