WORK IN PROGRESS: Three Witches #1: Magnus and Magnolia

Chapter 9 (Magnolia): A Confrontation

We make our worst mistakes, I think, when we assume that people's hurtful actions are simple acts of nastiness. Instead of thinking about the why behind someone's actions, we just assign knee-jerk, obvious reasons for a behavior that only skim the surface and don't dive any deeper than that.

She's being a hormonal bitch? It must be that time of the month.

He's being stupid? Well, he's a man. What do you expect?

She's pissed at you? Women are always flying off the handle over the slightest thing because they're too emotional.

He cheated? Oh, that obviously means he doesn't love you. 

Plain. Simple. Straightforward.

But it rarely is. 

During my training with Rosemary, one of the many things she revealed to me was that witches had a heightened sensitivity to the deep wells of feelings and emotions inside of people.

"It's essential that you become attuned to those, Magnolia. People will be coming to you now for help, and they may tell you it's for one issue, but often times, it's not."

"So they're...lying?"

She'd frowned, unsure how to respond. One of the things I most admired about Rosemary, aside from her endless witchy knowledge, was the way she thoughtfully approached her answers to my questions.

"Not exactly. They may believe they're telling the truth, but their truth may be covering for something deeper within them that they either don't want to admit to or may not even be aware of. Sometimes they are just lying, but for the most part, those who seek you out simply lack awareness. It'll be up to you to determine their real needs, and you'll do that by tuning in to them."

But for all of those thoughts and realizations crowding my head on the drive home, I still wasn't able to think of Magnus cheating on me as anything but a clear statement that he didn't love me, he didn't care about me nor did he cherish what there had been between us.

He'd been important to me from the moment I met him. Never in my life had I experienced such an instant, all-consuming feeling toward a man as I had with Magnus, and every single day we'd been together, it had only grown until my feelings for him felt as if they couldn't be contained any longer or fit inside of me. They were that big and overpowering, and made the serious feelings I'd had for previous boyfriends seem childish. He spoke to me, spirit to spirit, on such a deep level that it almost frightened me because I could feel myself reaching out to him, invisible tendrils from my heart twining around his heart, connecting us to one another -- and he was reaching back to me just as hard, chaining my heart to his. The love I'd felt for Magnus had been the most beautiful, overwhelming, pure emotion I'd ever experienced in my twenty-seven years of life.

The day I'd met him, I'd gone to a local nursery to get a small magnolia tree to plant for Mom on Mother's Day. It'd become our thing since I'd turned sixteen and got my first job so I could afford to buy her a real gift. We lived on two acres and I thought a magnolia tree would be a nice addition to the property when it grew up, a tree I could someday bring my children to and let them play under its flowering branches. My mother had loved the idea and had asked for a grove of them, so every Mother's Day, I bought another one for her and we planted it together.

This particular day, I was deciding between two small trees when I felt little sparks sizzle and explode inside of me, the kind of sparks that felt momentous, as if something important was going to happen. Looking up, I saw a tall, strongly built man standing beside me with longish black hair and dark blue eyes.