Chapter 40
Transiting Neptune Conjunct Jesse’s Natal Sun
“I can’t be with you again, Wifey. I’ll show you.”
As he studies my face, his brow furrows. He sweeps my hair from my forehead and kisses me between my eyes, above my nose. Then he presses his forehead against mine, third eye to third eye, sixth chakra to sixth chakra. He’s too close to see his face so I stare down at his chest and the golden light pulsating off his skin.
His skin glows more brightly. The light radiates like an ever-expanding aura. The heat soothes me, comfortably warm, not scalding or painful. I lean into him. I breathe in the burning herbs from the fire pit. If I could keep him here forever, then I would stay here forever with him.
Starting at my heart chakra, heat blooms throughout my body, a surge of energy. The energy seeps through my skin as my own body turns to light and merges with Jesse’s light. In the union of our auras, I see everything.
Memories, each one from his point of view, flash past me like a review of his last days, not mine.
The Center of Light. The warm glow of his own happiness. Watching Lauren from a distance. The—
“Wait, Wifey. My mistake started before this. First, I have to show you the one secret I kept from you the whole time we were together.”
My heart skips a beat. We’d had no secrets, or so I’d thought.
His memories flash through my mind, speeding faster initially than I can process but gradually slowing down.
Medicating his bouts with depression with drugs and alcohol throughout college until his mentor sent him to a therapist, new medications that soothed his anxiety and helped him crawl out of bed every morning, an increased dose to carry him through the loss of his children with his ex-wife, a new start with a new woman, a new love, a new wife, a new pregnancy they’d thought unlikely, then loss—again.
Different medications, therapy, life becoming good again.
“Jesse? This, I know. I know all of this.”
“All up until this point. You don’t know the lie. There’s more. My secret I kept from you.”
Life becoming good again and then life becoming amazing.
The medications giving him back the life he wanted.
But—and it’s a huge “but”—he could have this fantastic life he wanted with one drawback: a stunted sex drive.
Fear of losing this beautiful new wife who loved him despite his flaws and his bad genes.
Worry over some of the side effects of his medications.
Was he man enough? Could he please Lauren enough in bed?
If he couldn’t satisfy her, would she leave him?
Just a matter of time until he lost her!
“Aw, Jesse, no. We were a team, you and me. Nothing we couldn’t handle. Besides, like you told me then, you just needed to get used to the dosage. And you were right: the side effects worked themselves out over time.”
“No. They didn’t. I tried every med there was, but they either didn’t work or my, er, little guy didn’t work. You wouldn’t have stayed with me.”
Before I can swear to him that I would have, his memories lurch forward, taking me with them.
Alone in front of the medicine cabinet, he thinks of Lauren in his bed, all curves and waiting, naked, for him. Waiting for his touch, and more. She thinks he’s just really into pleasing her with oral sex, but he can’t stay hard enough, long enough. Next time, he promises himself.
He drops the pill in the toilet and flushes. The first instance of what becomes his daily routine so she’ll never realize he’s weaned himself off his medications.
He still has moments of anxiety and still days when he can’t get out of bed, but as a physician, he has resources.
A glass of wine with his beloved calms his nerves. Pills he carries in his car and in the medicine bag at home help him cope with his lack of motivation. He manages. A pill to pick him up, a pill to settle him down.
That’s his secret? The lie? All those years, I thought he was fine, yet it took everything he had to hide it from me. He struggled twice as hard—once with the depression and anxiety, and second with hiding it from the entire world but especially from me. He had no reason to fear losing me.
I’m sure of it. Because no one can make more excuses for someone else’s behavior than I can when I love them.
“I’m sorry, Wifey. I was managing and making do. Until I wasn’t. It just kept getting bigger until I didn’t know how to stop it from eclipsing everything. That night at the ritual, when we dropped pieces of paper into the bonfire with our most fervent wishes and let you bless them and send them in the smoke to your imaginary sky people. You know what I wrote down to welcome into the new year?”
