Allison looked down the long, dark corridor and trembled. She knew that he might come back any minute. She reached up to her neck and touched the crucifix, reassuring herself that it was still there. He seemed to be afraid of it, although she wasn't sure whether his fear was real or just a way to lure her into a false sense of security. She knew she couldn't count on the things she'd seen in vampire movies to protect her from him. She'd already seen him walking around in broad daylight.
He'd seemed so charming and debonair when she --
* * *
Garbage, thought Jeremy morosely. A single paragraph and it's already garbage. Vampires. Bleah. And a charming, debonair vampire at that. Double bleah.
* * *
Allison looked down the long, dark corridor and trembled. It seemed to stretch before her endlessly, although she couldn't see very far. The torch in her hand cast a small pool of light perhaps five feet ahead of her, that diminished quickly and before long gave way to utter and complete blackness.
She walked forward slowly, straining to see, to hear, to feel whatever may be ahead of her. She had no clear idea of where she was, whether she was still in the basement of the old abandoned hospital or whether she'd wandered into one of the tunnels that connected it with the other buildings that once made up a busy medical complex. She had no idea where Rick was, or even if he was still on the site at all. Perhaps the whole thing had been Rick's idea of a sick joke, talking her into exploring here, getting her lost and then abandoning her.
No, Rick wouldn't do that, she told herself. He did have a sick sense of humor sometimes, and she had to admit that he even had a mean streak when it came to enjoying pranks and the like, but she was pretty sure he wouldn't have done that. She had just been stupid and had gotten herself lost. He was looking for her now, she was sure, and she just hoped he didn't get lost himself. That way, if he didn't find her, he could go get help. She had a feeling she was going to need help.
* * *
Much better. He still had no idea of who Allison was, but he had some idea of where she was. He didn't know if the old City Hospital -- which was being turned into condos now after sitting empty for a couple of decades -- really had tunnels underneath it or not. He knew the Barnes-Jewish complex on Kingshighway did, a whole network of them on two different levels underground. And he knew that City Hospital had been both added to and augmented by several other buildings nearby, just as Barnes and Jewish Hospitals had become a complex of half a dozen different locations within a few blocks of each other, so it made sense that they would have been connected in the same way.
So he knew now that his story was set sometime in the last 20 years, in the empty City Hospital complex, in the possibly imaginary complex of tunnels underneath the hospital connecting the different buildings, and that his heroine was carrying a torch, lost in those tunnels. But what was she doing there?
* * *
"C'mon, it'll be fun."
She should have known better. So many problematic "adventures," even a few near disasters, had started with Rick uttering those words. It's true that he had also proposed outrageous sounding things that had, as it turned out, indeed been fun. But it only takes one really bad day to ruin your whole life. They both knew that. Rick's best friend Bobby had been paralyzed from the neck down when he crashed his car into a tree after a night of drinking. "C'mon, it'll be fun," he had no doubt said before heading to the bar on the east side he'd been returning from.
She'd suspected that what Rick really wanted was to get her alone in the dark, but while that was almost certainly on his mind (she knew from experience that sex was seldom very far away from Rick's conscious mind), it certainly hadn't been all he'd been thinking about. He had a genuine desire to explore the place. They'd found several rooms that seemed to have been recently inhabited, some with mattresses, some with evidence of fire, lots of trash and graffiti and drug paraphernalia of various kinds, but they didn't run into any other actual people.
The elevators hadn't worked of course, and indeed even Rick was smart enough to stay away from them, because they saw from pretty far away that some of the doors opened onto empty shafts.
* * *
Wait a minute. Did he say "torch" earlier? He'd been thinking Dungeons and Dragons, then, like Allison was a character in a D&D game working her way down a dungeon tunnel. Why would she have a torch? He went back and changed it to "flashlight." Then he continued.
* * *
They'd gone up as high as the third floor, but she wasn't going to climb all the way up to the 8th or 10th or however high it went. She knew it wasn't as tall as Queeny Tower at Barnes, but it looked plenty big from outside, and she wasn't interested in going any further up. Rick reluctantly agreed. He seemed to want to explore the whole building.
