The 7 Secrets of Mr. Magpie Ch. 02

Part Two - Joy

The next seven months, I saw either Madi or Saffi once a week, and they always brought Alistair in tow with them. I felt bad for the guy at first, but after a few weeks, he began confessing every sin of his life to me until I told him to stop, and the guy was an endless well of shitty behavior. Nothing completely criminal, at least not that he confessed to me, but if there was any chance he could fuck someone over by making a decision, that was always what he was going to do.

He'd called ICE on the family maid because she'd turned down his advances and wouldn't fuck him. When his best friend got arrested because he was holding onto a bag with Alistair's drugs in it, Alistair claimed his best friend was a dealer to ensure that he personally didn't suffer any repercussions for his actions. And that was supposed his best fucking friend. He'd tormented and bullied kids at every school he'd ever gone to. He'd cheated on every girlfriend he'd ever had. It was like a neverending, bottomless pit of shit and cruelty. It made it much easier for me to tolerate his ever present observing eyes, even if I didn't like it. Some people are built to be an asshole, but that's not me.

Which, it turned out, was fine, because while Saffi mostly just wanted to ignore his presence, Madi absolutely enjoyed the shit out of punishing her ex-boyfriend. It felt like Alistair just became a stand in for every person who had ever treated her terribly in her life, and the fact that Alistair agreed that he deserved all of it and worse just seemed to push her to push him further and further into his shame and penance.

I tried going a week without calling either of the girls, just to see what would happen, and I thought I was getting away with it, but come that Saturday morning, they showed up at my house together and refused to let me turn them away until I'd used at least one of them. I thought about trying to push it, but when Saffi began stripping on my front porch, in what could've easily been in view of the neighbors if not for the hedges around my door, I ushered the three of them inside and gave in. It was the last time I tried arguing with them about it.

The strangest part of the whole thing was the way it all ended. The last time we had together, both Madi and Saffi were incredibly sweet to me, making a full day of it, taking loads of pictures and videos on my cellphone, even making Alistair work as a camera man in our own little private porno for a day. Instead of torturing Alistair, the two girls were focused on making sure we had a great time together, and Alistair just sort of drifted into the background, as if they wanted me to remember how good they were to me, instead of how horrible a shit Alistair was. The girls insisted on staying the night, curling up on either side of me as we all fell asleep.

When I woke in the morning, they were all gone, and true to their word, I haven't heard from them or even about them since. I tried doing some internet research - I'm not completely useless when it comes to those kinds of things - but after a day or so, it dawned on me... I didn't know anything about them for a fact.

I didn't know their last names, and, I realized, I didn't know that the names they'd given me when the showed up on my doorstep the first day were their actual names. I didn't know where they lived. Uber didn't give us records of passenger's names, and I hadn't remembered what Alistair's actual name was on the day, and now seven months had passed and I didn't have anything to go on.

The phone numbers were dead ends, and the lines had been disconnected. I even tried running reverse image searches on their faces, taken from some of the copious photos and videos they'd left me as mementos, but those turned up dry as well. There are nearly eight million people in the Bay Area, and I still have no idea of those three remain among them, or if they've since relocated back out into the wider world.

I wondered for a long while whatever became of them.

I still wonder.

As soon as the trio disappeared from my life, I started pondering when the next secret was going to drop, but it seemed like things went silent for a while. My life had gone through a number of changes during the months the girls had been in my life. I stopped driving for Uber when I began to find contract work for my skills as a modeler and animator again, maybe three months after Alistair had first appeared on my doorstep. Nothing permanent, mind you, but enough gigs here and there that I was making enough to keep my head above water, and that gave me the freedom to get away from the horrible model that Uber was presenting as a 'business' and not 'exploitation,' which it absolutely was. I'd done the math, and taking into account gas and mileage, Uber was paying less than minimum wage, generally. And Uber considered the wear and tear on my car as "my problem" not theirs. So fuck them for that. On top of that, some asshole had complained that I didn't have free bottles of water in my car, and rated me 1 star because of it. A single rating meant next to nothing, but it was yet another nail in the coffin after why I left. I could go on for hours, but I won't.

