Present For Today

by W. J. May

  “What’re you doing?”

  He froze in place. All those warm feelings dissipating with an icy chill. “I didn’t...” A look of absolute panic paled his handsome face. “I just thought we—”

  She pulled away from his arms, planting her feet firmly on the floor. “You just thought that because we kissed, you and I were going to have sex now?”

  What—is that wrong?!

  He didn’t know where to look. Didn’t know how to stand. For the first time in his life, he was having trouble remembering where he was supposed to put his hands. “No! ...yeah, I guess.”

  Her eyebrows lifted into her hair as she considered this, but other than that it was absolutely impossible to know what she was thinking. An excruciating minute dragged by as she looked him up and down before she folded her arms tightly across her chest. “What kinds of girls are you used to being with?”

  In hindsight, it was probably a good thing that Gabriel was too panicked to speak. His mind flashed through a hundred nameless faces. Each one more forgettable than the last. Each one a beautiful remedy, a fleeting comfort to help him brave the long nights.

  When he didn’t answer Natasha took a step back, looking uncertain for perhaps the first time since Gabriel had met her. “How many girls have you been with?”

  The first question, Gabriel was unable to answer. The second, he wisely chose to keep to himself. His head bowed to his chest, spilling his golden hair between them like a shield. So he wouldn’t have to see her face. So she wouldn’t have to see his.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity, her eyes flashed with sudden defiance. “I guess tomorrow we’ll find out.”

  THAT NIGHT, INSTEAD of reading Cromfield’s journal just as he’d done nearly every other, Gabriel found himself calling the most unlikely of people.

  “Hey, Luke, what’s up?”

  There was a slight pause, followed by a voice of disbelief.

  “...Gabriel?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Gabriel paced manically back and forth in his room, casting occasional looks at the fish tank as he raked his fingers through his hair. “Is now a bad time? Are you busy? What’re you doing? Am I interrupting something?”

  Luke paused again, the disbelief melting into warm affection. “Are you trying to impersonate my wife right now? Take a breath, man.”

  Gabriel took five very short ones in quick succession, perching on the edge of his mattress as his legs continued bouncing in place. He hadn’t planned on calling Luke that evening. Truth be told, he hadn’t planned on calling anyone. His fingers just sort of dialed. “Yeah. Sorry. I just...how’s it going?”

  Luke chuckled under his breath. There was the sound of a door closing as he tiptoed quietly down the hall. “Uh...everything’s good over here. Just checking on Benji. How’s it going...wherever you are?”

  Wherever you are? So, Julian had kept his Brooklyn trivia to himself. Good man.

  “It’s, uh...” Gabriel trailed off, desperate to shift the attention away from himself even though he was the one who’d called. “Tell me about what’s happening in London. Everything’s good? Nothing new I should know about? I know you guys were waiting to hear back from that preschool—hey—did they ever open that Starbucks Molly was hoping—”

  “Dude, are you high?”

  It was a fair question. Especially considering they hadn’t talked in five months.

  Gabriel took a deep breath, willing himself to slow down. Of all his friends, Luke was the least likely to ask questions. Not because he couldn’t sense that something was going on, but because he had a more highly developed sense of tact than the others did. An inherent respect for a person’s right to privacy. It was one of the main reasons they’d bonded in the very beginning.

  Just say it. Just close your eyes, and say it.

  “Luke...how many people have you slept with?”

  There was dead silence on the other line. Dead, ringing silence. It went on so long that Gabriel thought the connection had been lost. He was about to redial, when Luke took a breath.

  “Okay, I know I asked before, but I’m just going to do it again. And this is coming from a friend, all right? So, no judgement.” He paused, then cleared his throat. “...are you high?”

  “Luke—”

  “What kind of question is that?” Luke fired back, laughing softly as his other hand covered the phone. “My wife is literally sleeping in the next room—”

  “Sleeping?” Gabriel interrupted with a frown. “It’s just after ten.”

  There was another pause. This one went on much longer.

  “Gabriel, it’s three in the morning.”

  The aquamarine glow of the aquarium flickered in Gabriel’s eyes as he remembered the time difference for the first time. “Oh. Right.”

  Without another word he collapsed on the bed, running a hand over his eyes as his shoulders wilted with a quiet sigh. It had been a knee-jerk reaction to call. A reaction he had more often than not, but had trained himself to ignore. He felt foolish to have given in tonight.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Nah, I was up.” There was a telltale creak as Luke settled himself in a rocking chair in the living room. One that Gabriel had helped assemble. “Now, why don’t you tell me what’s going on? But before you do, let’s stipulate that I’m not going to talk about my sex life.”

  Gabriel chuckled wearily, grinning up at the ceiling. “Agreed.”

  There was a momentary silence as he debated how to continue. While Luke might have been the easiest of the group in terms of bouncing off random ideas, that didn’t make the subject any easier. Every time Gabriel opened his mouth to try, a lovely face would flash through his mind. As beautiful as it was severe. Staring him down with a pair of staggering eyes.

  After a minute or two of silence, Luke graciously got the ball rolling.

