by Megan Hart
He leaned in her doorway, the screen making him a blur. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”
Max woofed and nudged the door open, knocking past Martin hard enough to cause the man to take a step inside. Martin grabbed the doorframe, then held out a hand but was too slow to keep the door from swinging back and hitting him in the face.
“It swings both ways,” Tovah explained unnecessarily, since he could see that well enough. “So the dog can get in and out. Are you all right?”
He nodded, holding his nose. He tipped his head back. “I don’t think it’s bleeding, is it?”
“Oh, for—come in.” She put down the bowl and spatula and pulled out a kitchen chair. “Martin, sit down.”
He did, so tall his head came up to her shoulder even sitting. She looked at his nose, which bore the red hashmarks of the screen but wasn’t bleeding. She gave him a dampened paper towel, anyway.
“I think you’re fine.”
He nodded, looking at her quickly before looking at the table. “Thanks.”
Tovah looked at herself. The cardigan she’d thrown on hung open, revealing the nightshirt she wore beneath. Made of thin cotton, it outlined every curve and bump and hit her in the middle of her thighs. She pulled her sweater tight over her breasts but could do nothing about the way the gown shifted high on her thighs.
She turned back to the griddle.
“I was awake and saw the dog,” Martin said after a minute. “And your lights were on. I was going to go out for a jog, and…I’m sorry, I should go.”
“I haven’t seen much of you lately,” Tovah said.
From behind her, the purr of the chair legs on her linoleum stopped. Martin didn’t stand. “My hours at the hospital changed.”
She dropped another circle of batter on the griddle. “How’s the house?”
“The house? It’s…great.”
Silence between them. She turned, expecting to see him staring, but Martin was looking at his hands, clasped in his lap. The paper towel had been folded neatly into a perfect square on the table.
“Would you like to stay for breakfast?”
He looked up. His smile knitted tension in her belly as she waited for an answer. “Sure.”
“I don’t mind telling you,” she said in a few minutes as she slid the plate of steaming golden pancakes onto the table, “I’m a pretty fine pancake maker.”
“Nobody’s made me pancakes in years.” Martin waited for her to sit and serve herself before he used a fork to pry one of the pancakes from the pile. He settled it on the plate and took the bottle of maple syrup from her. He poured a small puddle to one side of his plate, then cut his cake into several even pieces as she watched, a bit amused. He caught her looking. “These look great.”
She looked at her own plate, which bore a stack of hacked pancakes smeared liberally with syrup. “Did you want to be a surgeon?”
Martin paused, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Pardon?”
She used her knife to point at his plate. “You’re so precise.”
He looked at the food, then finished his bite, chewing slowly and swallowing before answering. “I don’t have the patience to be a surgeon.”
“You have the hands for it.” She meant the statement lightly, but Martin put down his fork and lifted his hands to stare at them, front and back.
“You think so? I never did. I have big hands.” He curled them into fists, slowing, working each finger.
“Does size matter?”
As soon as the words came out, she realized how they sounded, and laughed. Martin looked up, mouth slightly parted, like he didn’t get it at first. And then he did.
“That’s not the sort of question you should ask a man, Tovah.”
“I’m sorry.” She giggled. “Blame it on lack of sleep.”
He smiled and opened and closed his fingers again, then picked up the fork. “Why were you up so early? Surely not just because you had a craving for pancakes.”
“No. I had a bad dream. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I could ask the same question of you.” The scent of coffee she’d forgotten to pour teased her nostrils. “Oh, I forgot, coffee!”
She got up to pour them both cups. When she came back to the table, Martin’s gaze followed her path. She’d been under such intense scrutiny before, and as usual heat rose in her cheeks because of it, but she tried not to show it. She gave him the sugar and cream she already knew he took.
“Thanks.” He added the sugar and cream and stirred, but didn’t sip. “I never wanted to be a surgeon because I wanted to fix what was inside people’s minds without having to cut them open to do it.”