Despite how definitively I'd been sure that Mrs. Choi had gifted me some sort of magic, as the months passed with no second secret coming, I began to think that maybe it was all just one sort of weird, freaky coincidence.

God, looking back, I wish I hadn't been so complacent upfront. Or, maybe not complacent, I guess, but observant? Later on, I would know exactly when secrets were arriving, but at this point, I hadn't figured that out yet.

Her house, interestingly enough, hadn't sold yet, and I'd contacted her real estate agent to ask if he knew how to get in touch with her, and he said while he could pass on messages and mail to her if need be, he wasn't to give her new residence out to anyone, for privacy reasons. That irked me, even if I understood why.

Any answers I wanted regarding this were going to come on their own time, not on mine.

I did a little bit of research into the magpie nursery rhyme, but despite how well known the verse was (and how there were multiple versions of it), there wasn't a lot in terms of what any of it meant, beyond the fact that magpies were often considered bad luck, and that the number of them you saw had some sort of mystical importance.

I've always hated magic numbers.

As months turned into seasons, my obsession with the rhyme started to fade as I wondered if maybe that had been all there was to it, and that what I'd experienced was all there was to it. I'd later look back and think trying to write it off was a one-and-done was one of the stupidest things I'd done over the course of my life.

Nearly seven months after my last day with Madi, Saffi and Alistair, my second secret arrived.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was at home playing The Witcher 3 when there was a knock on my door. I debated not answering it, but the house is far up enough in the hills that generally someone at the door was either Amazon dropping off a package or a neighbor asking to borrow something. Very rarely it would be somebody's daughter or granddaughter trying to sell Girl Scout Cookies, but that seemed unlikely since it was January of 2016. (I can never remember when 'that time of year' is, no matter how much I enjoy the cookies.)

I stepped away from my Xbox One and headed to the door, opening it to find a very unexpected and highly familiar face on the other side, even if it was one I hadn't seen in almost a decade. "Freya?" I said, unsure of what the hell was going on.

"Hey Raf," she said, that easy going smile melting any resistance I had in second, as she pushed a long curly strand of blonde hair back over her shoulder. "Can I come in?"

Even though it had been nine years since I'd seen Freya Thompson, I wasn't ever going to forget her. I'm only 5'7", and Freya is a good foot taller than I am, even way back when. She never lorded it over me, but I always felt a little small next to her.

Freya had been my girlfriend my junior and senior years of college, and I'd hoped that we were going to stay together, but a few weeks after college graduation, she told me she had gotten a job offer in Copenhagen, and that she was going to take them up on it, even though we'd been talking about moving to California together.

We'd both been interviewing at a lot of Californian companies, and I knew she had offers from several companies in Los Angeles and in the San Francisco Bay Area, but she'd decided that being an investment banker in Denmark was what she wanted to do, and whatever she and I had (or what I thought we had, I guess) wasn't strong enough to keep her from that.

She broke up with me that night, and moved all her stuff out and over to her friend's place the next day. A week later, I had the offer from Arcadia Games, and I relocated from Chicago to Oakland in the summer of 2005, which put me only about an hour's drive away from my grandfather, Arturo, my Mom's dad. He and I became good friends, and when he passed away in 2010, he left me his house in the San Jose hills, which I moved into, somewhat cementing my home in the bay.

Freya and I hadn't spoken since the night she moved out.

"I, uh, yeah, sure, I guess?" I said, stepping in so that she could move into the house. "What the hell are you doing here? Shit, how did you even find me?"

She laughed a little bit, that joyous chiming sound like freshly fallen autumn leaves, as she moved into the house, heading towards the living room. "I originally came here to ask your grandfather if he knew where to find, so imagine my surprise when I found out you were living here now. I'm sorry he's gone, but he lived a good life. How old was he when he passed?"

"Ninety-two, although the neighbors thought he couldn't have been a day over seventy, even up to his last days," I said, looking her over.