I see the scrap of paper in his mind, with words scrawled.
End of the lie.
“I didn’t know how, Lauren. I didn’t. I was in over my head.”
A metaphorical image flashes in front of me. I’ve seen it before when I think of Jesse during these months. He’s pulling a stack of concrete and rebar with a rope or chain, but trying to drag them forward from underneath. He’s being crushed but he can’t escape the heaviness. And yet, even up until the night of the Solstice ritual, I still felt Jesse’s closeness. He had not yet taken his energy away from me. That didn’t start for another couple of weeks.
Then his memories rewind, almost comically, and lurch forward again.
Standing in the parking lot of the Center of Light near the gates that lead to the public ritual area. Hundreds of people, some chattering but most reverent and silent.
A bonfire licking at the night sky at the center of where Lauren will conduct the Winter Solstice Manifestation Ritual. It has become outrageously popular in this small town and draws another dozen participants from across the country.
Lauren standing, silhouetted in front of the fire, arms raised high, preparing the space for the evening ceremony.
Christabel, beautiful and on the verge of adulthood, directing people through the gates and saging them with sweetgrass as they pass through.
And then a dark-haired beauty in all black and a red headscarf, maybe twenty-five, no more than thirty. She stands in front of him, flirting audaciously with him. As always, he’s friendly but doesn’t flirt back.
Lightly, she touches the back of his hand, dragging the backs of her red fingernails across it.
He sidesteps her nervously, but then she plants one palm against his chest and tells him she’s had a little too much mead to drink at the pre-circle festivities.
He doesn’t believe her. Mead hasn’t been served yet because it’s part of the ritual. Even if she had been partaking of something ahead of time, he doesn’t smell it on her breath. Her lips are too close. He takes a giant step backward.
She seems to get the message. She changes the subject and asks him about the High Priestess conducting the ritual.
He explains that his wife—did he say wife clearly enough?—leads the Winter Solstice Manifestation Ritual every year and that everyone raves about how some of their deepest desires are manifested within the first thirty days afterward.
The dark-haired beauty stares into the distance at Lauren. It’s like something clicks in her brain. Her jaw drops. She whirls back to him, jealousy in her eyes.
What was the inciting word—wife or High Priestess?
She tells him that she’s powerful like that, too, and that it should be her leading that ritual and teaching here at the Center of Light. She’s still in the Maiden phase of life and has more to offer than the woman at the bonfire. She oozes her sexuality, wields it like a weapon.
He’s curious, but not interested. She’s certainly attractive, but he has Lauren.
He shrugs her off, then suggests that maybe after the ceremony, she might want to talk to Lauren about leading circles. He says it just to be friendly, not to promise anything.
Then he reminds her that she is last in line of the hundreds of people who are walking ahead of her. She tries to convince him to stay behind and talk to her more, but he tells her to hurry or she’s going to miss the ritual.
I try to pull away from the memories. I can feel Jesse’s anxiety, like ants crawling over my skin from head to toe. Not his anxiety now but then, in that moment. The discomfort. The desperation. His aura pulls me back in.
The flirty brunette takes all of three steps forward and then pretends to twist her ankle. She grabs his hand, almost pulls him down. She pleads for help, even though he doesn’t have to be one of Lauren’s witches to know it’s a game.
He needs to give her some assurance, enough to extricate himself and send her home. He tells her he’s the doctor at the clinic behind him and takes a quick look at her ankle. He can tell there’s nothing wrong with it and says reassuringly that maybe it’s just a little strain.
He grabs a camp chair and briskly seats the brunette. Before he can walk away, she grabs his hand and begs him to carry her. She’s desperate to be a part of the ritual. She says it would mean the world to her because it can help her manifest what she hasn’t been able to.
He rolls his eyes and pulls his hand out of hers. He explains quickly that Lauren, as the High Priestess, makes the rules and that if someone for any reason can’t arrive at the circle before the gates are closed, then they’re not meant to be there. They can watch from outside the gates and outside the circle, but they can’t participate in any of the goodness inside of it. His voice sounds harsher in his ears than he means for it to.