“That’s a good reason.”
After a moment he dug back into his pancakes, severing each piece into halves and chewing them carefully. He interspersed each bite with a swig of coffee, finishing his first cup before she’d even taken more than a few sips of hers. He got up to help himself to another as matter-of-factly as if he’d always made himself at home in her kitchen.
She liked that, she realized, as he brought the pot to freshen her cup. Having a man puttering around. “Thanks.”
He smiled. “Thank you. This is the best breakfast I’ve had in a long time.”
“Me too, actually,” she admitted. “Usually it’s a toaster pastry and a diet cola as I work at the computer.”
Martin laughed, the sound easier than it had been before. Tovah was having a hard time getting a handle on this man, who moved among his patients with such confidence but spoke to her as though he expected her to bite his head off.
He looked up and saw her staring. “What?”
It was just the sort of thing she’d have said, herself. She recognized that awkward sensation of wondering whether she had something on her face. “I’m glad you stopped by, Martin.”
“Are you?” He sounded surprised, and finished his second cup of coffee.
Tovah nodded. She tasted syrup on her mouth as she licked her lower lip. His eyes followed the motion of her tongue before he looked away. He was blushing again, and she found it as charming this time as she had the first. “Yes. I really am.”
“Well,” he said, sounding a bit gruffly pleased. “You make excellent coffee. And pancakes. I’m glad I came, too.”
A step forward and another back, like a child’s game of I Dare You. Watching him, unable to read his signals, Tovah didn’t dare. “Thanks. Be careful, Max will beg you for the rest of it.”
Martin looked at Max, who’d raised his shaggy head at the mention of his name. “Will he?”
She remembered what he’d said about being bitten as a child. Though Martin didn’t seem frightened of Max, he did seem…wary. And Max, for his part, hadn’t snuffled or slobbered on Martin the way he did on nearly everyone else.
“He might.”
Martin ate another bite. “I guess I’d better finish, then, before he has the chance.”
He watched her again when she got up to put her plate in the dishwasher, and Tovah was mindful of the way her nightshirt hit her at mid-thigh. How she must look, disheveled from sleep and without makeup. No wonder Martin wasn’t flirting, she thought wryly. She probably looked like a mess, and even though he knew about her leg, the sight of it was still probably unfamiliar enough to make him feel a little awkward.
Or, he just didn’t like her in that way.
He was up to put his plate in the dishwasher, too, close behind her when she straightened and turned. She came face to chest with him, and it was impossible not to notice how tall he was. How broad. It was the first time she’d seen him in something other than a button-down shirt and dress trousers, and his T-shirt stretched across muscles she wouldn’t have guessed were there.
“Sorry.” Martin leaned around her to tuck his plate into the open slots of the dishwasher.
Tovah had always had a fairly large personal boundary area; Martin had seriously encroached upon it. Yet she didn’t move, and not because she felt so comfortable with him it didn’t matter that he�
�d suddenly entered her space. The reason was something more visceral than that, like a punch to her gut.
He smelled good.
Better than the scent of cologne, or even the clean scent of soap. Better than anything artificial. Martin smelled of…himself, of skin and breath and sweat, of something so familiar it was like breathing in a memory she’d forgotten until just now. Except she still didn’t remember it, just had the hint of it in her mind.
She looked up. He looked down. His thumb came up to stroke along the corner of her mouth, and her mouth parted with a sigh of surprise and no small flare of sudden desire.
“You have some syrup,” he said, “just there.”
He wiped it, then licked it from his thumb. The bottom dropped out of her belly, the feeling like being on a roller coaster just before heading down the first hill. She drew in a shivering breath.
Then he’d moved back, away, turning to the table to pour more coffee and leaving Tovah blinking away the rush of heat that had filled her to overflowing. Her heart pounded. She went to the sink to wash her hands and take up a paper towel to clean her mouth.
