Winter Heart Page 6

  In a way it had been freeing. When Howard had first urged him into sexual situations with others, his response had been halfhearted—a way to please (and keep) Howard. But when it had been in the context of a religious rite? Somehow that was when Wyatt finally let go and really did whatever Howard urged him to do. After all, wasn’t the Goddess supposed to say, “For behold, all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals”?

  It had also been when his and Howard’s sexual escapades had truly begun. Or at least his own. Howard’s had apparently begun long before then—just without the virtue of Wyatt knowing about it.

  “Wyatt?” Cedar asked again, louder, breaking him from his thoughts.

  “Huh?”

  “I think I just might have Scott talked into it.”

  Wyatt looked at his blushing friend.

  “No,” he said. “No wrestling. Not tonight. Breakables. Candles.”

  “Sure,” Asher said. “Burning the house down would be a bad way to end the evening.”

  “And no nudity, right?” asked Cedar.

  Wyatt had to laugh once again. Coming from anyone else, he would have thought they were trying to make this sexual. It was not something he was prepared for in the least. The wounds were still very fresh with Howard. But no. As sexually free as Cedar was, Wyatt knew he wasn’t suggesting some repeat of that night Howard had taken him over the altar. Not the way Cedar was bonding with Scott. Cedar was just a naked kind of guy.

  “No, not this time,” he answered.

  He could see from their expressions that Max wasn’t the only one who was relieved. But then he got yet another little surprise.

  “You know, I was kind of expecting to show off,” Peni said. “Would you mind if I just wore a sarong?”

  Wyatt raised his brows in surprise and then nodded. “Sure. Whatever any of you want.”

  Peni looked at Asher, who nodded, and then they excused themselves.

  “What are they up to?” Max said.

  “I can’t imagine,” said Wyatt, because he really couldn’t. Show off? What did that mean?

  “You know I wasn’t trying to turn this into some kind of orgy, right?” Cedar asked.

  Yes, he did know that. Wyatt told him so. And hadn’t he just been thinking that—a thought confirmed when Cedar put his arm around Scott’s waist and pulled him tight against him.

  “I was just wanting to respect your path, and I knew a lot of rituals were done in the nude.”

  “Some,” Wyatt responded. “But not all by any means. I doubt even the majority. Remember that Men’s Festival is hardly the ‘real world.’ And when we did Ritual, most of us weren’t naked. I appreciate it, Cedar. But just the fact that you’re all here tonight means the world to me. That you are respecting my beliefs.”

  “Well, Wyatt,” Asher said, coming into the room holding Peni’s hand, “I’m starting to learn respect.”

  They all turned to see Peni and Asher standing there, both wearing gorgeous sarongs tied around their waists. They were folded in half lengthwise so that instead of hanging nearly to the floor, they came down to midthigh, showing off their muscular physiques and—of course—Peni’s magnificent Samoan tattoos. The lovers looked like two gods standing there in the light of the candles.

  “Wow,” said Sloan.

  “Wow, indeed,” said Max.

  Yes, thought Wyatt. Wow. Because even though they’d seen Peni’s pe’a before, here, tonight, they were magnificent.

  “Oh, what the hell,” said Max. “I can wear one of those. Actually they look pretty comfortable. You have any more of those sarong-thingies, Wyatt?”

  Sarong-thingies? Really? Mr. College-Teacher Max Turner just said sarong-thingies? Wyatt laughed. “Do I?” Did he have any sarongs? Even after Howard took half of them, he still had a million. “Come on!”

  So he took them upstairs and showed them the big green tub he had and left them to it. They could pick out whatever they wanted. He didn’t care.

  Then halfway down the stairs, something hit him. Yes! If even Max was willing to shed his comfortable ways and wear a sarong, that meant he could skip his jeans and T-shirt (even if it did have a silhouette on the front of a witch on a broomstick with a rainbow flowing out the back instead of billowing smoke, and the words Ride With Pride, on it).