Chrissy smudges him as he walks through the gates and closes them behind himself. He catches a glimpse of the brunette scrambling to her feet and running for the gates, but too late.
Jesse shows me everything in that encounter in a split-second flash of memory before the next scene passes before my eyes as it once passed before his.
A few days later, after the ritual but before New Year’s, the brunette shows up at the clinic with complaints of an ankle injury and giving her name as Nancy Downs. She’s paid cash for the office visit and refuses to give much information other than an address that sounds bogus. This little town could be a bit crazy at times, but not a single address that received mail in town had a 666 in its street address. Not that some people weren’t attracted to that kind of thing, but most people didn’t want to be neighbors with someone who might be The Beast of their holy book.
Part of me wants to crack a smile at Jesse’s humor shining through in his memories. That’s the old Jesse, my Jesse, always so outwardly lighthearted. Only now do I realize how much of it was a façade.
He’s startled to walk into an exam room to find the brunette sitting on the black-padded exam table and swinging her high-heeled feet.
A quick check at a public event and reassurance that she was just fine was one thing, but now that she’s in his place of business, he can’t brush her off as easily. He wonders if maybe there really is something wrong with her foot or leg.
He palpates her ankle where she said she twisted it.
She says ow in all the right places.
He had prescribed rest, ice, and “for the sake of dolphins, crystals, and rainbow ponies, get out of those heels!”
As soon as she leaves, he slaps a yellow sticky note on the top of her file folder. Then he thinks better of it and covers the yellow with a pink sticky. For good measure, he tapes down all four sides. Point made!
That flash of memory rolls into the next and the next and the next.
She’s back a few days later, this time “handsy” with him. He rebuffs her gently because—truth be told—she makes him nervous and he doesn’t want his reputation ruined over the false allegations she hints at. He tells Lauren about a “handsy” patient—no more, no less—but immediately regrets it.
“Oh, Jesse. Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”
“I started to. I told you one of my patients made me uncomfortable, but that made you uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to worry you. You were already so worried about your surgery that I couldn’t add to your burden. I was stupid, I know, but it all seemed like the best thing I could do at the time. I wanted to make things light and easy when we were together.”
His memories roll forward, showing me event after event, but also his emotions growing more frantic. This was the internal side of the outward off-centeredness I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something had been wrong, and this was it—the rising anxiety and fear of losing me, the pills flushed down the toilet every single day. I had blamed myself for missing it and not doing what I could to support my husband when he needed me most, but now I see that he’d gone to great lengths to hide his tells from me.
The brunette comes back each time, maybe once a week, and points out a slightly different pain in her leg, each time a little higher on her leg than before.
Each time, he’s surprised and flustered to see her. Petra isn’t being conscientious about chaperoning the pink-flagged patients. Not just this patient, but others as well. She’s longing for retirement at the end of spring and growing more relaxed about office procedures.
When he talks to Petra about it, she reminds him that she’s overworked and also screening potential replacements as well as supervising his alone-time with lovesick patients. He will be fine saying no to women all by his lonesome, she says, and he should stop worrying so much because women are always put in uncomfortable situations, so men can just suck it up and deal with it, too. They laugh about it, but his uneasiness grows.
Yes, he’d tried to tell me early on. He’d mentioned a patient making allegations but later said she’d stopped coming around. I’d responded by putting up security cameras and trying to fix the situation rather than really listening to him. I’d been too worried about my own issues to dedicate much time to this one, and once he’d told me she wasn’t a problem anymore, I hadn’t given her another thought.
A year ago, I would have been like, “Let me at her!” But not this year.
Jesse hadn’t wanted me worried because I had too much on my plate already. In truth, both of us were in trouble and hadn’t realized it. All I knew was that Jesse’s withdrawal from me started around the time this patient showed up.
A person’s energy never lies. Never.
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