Magic Mansion by Jordan Price (best fiction books to read .txt) 📕

She considered putting her cigarettes away, then changed her mind and lit a second. “So what about Ricardo—is he your type?”

John looked to the invisible stars, and said, “I might not have thought so a few weeks ago.”

“But now he is. Wow. I didn’t pick up on that at all. Is it mutual?”

John thought briefly about what he stood to gain or lose by admitting it, and nodded.

“Then you’d better watch yourselves. Remember that guy on Genuine Friends who turned out to be gay? Once his whole past came out, they raked him over the coals for the rest of the season.”

True, but that participant had been dating a woman on the show, then was discovered to have done gay-for-pay Internet porn. That was different, intrinsically unsavory; the woman he was sleeping with felt deceived, violated and confused. Surely, two unattached gay men coming together simply because they were drawn to each other wouldn’t invoke the same condemnation?

Jia shook her head as if she’d lifted the whole rationalization right out of John’s mind, and said, “Maybe you can afford to throw caution to the wind—and given the way you don’t seem to be trying particularly hard, I’m guessing you agreed to get voted off before the end.”

“I agreed to nothing of the sort.” Though it had been implied, hadn’t it?

“Well, I’m pretty sure Ricardo didn’t, either. Kevin’s been going apeshit trying to figure out how to knock Ricardo out of the show before it comes down to the Final Four. So even if being outed doesn’t make any difference to you personally, there’s Ricardo’s career to consider.”

John reminded himself, as Jia said it, that Ricardo could very well win. Not only was he young and handsome, talented and charming—but he was a True magician. John looked down at Jia and sought her eyes, and she exhaled a stream of smoke and looked back at him. There was no Truth in her. Only ambition.

If Ricardo did take home the trophy, what then? Would he be free to go, or would he be obligated to continue living a sanitized persona where everyone essentially knew he was gay, but the subject would be tacitly avoided?

John and Casey had never needed to downplay their relationship. Neither of them had been famous enough to worry about sweeping the strides they’d made at Stonewall under the carpet by concealing their sexuality.

Magic Mansion’s victor wouldn’t be nearly as famous as the winners of, say, National Treasure—but within the magic community, whoever conquered the Mansion would be an instantaneous superstar.

A superstar who may or may not want to deal with the fumbling start of a publicly gay relationship.

Something to ponder, John supposed, as Jia finished her cigarette and they moved to rejoin their team.

___

“I did set construction both junior and senior years of high school,” Sue told Iain. “I won’t need some guy to run my circular saw.”

“Sorry,” Iain said, without sounding particularly sorry. “The word’s come down from on high. You guys don’t get to handle sharp objects bigger than a breadbox. Not after what happened in the garden.”

“C’mon, kiddo,” Muriel said, steering Sue into the Gold Team women’s dorm room. “Be thankful for small favors. It’s bad enough we need to draw up some kind of plan that’ll actually work.”

They piled into the room, five team members and a cameraman with a handheld, and proceeded to attempt to formulate a game plan. No actual construction could begin until morning, when a union carpenter would be on hand to work the power tools. But even though it was late, a majority of the planning would need to be done then and there, before some guy in a toolbelt was waiting for the Gold Team to give him orders. Besides, it wasn’t as if any of them could fall asleep without assembling and disassembling a Zig-Zag Cabinet in their mind until the wee hours of the morning. They might as well get it on paper.

Because Red Team sure as hell wasn’t waiting until morning.

Faye took the pad of paper they’d been given and split it into five parts so that everyone could sketch while they talked, and Ricardo handed out the pencils. They pulled a pair of beds closer and sat on the edges facing one another, three teammates on one side, two teammates and the cameraman on the other. The plain white paper on their laps formed a blank mosaic waiting to receive their ideas.

Muriel began by drawing a rectangle and dividing it in three. “I take it there’s some kind of frame involved. Maybe fitted with channels, like a dresser drawer. Something that’ll let the middle part slide over without flopping onto the floor.”

“Right,” Sue said. “They’ve got one of these at Magicopolis.” She reached over and drew a wide frame around Muriel’s rectangle. “But the frame is kind of thick, see? The eye doesn’t really pick up on the thickness. It just looks decorative, like it’s part of the design. But that’s where the assistant stands while the box is split up.”

Ricardo stared at the rectangles. They could have represented anything. A TV dinner. A medicine cabinet. Until Muriel drew a smiley face in the top section to indicate where the magician’s face would show through—though, as smiley faces went, it looked misshapen and perhaps a bit unsure of itself, with one eye higher than the other and a lopsided, lackluster smile.

Its expression seemed strangely apt. Ricardo was not currently experiencing the pinnacle of his own confidence. It was one thing to know how the trick worked. But it was something else entirely to figure out how to build it.

“So,” Faye said, “we need three boxes with fronts that can open and close, with cutouts for a hand, a foot and a face. We need the center to slide sideways on a track. And we need two channels to hold the blades.”

Overwhelm washed over Ricardo. He’d be lucky if he could put together a plain box and have the sides stay level and plumb, let