Her Decision

“Kallum. I’m not going to the hospital,” Emi insisted, pressing a towel-wrapped ice pack on her bruised temple. Sitting hunched over on the guest bed, Emi focused on her swaying white strands of hair, trying her best not to puke while the room spun.

The sound of hinges and a click was followed by a silence. Then a thump. Emi felt the bed sag slightly.

“I’m just worried,” Kallum said, moving his hand to caress Emi’s shoulder affectionately.

“Please don’t touch me.”

Kallum instantly retracted his hand.

“I'm fine.”

Physically, at least. Emi suffered a small bruise from hitting the floor, but the oncoming hangover was more pressing to her than the ‘seizure’ Kallum described. In actuality, the seizing was the result of information about a quest for New Magic getting uploaded to her brain in milliseconds; a broadcast signed by Talitia—a name she knew nothing about. However, emotionally, Emi was a mess.

Shortly after regaining control of her body, it was hijacked by a crippling panic. A panic that Emi hadn’t experienced since she first started dating Kallum years ago. And Kallum, bless his heart, was never good at handling those. Surprisingly, the cops that arrived were actually useful and had some moderate training in alleviating panic attacks. After a quick and dry interrogation, Emi retreated to the solitary guest room while Kallum and Quinn helped extract an unconscious Maddie.

“Can we talk?” Kallum asked.

Emi silently continued to focus on the contrasting black and white strands of hair swaying with the room.

“Like, about the mage stuff,” Kallum continued.

Emi flinched. It was the last thing she wanted to talk about. She’d so desperately tried to forget. Meeting Kallum let her do that. He made her feel normal. That she was capable of love and deserving of living a normal life. More than that, Emi—the once hollow carapace—blossomed into someone new.

“I never told you either, Emi.”

It’s not even close to comparable. Frankly, Emi didn’t even care if Kallum was a mage, or if he hid it; he wasn’t really a mage. Magic was an inconsequential part of his life. Emi knew this with absolute certainty. Kallum would occasionally have a bounce in his step, get depressed on bad days, but most importantly, he always empathetically cared for those around him; even strangers. Kallum cared about people.

“Can… Can I show you?” he asked.

A vicious question. She wanted nothing more than to dissociate and sleep, pretending the last hour was simply a nightmare left to fade in the morning. But ‘no’ died on her lips and she nodded instead. There was a sensitive vulnerability in his voice that spoke louder than his words. This was important to Kallum, and Emi would not deny him that.

The bed pushed upward, now free of Kallum’s weight, but she kept her sight trained downward, now counting the stray fuzzballs in the carpet. Emi heard the door squeak open and reflexively played with the Guide Stone in her pocket, dispensing her anxiety through fidgeting. As far as stress-relievers go, the object was stunning: a forest green outer shell with a light-gray mist uniformly swirling within. Only, for Emi, the sight would just send her over the edge; so in the pocket it remains.

Kallum returned, evident from the click of the door, and kneeled before Emi. He was holding a large, half-melted, red candle wrapped in silver ornamental wiring. Instantly, a gentle flame appeared, and at last, Emi shifted her gaze upward.

The flickering, warm hue danced across Kallum’s face while he kept his emerald eyes trained on the flame. A compassionate, yet wistful, smile, born from deep within his heart, stared back at Emi. Kallum was smiling.

As quickly as it appeared, it was gone. The flame extinguished into a pitiful smoke trail and Kallum walked across the room to set down the candle on a stock IKEA dresser. Emi’s eyes tracking him all the while.

Kallum returned to sit with Emi and gave the candle a sentimental look.

“That’s all I can really do,” he said mournfully. “You don’t have to… ya know. Just when you feel ready.” And then he turned to look at her.

Kallum was smiling.

In a surge of anger, Emi flung herself on him and pressed his shoulders down to make him submit. Collapsing onto the bed, the target of her affection let out a small yelp. She coiled her arms around him and pulled up towards the tendon between neck and shoulder, dragging her pelvis across his hips. Full of rage, she sunk her claws deeper into his back, desperately trying to make contact with the skin protected by thin fabric.

