by Mindy Klasky
I would have heard Ryan approach, anyway, would have heard his door open. Startled by the newcomer who had somehow appeared from nowhere, I started to scream, but I caught the sound at the back of my throat as the man held up his hands in a disarming, reassuring gesture. He took a slight step away, adding a soothing smile to his lips.
He was dressed in a perfectly tailored tuxedo. The satin stripe down the side of his pants glinted mellowly in the hallway light. His pleated shirt gleamed white, sharp, stark against his flawless cummerbund. Onyx studs marched down his chest, echoing the glint of his perfectly knotted bow tie.
As if he’d consciously chosen to dilute his unmarred image, the man’s dirty-blond hair was ruffled; it looked like he’d just fought his way through a gale. His glacial eyes watched me with some amusement.
“I’m rather good with locks. Perhaps I can help?”
He extended one sinewy hand, palm up, and that’s when I saw it. Brilliant gold flames, picked out in shimmering black ink. The tattoo looked as if it had come to life, like it was gathering in all the light in the hallway, transforming the very air around us into sunshine cast back at my dazed eyes.
“Teel!”
He cracked a self-deprecating smile. “You were expecting James Bond?”
I clutched my keys like a lifesaver. “Go away.”
“Don’t be like that,” he purred.
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do. I really, truly do.” I gaped at him, though, amazed by the transformation he had worked on his own body. A subtle energy vibrated off him, drifting toward me like musk. I remembered the way Ryan had originally reacted to the Marilyn Monroe monstrosity who had met us in the coffee shop. Was this what he had felt? Was this how Teel’s manifestation had seemed to him—compelling? Alluring?
As I stared, Teel raised his hand toward his earlobe. His fingers were blunt against his coarse hair as he tightened his grip and tugged.
The metal key in my hand jangled, as if it had passed through an electrical field. I felt the motion, knew that something was changing, but I felt no actual pain. At the same time, my door whispered open, as if someone had actually taken the time to fit my new key into the stubborn lock.
“How did you do that?”
“Magic,” he said with a self-deprecating shrug. “Consider it an apology. A peace offering. A wish I’ve granted for you, even though you didn’t ask.” He extended his arm, inviting me into my own home. “You’ll find the lock won’t give you any trouble now. I fixed it permanently.”
A little stunned by how easily he’d made the repair, I walked into my living room. The late-afternoon sun streamed through the tall windows, painting the couch and love seat with great swaths of buttery yellow. At any other time, I would have been floored by the beauty of the scene. I would have felt indebted to the genie who had given me such a perfect home.
But I was still angry.
I closed the door and set my hands on my hips. “You can’t do this,” I said. “You can’t just pretend that other incarnation never happened! You waltzed into my life and acted like an idiotic maniac, even after you told me, you promised me, that you’d appear as a student. An ordinary, everyday student. Teel, you can’t go around sabotaging my job. This is my life—the only one I have—and you’re ruining it!”
I drew a deep breath, ready to continue with my tirade. Before I could say another word, though, there was a flash of darkness, a sudden screen of black snapping down across my vision. I closed my eyes in reflex, flinching backward, and when I opened them I was nowhere.
Well, I was somewhere, but not anywhere that I could define. There was no floor below me, no ceiling above me. I looked to the left and to the right, but as far as I could see, there was only endless, featureless gray.
I was back in Teel’s Garden.
I whirled around, and he was standing behind me. “I didn’t give you permission to take me here!”
His sapphire eyes widened, and his jaw dropped, as if I’d tossed a perfectly shaken martini into his face. “I thought you liked it here!” He glanced longingly to his left, and I realized that the gate must be located there. The gate that only he could see. “I thought you loved it here as much as I did.”
I couldn’t exactly tell him I’d been lying. I was firmly ensconced on the moral high ground, and I intended to stay right there. “Even if I thought the Garden was the Taj Mahal and all that, I wouldn’t want you just whisking me away without a word of warning!” At his crestfallen expression, I said, “Come on, Teel! This can’t be news to you! Kira didn’t want to be here, either! I heard her! She made you promise never to bring her here again!”
