Free Mind Games by Christine Amsden

me.
    The moment came with a heart-stopping jolt, followed by a graceless landing that bruised my tail bone. I closed my eyes, waiting for the roof to come down on me, but it remained miraculously in place.
    Then came a high-pierced shriek from the kitchen. Remembering the large pot of boiling spaghetti sauce, I scrambled to my feet and raced to the kitchen to see my fears realized: The stock pot lay on the floor, its molten contents strewn across ceiling, cabinets, and floors.
    “Madison!” I raced to her side, almost losing my footing in a patch of slick sauce. “How bad is it? Are you burned? Should I call Nicolas?”
    She shook her head, groaned, and clutched at her back, which had apparently landed hard against the refrigerator. “I’m okay. Just freaked out.”
    As my racing heart began to slow, I took in more elements of the confusing scene before me. Madison actually sat, surrounded by a pool of sauce, but none of it had touched her. I actually patted her dark brown hair, expecting the color to have hidden the sauce and my hand to come away sticky. It didn’t. Her pale blue shirt couldn’t have hidden any sauce if it tried. The stuff had quite simply missed her.
    “How-? What-?” Oh yeah, she was hiding things. I took a step backward, nearly slipping in the sauce again, but this time Evan caught me before I could fall.
    He could have used his magic – a cold, impersonal assist – but he didn’t. He caught me with arms around my waist and hands braced on my elbows. He caught me with his whole body, pulling me against him, holding me as closely as if he had never pushed me away.
    My body betrayed me. It leaned into him for a moment, finding comfort in his warmth and his scent. It longed to kiss him, to feel the unmatched eroticism in the touch of his lips. It longed to forget the last two months, to pretend they had never happened, and to allow him access to my tortured heart once again.
    The responding ache of pain finally snapped me back to reality. I jabbed backwards with my elbows to push him away, then flew into the living room to put space between us. The movement left a trail of red footprints across the beige carpet.
    “Are you okay?” Evan asked Madison.
    “Fine.” She stood and gave him a shy smile.
    “Let me help clean this mess.” Before either Madison or I had a chance to respond, let alone stop him, Evan began levitating bits of pasta sauce back into the stock pot. He seemed to have trouble separating the sauce from the carpeting where I had trampled it in, but the tile floor in the kitchen turned out spotless.
    “So much for dinner,” Madison said. “I’m going to run out and get something. What do you want? Pizza? Chinese? Or, you know what? I’ll just surprise you.”
    Madison grabbed her purse and flip flops before racing out the front door as if the hounds of hell were on her heels. Since she had been afraid of Evan for years, maybe she thought they were. She had softened to him when he had saved my life, at least until she’d learned about the debt. Now I had no idea what she thought of him.
    “I can’t believe you did that to her,” I said when we were alone.
    “Did what?”
    “Scared her like that.”
    “Me? I can’t believe you slapped me while I was casting a spell. Have you lost your mind?” He gestured at the toppled tables and lamps, as well as the sofa and recliners that had come to rest in a new configuration.
    To cover the growing tension in the house, I began pushing things back into place. “You were trying to break into my house. You did break into my house! Get out!”
    “We need to talk.”
    “I don’t have anything to say to you.” I shoved at the sofa with my hip until I felt it settle into its comfortable carpet grooves.
    “You don’t need to talk, just listen.” Evan levitated the recliners back into place before I had a chance to take out my frustration on them. He then proceeded to put the rest of the living room back in order while