"You never know what we might find, Ally"
"Rick, look at this place. People have been here. Maybe hundreds of people. Homeless people. Junkies. If there was anything of value left behind, they'd have taken it long ago."
Rick shrugged. Facts and reason seemed to run off him like water off a duck's back.
It had been his idea to try the basement, and when confronted with a bunch of different tunnels leading in different directions, it was Rick who pointed out that they'd get "done" faster (whatever "getting done" meant to him) if they split up. Each one should go forward for 500 paces or until he or she found something interesting, or came to a dead end, whichever came first, and then come back here and meet the other one. If they found something interesting, they'd investigate it together.
Except her tunnel had branched, and branched again, and then again, and she thought she'd kept track of which way she'd gone, but when she tried to backtrack she couldn't find the place where she'd left Rick.
She was lost.
* * *
Jeremy stopped. He had no idea where to go. His burst of inspiration had suddenly dried up. He shook his head, put his fingers back on the keyboard, but nothing happened.
What kind of story did he want to tell?
No, he realized. That wasn't the question. The question was, what kind of story did this want to be.
* * *
Suddenly, she heard a moan from up ahead. She rushed forward, thinking she had found Rick at last and he had hurt himself.
But it wasn't Rick.
She came out of the corridor into a large open area. Her pitiful flashlight beam barely penetrated into the gloom. But it didn't have to. In the middle of the room, perhaps fifteen feet away from her was a glowing white figure, something that twisted her stomach in knots and made the hair on her arms and neck stand up straight. It was vaguely of human shape, but it wasn't human. She wasn't sure it ever had been. Whatever it was was making the sound that she'd mistaken for moaning, but it wasn't issuing from a mouth that she could see. The creature didn't have a recognizable face, just a mass of dripping, oozing tissue that defied description. Her mouth opened to scream, but no sound came out. She was frozen with terror, unable to move a muscle, unable to even breathe.
It came towards her, and then she did scream.
* * *
Jeremy got up and walked away from the computer. He crossed over to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out a beer, and drank half of it. He felt tired and drained yet at the same time energized and exhilarated. It had been more than a year since he had written anything creative, and here he had written three poems and the beginnings of a short story in just . . .
"What time is it, anyway?" Jeremy wondered. He looked at the clock and was suprised to see that it was past midnight. He'd been writing for 12 hours straight. It seemed like just 2 or 3 hours.
Now that he'd stepped away, though, he realized he was hungry. Starving. He took out a frozen dinner and popped it into the microwave. While it cooked, he finished his beer. He had no idea where this story was going. He was literally making it up as he went along. Part of him knew he should go to bed soon, probably he should just eat and go to bed and get a fresh start tomorrow. But another part of him felt like he needed to keep going, that if he quit now he'd wake up tomorrow with no idea where to take the story next and it would just die, never to be finished.
He ate his meal, looking over the poems he'd written earlier, scratching out some words and replacing them with others, marking other places for future revision. The first one was the best, and by the time he finished he was almost satisfied with it. There was still a problem with the turn, though.
He finished eating, washing it down with the last of his second beer. The moment of decision had come. Bed or more story?
* * *
The glowing creature stopped, and it's head -- or at least the lumpen mass that stood up in the middle where it's head should be -- tilted a bit, as if it was regarding her quizzically. It moaned louder. Allison screamed and screamed. The noise seemed to keep the creature at bay, and she was desperately afraid of what would happen when she ran out of breath. She suddenly realized there was another tunnel behind her. It wasn't the way she came, she had no idea where it led, but wherever it led was away from the . . . ghost? monster? Whatever it was, she wanted to get away from it. Still screaming, she turned an ran into the darkness.
She hadn't gone far before she realized that she was running blind, the tunnel so dark she couldn't see the walls or floor, could barely detect her own hand held inches from her face. She looked back and saw the glowing creature in the doorway -- looking at her? She had apparently dropped her flashlight back in the room or hall or lobby or whatever it was. Well, she wasn't going back for it.
She moved to the right-hand wall and put her hand on it, using it to stabilize her balance as well as inform her steps. She walked more slowly now. The creature didn't seem to be following her, its glow receding into the distance behind, so speed became less important than not tripping and falling. She still moved fairly quickly, though, and turned back every few steps to make sure, though, that the glow stayed in the doorway, and kept getting smaller.