He’d touched her face as though he owned it. Yet he wouldn’t shake her hand? He couldn’t meet her eyes, sometimes, but he’d licked syrup that had been against her lips?
She didn’t understand him. Not one bit. “Martin—”
He turned, face already set in a smile, seemingly unaware of the mixed signals he was sending. “Hmm?”
Something had changed between them. Something small and subtle, but good. “Did you have enough coffee?”
“Never have enough coffee.” He lifted his cup to her, toasting. “Thanks.”
She took some more for herself, though she could already feel the caffeine making her jittery. “Do you have to work today?”
“Yes. Later.”
It was Sunday.
“I’ll see you there?”
He nodded, sipping coffee and watching her over the rim of his cup. “I guess you will.”
And this, for some reason, made her laugh, the weird moment gone. Max lifted himself from the floor and nudged her hand with his head. Martin put his cup on the table and used a paper napkin to wipe the corners of his mouth.
“I should get going on that jog,” he said, putting a hand flat on his stomach. “Though after all that coffee and those pancakes, I’ll be lucky if I can go any faster than a brisk walk.”
“Don’t make yourself sick,” she warned.
Martin shook his head. “I’ve got an iron stomach. I’ll be fine.”
She watched him head for the back door, not missing the slightly exaggerated berth he gave around Max muzzle-deep in his food bowl. Martin pushed through the screen door and caught it so it didn’t swing back again, but instead closed gently. He stood on the other side of the screen and looked back at her, then raised a hand. It wasn’t a wave, exactly, and not quite a salute.
She raised her hand too, as he’d done, and without saying goodbye, he jumped off the back porch and disappeared around the corner of the yard.
“Max, I have no idea what to think about all that.”
Max didn’t care. Max wanted food. Tovah scraped the remains of the waffles into his bowl and watched him gobble the sweetness with the pure joy only animals and children seem to make look easy.
Chapter Nineteen
The witchwoman was angry again. The witchwoman wanted the boy to put away his toys. She wanted him to make the earth shake and the skies dance.
The boy didn’t want to.
So the witchwoman did what she always did when the boy defied her. She found someone else instead. She’d met him on the beach before. The boy knew him too. He’d seen him with the nice lady who’d tried to help him a while ago.
“Hello, sweetheart,” the witchwoman purred, crooking her finger at the man. “I know you.”
He came forward at once, though the boy felt him trying to resist.
“Look at me,” she said softly, then louder when at first the man ignored her. “Look at my face.”
Blinking, the man did. “Leave me alone.”
He’d maybe meant to dream of fishing, or playing baseball, or painting a picture. He had a lot of wishes, and all of them fell away when the witchwoman pushed him. There was no secret to this. No tricks.
She lowered her voice to tease him into leaning forward. “Why should I?”
“Because I want you to!” His shout pushed her back with more force than she’d expected.
“Oh, sweetheart. That’s not very nice.”
He cried out, and the witchwoman laughed. His shirt hung from his body in shreds over the skin scored red beneath. Crimson painted her fingertips, and she lifted each to her mouth to lick them clean.
The boy shuddered, clutching his ball, watching as he always did from the shadows as the scene played out in front of him. He thought he could stop the witchwoman, take her attention away from the man she was abusing, but when he stepped forward the dogman growled and snapped, and the boy held back.
“I taste you,” she purred. The grass beneath them waved in a gentle breeze. “No snakes this time, sweetheart?”
The man grimaced. “Don’t call me that.”
“What should I call you, instead? Baby? Lover? Punkin Pie? Ah, I know.” She snapped her fingers and advanced on him. She reached, tugged, pulled, yanked. Stole. “Your name is…Ben.”
He flinched, and she clapped her hands in glee.
“Oh, I love it when I’m right!” She looked over her shoulder at the boy in his place. “And I’m always right, aren’t I, sweetheart?”
