His worry as he’d realized I’d disappeared into the pipeline a week earlier was an ache in my chest, like a fist squeezing my heart. I felt it now just as he had then.
The pain that had assailed me in the crossing between worlds reached out like an ice cream scoop to hollow his middle, and I actually heard his breath stutter.
After that I had a vision of him hunched over papers in the map room attached to the warehouse, making connections, his determination fueling long hours. In return, the memory plucked from me was of staring down Harlan Tripp across a pile of poker chips, and of sweeping those chips into my bag. The bag, connecting memories, was next seen hanging around a pipe as I huddled, barely breathing, feet away from the Tulpa and Regan in the dark.
The linear connection broke then, and we were flung back in time where a slash of stark moonlight lit Hunter’s face as he spoke the words I’d last read in a Shadow manual.
Everyone should have their greatest desire.
I wanted to turn to him, to question that, but the pain of the rejection he’d just endured, because of me, ran through me like a guillotine. To escape it, I squeezed my eyes…
And recalled for us both Solange in silhouette, stars spinning around her.
Hunter and I gasped together as the power arching between us reached its apex then, a shuddering pause before the coaster of emotion thundered downhill, picking up speed as we found our bodies again, renewed our rhythm, regained the present, and came together as one. Hunter’s aura, a gold spinning behind my closed lids, burst through me like a rocket. My red aura was weak, but my emotion was concentrated, and it spun from my mouth on that final cry.
It took minutes for the world to right itself, our breaths interloping to tug us back, together, inhale by exhale. I pressed my cheek against the cool concrete wall, spotted a bull’s-eye across the distance of the shooting range, and still breathless, I smiled.
We dropped to the platform bed tucked in the crow’s nest after that…it was either that or fall over, but the rightness that had slid over me upon climax enveloped me again as I nestled in next to Hunter. I was sore from the give and take, the aggressiveness and the surprising desperation in our lovemaking. I was also feeling the effects of my fight in Midheaven, and the passage both there and back, but nestled into the crook of his left arm, staring up at a ceiling of faux stars, I sighed, and every muscle relaxed.
Unlike Solange’s planetarium, this ceiling offered up a faulty version of the night sky. Hunter didn’t only track constellations, but “frozen stars,” dead ones, black holes. I’d wondered at that once, thinking it strange, but right now I had no energy to even care. I fit so well at his side, and was so relieved to be safe and home-not to mention out of those chaps-that I immediately began to drift off.
“How do you feel?” Hunter’s voice reached out to me like a breeze, hesitant and shifting. It was a similar question to the one he’d asked the last time we’d been tented beneath this improbable sky.
What do I make you feel?
At war with myself, like there’s something lacking…and violence…
I knew my answer had been hurtful, but at the time it had also been my truest reaction to the shock and sadness of having witnessed Ben and Regan together. Though rephrased, by asking the question now, Hunter was again opening himself to that hard answer, obviously hoping it’d changed.
My hesitation spooked him. He edged away, turning his back to me, but I caught his hip with my palm and spooned his body with my own, feet and knees and hips and chest an echo of his male strength. So complimentary, I thought, drawing closer. It made me honestly wonder why we were so often at odds.
While he remained silent, waiting, I traced the tattoo on his back with my fingers, trailing the shadowed side of the yin/yang symbol before running my index finger along the dueling words on each side: fear and desire.
“You make me feel…”
You make me feel like touching myself in the dark. You make me feel like whispering your name for no reason. You make me wish to put need and lack and violence behind me.
He turned to me, determined to face whatever I was going to say.
I offered up a watery smile, my fingers going tentative on his arm. I whispered, “I feel like me.”
Like I could be me-the good and the bad, the fabled and fallible, the Light and the Shadow-and still look in the mirror without shame. The jerk of his head revealed his surprise, but his relieved sigh told me it was the answer he’d been seeking. I stroked his arms, feeling the fine hairs there, the soft skin, the hard muscle underneath. I’d go back to Midheaven, I thought, like he could still hear it, and risk soul and powers and life for you alone.
He shifted toward me again, taking me in his arms. “It hurt.” It wasn’t a question. He knew, through the aureole. Still, the words made me feel small. I recalled what memory the aureole had shared, and closed my eyes.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Was it…that woman? The one in the aureole memory?” He was going to say “the beautiful one.” The hesitation was in his voice. I suppose it was indiscreet to say something like that when another woman was in your arms. But it was my memory…and Solange was beautiful.
“It was all of them.” They’d all been working together there, I now realized, as much of a troop as we were over here.
“What did they take?”
Now I really wanted to hide. How was I supposed to know? I hadn’t even had time to catch a second breath upon extinguishing that candle, much less worry about the triangles I’d so freely gambled away, what they represented, what I’d lost. I remembered the personality traits, stubbornness and fear, things that made people irrational-freeze when they should act, act when they should be still-yet they were also tools that could save a person’s life. Each trait on the human spectrum overlapped to zigzag like the locked pieces of a unique puzzle.
Then again, what about Solange’s words? Who armored you? Who is protecting your soul? Was someone protecting me? Had I possessed some sort of armor while there? I honestly didn’t know-not that, or what my passage to Midheaven had cost me. I just hoped it wasn’t a corner piece.
“I don’t know,” I finally sighed, so softly it disappeared into the black space between the winking stars.
“I’m sorry.”
And somehow that made it better. Not okay, I thought, turning into him again. But better.
Sleep visited in a series of images, none of them as pleasant as the reality that fatigue had me leaving behind. The first time I’d endured scorching heat and twisted poker games it was because I’d been trapped in another world. This time they were only bearable because even in unconsciousness I was aware of Hunter’s solid form next to me, that I was safe in my world, that I was home. I tossed during the next few hours, murmuring the names of men so washed out they looked made of dust, until Mackie’s skeletal visage, stretched in a furious scream, had me startling into full awareness. Hunter’s lips at my temples slowed my breathing to a normal rate, but when I turned to him again, limbs and lips seeking, it sped up in short time.
He entered me slowly this time, a calmness that hadn’t been there before riding over the both of us like we were still dreaming. Buoyed by it, we rode the waves of sliding limbs and twining tongues, and our long, slow climaxes were like ripples from stones dropped deep inside of us. He fell asleep, still inside, muscle gone lax atop me, transferring his strength to my bone. I lay there for a quarter of an hour, enjoying the weight, then shifted so we fell apart, again two separate people.