Chapter 41
The Chaos Witch’s Natal Pluto Conjunct Jesse’s Natal Venus in Synastry
In the next flash of memory, the brunette walks into his reception area right before noon and begs to see him because she is in so much pain. Or so she says. It’s a Wednesday, in late January, a day Lauren doesn’t work in the clinic, because Bianca never comes to the clinic on days when Lauren is there, which isn’t often anymore but never on a Wednesday.
Petra rolls her eyes at the brunette and leaves her in an empty exam room.
He’s barely glanced at the folder in his hands when he breezes into the exam room. He doesn’t close the door all the way, but his patient does.
Bianca—Nancy, as he knows her at this time—takes his hand and places it on “where it hurts”—on her inner thigh.
He stumbles backwards and bumps into the door of the exam room, opening it without looking behind him and stepping into the corridor outside. He tells her to leave the premises, but that he’ll find her another doctor.
He turns to see Lauren walking in with pizzas in her arms. Relief! And terror.
The memories speed up like video on fast-forward and stop maybe a week after that.
He’s told Petra and the rest of his staff that they are not to make an appointment for Nancy Downs, ever, and to package up her records.
It’s Wednesday, a day when Lauren works from home to create the courses she sells online. He leaves and picks up fixings for dinner and a bottle of chianti and drops them off at the house before eating a sandwich as he heads back to work. He’s looking forward to Wednesday date night with Lauren.
Late in the day. Everyone else in the clinic has gone home, but it’s his one day of the week that he works late to make sure that all his patients’ files are up to date if he got behind during the first two days of the week. He’ll be done and home in time to cook ‘sketti with Lauren and watch the sun set over a nice, calming glass of wine.
Someone knocks on the back door at the clinic.
The clinic has a front door that serves as the primary entrance and exit, a side door that his staff use, and a door to his personal office that allows him to sneak out to have lunch with Lauren during the day without anyone knowing. He’d been signing off on the last patient record when he heard the knock.
Opening the door, in this flash of memory, I see through his eyes, his thoughts.
Lauren stands at the threshold, smiling demurely at him, wearing clothes that he’s never seen her in, and spike heels she never wears, given her old knee injury that still plagues her. Closing the door behind her, she pushes him against the wall and reaches for his belt buckle.
“That’s not… that’s not me!” I pull away from his reel of memories and the scene freezes in place with this doppelganger mounting him. “I never went there.”
“Shh, shh, now, Wifey.”
“But Jesse, it didn’t happen like that!”
“It did for me.”
The flurry of memories spins forward, and I relive them each in a flash.
He washes up in the small bathroom across the hall from his office and returns to find the brunette with her long red fingernails, smoothing the clothes Lauren had worn moments before, slowly sliding her fingers over the fabric against her skin.
I can’t look. It’s almost as if something in his mind breaks.
A glamour. She used a glamour on him.
“Oh, Jesse.”
He can’t comprehend what he’s done. His mouth works but no words escape. He falls to his knees. He begs her to go away, to stay silent, to not ruin his life.
The memories speed forward.
Full days at the clinic, then additional night shifts at the local ER or the one in the next town to the east. His schedule zaps all his energy. Up half the night on his free nights because he’s on call. And every penny extra he earns goes to Bianca—he knows her name now—to keep her quiet.
I try to pull away from him, from the memories he shows me. I never knew this side, only that Jesse shifted into a cycle of never resting, supposedly to pay off his loan for the clinic more quickly. When the bank first told me we were going to lose the healing center, I looked at the loan payments for the clinic, and not only had he never made a cent of additional payments but he’d missed several regular payments by then.
He’d been in full-blown meltdown mode by then and had distanced himself from me, and it had hurt like hell that he took that part of himself away from me. As a witch, I could tell that his energy had shifted away to keep me from seeing some part of his life. He’d practically ghosted me over a couple of weeks.
