Hex

Chapter 7
Final

Chapter Description: A few weeks have passed since the ritual.

The sun was bright. Adam crawled all over the floor, exploring his new playground. It was a cold day in late November, but there was a fire in the fireplace and Nikki sat on the couch, reading a book. She had just changed Adam and let him explore. Nikki looked up to see that Adam had found her cell phone and put it in his mouth. Nikki laughed, “Tasty, huh?” It had taken Adam a few days, but he finally started to calm down. Nikki’s lease on her apartment was up a week ago, so she bought a fairly nice house. Nikki got up to take her cell phone from Adam. To both their surprise, the phone began to ring.

Terrified at the sudden vibration and the noise, Adam dropped the phone. He cried desperately. Nikki picked up the boy as she answered her phone, not bothering to check caller ID. “You scared my baby,” she answered. She jiggled Adam on her hip. That always worked whenever she wanted to calm him down.

“Nicole, is that you?” a familiar voice answered, one that Nikki had been avoiding. “Why, yes,” Nikki replied, “What can I do for you?” the voice answered immediately, “I just heard that you won the lottery...” Nikki waited for them to continue, but they did not, “Why, yes I did,” she responded, “but that was years ago, Shelly. You really need to get with the times.” There was a long pause before Shelly continued, “I was just wondering if you could lend me a few grand, I need...” Nikki hung up. This wasn’t worth her time.

“It’s story time, kid,” she told Adam as she brought him to the couch. “Once upon a time, there was a girl who went to school. This girl had many friends and relatives who treated her very nice. This all changed one day when the girl’s family went bankrupt and she couldn’t afford school anymore.” Nikki paused, obviously agitated, but Adam couldn’t tell; Nikki was warm and the sound of her sweet voice was a comfort to him.

“The girl got a part time job in retail. She had lost a lot of her friends who decided that since she wasn’t in school anymore, they didn’t want to hang out with her. The girl was depressed. She started to play the lottery in hopes that she’d win and turn her life around, which, to her joy and amazement, happened one day.” Adam continued to snuggle, obviously taking in none of it.

Nikki squeezed Adam. It was good to have someone who could listen to her who didn’t make her feel enraged about her scenario. She continued, “The girl got her family back on track, but that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted everything she had, so she ran away. The girl hadn’t considered going back to school until many years later. She was too old for school though. Everybody was younger than she was. The girl looked into anything that could restore her age to what it was before the disruption in her life.”

Adam’s stomach rumbled. Nikki grabbed his bottle of formula from the kitchen and gave it to him. “After a couple of years, she finally found an experimental drug on the black market. She tried out this drug and was able to restore her age. She reentered college, while doing so she looked for people with whom she could continue her life. Years of experience told her that all the men she was attracted to were fake, not worth the time or the effort, but still, she had to give it a shot. She missed having love in her life. She formed relationships with all kinds of men, only to confirm what she already knew; they didn’t love her, they were more interested in what she could do for them. Finally, the girl was about to give up on people for good, but she met a loner. Somebody who would not get close to anyone. She started to check him out.” Adam dropped his bottle. He started squirming.

“The guy was interesting, but he wasn’t her type.” Nikki continued, “No matter what she did, she couldn’t be interested in him. She knew that out of all the men she had encountered, this one was different, this one could love her. The girl was confused. Here was a man that was meant for her, but she could not love him. Desperately she pried into his life, finding out everything about this man, so she might develop some feeling for him. In the end, she found nothing.” Nikki squeezed Adam again, as she tried to let her sadness and frustration go.

“’This man would be better off if he could just restart his life’ she thought to herself. But as coincidence would have, she could do just exactly that for him. She’d noticed he looked rather cute as a baby, so she’d give him that opportunity. She set up a ruse for him to follow and secretly spiked his drink with a large dose of the experimental drug that she’d purchased. She suspected it would take some time before his mind fully dissipated to match his body, so she led him to believe she was a witch, and could undo what she had done. The man believed it, all the way to the end, right to the point where his mind dumped all that icky memory. The girl became attached to her friend after that. He made her feel comfortable and took the trouble away of making her have to adopt. There is a missing persons case that resulted from this story, but nobody is bothered by it.” She kissed Adam on his forehead and checked his diaper, which was clean.

“Nobody misses the man, and he fits in perfectly with his new mommy. Hopefully his mommy will find a man worthy to live her life with and she will give her friend the second chance he deserves.” Nikki grabbed a blanket and snuggled with Adam on the couch.

***

Little did she know, Nikki and Adam would never grow any older, such was the undocumented effect of the experimental drug. Nikki would find many men that she would love, but they all would all grow older than her. Having none of the drug she had bought years before, and being unable find it again, Nikki would have to leave each man before he grew too much older than her.

THE END