[Author's note: Warning - loooads of text in this update. Really sorry about that
If it's very bothersome I'll try and cut down in the future].
3.1. Catching Up
Both Penny and I graduated with straight As, but then we hadn’t done anything but studying for the last couple of days at university. When time came to go celebrate graduation and parties broke out all over campus, we just slept, and only a few days later we returned home.
Monte Vista was much like it had always been, and Mum and Dad waited for us right where they’d always been. They told us all about Hector’s girlfriend Thelma, and told that Thalia was coming home soon. Then it was Penny’s turn to tell her news – she’d proposed to Hebe and the two of them had gotten married privately. Without telling anyone.
Including me.
Penny just chuckled as we all cried out in outrage, and then, of course, she dropped the next bomb: the two of them were adopting.
She was just about to tell us more about it when the doorbell rang. I went to get it. I was a bit annoyed, but that changed as soon as I opened.
“… Hi? Kleio, I… think I owe you an apology because…”
I didn’t let him finish. I flung my arms around him with a cry and he was almost knocked over in the snow. He only just managed to stay on his feet and return the hug.
“Kleio!”
Donte. I took a step back, feeling heat flooding my cheeks. “Donte, I’m sorry, I’m too forward, right? I mean… It’s been so long, so…”
“What? No, no! No, I’m just surprised.” He scratched his neck, and a feeling of wonder washed over me as I realised that I recognised that gesture. It was so
him. “Honestly, I thought you were going to kill me. It’s… been a while.”
“A long while.” Regardless, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face, and his smile grew warmer, more sincere.
“You really don’t hate me then?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Of course not. Come on. We can go inside and talk and…” I spied my mother through the window, stretching her neck to see whom I was talking to, and then I giggled at Donte. “On second thought… Do you want to talk in the garden? My mother is…”
“Oh, please. Garden. I’m still scared of your mother.”
We sat down on the bench in the back garden and, it seemed, just stared at each other for long. He was taller, certainly, and his hair was less unruly, and he looked good. Confident, somehow. Even if he was still as awkward as I felt myself. But he was still the same Donte; that much I felt clearly.
“I didn’t want to move, you know,” he said. “It was my grandmother’s decision, and she didn’t listen to my arguments against it.” He shrugged. “Though I admit, my arguments consisted mostly of ‘It’s so not fair!’ I was a teen, after all.”
For a while, he looked at me, biting his lip, then he touched my hand. “I… missed you. I mean you’re basically the reason I returned here, even if she asked me not to.”
“Do you know why she asked you not to? Why does she hate me so much?”
“Oh, it’s not you personally. I swear. I know it must seem that way, but she explained everything to me. It’s more… I’ll tell you. But not right now, I’m so tired of that old story. I’m just glad to see you. What about you – what have you been up to?”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Got my degree in technology, made some potions, acted like a mad woman during the full moon…”
He started. “Is it very bad?”
“Well… kind of. I’ve been to some pretty crazy parties. And I talked to a horse. Other than that, I manage.”
He tightened his grip around my hand and I put my head on his shoulder, holding on to him. “I’m here for you,” he said. “It will get better. We’ll work it out, you know.”
And so we did. During the next couple of days, he braved both the snow and my mother to come see me. He was preparing me for the next full moon. Just like me, he’d felt a bit of the moon illness, but he’d had his grandmother to help him get over it. That and the magic.
“Some say it’s a magic thing. That during a full moon, magic powers get so strong that it goes to your head,” he told me, one evening when we were sitting in my room on the bed. “My grandmother says that’s nonsense – she’s magic too, and she hasn’t experienced the moon illness even once in her life.”
“And I’m not magic,” I said.
“Exactly. That doesn’t mean magic doesn’t run in your family, though. Some people just have an affinity for magic, and for some reason, some people with affinity for magic feel the moon illness. Myself included. But I guess it doesn’t really matter why we feel it – we just do. The point is that we need to help you hold it back.”
“Yes, we do. How?”
“I’ll show you tomorrow. Your parents aren’t home then, right?” I shook my head. “Good, I don’t think we’d want them to see this.”
The next day he appeared and pulled out his wand. I recognised it from when we were teens, and I took a step back. Back then he’d never actually
hurt anyone with his magic, but he had made a few mistakes.
“Careful where you point that thing.”
“Oh, I’ve gotten much better at it. Don’t worry, I’m pretty good at this spell by now. It almost never fails.”
“Almost?”
“Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”
I closed my eyes and braced myself. I heard him muttering some words under his breath and then a warmth spread in my body. From my heart outwards in my entire body, down my spine and it swirled in my head and settled there. When I opened my eyes, my body was completely calm and soft, like I didn’t have a care in the world. He looked at me with an expectant smile.
“Well?”
“I feel… pretty good.”
“Of course. I wouldn’t hurt you.” I just nodded, looked at him. His eyes were warm. I didn’t get a chance to say anything more because he spoke again: “Now, it’s only a help. I can’t promise it’ll completely get rid of it. Sometimes it works well, and sometimes not at all. You still need to stay calm and not think about it too much – think of anything but the full moon, like that time when we were teens. Remember?”
“Yes.”
He put the wand in his pocket and was about to say something more when my parents burst in the door. A look of panic crossed his features. “I’d… better go.” And so he left.
The full moon came with its eerie green glow, and I felt the difference. I was a little less foggy, a little less strange. So when the full moon was at its highest in the sky, instead of going out to a wild party or to the beach to make a sandcastle, I was enough in control to knock on Donte’s door instead, in the house where he’d lived with his grandmother when they were teens. They hadn’t sold it and he was staying there now.
He didn’t look like I felt. He looked in control.
I’m guessing anyone else in the universe would have wondered at seeing me on the doorstop in the middle of the night, but he just nodded, took my hand and said we’d go for a walk.
“Isn’t it working?” he asked.
“No, it is working. I just still feel… foggy sometimes.”
Actually, as we walked, I still felt my control slipping sometimes, and I’m sure my mind completely blacked out for a long time, until I found myself sitting on a park bench with Donte’s arm around my shoulders.
“Are you with me again?” he asked.
I nodded. “I think so.”
“I’m sorry. I think the spell partly worked, but I’m not as good at it as my grandmother. Not yet. I’ll… try and practise. But you didn’t sound that weird, even though you wanted to play chess… I’m so bad at that, you know.”
I smiled and closed my eyes. For now, at least, I was enough in control that I enjoyed how close we were. I snuggled close to him and I’m sure I heard a smile in his voice when he said: “We should probably get you home to bed.”
I must have blacked out again, because later I woke up in my bed, lying on his chest with his arms around me. He was snoring peacefully until I stirred, then he tightened his grip around me.
“It’s okay, I’m not going to run off to Las Vegas,” I said. I felt more sleepy than loony at that moment.
“Good. You should go back to sleep now.”
“Did I do anything stupid?”
He kissed the top of my head. “Not on my watch.”
And the full moon passed.
I tried my hardest not to let my time spent with Donte intrude on family time, even though Penny did say that I spent much too much time with him and not enough with her. Even if she didn’t seem to mind – she had a glint her eye when she said it. Certainly a glint that I’d wish my mother had. Still didn’t trust him completely.
Fortunately for me, her first grand child’s arrival interrupted and took all her time. Penelope and Hebe’s son, Paris, appeared. A gorgeous toddler. Everyone instantly fell in love with him, not least both his mothers, though the two of them liked to bicker about how he should be handled.
“You’re being too wild with him,” Hebe complained.
“I am not. I’m being exactly as wild as I should be.” And then Penny threw him into the air while he was giggling away.
One evening, she left him to Hebe and his grandparents and pulled me to the next room.
“I meant to ask some more about Donte. How are things?”
“They’re great.”
There hadn’t been another full moon since the last one, but I felt more secure now, and he was practising the spell that would make it easier to control. Somehow, though, I suspected that’s not what Penelope wanted to know. She elbowed me with a grin.
“Gosh, don’t leave me hanging, sis. You were dating back then – you still into him…?”
I shrugged and looked away so that she wouldn’t see my smile.
“We’re good friends,” I said.
“Not buying. You’re blushing.”
I laughed. “Well, it’s been so long since I saw him last and he’s been back, what, a moth? Things will change after so long a separation.”
“Mm, yeah. Still not buying. You’re so still into him.”
I only gave another laugh and a shrug, but when she left the room, she signalled that she was keeping her eyes on me.
Penny really did know me too well.
[Author’s note:
Yay, more update! I’m so worried I’m messing these up. But it’s a matter of balancing telling the story and not making too many chapters that are too long.
But guuuh, can you tell I like Donte way too much? Here, have some gratuitous pictures of Donte and Kleio in the snow, because I think they’re good:
Also: grown up Thalia, because I don’t think we’ll see too much of her in the future:
She didn’t turn out that bad, but she’s pretty much a female version of Junior and that’s not very good on females. Kleio’s still my favourite of the gen 2 kids… and now I’ll be quiet].
