Craving

by Kristina Meister

“Sit down,” he instructed quietly, and pointed to a wooden chair beside the desk.

  That was what people always said to someone when they had horrible news to reveal, and before I could do anything about it, my heart was racing. I sat down, but even then, his expression didn’t change. He turned his chair to face me and leaned forward until his hand could touch mine.

  “What do you remember about yesterday?” he asked.

  Perturbed, I considered refusing to say anything. What was he playing at, making me relive those things when I needed to be moving forward?

  “What are you talking about?” I said with a sniff.

  “Humor me,” he replied.

  “I went to the club, Ursula killed a man, I got hurt, and you rescued me, what else is there? I really don’t want to talk about this now!”

  He sighed heavily and leaned back. My eyes flicked between his face and the book and a sinking feeling began to drain my body of energy.

  I covered my mouth in expectation.

  He put his hands out as if to stop me from blurting out any kind of denials or defensive accusations. “Where were you hurt?”

  In a flurry of movement, I pushed the robe away from my torn knees and found nothing but unblemished skin. With a weak sound, I frantically pulled off the socks and discovered why my feet had seemed stable. There were no cuts, no gashes, no telltale signs of glass slivers. I crumpled, my face landing on my perfect knees, and sobbed like a gibbering infant.

  “What’s . . . happening to me?” I panted.

  His hand rested on the back of my head as before, and his fingers massaged my scalp in comfort. “You passed out as soon as you stood up,” he explained, “after we talked downstairs.”

  My mind was a confusion of dates and events. If it had all been another dream, then he didn’t know me, there was no fealty of dire necessity, and most importantly, the man from the club was still alive. I sat up suddenly, and instead of pulling away, his hand slid down the side of my face to cup my chin.

  “What time is it? What day?”

  He combed through my hair and pushed it from my crazed face. “Saturday, but only just.”

  “Then he’s still alive,” I insisted. “I’ve got time, this time! I can do something!”

  I knew he had to be confused, but he didn’t look it. He was frowning, but not at me. It was as if he was piecing together what I had seen from the few hints I gave, and like scattered breadcrumbs, he found his way to my knowledge.

  “You want to prevent a death.”

  “Yes!”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic,” I admonished.

  “If you were hurt last time, what’s to stop it from happening again?”

  I pushed his hands away. “I know what’s going to happen! Look, I know none of this makes sense to you, I get it, but I don’t have time to explain!”

  “I thought you had plenty of time, this time.”

  “I do, I mean . . .” I hesitated. If it was early on Saturday, then I had a full day to rally his support. I took a moment, knowing he wouldn’t demand anything from me as I focused for a few moments on my own breathing.

  “This has happened before,” I confessed. “With my sister, I came before she was actually dead. I saw it all before it happened.”

  He nodded and my heart soared that he seemed completely willing to consider my ability, just as willingly as he had been in my dream.

  “It’s going to cause me problems, I know. Unger, Detective Unger has already got my name on a short list of . . . oh my god!”

  “What?”

  “He’s been following me.” I jumped up, but he pulled me back down. “He’s coming here.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, you didn’t say.”

  “Lilith,” he murmured, and his voice sounded so worried for my safety that I couldn’t help but be enamored. I stopped struggling to rise, let his hands hold mine, and allowed him to look me over. Afraid he was going to suggest I go back to bed, I set my jaw, but he only appeared to want to make certain I wasn’t about to do a flying leap off his roof.

  “I’m fine,” I whispered. “I don’t have any control over it. I’m not even sure if I believe it, but I know it worked once, and if it saves a life, I have to trust it.”

  His fingers covered the backs of my hands and his thumbs stroked the center of my palms. “Lilith, what’s my name?”

  I blinked, perplexed for as long as it took me to realign timelines in my mind. It was proof, and he had been smart enough to look for it. “Arthur,” I declared earnestly.

  With a sorrowful look on his face, he sat back. The fingers slid from me and were concealed by his elbows as he tucked his arms close to his body.

  Uncertain, I shook my head. “Did I get it wrong?”

  “No,” he soothed, “but that’s what concerns me.”

  With a sigh of relief, I looked around his impersonal home. “Why? Aren’t you the one who said power of that sort should be used?”

  He cleared his throat in mild accusation. “Were those my exact words?”

  “Well,” I blushed, “not exactly. It was a hypothetical question, actually.”

  “Mmm.” He looked at Eva’s book. “And this Ursula person, tell me about her.”

  I did, in as much detail as possible, watching his features dance over my revelations with smoothness that was so encouraging, I almost began to have pride in my own accomplishment. He listened without a hint of judgment and after I had finished, he mulled it over in placid consideration, eyes closed.

  “Do you think it’s some kind of cult?” I wondered aloud. “All this Sanskrit and stuff . . .”

  One of his azure eyes opened and looked at me stoically. “Sanskrit is a language.”

  “I know, but maybe they’re like those Wiccan guys who think they’re practicing an ancient religion when no one has any idea what the Druids actually did, since they didn’t exactly keep files. Who knows, maybe they have a comet to catch!”

