by L. E. DeLano
Soon it’s nearly midnight, and I know we should probably both get some sleep, but somehow I’m nervous as hell about sharing a room with him. I know that doesn’t make sense considering I platonically shared a bedroom with him just last night, and with his counterpart before. But then again, that Finn and I had no previous physical history at the time.
And while I wasn’t the one who shared the four-poster bed on his ship, I got a wealth of memories all about it—and several other occasions as well when I was there. I’d like to say I got the memories by accident, but the truth is once the first of those memories was triggered, I thought about him—about us—a lot while I was there. And here.
“Jessa?”
I look up from my story and glance at the door, but he kept his voice low so Mom can’t hear us. Her room is down the hall from mine, and she usually sleeps with the TV on, but I’m not taking any chances. She’s just warming up to Finn—the last thing she needs is to find him in my bedroom at midnight.
“What are you working on now?” he asks, taking off his headphones and moving the DVD player off his lap.
“It’s another story,” I say. “Now that I’m writing again—crap!” I interrupt myself. “I need to change back to creative writing for next semester.”
“Is this a story for class, then?”
“No. I’m thinking about entering it in a flash fiction scholarship contest.”
I can already see the question forming, so I answer it before he can ask. “Flash fiction is a short story that’s usually five hundred words or less. You have to tell a lot in very few words.”
“And you could win a scholarship with that?”
“Yeah. It’s for Westport College in Connecticut. They’re a private school, and not very big, but their writing program is one of the best around. If I win the scholarship, it’s almost a guarantee that I’ll be offered admission, as long as I keep my grades up.”
“That sounds like a fine idea,” he says. “May I?” He gestures down to my journal, and my hand covers it reflexively.
“It’s not very good yet.…”
“Rubbish.” He reaches over and pulls the notebook onto his lap and leans back against the headboard next to me. I fidget with my pen and gnaw my lip as he reads, but after a moment I find myself studying his face again, the way the light plays along the line of his nose, the way his oh-so-long eyelashes fan out, the curve of his lips. I move back up to his eyes, and then flush hot red when I meet them dead on. His mouth quirks up into a smile.
“It’s all right, love,” he says. “I was staring at you the whole time you were writing.”
“You’ve known my face longer than I’ve known yours,” I remind him.
“Ah, but I don’t know you, do I?” he says. “Not entirely. I get bits and pieces. Like this story.”
“It’s not about me.”
“I can see that. It’s about me. Or I should say, your Finn.”
I start to tuck my hair nervously behind my ear, and he reaches out to help me. I feel the flush of my skin where his hand touches.
“This story is kind of a first for me,” I confess. “I usually write from my memories—both here and other places. He—you—told me once about the tree. I just went from there.”
“And with only that to go on, you’ve captured us well. All of us,” he says. “That’s quite the gift you have.”
His comment lights me up inside. It feels so good to be writing again, and his return has reignited whatever it was that burned out of me. I’m absurdly grateful for it.
“Finn … do you ever talk to your other selves?”
“’Bout what?” he asks. “I know what I need to know while I’m there, as do they.”
“I guess I question myself more. It’s good to get other points of view.”
He gives a soft chuckle. “I suppose that’s one way to hear the advice you want to hear.”
“It does seem kind of self-serving,” I admit. “But it’s nice to have a support system.”
“Perhaps Mario can arrange a tea party for the lot of you,” Finn says. “Danny should be invited, of course, since it was his idea.”
“Of course,” I agree with a smile. I have to ask: “Did it feel weird to you? Reading about your other self?”
“A bit,” he says. “Like I’m a voyeur and victim at the same time.”
“Yeah, I guess I know that feeling.”
“We’ve both got the same walls to chip through, you know,” he says, leaning back against my headboard again. “You’re her and yet you’re not. I’m not him, but he was so much of me. And are we drawn to each other out of familiarity? Or is it more?”
He folds the journal shut and places it on the bed beside him as he continues.
“And do you feel as guilty as I do?” he asks. “Because more than anything, I want to be holding you right now. I want to smell your hair and feel your weight against me and—”
He doesn’t get a chance to finish before I crawl into his arms. He pulls me in sideways across his lap and I rest my head in the crook of his neck as he slides his arms around me, holding me close. Nothing has felt this good in entirely too long.
“You feel guilty, too?” I ask in a muffled voice as I breathe him in.
“Yes. Even though I know I’m gone in the head to think it. You are you and I am me wherever we are. We both know that. And no matter where we go, we’re usually in each other’s lives.”
“It’s like we can’t help but be pushed together,” I say. “Like we don’t have a choice.”
He pulls back to look at me, and his face is troubled. “That’s not how it is at all,” he says. “We always have a choice. If we didn’t, we certainly wouldn’t need Dreamers. And they wouldn’t need us.”
“But we’d still need each other.” The words come out and I know that they’re true. “I think … maybe they’d be okay with this, your Jessa and my Finn. You and me.”
He goes very still.
“So there’s a you and me? And what of Ben?”
“I looked in the mirror and told myself the truth. And he wasn’t part of it. I owed him the honesty of letting him know that.”