I couldn’t explain why, only that it really hurt, and I’d thrown up my armor to protect myself. No matter what the facts are or a person’s intentions, the flow and tone of their energy says everything, and he’d turned uncharacteristically, inexplicably distant to me.
Energy does not lie!
The light around Jesse tangles with the light around me and pulls me back into his stream of memory.
Bianca shows up weekly as a walk-in on Wednesdays. His staff starts to gossip. He sticks a yellow note over the pink sticky and makes excuses for her. She could out him at any moment to his staff and to Lauren.
Jesse hands her cash and never writes down notes on her office visits. Not anymore. He sends her away as quickly as possible.
He goes home keyed up from long work hours and takes pills to sleep. He goes to work exhausted and takes pills to stay awake. He hides pills in his car where Lauren won’t find them. He doesn’t bother with the pills to prevent anxiety. He’s way past that now.
He doesn’t see Bianca outside his exam room. He rarely sees Lauren at home because he’s rarely home. The joy in his life fades.
Pills to sleep. Pills to wake up. Running on empty. Hopelessness.
He’s worried about the financial drain of diverting his income to Bianca to quiet her threats.
He’s worried she’ll tell Lauren about their liaison and she’ll never believe he thought he was making love to his wife.
He’s worried Bianca might be pregnant from their one encounter, but thankfully she isn’t.
He’s worried the staff will figure out what’s going on—Petra’s concern grows even if she doesn’t act on it.
He’s worried about Lauren’s cancer scare and how many surgeries she’ll face if the next labs come back bad.
He’s worried he’ll lose his medical practice and with it, Lauren’s dream of the Center of Light.
He’s worried he’ll disappoint everyone. Everyone!
Bianca visits him at his office, and he tells her this has to stop. Hasn’t he given her enough money to start a new life elsewhere? Isn’t she ready to continue her cross-country trek that was never intended to stop in this town for more than a few weeks? What is it she really wants? And then she answers.
“I want your wife gone. I don’t care how. I want what she has. You. The Center of Light. The house. Most of all, the power she has. All of it. I want her life. And you’re going to get it for me. I’m going to tell you how.”
He’s terrified of what Bianca might do. It’s not even about him or about money. It’s about one witch’s jealousy of another’s hard-won gifts. She’s powerful herself, but it’s not enough for her. This isn’t about how much he might lose—not anymore—but about what it’ll cost Lauren. He can’t keep hiding his mistake to keep from hurting her. He has to tell her, even if he can’t explain how he confused Bianca with Lauren. He knows everything will change between them, that she’ll no longer trust him, that she’ll never look at him the same way again.
He’s going to lose the love of his life. He can’t think straight. All he can see is the absence of hope.
Trying to take the edge off his anxiety, he downs a couple of pills. It’s not enough courage. He chickens out of going home to Lauren for a date night she’s been longing for and instead heads to an ER shift, forgetting he had previously rescheduled it so he can have a night with Lauren and maybe come clean about everything.
When he shows up wild-eyed and unexpected at the ER, a nurse who’s fond of him discreetly sends him away. When he thinks he’s sober enough, he walks back to his car and drives away—straight into the three-hundred-year-old oak that graces the town’s signage and official stationery. His sports car is totaled and, much to the dismay of the townspeople, a third of the tree breaks and topples from the rest.
Jesse stumbles away without a scratch.
All he can hear in his head is his grandfather telling him what a disappointment he is as a teenager. He imagines how awful it will be to hear those words from Lauren. It’s as if she’s already said them.
A cop who sometimes comes over occasionally to record guitar tracks with Sonnet and him is the first on the scene and finds Jesse addled. The cop assumes it’s a head injury and calls Lauren to meet Jesse at the ER, less than a quarter of a mile away.
Instead, Jesse panics. He slips into the gathering crowd and behind an abandoned farm equipment building. He can’t go home. He can’t go back. He has nowhere to go.
So he calls Bianca, the only person who knows what he’s become.
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