  “Tell you what, why don’t I go first? Yesterday I slept through my alarm, hacked an international crime syndicate, Benjamin threw up on my shoes—”

  “I met someone.”

  This time, the pause was much more significant. When Luke finally broke it, Gabriel could practically see the smile. “And she wanted to know how many people I’d slept with?”

  There was a beat.

  “You’re a jerk, you know that?”

  Luke chuckled, leaning back in the chair. “Sorry, couldn’t resist. So,” he prompted casually, “you met someone...”

  “She’s incredible.”

  Gabriel was as surprised to say the words as Luke probably was to hear them. He hadn’t been expecting to give any details. No emotions—just the cold hard facts. But it wasn’t so easy to separate those things when he was talking about Natasha. All the lines seemed to blur.

  “She’s incredible,” he continued, “and she’s about to find out that I’m not.” A heavy weight descended in his chest as the truth revealed itself. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Luke absorbed this for a moment, then proceeded with caution—choosing his words with the utmost care. “Gabriel, she can’t hold you accountable for people you were with before you met her. Unless we’re talking about her family or something, it’s a blank slate—”

  “We’re not talking about family, we’re talking about quantity.” A painful grimace flashed across Gabriel’s face as he thought about the women in the last month alone. “It’s a quantity she’ll be unable to ignore.”

  “Yeah,” Luke continued slowly, “but she likes you, right?”

  Gabriel stared at the ceiling, considering it for the first time. Yes, they’d kissed. But, to be honest, he had never connected the two in his mind. In his experience, emotions and physical intimacy didn’t exactly go hand in hand. He had no idea if Natasha felt the same.

  “She yelled at me. I helped her cook a duck.”

  It was a testament to the goodness of Luke’s character that he didn’t laugh at either of those statements. He simply continued in his own thoughtful way
. “Well...those are both good signs.”

  “No, they’re not.” Gabriel cursed quietly, throwing up his hands. “It’s crazy... I can’t believe what I’m even saying—”

  “Gabriel, listen, whoever this girl is, if she means enough that you actually picked up the phone to call then you’ve spent some amount of time together. And unless you’ve spent all that time pretending to be someone you’re not, then she knows you. She likes you.”

  There was a moment of silence as Gabriel absorbed this. For possibly the first time in his life, he wasn’t pretending to be someone else. For possibly the first time in his life, this girl did know him. She knew him in a way that no one else did. Knew about the good and the bad.

  Luke’s voice quieted persuasively. “People come with baggage. Every single one of us. If she’s as incredible as you say, she’ll understand. Trust me.” There was a brief pause as the two men stared up at the ceiling from opposite ends of the earth. “If not, then please come back to London. Benji misses his uncle.”

  Gabriel smiled in spite of himself, feeling oddly reassured and incredibly homesick all at the same time. “I will. I promise. Thanks, Luke. Sorry for calling so late.”

  “Call anytime. In fact...” there was a rustling of paper, “...I’ve got to write this down somewhere. Commemorate the time and place.” For a moment, that old-soul wisdom fell away to reveal the twenty-five-year-old underneath. “Do you realize you just called me for girl advice?”

  Gabriel’s eyes narrowed as he clenched the phone. “Speak one word, and I’ll strangle you in your sleep.”

  The line went dead and Gabriel leaned back on the mattress, staring into the darkness as his mind opened to a world of possibilities he’d never considered before. Wondering what exactly Natasha meant when she said, I guess tomorrow we’ll find out...

  Chapter 13

  Gabriel was late getting to Natasha’s apartment the next morning. Not because he didn’t arrive on time, but because he spent a full ten minutes hovering nervously outside the door. No matter what he did, no matter how many times he tried to steady himself, an endless parade of faces kept crowding into his mind.

  A brunette on an elevator in Belarus. A pair of twins on a rooftop in Guam. There had been five separate women on a particularly eventful night in Paris.

  And that was just the first night...

  Nothing good can come from going up there. Gabriel reluctantly lifted his gaze to the window, staring up from the street. You know exactly what she’s going to find.

  After getting off the phone with Luke, Gabriel had spent the majority of the night looking up different ways to hide a memory. They could obviously be suppressed—that was the entire reason Canary had taken him to a mnemokinetic in the first place—but short of having either decades of practice or a sharp blow to the head, he had no idea how to accomplish such a feat.

  Then there was the fact that Natasha’s specialty seemed to be undoing such a block.

  Nothing. Good. Will. Come. Of. This.

  He paced in a tight circle, ignoring the curious pedestrians who passed him by. After a few minutes, he had half-convinced himself to head back to the Fischers’. Cromfield’s journal was waiting, along with a ring of deadly former employees ready to be tracked down. It was a strong case and he might have actually left, if there hadn’t been a sudden buzz in his pocket.

  He pulled out his phone to see a text from an unknown number.

  Are you going to come up? Or are you going to stand there all day?

  His head shot up in surprise to see a hint of honey-colored hair glinting in the window. A flush of embarrassment colored his cheeks, but before he could respond it buzzed again.

  You’re scaring my neighbors.