Teel took a step forward, curling his fingers around thin air, around the Garden’s invisible fence. “But Kira couldn’t see it, not the way you can. None of my humans has ever been able to see it. You’re the only one.”
Now he told me.
He raised his chin, and I could imagine that he was listening to some bird in the distance. For just a moment, I thought about Dani, about the gardens that she wanted to bring to the city. Maybe she worked so that some urban cave-dweller would get that same expression of perfect longing on his face. Maybe her guerilla gardens were a way of spreading light and joy, the same peace that Teel sought on this alternate plane.
When my genie spoke, his voice was soft, sing-song. “I thought that maybe I’d learned something at MAGIC. I thought that all of those seminars, all of those sessions, had finally taught me how to be a better genie. I thought that Jaze…”
“What’s Jaze?”
He turned to me, his brilliant eyes haunted. “Not what. Who. Jaze is another genie, someone I met at MAGIC.”
Wow. There were untold volumes behind that one sentence. I knew all about humans hooking up at trade shows, at out-of-town conferences. It had never occurred to me that genies might do the same thing. Truth be told, it had never occurred to me that Teel could have any sort of romantic life—not when he bounced back and forth from slick 007 look-alike to bimbo Slut of the Year to Con Ed lineman…
But there was no denying the longing in Teel’s face. He stripped his bow tie open. “Jaze is in there now. He granted his last wish a few days ago. I want to join him before he’s back out, back in his lamp for another full round.”
Great. It wasn’t like Teel was adding any pressure on me or anything. “Can you call him over to the gate? At least get a chance to talk while you’re here?” I was taking a gamble, assuming that the other genie wasn’t standing right in front of us. I’d see him, right? He wouldn’t be invisible, like the Garden was.
Teel ran his hand through his rough-cut hair. “She’s moved deeper inside, beyond the outer ranks.”
“She?”
Teel shook his head, distracted. “Sorry. She. He. Jaze. You may have noticed that we genies aren’t really tied to your human notions of gender.”
I smiled wryly, thinking of my confusion when Kira had referred to my female genie lawyer by a male pronoun. “Yeah. I did notice that.” Teel was barely listening to me, though. His eyes darted around—I was pretty sure he was checking out the shadows beneath trees, craning his neck to look beyond something that grew to shoulder height. “How long will she, uh, he, uh, Jaze be in there?”
With a visible effort, Teel stepped back from the gate. I could feel the power he put into looking away from the invisible Garden, into focusing on me. “Time flows differently for genies. I can’t tell you precisely—part of it depends on how deeply he goes into the physical space, how much magic she uses to conjure other imaginaries to keep him company. To entertain her.”
I shook my head, a bit dazzled by the rapid pronoun shifts. Apparently gender truly was immaterial to genies. “Are we talking a day, though? A year? A century? What’s the ballpark?”
Teel shrugged. “Maybe as long as a year. Just possibly two. This isn’t Jaze’s first time inside. He’s served at least two complete Fulfillment
rounds in your human world. This is his third time in the Garden.” Teel sighed. “I have no idea if she’ll still be there when I get in. You still have two more wishes, and then I owe another four to someone.”
He sounded so sad, so lonely…. Even though I was still angry with him about the Union, I couldn’t help but take a step closer. I forced myself to ignore the strange feeling of moving through nothing, of trusting that there would be some floor beneath my feet when I set them down. “Teel…” I said, staring into the nothingness that hid the missing genie.
Teel sighed and clutched at his collar, working free the onyx stud at the bottom of his Adam’s apple before he offered me a tired smile. “Of course, if you made your two wishes right away, made them now, I’d be that much closer to getting in.”
“Dammit, Teel!” He might be a gorgeous guy in a tux, showing his emotional vulnerability, but he wasn’t going to sway me that easily. “Is that what was going on this afternoon? Did you purposely screw things up at the International Women’s Union so that I’d have to use an extra wish?”