“Woah—Emi. You okay?” he asked, hesitantly reciprocating with hands gently resting on her lower back.

Neck craned towards his ear, she let go a feverish breath, laced with alcohol.

“I’ll show you what I can do,” she whispered and—not so playfully—bit down on his neck. He made a small yelp.

She wanted to hurt him. She wanted him to feel a fraction of the pain she felt. Vitriolic fury ascended to sadistic ecstasy. She wanted to make him bleed. So that’s exactly what happened as her teeth pierced the fragile layer of skin.

“Ow! FUCK!” He yelped and threw her off.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Kallum screamed. “Are you like a vampire? Am I a vampire now?” A vibration of terror made his voice shake.

“No,” Emi said, regaining her sense of self.

Avoiding eye contact, Emi placed her hand atop the jagged wound on Kallum’s neck. Thick liquid pooled to the surface and clung to the palm. A tingling sensation in Emi’s head made her stomach feel uneasy, but as she pulled away, all that remained was the wet blood on her hand.

“Woah…”

Kallum traced his finger along the non-existent wound inflicted moments ago, fliching slightly with pain as he did so; imperfect once again. Emi felt his gaze on her, but she refused to meet it. His voice was filled with wonder, and she felt absolutely disgusting.

Emi balled the sheets in her fist and vainly tried to shove the bed away, Kallum along with it, only to find her back now against the mahogany headboard. She softened her grab and clung to her knees instead, keeping her eye level low but trained on Kallum’s torso.

“Traditional Restoration Magic,” Emi muttered.

“Can you teach me?” Kallum asked softly.

Emi let out a dry wheeze. If he had a child-like ignorance before, it had been downgraded to infantile. The two lovers were at opposite ends of the queen-sized bed, but the distance felt like the Atlantic Ocean. Two continents that were cleaved and ripped away from each other, leaving a volcanic scar.

“I can’t,” Emi replied. “Magic is hereditary. You can’t teach it,” she explained, feeling that she owed him at least that much. A reality check to snuff out the dangerous optimism budding within Kallum.

“Is it?” Kallum asked, desperately trying to protect the sapling that Emi threatened to crush. He repositioned himself sitting criss-cross on the bed, body fully facing Emi head-on. She kept her eyes trained on his chest.

“My dad only ever taught me how to light a candle,” he continued. “I taught myself how to put it out.”

A painful silence followed.

It must have been a minute. The time that the two sat motionless—completely enveloped in their separate realities—before Kallum pushed through the barrier, crawling to Emi’s side of the mattress, threatening to invade her world. But he didn’t.

“I can tell this is hard for you, Emi,” Kallum said, pulling past her field of view. Emi felt the headboard give slightly as Kallum leaned against it, sitting an arm’s distance away. Close, but not too close.

“We can take it as slow as you want, but I want to do this together,” Kallum said.

Emi laughed, “You can not be serious.”

The infantile candle boy aspiring to fight for the New Magic stirred a sadistic amusement inside her; like watching a spider pointlessly scurry for survival when the only outcome is beneath a shoe. But then, Emi remembered she loved that stupid, helpless spider. The hostile smirk faded and coldness set in. She pulled her knees tight and buried her face.

“Do you remember,” Kallum began, “when I geeked out during welcome week over the choreo stuff?” His voice was soft and sentimental.

Emi nodded, face glued to the fabric of her pants.

Time slipped for a second and Emi stumbled into a simple memory. A destitute white room in the student union, co-opted by the freestyle club, filled with more shouting voices than pieces of furniture. Kallum’s loose clothes and formerly brown hair swayed with each expressively infuriated gesture. The club president had just denied Kallum’s request for a show battle and he would be doing a choreographed piece with Emi instead. The deadline was less than a week away.

“I caved 'cause you were chillin’ the whole time,” Kallum said, bringing Emi to the present. “So, I thought you knew a thing or two about choreographing.”