  He wouldn’t go naked—he couldn’t do that. But he could….

  While Max and Sloan went through the tub, he dashed back up the stairs, went to the closet in his magick room, and found his special outfit. The one he’d made himself. It wasn’t perfect, but to misquote Grace Jones once again, it was perfect for him.

  The outfit consisted of two sarongs that he had batiked himself in a class at Festival several years ago. (Gods, was it going on five already?) The two sarongs had started out white. He’d dyed them gold and brown. Then he’d used the batik technique to apply wax in a bear pattern over and over on the fabric. Once that was done, he’d dyed the sarongs black, and where the wax crackled, it left wonderful tiny lines of black to come through. Once they were dry, they were washed in hot water, which melted the wax away and left a completely unique set of sarongs. Then he gave them to Zebra the Baker (who also sewed wonderful quilts) to turn one of the sarongs into a jacket and—voilà—Wyatt had his own magickal robes!

  And he could wear the outfit tonight! He could be all flowy and lovely tonight. He quickly shed his clothes, swept into his homemade garments, and found his bear-claw necklace, and he was ready!

  Watch out, McDonalds!

  Wyatt stepped out into the hallway just in time to finally get a quick flash of Max’s butt and, as lovely as it was, to not really care. That’s not what tonight was about. You’d seen one perfect ass, you’d seen them all.

  Wait!

  Had he just said that?

  Wyatt shook his head and dashed past the crimson Max—Oh, relax, Max. How many men have seen you naked in the locker room at the gym?—and down the stairs, garments flowing about him like, well, magick!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS a colder night than expected, but there was no talking Cauley out of joining them, and really, who were they to say no? It got him out of the house. And at least it was his own backyard.

  That night there were three of them: Kevin, Cauley, and Theresa—the woman Kevin jokingly referred to as his “voice.”

  They were sitting around the black, bowl-shaped fire pit Kevin had bought for Cauley for his birthday (which ironically resembled a cauldron quite a bit) on patio chairs pulled as close as they could without burning themselves.

  Cauley was especially bundled up, and his mother had made quite a fuss about it too. Flannel shirt, two sweaters (one of them Kevin’s, and Cauley would have looked ridiculously small in it if there hadn’t been layers beneath it), heavy gloves, and a hat that made him look like a skinny Cossack. And that wasn’t counting the blankets. He’d complained, but only a little bit. Kevin knew it was just for show.

  “So how come there’s only three of us?” Theresa asked. She was wearing a thick sweater and had pulled off her hat, and the big fluffy snowflakes that had begun to fall moments before looked like down feathers caught in her very blonde hair.

  At least the snow wasn’t falling hard. The weather report was only calling for a few inches at most. It was interesting to watch it sizzle midair over the fire pit and never reach the ground.

  “What do you mean?” Kevin asked. “Only three?”

  “Don’t we need a fourth?” she asked, blue eyes flashing. She brushed the snow off her head and pulled on her thick fuchsia knit hat. “Weren’t the chicks in that movie looking for a fourth?”

  “Oh hell, Theresa.” He shook his head. “This isn’t The Craft. And it’s nothing like that. And I’m not a witch.”

  “Then what are you? I mean, I’ve never really gotten that.”

  “Me either,” said Cauley from the depths of his hat and blankets.

  Kevin looked over at Cauley and huffed a quiet half laugh. The comment was just part of wh
y they hadn’t worked out. He’d begged Cauley to go to Camp with him years back, and Cauley had just said, “Yuck. Bugs. Spiders.” Shook his head and then told Kevin that he didn’t have the shoes to go camping. “And I refuse to use a Johnny-on-the-Spot!”

  “I guess,” Kevin continued, turning back to Theresa, “if you had to pigeonhole me, I’d say I was pagan, or neo-pagan—”

  “Neo what?” Theresa asked.