What she needed was a stairway. She needed to go back up to ground level, get the hell out of here. With Rick or without him. She wasn't sticking around to look for him.
What if there were more of them? What if Rick had already run into one? What if there was another one up ahead the way she was going? She shivered. Don't think about that, she told herself. Just keep walking, one step, two steps, three steps, four.
The moan came louder. She turned back. Oh, God. It was coming toward her, down the hallway. She started moving faster, finally breaking into a run, not caring if she fell and broke her ankle, because if it caught her . . .
Well, she didn't even know what it might do if it caught her, but she knew she didn't want to find out.
* * *
Jeremy stopped. He deleted everything back to Allison's scream. Continuing had been a mistake. He'd start fresh tomorrow morning. He shut down his laptop and went to bed.
* * *
That night, he dreamed the rest of the story, in vivid detail. He knew exactly what the creature was, and it was not a monster but a tragic ghost whose story, when she heard it, tore at Allison's heart, so that she resolved to do what she could to help lay this creature to rest, and with Rick's reluctant help she would solve a 50-year-old murder mystery, and finally in the end lay an old photograph of the ghost's lost love on his grave.
He woke up in a fever and finished the story, typing from 2 or 3 in the morning (he didn't notice the time when he got up) until past the dawn and on until noon - 24 hours of writing with only one break for food and a couple of hours sleep. But when he was done he knew -- he knew -- he had his first salable story, one so much better than anything else he'd ever written that it made him blush to think he'd thought of himself as a writer before. He hooked his laptop up to the printer and started printout out the story.
It still needed cleaning up, he knew. Rick was an empty cipher of a character up until near the end, where he finally started to develop a real personality. He'd need to go back and put some hints of that personality in the character from the beginning. Otherwise, Allison ending up with him seemed forced and false -- the reader wouldn't want her to end up with a lunkhead like Rick seemed to be early on.
Still, the story was strong. Definitely the best he'd ever written.
He wanted to show it to someone. Actually, he wanted to show it to Liliana, but that was of course out of the question. He had no way to call her, and besides, it was the middle of the day. He wouldn't yet admit to himself yet that she wasn't an ordinary human being, but he couldn't deny the evidence of his senses, which told him that she only turned up at night.
"Maybe she's a vampire," he joked with himself. Whoever and whatever she was, he was sure Liliana was no vampire. She'd had plenty of chances already if she'd wanted to suck his blood.
No, what Liliana was was a muse. Not necessarily a real muse, like some immortal creature from ancient Greece who had waved some magic wand and inspired him to write, but in some fashion it seemed clear that her coming into his life almost had to be related somehow to this burst of creativity.
Just that quickly, as soon as his thoughts turned towards her, Jeremy began to miss her terribly. He longed for her, ached for her. He walked over to the park, even though the last time she had been in his apartment and he didn't really expect to see her in the daytime anyway. He just had to do something that would at least provide the comforting illusion that he was doing something toward getting her back into his life.
As he expected, she wasn't there, but he felt comforted, nevertheless, as he sat on the rock where they had met and stared out over the pond. It seemed placid and serene today, untouched by wind or trouble.
He went home and made himself a supper and went to bed early, feeling like he'd just done a week's hard labor in a single day, which in a way he had. He didn't see Liliana that night, either in person or in his dreams.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Chapter 9 - Apprehension
When Jeremy woke up the next morning, she was gone, nothing but the empty foil condom packets on his bedside indicating she had ever been there.
That, and the fact that his apartment was clean.
But it wasn't, exactly, he realized as he moved about after showering and getting dressed. She had taken all the trash and dirty dishes off the coffee table, had washed the dishes and glasses and cups and put them all away, but the silverware was still sitting there, untouched. The dirty pots and pans in the kitchen hadn't been cleaned, either.
On the other hand, the things she did clean were all put away exactly where they belonged. Even the salt and pepper shakers, which he'd left on the coffee table, weren't on the dining table, where he knew most people kept them, but on the back of the stove, where he kept them because he sometimes used them while cooking. How had she known that?