  “Sanskrit is a part of the Hindu and Buddhist tradition,” he murmured.

  “Look, are you trying to call me a jerk, or are you trying to educate me?” I grumbled.

  He opened the other eye. “If you feel either might be true, then perhaps you have no business declaring anything.”

  I gasped. I was offended, until it occurred to me that he’d never once insulted me. It was almost humorous and when I smiled, his eyes slid shut in confidence that I took his meaning.

  “Do you speak it?” I said, trying to look less like an ass and more like a woman he might take an interest in. “Sanskrit, I mean.”

  His eyes stayed shut. “It’s a dead language.”

  “Then how did you know how to pronounce it?”

  “It is the foundation of many tongues, including the many Pali languages, and through that association, a comprehension can be formed.”

  I closed my robe tidily and tried to make myself look like a woman, not a wench, though I did it with mild skepticism. Even if he was too polite to say anything, there was no way he wouldn’t notice the transformation and wonder why I had waited for him to close his eyes to do it.

  “Are you like, some kind of genius?” I stalled, trying to work a few knots from my hair. “Do you just sit around all day reading the books you work on?”

  “Ignorance is the source of improper conduct. I read as many of them as possible. What I find inside them often influences how I choose to present them to the world,” he said quietly, his hands joined behind a head that was tilted to the ceiling. “If I have freedom to choose, that is.”

  I felt more at ease hearing him say that, because it meant that he was the sort of man who’d be in my corner when I acted on this newfound talent. “How did you get started doing this? I mean, I’d think it was a dead profession, given how many people are functionally illiterate these days.”

  “You say it as if that makes them less able than you,” he chided.

  “Doesn’t it?”
I replied honestly.

  “No one can live life without acquiring some knowledge. They receive their information in different ways, and those forms have their own caretakers. To those who still read, I am a guardian, and the number of readers does not diminish the significance of that.”

  “And when you’re not guarding priceless written treasures, you are sermonizing on the nature of the universe.” I chuckled. “A noble profession, Arthur.”

  He smiled. It was that smile, and it made my insides warm enough to melt. A little voice in my mind paid no attention and kept whining that a man would die while I sat there beaming, but what could I do? Arthur’s charm was more than a trifle disarming.

  “What kind of credentials do you have to have to do this?”

  “One needs credentials to have opinions?”

  “The books, Arthur,” I said with a smile.

  “None, but to do it well, you have to have the skill. Training in book arts doesn’t hurt.”

  “Where did you go to school?” Free from his perusal, I frowned and shook my head at myself. What was I doing? I was involved in a life-and-death struggle, and I was sitting there making small talk. I really needed to reassess my priorities. Howard had undone the list that had been on my fridge, and now without those helpful little reminders, I was completely discombobulated.

  Before I could compose myself completely, he opened his eyes and got up. “I didn’t,” he said, “go to school, and yet I contribute to society.”

  “I’m sorry.” I watched him walk to the kitchen in meek dismay. I had been enjoying the proximity. “I didn’t mean to suggest . . .”

  “You didn’t.” He opened the refrigerator and removed a loaf of bread. “I was just drawing an illustration. A man’s origins do not determine his quality, nor do his experiences determine his capacity for knowledge. If this is true, then why do we ever attempt to judge him by either?”

  “I suppose, because they’re convenient definitions.”

  “And humans are creatures of convenience?” he hinted with a tilt of his head. A package of lunchmeat was produced from a drawer and moments later, condiments joined the sandwich fixings on the counter. “All evidence to the contrary. As much as they try to convince themselves that they are simplifying their lives, they insist on making things more complicated. I have seen the iPhone and though I confess it is quite remarkable, I cannot fathom why I would need to be able to determine which song is playing wherever it is that I am. I feel that soon, there will be no mysteries left, and I wonder what we will do with our tenacity then.”

  I snorted, feeling the irony of that in my bones. There I was, trying to solve my life by getting into more trouble than ever before. I was making use of the incredibly fortuitous and amazing predictive abilities to try and simplify the whole world down to a series of events that could be avoided, in favor of what? What would I do when I solved it, simplified it, organized everything into neat packages? What did I have to go back to?

  Not a damn thing.

  I joined him and opened the mayonnaise, even though it was almost impossible to think about food, knowing what I knew. But he didn’t seem anxious, so I played along, happy he was wise enough to simplify me. “Is that why you don’t have any personal items in your house? No computer, no television, not even a radio?”

  He pointed at me with the butter knife, and a twinkle in his eye. “Do your possessions make you feel any better about your existence?”

  I shrugged; after all, I wasn’t exactly using them. Living out of a suitcase did have its advantages. I hadn’t wondered about the pilot light in my water heater once.

  “I get the whole monastic lifestyle, but really, what’s wrong with a few things to call your own?”

  He shrugged back. “They end up owning me.”

  “What about your books? What if the shop burned down? Wouldn’t you be upset?”

  “It would last only as long as it took me to find a new hobby. I would go somewhere else, do something else.”

  I couldn’t believe it, but then again, it was him. “Wouldn’t you be sad, or miss it?”

