by Fleur Smith
The kitchen was tiny and the old stove looked like it might spontaneously combust if it was turned on. Most of the cooking utensils looked as though they had been purchased with good intention but then left to sit, unused and unloved. Her fridge was almost empty except for a number of bottles of white wine and two containers that looked like they contained leftover Chinese. The only item in the room that looked like it got regular attention was the microwave.
When the noise of the shower stopped, Evan grew even more cautious and stopped opening and closing everything in the kitchen. Instead, he moved through the compact house into the living room where a worn, two-seater sofa took up most of the space. A TV, significantly smaller than most people would choose, was mounted to one wall. Two wide windows flooded the space with light which made the small house feel a little less claustrophobic than it otherwise might have seemed and highlighted the purple hue of the pale lavender walls, making the room look less gray then the rest.
Next to the sofa was a small, retro side table that looked like it was old but still well used, so Evan moved to it and began leafing through the magazines that rested on top of it. Each of the magazines were specialist photography issues; there wasn’t a single gossip rag among them. He breathed a sigh of relief. There was nothing worse than trying to find a soul mate for someone whose entire existence revolved around the love-lives of celebrities. They always seemed a little too prone to drama.
A sound nearby drew his attention and he looked up to see Becca staring at the exact spot where he stood. For a moment, he worried that perhaps he’d forgotten to keep his cloaking in place and that he’d been spotted, but then he realized she wasn’t watching him, but the place where his fingers had just been rifling through her magazines. He stood stock still, even holding his breath, while he waited for her to dismiss the sight. He knew she would, they always did.
Right on cue, she frowned and shook her head.
“You’re going crazy,” she murmured to herself before turning to leave. On her way out, she grabbed a set of car keys and pulled the front door shut. Evan gave her a few minutes to get into the car and get it moving before he closed his eyes, focused on her and materialized in the nearest empty space near her, which happened to be the front seat of her Mustang. He twisted around in the seat so that he could see her better, parking his butt on the dash and leaning forward against his knees. It wasn’t the most comfortable position in the world, but it gave him an unrestricted view of Becca while she drove and that was worth a little discomfort.
With her steering wheel between her knees, she pulled her hair up as she drove, securing the raven-colored curls with a tie that she’d held between her teeth. In the muted sunlight, he could see that her hair was more of a dark brown than the black he’d thought. It was another little reminder that for all of her similarities to Rose, there were plenty of differences. He could tell that even after so little time in her presence.
“So late,” she kept repeating to herself as if the mantra would propel the car forward faster. When she pulled into the parking lot of the hospital, Evan trailed behind her, ready to watch her interactions with her colleagues and learn more about who she was as a person.
CHAPTER THREE
Becca fell into the cafeteria seat with an exhausted sigh. The hospital was a madhouse and, as usual, the reception and nursing staff had copped the brunt of it.
“So?” her friend and workmate, Cathy, prompted as Becca reached across the round metal table for the tray of food between them.
“So, what?” Becca responded.
Cathy offered her an exaggerated eye-roll. “Tell me about the date last night.”
Becca sank even further down into the chair. The disastrous date was the absolute last thing on Becca’s mind until Cathy had mentioned it.
Cathy fixed a steely gaze on Becca and raised an eyebrow. “That good, huh?”
“It was a non-date.”
“He stood you up?”
A slightly wistful sigh passed through Becca’s lips as she stared into almost 3-D pattern of silver triangles printed on the surface of the table rather than meeting the sea-blue of Cathy’s curious eyes. “It probably would have been better if he had. Instead, he just went on and on the whole night, crying about his ex-girlfriend. The way he spoke about her, you’d have thought she was a saint or something.” She leaned forward to pick at the sandwich in front of her. “As good as it sounds in theory to find a man with that kind of devotion, it was a little pathetic to witness firsthand.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Cathy said. “He was kinda cute.”
Becca glanced up and shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” she said around her mouthful of food.
“It does matter. I’m worried about you, the last three dates you’ve had were all disasters and you don’t even seem to care.”
“Maybe I don’t. I just don’t see the point in all of this.”
“All of what exactly?” Cathy took a sip of her lemonade and sat back in her seat.
“This meat-market style dating scene.” Becca placed her food back on the table, brushing a sprinkling of crumbs off her lap in order to avoid meeting the eye of her friend. “Surely I’ll meet someone when I’m supposed to meet them.”
“Like destiny?” Cathy asked. The derision in her tone was all too clear and Becca resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
Cathy meant well, Becca was aware of that, but sometimes it seemed as though all she wanted to do was marry Becca off to the first available bachelor. Becca assumed it must have been some unwritten law of marriage that once you were happily wed, you needed to ensure all of your friends took part in the act of coupling.