Silverware. Cooking pots. And she hadn't cleaned the stove, although she'd cleaned most of the kitchen. She seemed to have something against metal. He'd have to remember that.
But wait -- the necklace he'd bought her. It was metal. Silver. She seemed to like that. She'd been wearing it last night, the only thing she wore.
He suddenly realized he hadn't seen her clothes anywhere. They hadn't been on the floor by the bed. Had they been on a chair or dresser? He tried to remember, but couldn't.
Cold iron. He suddenly remembered the phrase from some fantasy novels he'd read. Some of them spoke of "faeries" -- spelled that way to differentiate them from the silly creatures of fairy tales -- mysterious creatures from another world, like a parallel universe, next door to ours, a magical place. Sometimes they were called "the fey" as well, but one thing all the books agreed on: they couldn't abide cold iron.
"That's silly," he told himself. "Liliana isn't a fairy." She didn't have wings, to begin with, and was five and a half feet tall. Of course, the faeries in those books were normal sized and wingless, also.
But those were fantasies, made up stuff. Of course, the books couldn't all agree if they weren't based on something real. Not necessarily that faeries were real, mind you, but there must really be folk tales or the like where such creatures were described in such a way that the characters in stories based on them tended to be similar to each other.
But . . . could there be faeries? Could he have met one? Could he be in love with one? It seemed not only impossible, but ludicrous.
It did explain some things that seemed to defy easy explanation. But he hadn't seen any real "magic," had he? Nothing impossible, or even anything so improbable as to demand such an outrageous explanation. So she talked a bit weird, and acted a bit weird, and there didn't seem to be any record of her existence in the databases that track most people. There were a lot of people who weren't in those databases. Most celebrities and criminals weren't there. You could have yourself removed from them, if you asked persistently enough. Some ordinary folks were paranoid enough to do that, right?
He refused to believe that his lover was a creature from another world. The whole idea was ridiculous.
Having thought about it, however, he couldn't completely shake the idea, either. It kept coming back to him at odd moments. And he kept dismissing it, but kept having this nagging feeling in the back of his skull that there was something . . .
He wouldn't even allow himself to finish the thought. Or rather, he tried not to, but words came unbidden: strange. odd. weird. inhuman.
"Stop it," he told himself. His girlfriend was not a fairy.
But could he really say that she was his girlfriend? He didn't know where she lived or her phone number or how to contact her -- he wasn't even sure of her name. It's true that he had slept with her twice (more in you count acts of lovemaking, possibly less if you took it literally, since he didn't know if she really "slept" either time). But he didn't know right now if he would ever see her again. He thought he would. He certainly hoped he would. But he just didn't know.
Jeremy decided that what he wanted to do was write a sonnet for Liliana. He sat down and thought about it, played around with a couple of rhyme schemes, came up with a couple of ideas for first line and last line, thought about whether he wanted to structure it as a Petrarchan, English or Shakespearean sonnet (he settled on Petrarchan, wrote out a first draft that had some good lines and two he'd definitely need to fix later, all in one long burst of energy. He put it aside, wanting to let it percolate before coming back to give it another go.
Would she like it? Would he even show it to her. Assuming that he ever saw her again, he really had no idea at this point. He just felt suddenly creative. Her wrote another sonnet for Liliana, then another poem, a lyrical place-setting poem about the ruins by the fountain lake. He didn't think he'd written three poems in one day since his college days, at least -- probably not since high school, and that stuff was drivel.
Of course, it was entirely possible that he'd look back on this as drivel a few years hence. He certainly knew that he was in the grip of some unusual emotion right now. He didn't know exactly what was going on, but he decided he should ride it while he could.
He sat down and started a short story. He'd tried writing short stories and novels before. He'd started half a dozen novels -- one of them three times -- but had never gotten very far. Well, once he'd made it about a hundred pages into a novel, but it was just meandering around without direction. He had no clear idea where it was going when it just sort of petered out.