Freya had put on a little weight, but it looked good on her, because back in college she'd been rail thin, and I'd always worried that she was starving herself. She had on a long navy summer skirt, loose and billowing, like it wanted to flap and dance in the wind, and a black top that left most of her arms and toned belly exposed, revealing a pierced navel, which was a new addition since I'd seen her last. She had a large satchel-like purse that could have easily concealed a small dog or a large handgun. Even with the heavy, chunky black rimmed glasses on her beautiful face, she looked more like a yoga instructor going out to visit a crafts fair than the corporate banking raider I suspected she still was. She still wore her natural blonde hair long, leaning slightly more towards curly than wavy but still mostly in that mid range. I also noticed a diamond ring on her finger with a stone large enough to have cost a small fortune for some lucky man.

"That's a good run," she said with a warm smile, her blue eyes still as bright and shining as ever. "So how have you been?"

"Some days are better than others," I said, quoting one of my favorite song lyrics at her. "I was funemployed for about half a year or so, but before that, I'd been with the same company since I moved out here. Now I've been getting regular contract work, but no steady employment, so good money, but no benefits and no job security. That's life in the games industry, though, I guess. I see you're doing well. That must have set your husband back quite a pretty penny."

"Fiancé, actually," she said with a slight pip of laughter. "And yes, I imagine it very much did, although I couldn't bring myself to ask. "You'd like him, Raf," she said, looking directly at me. "His name is Christof and he's originally from Germany. In fact, he's sort of the reason I'm here."

"Oh, how's that? We both know you haven't been hiding some secret love child from me all these years," I said, maybe a shade more bitterly than I would've liked.

When I was thirteen, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and to prevent it from spreading, they had removed one of my testes. I'd gone through a yearly screening since, but the cancer had never returned, and they felt comfortable declaring me cancer free. I'd had a prosthesis installed, so I felt more normal and appeared more normal, but the removal of one of my balls had lowered my sperm production significantly. While most men with only one testicle were able to father children, my doctor had repeatedly told me that it would be highly unlikely that I would be able to get a woman pregnant, as my one remaining testicle wasn't producing a normal amount of sperm.

I made peace with that when I was in high school.

It had been something of a sticking point between me and Freya, as she desperately wanted to be a mother, and I'd had to tell her about the medical problems that would probably keep me from being a father, without a lot of luck or a significant amount of medical help. The subject had only come up a couple of months before we'd graduated, and I always suspected it played a bigger part in our split than she wanted to let on.

"That's harsh," she said with a soft sigh. "Probably fair, but still harsh, I guess. I know it did have a bit of an impact on our relationship, but I couldn't pass up the job and that made more of a difference than anything else. And you were never going to move to Copenhagen, were you?"

"I dunno," I said with a sigh. "You never asked, did you?"

"I knew what the answer was going to be," she replied. "The video games industry doesn't have a good inroad into Denmark."

"I think by that point in our relationship, I deserved to be asked, don't you?"

She shrugged a little bit, but then nodded. "Looking back on it? Yeah, I made mistakes. I'll own that. I was young, and I was only thinking about myself, which wasn't fair to you. We were in a relationship, and I should've taken your feelings into account and I should've talked to you before I made any decision. It's easy to see that now, looking back, all the mistakes I made, like leaving and never calling or checking on how you were doing. You could've called me as well, though."

"By leaving without saying goodbye, you made it pretty clear you didn't want to talk to me ever again, so I was respecting your wishes," I told her.

"Everyone's an idiot at that age. We were just getting out of college," she said. "We weren't adults; we were barely more than giant toddlers."

"Why are you here, Freya?" I asked her, hoping I wasn't coming across as too rude, but this woman I'd spent two years emotionally invested in had left me without so much as a hug, and now, nearly a decade later, she had walked back into my life and acted like the break wasn't as big a deal as I remembered it being.

