The Long Night

Stacy lay flat on her back, staring at the ceiling she had once helped choose.

The master bedroom was too quiet.

The ceiling fan turned in slow, lazy rotations, pushing warm air across her bare shoulders. The digital clock on the nightstand glowed 2:17 a.m. in aggressive red numbers, each minute ticking forward like it had a personal grudge.

She was exhausted. Bone-deep, eyes-burning, brain-fogged exhausted. But sleep refused to come.

Turning her head slightly, she stared at the empty space beside her. The mattress dipped faintly where another body had once slept. The absence felt louder than any snoring ever had.

She missed David. Evan's dad. The thought landed just as heavily as it had every time it occurred to her in the long sleepless hours.

Their relationship hadn't been perfect. Far from it. David could be stubborn. Dismissive when work stressed him out. And she wasn't exactly low-maintenance herself. They fought. They made up. They understood the unspoken contract they had built together.

It had been real.

And now, thanks to his stupid son, he looked at her like she was...

She swallowed.

Not a stranger.

Worse than that.

In his eyes, she had become Evan's wife. Off the market. Filed neatly into a category his brain apparently refused to even consider. He spoke to her politely. Comfortably. The way someone spoke to extended family they liked but didn’t think about when they were alone at night.

Asexual.

The word stung harder than she expected.

She rolled onto her side, dragging the blanket with her, staring toward the doorway. The house had rearranged itself into a quiet little nightmare of bedroom musical chairs.

Evan was in the spare room.

David, Evan's dad, was in Evan's old room.

And she was alone in the master bedroom that was now apparently hers and...

No.

She squeezed her eyes shut. This potion had made everything worse.

She knew Evan had never liked her. She wasn't stupid. She understood how she looked from the outside. Young stepmother swooping in while his parents' marriage collapsed.

What Evan didn't know, though, was that marriage had already been rotting from the inside. She'd seen it in David’s face the first night he'd sat at her bar, nursing a whiskey like it was his only friend. He hadn't needed much encouragement to start talking.

They'd hidden the worst of it from Evan, sure. Two parents trying to protect their kid. She got it. But it hadn't done him any favours when the relationship finally ended. He'd been sideswiped. And he blamed Stacy.

And if she was being honest, she'd never liked Evan either. He hovered. Judged. Sulked around the house like she was a permanent storm cloud parked over his childhood.

She'd counted the months until he moved out.

Now...

She opened her eyes again, staring at the faint outline of the bedroom dresser in the dark, knowing exactly whose clothes were neatly folded inside.

Now things were... complicated.

Her body finally started to loosen, exhaustion pulling her downward like warm water closing over her shoulders. Her breathing slowed. The ceiling fan blurred into background noise. The tension in her jaw softened.

Sleep began creeping in around the edges.

And then...

"Ow!"

The sharp twinge snapped across her lower back like someone had jabbed her with a needle. Stacy jerked upright with a hiss, clutching the spot instinctively.

The instant the pain flared, an image flashed through her mind.

Evan.

His stupid, confused, earnest face.

"Dammit," she muttered into the darkness.

This kept happening. Every time she started drifting off, something yanked her back awake. A cramp. A twitch. A sharp little stab somewhere inconvenient. And every single time, his face followed it like an unwanted pop-up ad in her brain.

It was obvious what the magic wanted.

Same room. Same bed.

Absolutely not.

Her anger surged, hot and steady, pushing back against the creeping fatigue. She flopped onto her other side with a frustrated grunt, jamming her pillow into a new position.

Her cheek pressed into fabric that smelled wrong. Well, not wrong, exactly. Just... different. Fresh. Clean. Slightly citrusy with some cheap masculine undertone she recognized instantly.

Evan's shampoo.

"Are you kidding me?" she groaned under her breath.

She grabbed the pillow and shoved it between her knees, trapping it there like she was physically restraining the scent from crawling into her nose.

Her mind drifted despite herself.

Back to the bar. The sticky floor. The neon beer signs buzzing faintly overhead. The clatter of glasses and half-heard conversations. It hadn't been her dream job, but the tips were good, and she knew how to keep people looking at her while they handed over their credit cards. That night she'd chosen her lucky black crop top and a tartan skirt. The tartan always pulled in big money. Older men, the usual big tippers, loved that kind of thing.

David had sat three stools down from the service station, shoulders slumped in an expensive suit. She remembered sliding a drink toward him before he even asked, reading the exhaustion in his eyes like it was written in block letters.

One drink became two.

Two became conversation.

Conversation became confessions.

By the time her break rolled around, they were already laughing too easily. By the time her shift ended, her panties were around her ankles. The back room had smelled like cleaning supplies and spilled beer, but she remembered the thrill of risk, the heat of bad decisions stacking up faster than common sense. His wedding ring had disappeared into his pocket sometime between apologies and promises neither of them had intended to keep.

A week later, his ex moved out.

A year later, Stacy walked down a beach aisle in a dress that had prioritized spectacle over tradition.

It hadn't been perfect, but it had been good. Stable. Upward. Her mother had always told her to marry up, and David had been the definition of up. Money. Looks. Confidence. Security. A man who knew what he wanted and made space for her inside it.

His ex-wife had been an idiot for letting him slip away.

Stacy's throat tightened.

And now she was the idiot who'd lost it all. Traded in for the junior member of the family.

"God," she whispered into the pillow, squeezing it tighter between her legs. "I'm married to a nineteen-year-old."

The words sounded ridiculous even in the privacy of the dark. She stared at the dim glow of the clock again.

2:41 a.m.

Maybe the potion would let her get a divorce.

The thought sparked something fragile and hopeful in her chest. A legal escape hatch. A loophole. Paperwork and signatures and judges who didn't care about mystical retail experiences.

She let out a small, humorless laugh and closed her eyes again, chasing the idea like it might lead her toward sleep.

Her breathing slowed.

Her muscles loosened.

She drifted.

Then...

A sharp, unmistakable pinch on her left ass cheek.

Stacy yelped and bolted upright, heart hammering, hand flying behind her instinctively.

And, like clockwork, Evan's face flashed across her mind again.

Clear. Immediate. Impossible to ignore.

"DAMMIT," she hissed into the empty room.