He'd written several short stories, again going back to high school days. He'd sent a couple of them to magazines, but none of them had ever been accepted. One of them made the rounds of four different magazines before he gave up on it. He had just assumed that he didn't have what it takes to be a real writer. Oh, sure, he had had a few things published. Some poetry in his college literary magazine, some book reviews in the local newspaper and in a few small magazines that paid in copies. But he didn't think of that as writing. That was just stringing sentences together coherently, which was a useful skill, especially because it seemed increasingly rare in today's world, but to Jeremy real writing was fiction, or perhaps history or biography. Telling stories.
Jeremy had wanted to be a storyteller since he was a little boy. But his stories had long ago dried up. He didn't know what happened. Once upon a time, he'd been full of imagination, stories seemed to burst out of him. When he was eight years old, he learned in school about the water cycle, and was supposed to turn in a paper showing that he understood how the cycle worked. Instead of a dry recitation of the facts, he turned in "Sammy the Sea Drop," which told the story of how Sammy one day found himself evaporating into water vapor and rising up into the sky to become part of a cloud, and then fell as rain down onto the earth, and made his way into a river and finally out to sea again. In high school, he had written a story a week for nine weeks as part of an experimental English class in science fiction, along with reading stories and novels and writing book reports on them.
What had happened to all that energy and creativity? Somehow over the years it had just dissipated, like the air going slowly out of a balloon. But today, Jeremy felt like it was back.
He opened up his laptop, and instead of turning on the television or firing up his web browser, he just opened up his word processor and started writing. He had no idea where he was going, what he was going to write about. All he had to start with was an opening sentence:
"Alison looked down the long, dark corridor and trembled."
Why was she trembling? Where was the corridor? Who was Alison? He had no idea. All the books about writing that he'd read since his younger days told him that he needed to plan these things out, figuring out where he was going before he took off willy-nilly. But today, he just started typing, not caring whether what he wrote was good or bad, not having any idea of showing it to anyone, much less sending it off to be published. He wanted to find out himself the answer to the questions, and instead of working them out and then writing he decided to answer them by writing about it.
That, and the fact that his apartment was clean.
But it wasn't, exactly, he realized as he moved about after showering and getting dressed. She had taken all the trash and dirty dishes off the coffee table, had washed the dishes and glasses and cups and put them all away, but the silverware was still sitting there, untouched. The dirty pots and pans in the kitchen hadn't been cleaned, either.
On the other hand, the things she did clean were all put away exactly where they belonged. Even the salt and pepper shakers, which he'd left on the coffee table, weren't on the dining table, where he knew most people kept them, but on the back of the stove, where he kept them because he sometimes used them while cooking. How had she known that?
Silverware. Cooking pots. And she hadn't cleaned the stove, although she'd cleaned most of the kitchen. She seemed to have something against metal. He'd have to remember that.
But wait -- the necklace he'd bought her. It was metal. Silver. She seemed to like that. She'd been wearing it last night, the only thing she wore.
He suddenly realized he hadn't seen her clothes anywhere. They hadn't been on the floor by the bed. Had they been on a chair or dresser? He tried to remember, but couldn't.
Cold iron. He suddenly remembered the phrase from some fantasy novels he'd read. Some of them spoke of "faeries" -- spelled that way to differentiate them from the silly creatures of fairy tales -- mysterious creatures from another world, like a parallel universe, next door to ours, a magical place. Sometimes they were called "the fey" as well, but one thing all the books agreed on: they couldn't abide cold iron.
"That's silly," he told himself. "Liliana isn't a fairy." She didn't have wings, to begin with, and was five and a half feet tall. Of course, the faeries in those books were normal sized and wingless, also.
But those were fantasies, made up stuff. Of course, the books couldn't all agree if they weren't based on something real. Not necessarily that faeries were real, mind you, but there must really be folk tales or the like where such creatures were described in such a way that the characters in stories based on them tended to be similar to each other.
But . . . could there be faeries? Could he have met one? Could he be in love with one? It seemed not only impossible, but ludicrous.
It did explain some things that seemed to defy easy explanation. But he hadn't seen any real "magic," had he? Nothing impossible, or even anything so improbable as to demand such an outrageous explanation. So she talked a bit weird, and acted a bit weird, and there didn't seem to be any record of her existence in the databases that track most people. There were a lot of people who weren't in those databases. Most celebrities and criminals weren't there. You could have yourself removed from them, if you asked persistently enough. Some ordinary folks were paranoid enough to do that, right?