“I see.” He lets out the breath he’d been holding and he doesn’t even try to hide his smile. “Well, that’s a load off. And as for your story…”
I wait nervously for whatever he’s going to say.
“It’s good,” he says. “Bloody good. Don’t question your gift, Jessa. And you’ve nothing to lose by sending it off. If you don’t get this scholarship, you keep on trying. You’re one of the brightest, most persistent people I know, love. You’ll get there.”
“Thanks.”
“Let’s get some sleep, love,” he says, reaching across me and pulling the edge of my comforter over me. He scoots down, pulling the other pillow over to prop his head up, and I resettle myself on him. For a long time, the only sound is his steady breathing, and mine.
“Finn?”
“Hmm?”
“Are we just fill-ins for who the other person wishes we could be? Or something else?”
“Does it matter?”
I lean back to look up at him, and his hand brushes my face. “What I’m saying is that none of that makes a difference, does it?” he continues. “I cannot help but see her when I look at you, and I suspect I’m very like the Finn you knew and loved. But you and I have a relationship beyond that—this you and this me. We’ve forged that all by ourselves, and it’s made from melded parts of what we had before. You cannot possibly try to escape it or put that in the context of a normal relationship. What we have here is entirely unique.”
“I guess it is. I’m just not sure where we go from here.”
“Neither do I, love.” He leans in and gives me a lethal grin that begins with that dimple and ends at those gorgeous green eyes. “We call that ‘an adventure.’”
I’m smiling as his lips meet mine, and I want to lose myself in the feel of him pressed against me and the magic of his lips as
they move on mine, but I’m just not sure who it is he wants me to be. Or who I want him to be. I only know he feels right, and I wonder if that’s enough.
I pull away, and I think I hear him sigh, but he pulls my head down to his chest.
“Get some sleep, love. Tomorrow we start over, you and I.”
29
Fate
I wake slowly, in stages. My cheek is warm against his chest, and somehow, my hand has slid under his shirt during the night, lying flat against his skin. Finn’s arm is around me, and his hand is resting right on my hip. I snuggle in with a sigh, and I’m starting to like this entirely too much until I realize I can hear my text tone going off. Loudly.
Crap! I scramble to find my phone, and I pull up the screen.
“Who is it?” Finn asks, rubbing his eyes groggily.
“Shhh!” I put a finger to my lips and tilt my head toward the door. The daylight is streaming in the window and I can hear my mom in the hallway.
“It’s Ben,” I whisper, checking the text. “I’m supposed to meet him at the museum to get the mirrors.”
Finn sits up. “The mirrors?” he whispers. “I thought we agreed you were staying put?”
“Shhh!” I shush him again, and not a minute too soon.
“Jessa?” Mom’s voice calls through the door. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I call back. “I’m on the phone with Ben.”
“Oh. Okay. Danny and I are getting ready to leave—we’ve got that bus trip to Albany today with the retirement home.”
“Have fun,” I tell her. “Hey, if I drive you to Haven House, can I have the car?”
“We’re riding there with Mary Ann. Keys are on the hook in the kitchen.”
“Thanks!”
Finn starts to say something, but I hold up a finger, making him wait until we hear the front door close.
I turn back to Finn. “You were saying?”
“I was saying that we had an agreement. Let Ben fetch the mirrors.”
“I want to see them.”
“We don’t even need the bloody mirrors,” he says, shoving a hand through his hair in exasperation. “There’s no need to be venturing that far from home.”
“In case Eversor still hasn’t gotten the message yet, you mean? Come on, she has to have slept by now—especially if she thinks she’s meeting her true love on the overnight.” I think back to the way she looked in the museum in New York, and I can’t help but feel awful for her. “I hope she gets some help, now that she’s free from Rudy. She was really sick.”
“Don’t tell me you pity the she-demon,” Finn says incredulously. “After all she’s done to the both of us.”
“She was tortured, Finn. Just like Ben was—but worse. Imagine having that sicko playing around in your head.”
“I had him for a while, remember?” Finn makes a grim face. “I was just an unwitting pawn, but I’m finding it hard to feel any sympathy for her.”
“I’m only going to Manortown,” I press on. “That’s like … not even five miles. And besides, I want to see these things. Think about it, Finn—these mirrors may have belonged to a Traveler who was Aztec. Can you imagine? The things he’s seen? The history unfolding? The stories he could tell?”
Finn lets out a loud, gusty sigh. “You had to be a writer,” he grumbles, rolling off the bed. “Very well, then. Let’s get the damned mirrors and be done with it.”
“You can stay here,” I tell him. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes, tops.”
Finn says nothing. He just arches a brow and stares at me.
“All right, all right.” I wave a hand in his direction as I start digging through my dresser for some jeans. “We meet Ben in half an hour. We can grab some muffins at Mugsy’s on the way.”
* * *
The Lower Hudson River Museum turns out to be about the size of a large house, situated right on the river and just outside Manortown. I’ve only been here once with a class trip when I was in fifth grade, and all I remember about it is that I fed the birds Cheez-Its from my lunch when we were out in the parking lot.