"So I'm getting married in a few weeks," she said. "And instead of having bachelor and bachelorette parties where we do all sorts of stupid shit as our friends goad us on, things we have to keep from one another, Christof and I came up with... something different. Can I just show you?"

I had no idea what she was talking about. "I mean, I guess? Am I going to be angry?"

"I truly don't know, Raf..." she sighed, reaching into her back to fish out her cellphone, a large screen iPhone. She unlocked it, tapped on it a few times, then stood up, walked over and held it out to me. "I hope not. Here."

I took the phone from her hand, and she remained standing there. On the screen there was a movie of her and the guy I assumed was her fiancé, Christof, sitting on a very expensive looking couch. At that point, I figured I should just watch the damn thing, so I pushed play, and the video started to play, with Christof speaking first.

"Hey, I'm Christof and this is my soon-to-be wife Freya, and we're recording this video for exactly two people - my high school sweetheart Lara, and Freya's college boyfriend Rafael. Hi Lara!"

"Hi Raf!" the video version of Freya said to me, waving.

"Before we get married, we wanted each of us to have one last taste of someone other than the person we're going to be with the rest of our lives, and so we wanted to go back to the best lover each of us had before now."

"For me, that's obviously you, Raf," she said to me on the video, "and for Christof, that's Lara. We're each going to have one night where we have anything goes sex, Lara with Christof and Raf with me, so that we don't enter our marriage with any regrets."

"It is sort of a one-night-only hall pass, I guess is the expression," Christof said, his voice lightly tinged with a German accent. "And it is not being unfaithful, because we both know about it. In fact, it is happening at the same moment."

"You see, while I'm playing the video for you, Raf, Christof is also playing this video for Lara, across the globe," video Freya said to me.

"And we are going to have a little competition," Christof said with a smile. "Who breaks first. You see, Freya and I have a bet, who is better at seducing. If I can convince Lara to touch me first, I win. If Freya can convince Raf to touch her first, she wins. The prize isn't of any concern to either of the two of you, but I do hope you'll give me a fighting chance, Raf."

"And I hope you won't make it easy on him, Lara," Freya's image said on the phone.

"Once it's settled, assuming you're both interested, both pairs can have up to twelve hours of no-holds-barred, whatever-you-want sex," Christof said, "as long as neither party gets bruised or broken, since we're getting married in a week, and a black eye or bruising around the throat wouldn't be a good look for that."

"Most importantly, it's just sex," Freya's recording said. "No need for emotional attachments or worrying about saying the wrong thing, because there are no consequences for you afterwards, for either of you."

"Neither of you have been part of our lives for quite some time now," Christof's image said to me, and to this Lara person, somewhere else in the world, I guess. "So neither of you are invited to the wedding, but if you want to be friends again after this, that would be just fine. On the other hand, if you want us to disappear from your lives again, we will both happily do that as well."

"Just think, Lara," Freya's voice on the video said. "You can do whatever you want to with him, however you want to. Anything he didn't want to try back in high school, it will be a joy for him to do."

Joy? I thought for just a moment before nodding in silent recognition. Right. Two for joy.

"And the same for Freya, Raf," Christof told me. "She's always spoken fondly of you as a partner, but I know she has a couple of hangups, and I bet you'd take great joy in making her get past them. This is your chance for that."

I knew what he was talking about, of course, because as much fun as Freya had been, she'd also been something of a prude in the bedroom, wanting to stick to just a couple of basic positions, and never once giving me head while asking for it all the time. When I heard the Chris Rock bit about women who don't give head - "They still make you?!" he'd said - it clicked with me hard. Hell, she didn't even like doggy position the couple of times we tried it. Missionary and cowgirl were her two speeds and damned be asking for anything else.

"Just remember, Christof and I have a wager riding on this, so the longer you can resist, the better it'll be for the winner. We can touch you, but can't take any of your clothes off without your permission, and as soon as one of you two touches your partner sexually, that person loses. So hold out as long as you can," Freya's video double said. "And thank you for giving us a chance at closure, with one last night of intense passion. Give him hell, Lara! Good luck!"