He refused to believe that his lover was a creature from another world. The whole idea was ridiculous.
Having thought about it, however, he couldn't completely shake the idea, either. It kept coming back to him at odd moments. And he kept dismissing it, but kept having this nagging feeling in the back of his skull that there was something . . .
He wouldn't even allow himself to finish the thought. Or rather, he tried not to, but words came unbidden: strange. odd. weird. inhuman.
"Stop it," he told himself. His girlfriend was not a fairy.
But could he really say that she was his girlfriend? He didn't know where she lived or her phone number or how to contact her -- he wasn't even sure of her name. It's true that he had slept with her twice (more in you count acts of lovemaking, possibly less if you took it literally, since he didn't know if she really "slept" either time). But he didn't know right now if he would ever see her again. He thought he would. He certainly hoped he would. But he just didn't know.
Jeremy decided that what he wanted to do was write a sonnet for Liliana. He sat down and thought about it, played around with a couple of rhyme schemes, came up with a couple of ideas for first line and last line, thought about whether he wanted to structure it as a Petrarchan, English or Shakespearean sonnet (he settled on Petrarchan, wrote out a first draft that had some good lines and two he'd definitely need to fix later, all in one long burst of energy. He put it aside, wanting to let it percolate before coming back to give it another go.
Would she like it? Would he even show it to her. Assuming that he ever saw her again, he really had no idea at this point. He just felt suddenly creative. Her wrote another sonnet for Liliana, then another poem, a lyrical place-setting poem about the ruins by the fountain lake. He didn't think he'd written three poems in one day since his college days, at least -- probably not since high school, and that stuff was drivel.
Of course, it was entirely possible that he'd look back on this as drivel a few years hence. He certainly knew that he was in the grip of some unusual emotion right now. He didn't know exactly what was going on, but he decided he should ride it while he could.
He sat down and started a short story. He'd tried writing short stories and novels before. He'd started half a dozen novels -- one of them three times -- but had never gotten very far. Well, once he'd made it about a hundred pages into a novel, but it was just meandering around without direction. He had no clear idea where it was going when it just sort of petered out.
He'd written several short stories, again going back to high school days. He'd sent a couple of them to magazines, but none of them had ever been accepted. One of them made the rounds of four different magazines before he gave up on it. He had just assumed that he didn't have what it takes to be a real writer. Oh, sure, he had had a few things published. Some poetry in his college literary magazine, some book reviews in the local newspaper and in a few small magazines that paid in copies. But he didn't think of that as writing. That was just stringing sentences together coherently, which was a useful skill, especially because it seemed increasingly rare in today's world, but to Jeremy real writing was fiction, or perhaps history or biography. Telling stories.
Jeremy had wanted to be a storyteller since he was a little boy. But his stories had long ago dried up. He didn't know what happened. Once upon a time, he'd been full of imagination, stories seemed to burst out of him. When he was eight years old, he learned in school about the water cycle, and was supposed to turn in a paper showing that he understood how the cycle worked. Instead of a dry recitation of the facts, he turned in "Sammy the Sea Drop," which told the story of how Sammy one day found himself evaporating into water vapor and rising up into the sky to become part of a cloud, and then fell as rain down onto the earth, and made his way into a river and finally out to sea again. In high school, he had written a story a week for nine weeks as part of an experimental English class in science fiction, along with reading stories and novels and writing book reports on them.
What had happened to all that energy and creativity? Somehow over the years it had just dissipated, like the air going slowly out of a balloon. But today, Jeremy felt like it was back.
He opened up his laptop, and instead of turning on the television or firing up his web browser, he just opened up his word processor and started writing. He had no idea where he was going, what he was going to write about. All he had to start with was an opening sentence:
"Alison looked down the long, dark corridor and trembled."