The museum has abbreviated hours in the winter months, but we have time to make it before it closes. As we get out of the car, a flock of seagulls scatters from whatever it was they were picking at in the parking lot. The sound of the river carries over their calls, and Finn stops to look at it, drawing in a deep breath.
“Ah, this is just the tonic I need,” he says, stretching his arms behind his head and leaning back. “It’s good to be near the water again.”
“I told you the town was on the banks of the river.”
“It’s lovely.” He stands and stares a moment longer, and I watch the wind lift his hair.
“You miss it, don’t you? Your ship?”
“Aye. I do.”
“I wasn’t there long,” I say. “But it was a really cool ship. It must be an interesting life, waking up in the morning on a ship, traveling all over.”
“You’d love it. She’s the fastest solar schooner on the water. She’s a marvel.” He smiles a genuine smile. “I should take you out on her sometime.”
I zip my coat up tighter against the chill coming off the water. “That’d be nice.”
“Just you and me and the open sea.” His eyes are closed and he’s smiling as he imagines it. “We can fly with the wind or roll with the waves. I’ll take you out on the water someday, love, I promise you.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” I say, smiling back. “But can we go inside now? It’s like ten degrees out here.”
“There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the view,” Finn says, taking a deep breath of the fresh air. “You need to take in the moment.”
“The view is the same through the windows,” I remind him. “I’d like a warmer moment.”
We head through the door and just make it inside as Ben emerges from a back room, talking over his shoulder to someone who must work for the museum.
“Well, the Greavers were big in these parts,” she says as she steps through the door behind him.
“I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know half of what you’ve got,” Ben tells her. “I can’t believe you have daguerreotypes of the original Lewis and Clark diaries.”
“Ben?” I stare at the two of them in shock—not that I’m shocked to see Ben discussing daguerreotypes with a museum employee, but with this particular museum employee, I’m a little surprised. And more than a little thrilled. Unfortunately, Ben looks less than thrilled to see Finn with me.
“Jessa … Finn.” He gives Finn the barest nod. “This is Olivia.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say, sticking my hand out and grinning like an idiot, I’m sure. “Is Ben talking your ear off? He’s a bit of a history buff.”
“So am I,” she says with a shrug. “I never knew Ben’s dad was on the board here.”
I take my eyes off Olivia long enough for it all to click. “Wait—do you two know each other?”
“Her brother plays soccer for Manortown,” Ben says. “We met at a game.”
My eyes pop wide. “She’s the soccer girl? The one you were supposed to meet for coffee the day your truck broke down?”
Olivia looks up at Ben. “It really did break down?”
“Why would I lie about that?” he asks.
“I thought you had second thoughts, you know … since my brother’s team is the enemy.”
“No…” Ben makes a confused face. “I really wanted to go. But then after that you had a boyfriend, so…”
“I made him up,” she says with an embarrassed smile. “I thought you stood me up, and I didn’t want to look pathetic. Like I’m somebody who spends her free time at museums or something.” She laughs at her own joke, and I laugh, too. Because that is such an Olivia thing to do.
“Hate to interrupt a lovely reunion,” Finn says. “But we do have a reason to be here.”
“Oh. Right. Got ’em right here.” Ben lifts up a small box. “They’re not much to look at. Two of them are more
like pieces than full mirrors.”
Olivia steps up behind him. “They’re in pretty good shape, considering the age,” she says.
Ben sets the box down on a nearby table and I carefully lift the first piece of obsidian from between the layers of tissue paper and bubble wrap in the box. It’s about six inches long, and it still doesn’t look like a mirror to me. I set it gently aside and reach my fingers in again. They curl around a smaller shard and I let out a gasp. I can feel the power radiating off it, pulling at me, like it’s demanding that I use it.
I turn startled eyes to Finn. “This is it,” I say. “It was definitely his.”
I hand it over, and Finn’s eyes widen as he touches it.
“That’s really something,” he says.
“We have it all documented,” Olivia says, eyeing us curiously. “Ben has the paperwork. You can keep the items for six months, and then they have to be shipped back—at your expense, of course.”
“We’ll take good care of them,” Ben says. “I promise.”
“I know you will,” Olivia says, packing the mirrors safely back into the box. She hands it to Ben.
“Hey,” I ask. “Do they need other volunteers here, do you know?”
Olivia shrugs. “We have plenty of stuff to do around here. And it’s kinda boring when you have to work alone.”
“Do you have an application form or anything?”
“You really want to spend your afternoons here?” she asks.
I look over at Ben, then back to Olivia. “My friends tell me I need to get out more,” I say.
Olivia steps behind the front desk and returns with a pen and a pad of paper. “Just leave your name and number,” she says. “I’ll make sure the docent sees it when he’s in on Monday. Or you could just stop in.”
“Will you be here Monday?” I ask Olivia. “You could give me a tour before I talk to anyone so I can get familiar with the place.”
She gestures behind her to the small room with the display cases. “That’ll take about ten minutes,” she laughs. “But I promise to make it riveting.”
I can’t help but laugh, too. Oh, it’s so good to see Liv! “I wouldn’t miss it,” I tell her. “See ya.”