Kallum let out a sincere chuckle, so full of life it made Emi’s heart twitch.

“We fucking bombed that performance so hard.”

“Your fault.”

“Okay, yeah I crashed hard, but that’s cause you forgot your cue.” Kallum playfully jabbed back.

Emi peeled her face from her legs with the most minuscule slant in the corner of her mouth. She rested her chin on her legs as Kallum, bless his heart, continued trying to pull their worlds back together.

“But, I think… Well, I didn’t really care,” Kallum said. “And I don’t think you cared either.”

The fond memory of the two of them—just the two of them—laughing together on the campus lawn minutes after sprung to the surface of Emi’s consciousness. It was just before they started dating. She remembered every detail of that moment.

How Kallum shyly adjusted his breaking cap when she mentioned how the audience got a good look at his ass. A burning redness in her face when Kallum pointed out all the guys staring at her bouncing chest while popping. Distractingly powerful wafts of cheap pepperoni pizza from the overhyped place in the union that every freshman lives off. The insanely random realization that the top of Kallum’s head perfectly aligned with the last row of bushes along the lawn, accidentally making eye contact with a passing student. How insufferable the itchy grass was, which Emi endured to share just one more joke between the two of them.

“That was definitely one of the best weeks of my life,” Kallum muttered lightly, as if to himself.

At long last, Emi turned her head.

Kallum was sitting, much like she was, arms crossed over his knees and chin resting on his forearms, gazing forward into the past. His shaggy white hair lightly covered his wet, green eyes.

“We had no God damn clue what we were doing, but we just went for it. No school, no classes, just that tiny black room with shitty ventilation for hours on end.”

Emi intently watched the twists and turns of Kallum’s lips as he spoke, before returning to her own post of vigilantly watching the end of this queen bed the two shared.

“With that weird stain in the corner and the ants,” Emi said. “How could I forget? You made it smell so bad in there.”

“And you actually brought a desk in to research choreo on your laptop. I couldn’t stop laughing.”

“You laugh but it worked, dummy. We started making progress after that.”

“Okay, but that fact you needed a desk for that cracks me up.”

A blanket of silence settled on the couple. This one was welcome. A soft heat spread through Emi’s chest.

“I fell in love in that room you know,” Kallum said.

Unquantifiable emotions bubbled within Emi and leaked into reality through her eyes. How badly she needed to hear those words right now.

“We blindly lept into darkness,” He said. “Together. Without reason. I did breaking and you did hip-hop. There weren’t any guides to follow or routines to copy.”

Kallum paused and his voice was shaky. The emotional rumbling within Emi was likely stirring inside him as well. He took a deep breath and composed himself before continuing.

“It’s so cheesy, but we braved that stupid frontier together and argued so much over things we had no idea about, trying to make the best of what we already knew. We pushed each other so deep into this unfamiliar territory and blindly relied on each other’s suggestions that had no basis. Even though we botched that performance we came up with such a beautiful routine. That—that experience is what made me fall in love with you Emi.”

Emi lost control of her body. In an instant, her lips connected with Kallum and pressed her face so deeply into his that it captured just a fraction of the love she felt for this man who had ripped her away from the hellish life of magic she once lived. The moment she pulled away, Kallum’s soft, wet eyes gazed up at her as she straddled her hips atop his.

Emi watched Kallum’s lips move, “I think this… I think what happened, magic, Is another frontier for us to explore. Together.”

“I want to figure it out with the girl I love,” Kallum said.

A vile curiosity, desperate to crush Emi, caused her mouth to move on its own, “Talitia,”—whoever that was—“told us everything though. What are we figuring out?”

“Huh?”

The magical moment cut to reality.

“What?”

Kallum, the comfortable bed, and his firm lower abs pulled away from beneath her pelvis. The ‘this’ he wanted to do together was so drastically different from the ‘this’ that Emi had in her mind. Of course it was. Kallum never received the mental broadcast that she had. That’s why he was by her side the moment she began to seize. The distance between them was greater than the few meters between Emi standing tall atop the bed and the child lying beneath.