Why was she trembling? Where was the corridor? Who was Alison? He had no idea. All the books about writing that he'd read since his younger days told him that he needed to plan these things out, figuring out where he was going before he took off willy-nilly. But today, he just started typing, not caring whether what he wrote was good or bad, not having any idea of showing it to anyone, much less sending it off to be published. He wanted to find out himself the answer to the questions, and instead of working them out and then writing he decided to answer them by writing about it.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Chapter 8 - A Sending
Jeremy went back to the park every night, sometimes just for a walk around the pond, sometimes to stay and wait to see if she would show up. Sometimes he knew she wouldn't be there. Sometimes he thought maybe she would be.
He got stopped once for loitering after curfew, but he was just given a warning. Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night.
Friday night he thought about the fact that last Friday he had missed her, and how guilty and angry with himself he had been about it, certain he had blown every chance with her, and how unbelievably she'd proved him wrong about that the very next night. He was an emotional wreck, bouncing back and forth between being depressed that he hadn't seen her in so long (every hour without her had become a week, and five days had been an endless torment that showed no signs of letting up), and being angry with her for treating him this way. He wanted to give her a piece of his mind. He wanted to . . .
He sat down on the stone near the archway where they'd first met. What he wanted, he knew, was to hold her, to kiss her, to make love to her again. Even just to hold her in his arms. Even if she said up front that that was all, no sex, not even kissing, just to hold each other, that would be enough.
Well, of course, it wouldn't be enough, but it would be considerably better than nothing, which is what Jeremy had now.
He sat quietly, and tried to banish these tempestuous thoughts from his head, tried to calm himself. He crossed his legs as he'd been taught in a yoga class he took back in college, balanced his hands on his knees, sat up with his back straight, head held high, and closed his eyes. Deep breath in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, deep breath out, 2, 3 4, 5, 6, deep breath in, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, deep breath out, yes, calm, quiet, restful, counting, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 --
"Jeremy, go home."
His eyes snapped open. He was all alone, sitting on a stone, no one was anywhere near him. Yet he had heard distinctly, Liliana's voice whispering in his ear. He had been positive she had been there, right beside him. He could have sworn he'd even felt her breath on the side of his face.
He shook his head. This was all getting way too weird. He looked around, even sheepishly looked under a nearby bush, just to make sure she wasn't nearby playing a trick on him. He'd had a lifetime's worth of pretty girls making fun of him in 8th grade.
There was no doubt about it. Liliana wasn't there. But she had spoken to him, clearly and distinctly, and even if she hadn't, it was probably time to go anyway.
All the way home, he'd tried to figure out what had happened. She'd said that women read minds. Did that mean she could send her thoughts to him by way of telepathy? Was she taking pity on him? Was she aware somehow that he'd been going to the pond every night? She'd said the first night that she'd been watching him. He still didn't understand exactly what that meant.
Jeremy wasn't a superstitious guy, but enough weird things had been happening that it unnerved him when he turned onto his street in time to see a black cat saunter across it, right underneath a streetlight, leaving no doubt as to the fact that it wasn't a mostly black cat with a little white her and there but a coal black silent Halloween cat, crossing his path with trouble.
"Great," thought Jeremy, "just what I need."
But perhaps the cat was harbinger of some other kind of luck altogether, he thought later, because he felt something, some electric charge in the air, as soon as he entered his apartment building. He found himself running up the stairs eagerly, fumbling for his keys and throwing open the door as if in expectation of something he had waited for without knowing what it was.
The apartment was quiet, but . . . different. He couldn't put his finger on it.
And then he could, and the obviousness made him feel an oblivious moron for not noticing it right away. The apartment was clean. The microwave pizza box he'd used as a plate the night before because all the plates were dirty was gone from the coffee table, the cups and plates and knives and forks all vanished from the living room, the "dining area" table and the counter between that and the kitchen. His heart thumping, he didn't even dare imagine what else he might find.
"Jeremy?"
The voice came from his bedroom. He rushed in, and there she was, naked in the moonlight, arms held out to welcome him.
He didn't ask how she got into his locked apartment, or why she didn't call or where she'd been all week. A part of him knew that these were really important questions that shouldn't be ignored, that he was just asking for trouble down the road if he accepted this situation as it was, without probing and analyzing and trying to find out what was going on. But it was all he could do to keep from literally ripping his clothes off and taking her without even a word of greeting, so fierce was the longing inside of him. He reached out for her with something like a sob, and held her long in his arms saying only "Thank you," over and over again.