“No!” To his credit, he looked horrified. “I would never do that! I could never do that—it would violate our contract!” I thought about asking which clause, but I knew he’d just rattle off an incomprehensible string of letters and numbers. Teel shook his head. “This afternoon wasn’t about Jaze. I just thought it would be fun, to shake things up a little in the meeting. You humans are all so serious all the time. That Eleanor Samuelson could certainly use a laugh or two.” I glared at him. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he sounded sincere. “I’m really, truly sorry.”
I thought about how many times I’d said those words to Ryan, just that afternoon. I thought about how much I had longed to hear him accept my apology, how much I had craved his accepting my mistake, forgiving it, letting us move on.
What was my real alternative here? I could remain angry with Teel from now until the day his brass lamp tarnished into a pile of metallic dust, but that wasn’t going to change what had already happened.
I kept my voice perfectly even as I said, “I accept your apology.”
The change in Teel was instantaneous. He jumped back from the unseen gate, clapping his hands once as if he’d just played a winning hand at baccarat. “We can fix things at the Mercer! You have two wishes left, and there’s no time like the present to use them.”
“Absolutely not!”
“Just one, then,” he wheedled, glancing at the invisible Garden behind him. “Bring the theater into line, and you’ll still have one wish left for whatever else your heart desires.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, forbidding myself to think about Jaze waiting somewhere in the distance. My remaining wishes were too precious to waste, no matter how hard Teel tried to manipulate me. “No. And you can’t make me.”
“No. I can’t.” He sighed, but then he seemed to remember the guise he’d chosen for himself, the pure seduction that emanated from his suave incarnation. “But we could have some wicked fun while I tried.” He pinned me with those gimlet eyes, and I felt myself buffeted by another wave of his subtle, magical compulsion. A tendril of naked lust curled around my belly. Or something lower.
With perfect clarity, I could imagine exactly what kind of wishes Teel would try to extract from me once he had me in a fully compromised position. “No, thank you,” I said dryly.
He shrugged. “It was worth a try,” he said, flipping the switch on his burning gaze. My heart fluttered as he released me; I felt like I’d had a few too many cups of coffee. My Casanova was suddenly a roguish little boy, hanging his head in mock shame.
“You are incorrigible!” I exclaimed.
“Isn’t that what every girl wants her genie to be?” That slow smile spread across his rugged features and he waited just a beat, obviously hoping that I’d change my mind. Even if I’d been inclined to invite him into my bed—the very bed that he had given me less than one week before—I knew he’d only break my heart in the morning. That’s what men did when they were as drop-dead gorgeous as Teel was pretending to be.
At least in my experience. And in the experience of every actor, stage manager, and other theater professional I’d ever spilled my heart to.
Teel sighed, finally abandoning his pretense of seduction entirely. “So? Who’s up next on the sponsor list? Who are we meeting with tomorrow?”
“No one!” I answered so forcefully that I probably frightened off the nearest of the Garden’s birds. “You are not meeting with any sponsors. You’re not coming anywhere near the Mercer.”
“Please?” he wheedled, stretching out the word like a child playing with chewing gum.
“No!”
“Even if I promise to be good?” Again, with the glowing eyes.
I ordered my body to ignore its immediate animal response. “You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“You’re probably right.” He sighed and looked toward the Garden again, back to being the lovesick genie I pitied. “You know, I’d give you a bouquet of those wildflowers, if I could reach them through the fence.”
I followed his gaze, acting as if I could see the blossoms. I pushed a little sympathy into my response. “And I’d take them from you. And enjoy every last one.”
“Isn’t the honeysuckle incredible?”
“I’ve never smelled anything like it,” I said.
He sighed and filled his lungs so deeply that I thought his cummerbund would burst. “Time to get back to your real world, though, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
He turned his back on the Garden I could only imagine. “Thank you, Rebecca. It helps sometimes, just to talk.”