“I’m gonna take off my makeup and shower now,” she said. “It might take a while.”

“Okay,” Kallum said as Emi stepped off the bed, leaving him lying alone.

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” Emi replied, twisting the handle of the matching mahogany door and stepping out of the room and back into her own, grimy world.

She might have slammed the door a bit too aggressively, but she wouldn’t ever know because the next thing Emi remembered was painfully scraping her face with wipes in a vain attempt to cleanse the emotional dirt tainting her soul. It was asinine to believe that for a second they inhabited the same reality.

Devoid of the faint mask she wore on a daily basis, Emi looked into the mirror and the real her stared back. The mage sold into slavery. The mage who led her family into a brutal massacre in a fit of revenge. Once she felt enough contempt for the image in the mirror, she pulled away and turned on the shower, hoping to purge the filth inside.

Time became incoherent as Emi sat huddled under the beating water clutching her naked body. It dawned on her that the only reason the two had been picked for that welcome week performance was because Shailene was truant at that pivotal meeting. She was the better dancer after all. It was only because Quinn let it slip to the prez that she was interested in Kallum that they were paired. In another world, Shailene would be lying next to the love of her life, playfully drawing shapes on his rigid chest, naked in that guest bed.

“Whore,” Emi said blindly. Somehow her vicious thoughts leaked into words. The raining water pelted her exposed, huddled back.

Yet, Emi refused to let it break her. Two years ago—one year if she was being realistic—it would have crushed her. Emi was stronger now. With years of counseling, insufficient as it might be, Emi would not cave to the vile creations her mind brewed. Kallum loved her, not anyone else, and she would never let that go. Her new self was proof of that.

Emi stood and faced the shower head, letting the water rinse her defenseless face and run down her fragile skin. She’d been given an opportunity no one else could attempt. No matter how violently she scrubbed herself, the filth of her past would remain, but Emi had the chance to fertilize the ignorant budding optimism in Kallum.

Abruptly, Emi cut off the stream of water and stepped out with a new profound sense of purpose. No matter how corrupt or tainted her soul might be, she would lay her life down to support the loving man who gave her the chance to live.

-----

It had been a considerable amount of time, Emi realized, since she stepped into the shower because when she returned to the guest room, Kallum was fast asleep. The ceiling lights still harshly filled the room. Emi realized that he must have been waiting for her.

Kallum was awkwardly contorted on the side of the bed with his cracked iPhone resting a hair’s width away from his half-open palm. Emi delicately walked, heel-to-ball, over and draped the end blanket over his vulnerable body. Retracing her steps, she shut off the lights and entered the hallway, closing the door behind her.

Not so delicately pacing over to the master bedroom, Emi swung the door open. The spacious room was dimly lit by a single lamp on a modern-looking nightstand from Ikea. A cacophony of beer cans littered the surface, with one connected to an arm. The arm connected to a questionably lucid sleaze with half open eyes.

“We’re gonna do it.” Emi said, accidentally raising her voice a few octaves too loud.

Quinn raised his head with a tilt. Vacant brown eyes trained on Emi.

“You are?” he muttered, lost in an alcoholic daze. “What if it’s a hoax?”

“I don’t care.”

After a brief delay, Quinn slid out of the bed. Completely nude, he—and a grotesquely used sock—fell to the floor and pathetically crawled over to a disorganized pile of clothes. Emi kept her eyes trained on Quinn, completely unfazed. His naked, thin frame and abhorable, vile behavior was not novel to her.

“What are you doing?” Emi calmly asked.

Quinn fished through the pants he’d worn that evening and fished out his Guide Stone. A magically translucent gray outer shell with an inert pink mist filling two-thirds of the core. He held it out.

“Fine,” Quinn said. “Take it, no shot I’m falling for this.”

Bristling with anger, Emi took three powerful strides toward the pathetic excuse of a man and kicked his face into the pile of clothes.

Emi spat at Quinn, physically and verbally, “No. Fuck you. We is me and you.”