Cathy looked deep in thought for a moment. “You know what?” she asked, with a serious tone in her voice. “I think it’s time for me to invest in a cat for you. Two maybe, just to get a jump start on things.”
Becca threw a piece of her sandwich at Cathy as they both laughed. The crumbs stuck in Cathy’s auburn locks and she sat picking them out as Becca spoke.
“I’m not quite at the crazy-cat-lady stage yet. I think I just need to take some time off from dating and concentrate on myself and the things that I like to do.”
“Like visiting a different cemetery every day.”
“I don’t visit a different one every day.”
“No, that’s true,” Cathy relented, before adding in a teasing tone, “Sometimes you go back to the same one a few times first. I still don’t understand how though, those places give me the creeps.”
Becca waved off the comment. It was a long-running conversation and she didn’t think she’d ever be able to explain to her friend the peace she felt among the memories and history. On occasion, she did go just to visit her family plot, but she didn’t need to visit that particular place to feel connected to the past. It wasn’t something many other people seemed to understand and made her long for someone who would appreciate that part of her once more.
“Maybe we just need to get you a new vibrator?” Cathy continued. “Or maybe the ones you have are too good and need to be destroyed before you’ll want to try to find a man to play with instead.”
“God, Cathy, you’re so vulgar. Remind me again how you were the first one of us to settle down?”
Cathy picked up the banana from the tray, peeled it and then gave Becca a demonstration of her deep-throat skills. As she extracted the fruit from the back of her throat, she took a bite.
“It’s because I’m so vulgar,” she said through a mouthful of mushed banana.
During the demonstration, Becca could have sworn she heard the chair beside her squeak, as if someone had shifted their weight on it. It had drawn her attention away from the display and onto the empty seat.
“What’s up?” Cathy asked, looking at her with a furrowed brow and lips pressed tightly together until her pink skin had all but disappeared.
“I just thought . . . never mind.” She didn’t want to sound like a crazy person, but it wasn’t the first stran
ge thing she’d experienced that day. The first was the encounter in the dark room, when she’d tripped over nothing. Then there was the magazine moving on its own in her living room. And now there was a seemingly unknown presence beside her. She was sure of it.
The more she concentrated on the noise she’d heard, the more certain she became that if she reached out, she’d touch something solid. Determined to do just that, she moved her hand in the direction of the sound with a deliberate slowness. She didn’t want to arouse any suspicions of those around her or of whatever being it was that was following her.
She’d always been a rather practical person, not giving much stock to ghost stories and folk tales, but now she was wondering whether perhaps she’d written it all off too soon. Perhaps there was something more—and she’d unknowingly invited it home by going to cemeteries so frequently. When her hand was at the edge of the round table, she made her move. Forcing her fingers to cover the last of the distance in a flash, they collided with the empty chair. She blew out a breath of relief, which carried a nervous chuckle with it.
“Are you okay?” Cathy asked.
For a moment, Becca had almost forgotten herself—where she was and who she was with. She’d been so focused on the certainty that there was some invisible specter following her that all logic and reason had slipped away. Patting the chair once more, she smiled to reassure her friend that she hadn’t gone completely insane. “Yeah, but we should probably get back to work. You’re due back on the ward about now, aren’t you?”
Evan stood behind the chair, relieved that he’d taken decisive action as soon as Becca’s hand had begun to shift ever so slowly toward him. That was three times in one day that he’d almost been found out. He’d never come so close to revealing himself by accident before. He decided not to push his investigations any further in the short term. With his recent luck, the next incident wouldn’t be an almost-miss.
Standing and watching Becca walk away, he recalled the stab of misery that had struck him when she’d been talking about her failed date. Although she’d been nonchalant about it to her friend, the loneliness she’d felt had echoed through his body and almost rendered him immobile with the force of it. She was a lot sadder than she let show to the world—possibly even to herself.
That every emotion of his assignment rushed through him was one of the best and worst things about being so in-tune with them. The link was forged the very moment he first focused on their name and didn’t break until the day they passed away. Even now, if he focused on any of his previous cases, he could feel their emotions and get a small hit of happiness or love to keep him going.
It was never enough to stave away the numbing pain completely though; the initial intensity of love faded over time and for every happy match, there was another suffering the fallout of an argument or going into mourning. It was why he had to keep checking his list, making the matches, and doing everything in his power to amplify the positive emotions.
Evan focused on Becca’s house and returned to her darkroom. Alone for the moment, he didn’t have to worry about being caught snooping. Once upon a time, he would’ve felt guilty pawing through her life, but over the years he’d forgotten to feel bad about intruding on his assignments’ privacy. This was simply the best way to gather intelligence about their perfect partner, which was the end goal after all.
“Let’s find out a little more about you, shall we?” he murmured to the darkened space as he moved across to a small rack to look at the photographs she had hanging to dry.