“I know,” I said. “I understand.”
I blinked, and I was suddenly back in my living room. The late-afternoon sunlight was blinding as I turned to ask Teel what he was going to do next. Alas, my genie was nowhere to be found.
Before I could worry about what mischief he was getting himself into, my phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID and battled a sudden wave of queasiness. “Hello, Pop-pop,” I said after the third ring, forcing a smile into my voice. My grandfather had no idea that I’d lost his generous graduation gift.
“How’s my favorite granddaughter doing in the big bad city?”
“As you know perfectly well, I’m your only granddaughter.” The teasing felt old, familiar, like driftwood rubbed comfortably smooth by waves.
“How are things at work?”
“They’re…fine.” Damn. I’d let my voice hitch just a little. Maybe my grandfather wouldn’t notice. Maybe he’d think it was just a hiccup in transmission through the phone.
“What’s wrong?”
So much for that brilliant idea. I thought about everything that was wrong. My genie was hounding me to make my last two wishes so that he could hook up with the imaginary creature he had a crush on. Yeah, I couldn’t mention a word of that to Pop-pop, not without my throat slamming closed. My former boyfriend had taken off for Russia—Russia!—with every penny I’d ever earned. Right, like I was going to share that disaster. I needed to find a sponsor with thousands of dollars to pour into our emergency production of However Long.
Okay. I could talk about work, at least a little bit. “Things are just busy at the office.” I gave him the thirty-second summary of our copyright woes, our rapid schedule change, and our funding needs.
“You’ll work things out,” he said, brimming with the absolute confidence that only unconditional grandfather love could create. “You just need to give yourself a little treat. Take some of that money I sent you and splurge on something for yourself—a day at the spa, or a nice dinner out with your young man.”
My eyes welled up at the kindness in Pop-pop’s voice. At the kindness, and at the all too real fact that I’d lost his money. I couldn’t afford a bottle of nail polish at the corner drug store, much less an entire day of pampering.
As for dinner out with my young man…As soon as my grandfather said the words
, I pictured Ryan Thompson. Not Dean, not the boyfriend that Pop-pop expected me to share with. Thinking of Ryan was absurd, though. No matter how smoothly he had planted cabbage seeds in peat cups, he hadn’t conquered my heart. He wasn’t boyfriend material. He couldn’t be—we were working together. Until However Long was over, Ryan was strictly verboten, in any sort of dating sense. I couldn’t even allow myself to think of getting involved with him.
No need to go into all of that with my grandfather, though. I forced a bright smile into my voice. “That’s a great idea, Pop-pop.”
“I won’t keep you,” he said. “I just wanted to hear your voice, doll.”
Doll. That’s what my grandmother had always called me, the woman Pop-pop had been married to for fifty-three years, before Alzheimer’s cruelly stole her away. We said our goodbyes, and I headed into the kitchen to boil water for my chicken-flavored ramen noodles. As I sipped my salty yellow broth, I tried to imagine what it would be like to love someone for more than half a century.
Four days and seventeen meetings later, I was almost ready to summon Teel and take him up on his wish-granting offer. No, not his offer of flirtation and reckless abandon and probably mind-blowing sex. He was a genie—he’d leave me in the morning—or after I’d made my fourth wish. Whichever came first.
I was, though, seriously considering letting Teel fund However Long.
Ryan and I had sat in office after office, making our pitches. While I came to appreciate the responses that were quick and to the point—I’d always been one to just hold my nose and swallow my medicine—the sudden stab of disappointment never hurt less.
The African Connection was too deeply in debt themselves.
The Women’s Empowerment Consortium refused to consider sponsoring a play written by a man.
The Better World Alliance wanted us to hand over e-mail addresses and phone numbers for every one of our patrons.
The Light in the Night Coalition demanded that we perform the show in their own grotty basement space, which could have used a few lights, or at least a couple hundred roach motels, before I’d even consider walking all the way to the back wall.