Quinn spun his head and gave Emi a malicious glare. He meekly pulled his naked body on all fours.

“I gave up on magic. I thought you did too,” Quinn shot back. His voice was full of vitriol and a twang of betrayal.

“I changed my mind. Kallum is actually pure. Like a child,” Emi said. “He might be the only mage in the world that deserves this New Magic”

“Ya, I know,” Quinn said, as he slowly started rummaging through the discarded pile of clothes. His wiry limbs digging through the heap conjured the image of a bug searching a pile of shit.

“How the fuck do you know that?” Emi said. Heart started bubbling with rage. “Did you know he was a mage?”

“Of course I did,” Quinn hissed, at last finding a pair of used boxers to don. “Why do you think my aunt adopted him?”

Emi froze with terror. Her heart was growing way too brittle from the rapid shifts in moods tonight. She slowly began to doubt herself. Had Kallum suffered at the hands of the Cullbrook family like her?

“No. Not like you,” Quinn said, reading Emi’s mind. “He was raised normally, away from the main family.”

Emi watched silently as Quinn pulled up the musty undergarments as he stood. His figure was mostly shrouded in darkness, with his toned shoulders catching the rim of the dim light. However, it was a brief moment. His unruly, blonde hair draped down and cut off the light like a curtain.

“They banned us from speaking to him about magic.” Quinn followed with an uncomfortably humorous tone, “The sole act of kindness within the Cullbrook lineage.”

Then, Emi felt Quinn adopt a refreshingly serious composure.

“I’m not doing it Emi,” Quinn said firmly. “It’s stupid. I can’t use magic, Kallum can’t use magic. We’ll just die. Kallum will die.”

“Quinn,” Emi said softly. “You’ve given me a life of freedom, an impossible dream for someone like me.” She gently rested her delicate hand atop Quinn’s shoulder. Emi gave a soft look into his murky brown eyes. She could tell he was tense from the slight twitch of the nose when she touched him.

“Because of you,” Emi began while dragging her fingers lightly across his neck and up to Quinn’s sharply defined chin, “I discovered what it means to live. The joy of laughter. The warmth of another.”

“I found love.” Emi said, tucking a few stray hairs behind Quinn’s ear, lovingly gazing into his hazel eyes. His face was tense, suddenly aware of the imminent threat.

Emi’s face scrunched inward, pulled by the gravity of rage. Her hand immediately followed. Palm on Quinn’s cheek, her thumb instantly found itself thrust deep inside his eye socket, leading to a satisfying squish.

“Fuck!” Quinn flopped to the ground in pain, clinging to his bleeding eye.

“You also made my life a living fucking hell,” Emi snarled, completely unrecognizable as the composed girl in the bar earlier. She bent down and stared into Quinn’s tearful good eye while writhing in pain. He wasn’t afraid of her. Emi knew that. He was only afraid of himself.

With a frigid expression and lips lined with poison, Emi whispered, “It took so long before I could be intimate with Kallum.”

A stake to the heart.

Emi watched Quinn’s body grow still and close his eyes. There was no fight left in him. Death seemed more preferable to him at this point. Emi knew she had driven the point home and would not grant Quinn the escape he so desperately craved. She brushed her fingers along his gouged eye and felt the irritating tingle in her head.

Emi stood.

She had made her point crystal clear. The despondent man below was on board with her mission. Eye perfectly healed, he remained silent as Emi turned to leave.

“What if Kallum dies?” he cried out, voice twisted by anxiety. But, it was honest.

Emi walked over and set her bloody hand on the doorknob before answering.

“You love him too, and you want to protect him. So why don’t you try using your magic and find out what happens.”

“I faced my shit. Now it’s your turn,” Emi said, twisting the doorknob and pulling. She looked back at Quinn, huddled next to a tiny pool of blood. He looked so incredibly pathetic.

“You’re not your father,” Emi said compassionately to the boy that raised her and stepped into the hallway, closing the door to leave Quinn alone with his thoughts.