  “—but I don’t like either of those terms. I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I don’t want to pick a ‘god.’ I think they’re all the same and that each of us finds God in their own way. For my mom it was Jesus. For someone else it might be Buddha. I had a friend once who prayed to Baldur for me. And do you know Parya? At work? Have you noticed she has a little statue of Ganesha on her desk?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Theresa said.

  “Well that’s not just for decoration. Did you ever notice she keeps a few M&Ms or Lifesavers or something in that itty-bitty dish in front of it? It’s an offering.”

  “Okay.” Theresa smiled. “I knew that was way too small to be a candy dish!” She laughed.

  “It’s all the same, you know?” Kevin nodded. “All spokes of a wheel leading to the same place.”

  “Damn,” Theresa replied. “That’s the most I think I’ve ever heard you say all at once since you introduced me to your apps that made us all so damned comfortable.”

  Kevin ignored her. “Let’s just say my religion is nature. I don’t like to label it. But nothing makes me feel closer to… God, if that’s the word you want to use, than nature.”

  “Which is why I never understood why he likes New York so much,” said Cauley.

  A slow smile crept over Kevin’s face. “And where did I meet you?”

  Their eyes met over the flames, and Cauley returned his smile. “Central Park.”

  “Exactly.”

  “If you boys tell me you met cruising and had sex in the bushes, I don’t know if I’ll be grossed out or turned on,” Theresa said. “You told me you met at a picnic.”

  “We did,” Kevin replied. “Our mutual friend Mark was having a birthday party, and we were both invited, and from the minute I saw Cauley, I couldn’t keep my eyes off him.”

  “Which makes no sense because he likes bears.” Cauley let out a long sigh that sent several snowflakes puffing away from his face.

  Kevin sighed as well. He’d hoped the story might make Cauley smile.

  Apparently Theresa noticed, and always knowing what to do (it was she who made his apps something that Google wanted so badly), steered the conversation back to why they were gathered together that night. “Okay, then, if we aren’t here to cast a spell, then what are we here for?” she asked.

  Kevin took a deep breath. “To take notice. To take a moment. This is a very special time of year.”

  “I know my nephews and nieces certainly think so,” Theresa said. “You should hear the not-so-subtle hints of all they want for Christmas.”

  “But this is far older than that,” Kevin replied. “I’m talking about Winter Solstice. We’re doing this a night early. But that’s okay. It’s real close. The real event takes place at 10:49 tomorrow night. But that doesn’t lend itself well for us. That’s pretty late for Cauley here—”

  Who let out a scoffing huff even though they all knew (including Cauley) that it was true.

  “—and Theresa, you have to be at work Monday morning. So I decided that tonight would be good enough. It’s pretty common for people to celebrate on the closest Saturday to a Solstice or Equinox. So tonight we’ll go ahead and take notice that we are on the threshold of the longest night of the year. Starting Monday, the days lengthen and call for summer to arrive once again, and surely there is something very powerful about that.”

  He looked at Cauley, eyes hooded in darkness, and could read nothing. Fire and shadow played with his face and obscured Kevin’s ability to read the expressions of the man he had known and loved for years. Then he turned to Theresa, whose eyes were filled with the flames of the fire pit and whose very posture showed that she was far more serious than she let on. She was biting her lower lip, and she looked alive, and Kevin knew he’d been wise to not only ask her to sell to the world what he could not, but to ask her here tonight.

  He loved her.

  He loved Cauley.

  There were few he dared to love, despite the fact that his heart wanted him to give it away. These two knew him and respected him like no one else, even though he was so quiet and private and rarely shared much of himself (and when he did share, it was a baring of the soul that left him ultimately exhausted). He treasured these two. And tonight he didn’t need to face such an important event as Yule on his own.

