Page 20 of Jinxes and Drumsticks

A little chill rolls through me, and I can feel how red my face is as I meet his gold-green gaze. He still looks so self-satisfied. It makes me want to throw one of the books he just bought me right at his head.

“I-is that a problem?” I stammer out with all of the false bravado I can muster.

“Only if it’s a problem that I’m already just as obsessed with you as you seem to be with me,” he says, brushing some of my hair behind my ear. “Is that fine by you?”

All of my fight drains out of my body. “If you keep saying stuff like that, I’m going to think you mean it,” I whisper.

“Do you think I’d be sitting with you at one in the morning in a bookshop, perfectly content to watch you read those door stoppers while I massage your feet if I wasn’t head-over-heels in like with you?” he asks.

“You don’t have to massage my feet.”

“Are you yucking my yum, Lillith?” he asks. “Shying away from my foot fetish when I didn’t even bat an eye at your blood kink? That’s rude.”

“Oh my god. I don’t. Have. A blood kink.”

He manhandles me a bit until my legs are draped over his lap. He starts untying my knee-high boots. “Stop changing the subject, beautiful,” he says. “Those books aren’t going to read themselves.”

I balk at him. “Damien—you don’t have to—”

“If you finish that sentence, I’m going to massage your back, too,” he says, quite literally threatening me with a good time.

Naomi returns with Damien’s card, which he pauses his unlacing to accept. “Thanks,” he says as he slips it back into his wallet and continues his work of freeing my feet from the boots.

My feet... are a little sore, I guess. And if he really does have a foot kink, I guess it’s only fair that I let him indulge in it after lusting over his perfect hands for so long. I nibble on the inside of my lower lip for a moment or two, but finally give in. Settling back onto a pile of cushions against the armrest picking up one of the books Naomi set aside for me.

It’s an analysis of the Corpus Hermeticum by a celebrated scholar of the occult. I’ve been really into reading about the Hermeticists lately. They get a lot of magic stuff wrong, but they have some really interesting approaches to ceremonial magic that I think I can make good use of if I tweak a few things here and there. “Should I read it out loud?” I ask him.

“Nah,” he says. “I probably won’t understand a text that dense, anyway. Just keep me in the loop for the interesting stuff, yeah?”

I smile at him as he pulls out my left foot. I forgot I was wearing my neon pink Kuromi socks, but he looks absolutely charmed by them as he digs his capable hands into the tender arch of my foot.

“Kuromi is the baddest bitch of all, you know?” he says, totally disarming my self-loathing before it can start.

It’s just what I need to settle into the comfort he’s offering me. I open the book and start reading.

ㅤ

“Okay, so, Oren was reading this book called the Kyballion,” Damien says as he idly presses his thumb into the arch of my left foot two hours later. “It says a lot of the same stuff you’re talking about.”

He transitioned a while ago from focusedly massaging my feet to using my legs as a way to keep physical contact going between us.

“Yeah, The Kyballion is basically a super watered-down version of the Corpus Hermeticum. Like, Corpus Hermeticum for Dummies, basically. In the early 1900’s, rich dudes got super bored, so they started forming all of these secret, occult societies that took a whole bunch of philosophical and religious texts and concepts and appropriated them for their own secret clubs. This is like The Freemasons, The Rosicrucians, Thelema, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.”

“Wait, no shit? Oren’s dad is a Freemason,” Damien says.

“No shit,” I say. “That’s one of the most active ones today. A lot of the others have disbanded.”

“So, what’s the main difference between the Kybalion and the uh—”

“Corpus Hermeticum,” I supply. “The Kybalion is a modern—or modern-ish—interpretation of the Corpus Hermeticum. Basically, reading the Corpus Hermeticum is like reading Shakespeare’s original text, and The Kybalion is like reading ‘No Fear Shakespeare’, if that makes sense.”

“It does, surprisingly. You’re way better at explaining this shit than Oren and his dad are. They always go right over my head.”

I smile, feeling a swell of pride in my chest when he says that. “Thanks,” I say.

Damien nods through a yawn. “I’m going to go get some coffee, I think. You want some? This couch is fucking dangerous.”

“Sure,” I say. “Can you get me a Turkish coffee?”