Each one was black and white and, even without an appreciation for art or photography, he thought they were beautiful. It was almost as if Becca’s emotions were printed on the paper alongside the physical print but it was the loneliness in each piece that echoed the loudest of all. She was waiting for someone to love. It made him determined to push aside the history he shared with her soul, so long ago, and find her a new match. If nothing else, she deserved that for what she’d been forced to endure in her previous life.
Evan spent the better part of the afternoon going through her house, moving from room to room and trying to find anything he could about her history. He found an old photo album with pictures of her and her parents, detailing everything for years until suddenly the photos stopped. In the last of the photos, she couldn’t have been much more than ten or eleven. He wanted to find out more, but there was nothing. Giving up on getting any extra information from her possessions, he went back to the living room to wait for Becca’s return.
When Becca left the hospital, she was beyond exhausted. Although her plan for most of the day had been to return to her dark room for another couple of hours when she finished work, her afternoon had gone to hell and made her morning look like a cake-walk. Two emergency surgeries, and the raft of paperwork they inspired, had seen her offered three hours of overtime. She’d accepted of course, knowing that the extra money never went astray.
Because of the crazy day, all she did when she arrived home was wolf down a couple of pieces of the pizza she’d picked up on the way, poured herself a generous glass of wine, and then headed for her bathroom. She rested the wine glass on a small ledge at one end of the bath and then set the taps to start filling the oversized tub with hot water. As the steam rose from the water in small coils, she squeezed a little of her favorite rose-scented bubble bath into the mix before agitating the water a little with her hand. While she waited for the tub to fill, she moved to her bedroom. She set her alarm for early the following morning. She hoped that she might be able to fit in a few hours of dark room time before her shift.
Walking back to the bathroom again, she peeled off her clothing and left it scattered in a trail behind her, dotting a line from her bedroom door, along the back of her living room and into the bathroom. She’d clean up the mess later, for now she just wanted to indulge in her wine and let the hot water relax her tired muscles.
When the floral scent that permeated around the small space reached her, she smiled.
Bliss!
The bath was one of only two things she’d changed when the house had fallen to her a few years earlier—the other was the darkroom in the basement. She’d always loved the feeling of plunging deep into the warm water as a child, but as she’d grown the tub in her house had become too small to comfortably accommodate her long, lounge sessions. Now, she had an extra deep, stand-alone tub which could comfortably fit two adults. She’d had a small nib wall installed at one end for books and wine, which completed the perfection. Truthfully, the huge tub made the rest of the room cramped, and it could be a bitch to get in and out of at times, but she didn’t mind. Not for the peace of mind it offered her.
She took a sip from her drink before returning it to the ledge. Then she stripped off her panties and bra before stepping into the warmth. Her tired and knotted shoulders relaxed against the cool porcelain, a stark contrast to the heat surrounding the rest of her body. Closing her eyes she rested her head against the top of the bath and reached for her wineglass.
“This is the life,” she said to no one in particular, unaware that someone was close by and listening—or that he’d witnessed her whole striptease.
CHAPTER FOUR
Evan had been present as Becca moved around her space, trailing just a step or two behind her with each step. When she tipped her head back and closed her eyes with a dreamy sigh, he leaned against the wall of the bathroom, feeling momentarily overwhelmed by her relaxed state.
Although he couldn’t be certain he wasn’t just imagining it, he was beginning to believe that her emotions affected him more than any other assignment ever had before.
He couldn’t help wondering about the reasons for it. Some of them were completely inconceivable. The most logical reason was purely geographic—he was thousands of miles from all his other assignments. Without exception, every other person he’d been assigned to had been concentrated around the Jersey area. They were practically piled on top of one another by comparison to how far awa
y Becca was.
Because of the simple fact that he’d always been in the one place, he’d just assumed that cupids were a bit like Pizza Huts. That each one had his or her own predefined area of service and Evan’s just happened to be New Jersey. Of course, he’d had no basis for that assumption outside of his own experience.
In fact, he had no basis for any assumptions he’d made period. Ever since he was put back onto the earth, he’d had to pick it all up as he went. What he wouldn’t have given for an instruction book or step-by-step guide to finding a perfect match for someone, especially in the beginning. He knew it was impossible, even after fifty years and countless pairings, he was still basically floundering. There were over seven billion people in the world, and each one of them had a different idea of the perfect partner. Even the most compatible people had moments of conflict because of those differences.
While he considered the way her emotions resonated deeper within him than any previously had, he watched Becca in the tub. She sipped her wine as the water slowly cooled around her, and he wondered again what her ideal partner would be. There were methods for extracting that information from her subconscious, but he didn’t dare try any of them while she was awake—even if she was utterly relaxed. Knowing his luck, he’d tip her off to his presence again and then he’d be in even more strife, and would probably end up wet to trunk. No, it was much safer for him to wait until she was asleep.