  He glanced at me and smooshed the two halves of the sandwich together. “As you pointed out, I have very little to miss.” The sandwich was put onto a plate and slid in front of me.

  I looked at it in amusement. Whether in dream or reality, he somehow always managed to give me exactly what I needed to stand, question just enough of me to help me evolve, and sharpen my thoughts just enough to excise my own misgivings. And I’d only just met him.

  “I know this is going to sound odd, but on the scale of things, probably not as odd as some of the other things that have come out of my mouth since we met.”

  He leaned against the counter and waited.

  I picked up the sandwich and took a bite, chewed it, and swallowed before giving him any reason to step away from my side.

  “Where on earth did you come from, and how long would it take me to get there?”

  There was that smile again, two in one day. Triumphantly, I grinned back and happily took another bite. I watched him, wondering if he would try to answer, and even though I knew it would never happen, wanted to know if he could blush.

  “Why would you need to go anywhere?” he replied, and with one finger, poked the smooth part of my forehead. For some reason, my spine shivered and it triggered a happy sigh.

  “Does that count as an invitation?”

  “You’re here aren’t you? Eat your sandwich, Lilith, and go back to bed. We have plenty of time, especially if you keep reading tomorrow’s newspapers.”

  “What about you?” I asked, before I considered that there was an invitation in my words that I had not meant to be so obvious. I set the sandwich down and gestured blindly at the sofa, “Are you going to sleep? Or do they just doze on your planet?”

  “I’ll be fine, but you are exhausted.”

  “No I’m not,” I lied. “I just took a long nap!”

  “In which you lived through a full day and an attempt on your life.”

  “But we need a plan!”

  “Go back to bed. Let me worry about the plan for now.”

  I pouted, but he was immune. Instantly, I was thrown back to my youngest days, when my father would make me my midnight snack and carry me to bed, patting my back while I made singsong noises. He would smile and shake his head while I asked interminable questions about why children were made to go to bed before their parents. I would insist that we have a “Waking Contest,” which always ended in my happy failure. It had been a long time since I had thought of those days.

  My skin warmed.

  “Would you believe me,” I said quietly, “if I said I didn’t want to be by myself?”

  I think he heard the catch in my voice. Without a sound, he took hold of my hand and plate and escorted me back to the bedroom. He tucked me in and sat beside me while I ate, and slowly petted my forehead as I tried to find dreams that weren’t so foreboding.

  “Arthur?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You remind me of my dad,” I said quietly into my pillow.

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “Yes.”

  The weight of his body adjusted, slid down so that his arm could wrap around me. “Past and future; do you ever spend any time in the present?”

  “Some of us don’t have much of a present.”

  “And that is the root of the problem,” he whispered in my ear. “No wonder your visions are so bleak.”

  I settled into his arms and felt completely safe. “Do you think I’m going crazy? Or is this something I should take seriously?”

  “I take insanity very seriously, regardless.”

  I chuckled. “Good point, but really, should I be worried?”

  “The problem with the future is that it has not yet been decided. Keep dealing in possibilities and you’ll very quickly lose sight of what is happening right now. Then you will have no choice but to believe in fate.” His lips were right next to my ear and
as he inhaled, he sucked at my nerves.

  “I like this now,” I mumbled sleepily, “this now is good.”

  His laugh was low and almost silent. “If you were still in dreamland, you’d have missed it.”

  “All the more reason to stay awake.”

  His finger tapped my forehead, this time in moderate reprimand. “Go to sleep. I will be here when you open your eyes,” he replied, and as if he were a hypnotist, I obeyed.

  Chapter 11

  I leaned over and stared at Arthur’s sleeping face, careful to keep my hair from tickling him. He was truly the most attractive man I had ever encountered, and in a way that I only just realized was my ideal. I had never met anyone that made me feel humble and happy at the same time. If he had been the one teaching my math classes in college, I probably would never have given up on my dream of becoming a doctor.

  I wondered if Eva had seen him the same way, if when he’d given her his card, she’d gone home and counted the moments until she could see him again. I wondered if she knew how I would think of him, if we ever crossed paths. She couldn’t have, or she wouldn’t have ever jumped. So perhaps for her, he was something else. If that was true, then perhaps he was amazing only for me, and if that was the case, then maybe I was just as unique to him.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, I thought. He barely knows you.

  And yet, I felt more myself than ever, which was a strange thing to consider, since I was thirty-five and still had no idea who I was supposed to be.

  I tipped forward, certain he would not protest, and kissed the smoothness between his eyebrows. My Aikido sensei called it the “third eye,” the sharpest point of the self. I hoped that while his blue eyes were closed, I would still be in his thoughts.

  Stupid, hero-worshipping girl.

  I pulled back to find him looking at me.

  “Uh . . . I . . .” I stammered.

  “Were greeting me?”

  “Um. Yeah right.” I sat up, radiating enough heat from my face to melt a glacier. “Sorry if I bothered you.”

  He sat up. “You are the one who seems bothered.”

  I chuckled and tried to pass it off with a wave. “I just didn’t expect you to open your eyes.”