It wasn't until much, much later that he thought that maybe the black cat might have been a warning, after all.
He got stopped once for loitering after curfew, but he was just given a warning. Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night.
Friday night he thought about the fact that last Friday he had missed her, and how guilty and angry with himself he had been about it, certain he had blown every chance with her, and how unbelievably she'd proved him wrong about that the very next night. He was an emotional wreck, bouncing back and forth between being depressed that he hadn't seen her in so long (every hour without her had become a week, and five days had been an endless torment that showed no signs of letting up), and being angry with her for treating him this way. He wanted to give her a piece of his mind. He wanted to . . .
He sat down on the stone near the archway where they'd first met. What he wanted, he knew, was to hold her, to kiss her, to make love to her again. Even just to hold her in his arms. Even if she said up front that that was all, no sex, not even kissing, just to hold each other, that would be enough.
Well, of course, it wouldn't be enough, but it would be considerably better than nothing, which is what Jeremy had now.
He sat quietly, and tried to banish these tempestuous thoughts from his head, tried to calm himself. He crossed his legs as he'd been taught in a yoga class he took back in college, balanced his hands on his knees, sat up with his back straight, head held high, and closed his eyes. Deep breath in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, deep breath out, 2, 3 4, 5, 6, deep breath in, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, deep breath out, yes, calm, quiet, restful, counting, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 --
"Jeremy, go home."
His eyes snapped open. He was all alone, sitting on a stone, no one was anywhere near him. Yet he had heard distinctly, Liliana's voice whispering in his ear. He had been positive she had been there, right beside him. He could have sworn he'd even felt her breath on the side of his face.
He shook his head. This was all getting way too weird. He looked around, even sheepishly looked under a nearby bush, just to make sure she wasn't nearby playing a trick on him. He'd had a lifetime's worth of pretty girls making fun of him in 8th grade.
There was no doubt about it. Liliana wasn't there. But she had spoken to him, clearly and distinctly, and even if she hadn't, it was probably time to go anyway.
All the way home, he'd tried to figure out what had happened. She'd said that women read minds. Did that mean she could send her thoughts to him by way of telepathy? Was she taking pity on him? Was she aware somehow that he'd been going to the pond every night? She'd said the first night that she'd been watching him. He still didn't understand exactly what that meant.
Jeremy wasn't a superstitious guy, but enough weird things had been happening that it unnerved him when he turned onto his street in time to see a black cat saunter across it, right underneath a streetlight, leaving no doubt as to the fact that it wasn't a mostly black cat with a little white her and there but a coal black silent Halloween cat, crossing his path with trouble.
"Great," thought Jeremy, "just what I need."
But perhaps the cat was harbinger of some other kind of luck altogether, he thought later, because he felt something, some electric charge in the air, as soon as he entered his apartment building. He found himself running up the stairs eagerly, fumbling for his keys and throwing open the door as if in expectation of something he had waited for without knowing what it was.
The apartment was quiet, but . . . different. He couldn't put his finger on it.
And then he could, and the obviousness made him feel an oblivious moron for not noticing it right away. The apartment was clean. The microwave pizza box he'd used as a plate the night before because all the plates were dirty was gone from the coffee table, the cups and plates and knives and forks all vanished from the living room, the "dining area" table and the counter between that and the kitchen. His heart thumping, he didn't even dare imagine what else he might find.
"Jeremy?"
The voice came from his bedroom. He rushed in, and there she was, naked in the moonlight, arms held out to welcome him.
He didn't ask how she got into his locked apartment, or why she didn't call or where she'd been all week. A part of him knew that these were really important questions that shouldn't be ignored, that he was just asking for trouble down the road if he accepted this situation as it was, without probing and analyzing and trying to find out what was going on. But it was all he could do to keep from literally ripping his clothes off and taking her without even a word of greeting, so fierce was the longing inside of him. He reached out for her with something like a sob, and held her long in his arms saying only "Thank you," over and over again.
It wasn't until much, much later that he thought that maybe the black cat might have been a warning, after all.
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