  “I believe,” Kevin said, “that there is power tonight. Power tomorrow night. Power always. But I can’t believe that there is no significance to a night that so many cultures have taken notice of. The Romans had a festival called Saturnalia on the winter solstice, where they brought branches of evergreen trees to decorate their homes. They exchanged gifts. All businesses were closed. The Persians held this time as sacred, as the time of the birth of their sun god, Mithras. In Sweden this time of year was sacred to the Lucina, the Shining One, and like all the others, it was a celebration of the return of the light. On Yule itself, bonfires were lit to honor Odin and Thor.

  “We don’t have a bonfire, but we have this instead.” He waved gently at the fire pit with an upraised hand. “And I think it takes little imagination to see those ancient times in our mind’s eye.”

  Now he could see that Cauley was listening. His shadowed eyes were hard to see, but they were focused in Kevin’s direction.

  “After this weekend, the nights will begin to shorten, and the days will grow longer and longer as the earth moves around the sun. Just think about it! Earliest man noticed that the sun’s path across the sky changed. People today think they were ignorant, but they noted that the length of daylight changed and the location of the sunrise and sunset shifted in a habitual way throughout the year. Those ‘ignorant’ people built monuments like Machu Picchu and Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza to follow the sun.

  “Today we use science, and we can see the earth from space. Now we know that the solstice is caused by the tilt of Earth on its axis….”

  “Huh?” asked Cauley.

  “Because Earth doesn’t orbit upright,” Theresa said.

  Kevin nodded enthusiastically. “It’s tilted on its axis by 23.5 degrees. And as we go around the sun, the Northern and Southern Hemispheres trade places in getting the largest amount of direct sunlight. And this very weekend our hemisphere is leaning farthest away from the sun for the year. Until the Summer Solstice, called Litha, when we experience the longest day and then continue around the sun, with the days growing shorter and winter returning.”

  “But that’s just science,” Cauley replied stubbornly. “It’s not religion.”

  “My religion is nature,” Kevin said again, unable to keep the wonder from his voice, the smile from his face.

  “This all sounds very leapish to me. That’s what it is, right? You got this from that Malcolm guy? Your guru?”

  Kevin rolled his eyes in his mind. “Leapish” is what Theresa called it? “Malcolm guy”? “Leapish” from the book Leap and the Net Will Appear! and “Malcolm guy” meaning Malcolm Kane, the author.

  “You’ve never been the same since we went to see him speak,” Theresa said.

  “That’s not true. And please don’t call him my guru again. It really annoys me.”

  Cauley gave a little groan from beneath his blanket, and Kevin winced. Cauley had much worse things to say about Malcolm Kane.

  “What I love so much about him is he is saying what I’ve somehow known my whole life. Things that were bouncing around in my head, but I had never known how to say them out loud. He put it all into words for me.”

  Theresa nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to tease. Apology accepted?”
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  “Of course,” Kevin said and smiled.

  And when he turned to look, he saw that Cauley’s eyes were still in shadow… but there was a spark as well that was more than a reflection of the fire.

  “So what do you want us to do?” she asked.

  WYATT TOOK a deep breath. His friends stood around him in a circle, holding hands. He reached down and took his blade—his athame—from the small table in the center of the circle (he’d found it in the basement, and it had been perfect for tonight’s altar) and raised it high over his head.

  He took a deep breath, tried to calm his nervous heart. This was sacred. This is sacred, he thought. He cleared his throat and took another breath. And began: “Tonight, my friends, is the festival of Yule. Tonight we celebrate the darkest night of the year. We are in the midst of frozen winter, and the rose is asleep beneath the snow. But take heart! For even in this deep darkness, we are on the eve of the night the sun is once again reborn. A spark of light comes to life and promises us that spring is coming again, light returns to the world, and new life. Just as the candles burn brightly around us, so soon will the sun.”

  Wyatt turned slowly to the north, athame now pointed before him. “I now draw the sacred Circle.” He continued to turn, drawing an imaginary (but no less meaningful) border around them all. “Let no man leave its boundaries until our Ritual is done.”