  This time, his lips twitched up into an unintentional smile. He made a rather grand show of glaring menacingly around the sidewalk before opening the door and briskly jogging up the stairs to her flat. The door was open when he got there.

  Natasha was waiting in the kitchen.

  “Coffee?” she asked as soon as he walked through the door. Instead of her usual jeans and t-shirt combination she was wearing a breezy sundress, swaying the skirt back and forth absentmindedly as she stood in front of a steaming coffee maker.

  Gabriel stopped cold a few feet away. He didn’t know which surprised him more: The dress or the coffee maker. She hadn’t had either the day before. All the coffee they’d ever drank, he’d either brought with him or they’d gone out to get.

  “I’d love some. Thanks.” He leaned warily against the door, watching as she fiddled with the top of it to adjust the filter. “When did you get that?”

  “This morning,” she replied, biting her lip in concentration as she smacked the thing on the side. The girl could probably hack the Pentagon, but a used coffee maker left her baffled beyond belief. “Got it off Craigslist from this guy over on Powell. He swore it would work.”

  One more frustrated slap and the thing started bubbling, filling the kitchen with the delicious aroma of early-morning caffeine. She stepped back with a triumphant smile, then proceeded to get two mugs down from an adjacent cupboard.

  Gabriel watched her carefully. Missing not a single detail. There was something not right here. People who acted this casual usually had a knife stuffed up their sleeve. “I thought you didn’t like coffee. More often than not, you order tea.”

  There was a hitch in her breathing. An almost imperceptible stiffening of her spine that only someone with Gabriel’s training would have been able to notice. For a second, all was quiet. Then she shrugged it off with deliberate nonchalance.

  “You like coffee.”

  That’s when he realized. She wasn’t casual. She was nervous. Just as nervous as him. A feeling of supreme tenderness swept over him as he joined her at the counter.

  “Did you make cookies?” He lifted one off a plate and bit into it, his eyes twinkling with a secret smile. Their shoulders were touching and he felt the heat radiating off her skin as she bowed her head with a little grin.

  “No, the woman who lives next door dropped them off.” The grin faded into a look of confusion. “Actually, it was super weird. She was basically yelling at me the whole time.”

  He nodded as if things like that happened all the time, chewing thoughtfully as she poured the steaming brew into two chipped mugs. She ignored one of them and pushed the other his way, carefully avoiding eye contact all the while. He stared at it for a moment, holding his breath, then they suddenly turned to each other at the same time.

  “Look, there are things I’m not proud of—”

  His voice cut off with a gasp as she placed her hands on either side of his face. The world around them went spinning out of focus and he braced himself as best he could, already regretting the dreadful litany of memories sure to come.

  Except...the memories he saw weren’t his. They belonged to Natasha.

  A million different faces flashed before his eyes, blending and flying together with a speed that took his breath away, suddenly settling into one beautiful, lonely girl. As the world around her twisted and changed, she was the only person standing still.

  He saw everything as she had seen it. Felt every stab of heartache, every wistful sigh as she gazed out the open window, longing for her family, wishing she wasn’t alone.

  What happened next was a series of closing doors. Some were unavoidable. Others she closed herself. A numbing procession of abandonments and departures. In the beginning, he felt the sting of each one. As time moved on, they began to hurt less and less.

  The world darkened into a melancholy grey as the girl found a new rhythm. Threw herself into work. Distracted herself with an endless stream of hobbies, each more hopeless than the next. There were other people now, a regular cast of characters, but they were few and far between. At any rate, they were always seen at a distance. Unable to get close.

  Gabriel watched breathlessly as the seasons passed. Watched as the world around them brightened with summer, cooled
into autumn, then frosted over with the swirling snows of winter before shifting into spring. Everything was in transition. Everyone was in flux.

  Except the girl. She watched it all from her window. Watched as the world passed her by.

  Until one day, one no more extraordinary than any other, there was a knock on her door. The entire picture froze as the door opened and a tall man walked inside, cross and bleeding. He was followed by a tiny woman wrapped in entirely too many shawls.

  Gabriel watched in fascination as the two of them met for the first time. Watched them argue and bicker. Watched them size each other up. Stealing secret looks. Making guarded assessments. Trying desperately to make room as their worlds opened up a little more.

  As time went on, the image began to change. There was a momentum now to the way things were moving. A feeling of anticipation that warmed him from the feet up. No longer was the girl staring listlessly out the window—she was waiting there instead. Watching eagerly from behind the curtains as he walked briskly up the street each morning. Eight a.m. sharp.

  The day they’d wandered through the park, that impenetrable grey had lifted for the first time. It lifted further still when he’d walked her home, sticking his hands deep in his pockets as he stared at her foster father’s house. When she jumped up on her toes to kiss his cheek it vanished completely, brightening into nothing but clear blue skies. A world of endless possibility.

  She didn’t understand it. No more than he did himself. A man seeped in such devastating darkness had somehow brought her light. And a girl, living in the shadows, had somehow chased all of his away. But there they were all the same. Staring into the horizon together. Just waiting to take that first step.

  The last memory he saw was the brightest one of all. He felt the way her heart raced as he leaned towards her. The way her body warmed with a soft glow as they kissed for the first time.