The man looked at him now. Looked at the boy. His face was sad, disappointed, the way his father had looked at him sometimes when he brought home the notes from Mrs. Bellestead.
That look made the boy ashamed.
The witchwoman laughed again, creeping closer to the man. She’d teased something else from him, too. Another name. Another face. It danced, shimmering, in the air above the man’s head like the thought bubble in a cartoon.
It was the nice lady, only instead of legs, she had a tail.
“How sweet.” The witchwoman sneered. “Does she know about you?”
Ben’s mouth twisted. “She has nothing to do with this.”
The witchwoman laughed. “Oh, I think she has everything to do with this. Doesn’t she? Your mermaid?”
The nice lady’s face disappeared. Blocked, but too late. The witchwoman had already tasted her. Smelled her. Learned her name.
“Tovah.” It clicked on her tongue.
“Stop.” Ben moved forward, hands out.
Stupid fellow. As if fists could harm her. The boy knew better.
“I’m not afraid of you,” the man gritted out.
“Sweetheart, I think you should be. I know how to make you.”
What an easy scene to create. A cliff. A figure with the face she’d seen shimmering in the sky over his head.
“Tell me, Ben. Have you ever wanted to fly?”
“Leave her alone!”
The witchwoman pushed. She couldn’t shake the earth or open the skies, or unmake the world, not the way the boy could. But she could try. She could do things. She could make stuff happen.
“Watch her fly!”
“No!”
“No?” the witchwoman said. “Take her place, then. You for her.”
Ben’s hands opened and closed. “Don’t hurt her.”
So predictable.
“Say goodbye.”
“No!”
“Time to fly, Ben, if you can.”
He ran. The figure the witchwoman had made vanished. Ben reached, grabbed. He leaped.
He fell.
Within a breath, the witchwoman waited at the bottom of the cliff to watch him break, but he never appeared.
“I guess he learned how to fly,” said the boy. He held his ball with both hands. “You tried to break him, but you couldn’t.”
“Be careful,” the witchwoman said through bared teeth,
“or I’ll break you, instead.”
But they both knew she could only try.
Chapter Twenty
Bounce, bounce. Catch.
Bounce, bounce. Catch.
Bounce. Bounce—
“Can you hand me back my ball?” The boy in front of Tovah held out his hand with the certainty of someone who doesn’t expect to be refused. “Please?”
A moment ago she’d been shaping the room in which she planned to meet Edward. The sudden shift of scene unbalanced her, literally. The step she took with her sound foot landed on soft black sand, and she pinwheeled her arms to keep herself from falling.
“I’m sorry?” She wasn’t sorry, just confused and taken aback, a little bit afraid. She knew this boy.
“My ball,” he said patiently. “It’s right over there.”
He pointed. The red ball with white stripes had rolled against a craggy stone wall. Details had filled in around her as they spoke. A dark sky. Dark trees. Black mountains in the distance and the far-off rumble of something like thunder. Shifting black sand. She remembered Kelly’s dream and looked for the black sea that would try to drown her, but she didn’t see it.
“Please?”
The force of his will pushed her to step toward the ball. Tovah was already reaching for it when she stopped herself. Her fingertips brushed the ball’s rubber surface, but she didn’t pick it up.
“Please, Mrs.” The boy’s voice hadn’t changed in tone or urgency. It remained the voice of a child complacent in knowing he has always had his way. “I want my ball.”
But Tovah didn’t want to be here. How she’d managed to lose the sensual display and end up in this place, she didn’t know, but she didn’t intend to stay. This boy was here for a reason, and she didn’t want to be a part of it.
She grabbed up the ball, which fit the palm of her hand perfectly though a moment before it had been the size of a basketball. She turned and tossed it. The ball became a blackbird and flew away.
“Oh,” said the boy, grief heavy in his voice. “Oh, my ball.”
“I’m sorry,” Tovah said. “It just happens that way sometimes.”