Free May Day Magic by Beverly Breton

Chapter One
    Diane Avery placed the palm of her hand against the restless eight-year-old boy’s forehead. Much cooler than when the new French teacher had left her son in the health office. April in Massachusetts meant roller coaster temperatures and bouts of flu for all the school nurses to manage. Diane reached for the book of fractured fairy tales the boy had been reading before he fell asleep. She placed the book back into the basket by the cot.
    Sun streamed in the large-paned windows of the old Emerson Middle School building, leaving bright rectangles on the scuffed wooden floor. Yet the room felt chilly. Diane picked up the fleece blanket at the end of the cot to cover the boy, but stopped when he thrashed his head from side to side and mumbled something that sounded like a plea.
    Watching him, she decided to stay near for a few minutes. Sitting at the end of the cot, she pushed back to lean against the wall. She folded her legs and spread the mint-green fleece over herself, the soothing aroma of her lavender-scented detergent drifting up into her senses.
    Her own lids closed. Long ago, she’d learned to nurture herself. When she divorced five years ago at age thirty-one, she legalized a single-mother lifestyle that was years old, for she’d married a man too focused on his professional life to have time for family.
    She had wanted more. A partner. A lover. A friend.
    The cot jolted against the wall. Diane’s head bobbed, and a noise of surprise sounded in her throat as her eyes flew open. The boy had flung his arm over his head, but he was still deep in dreamland.
    Curling her fingers into the soft blanket, she closed her eyes again. She could take care of herself, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t long for someone else to take care of her. Someone to tuck a cover around her, and join her under the covers. Someone to be her refuge.
    Someone like Marc Stafford.
    A long sigh escaped her. Marc was in the building this afternoon, giving a presentation to eight-graders considering a vocational technical high school. Every cell in her body was awake to his proximity in the guidance area down the hall.
    Like most area residents, she stopped often at Stafford Farms, a popular organic farm, gourmet grocery, and nursery center located on a curving road near the Minuteman Trail connecting to Boston. Marc, who’d been two years ahead of her in school, was not a tall man, maybe five feet ten inches, but fit and vital in the way of a man who worked with the land. Despite his kinetic energy, he had a way of stopping and considering her words before answering that had drawn her from the first time they talked at a PTA meeting.
    Marc had also been married until two years ago when his wife took off with a documentary crew, answering a wanderlust people avowed she always harbored. During the divorce, Marc turned inward but now with the ex remarried and living in another state, and Marc’s son choosing to live with his father, a change had come over Marc. Like sap rising in the maple trees, he returned to life.
    And Diane somersaulted into the throes of a wicked crush that rivaled those suffered by her middle schoolers. Now when she ran into Marc at Stafford Farms, confronted with his lean athletic frame, youthfully mussed dark hair, and considerate manner, she experienced breathing so irregular, she wanted to grab her purchase and flee.
    Picturing him just down the hall again, she felt a lively energy bounce to life inside of her, generated by one fit, brown-eyed proprietor.
    Footsteps sounded on her office floor.
    Marc?
    Her lids snapped up, and her gaze riveted on the doorway.
    The tall, spare Emerson Middle School principal approached Diane, a forbidding set to her mouth.
    Diane scrambled away from the wall to sit upright, grimacing at the twinge in her back. “Sorry, I—” She spun sideways to check her patient.
    He snored evenly, drool sliding out the corner of his mouth.
    “I, ah—-” She stopped again, not sure