“Robby wanted to live by the water,” she said. She hugged herself against the chill in the room. “He didn’t even like water sports. He just wanted to buy a house where he could get on a dingy and paddle around. ‘Our kids will like it someday,’ he told me.” Her eyes filled with tears, and the lake became a blur. “I thought it would be dangerous for kids to live next to water—someone else’s kids.”
Val felt Max approach her from behind. He stepped close, the heat from his body warming her through the thin fabric of his clothes and the sliver of space that separated them. He touched her arms and slid his fingers along her skin, up to her forearms. His lips brushed against her shoulder.
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he said, his voice husky.
A tiny groan escaped her throat in response. She closed her eyes and leaned back against him as a fire ignited in her belly and overwhelmed all her other senses. God, she wanted him, all of him, despite what a mess he was. She wished it wasn’t so, for Robby’s sake, but it was. She couldn’t recall wanting anything so badly in her life.
He kissed every inch along the soft arc up to the nape of her neck. “Tell me when to stop.”
His breath against her skin was so hot, it nearly burned. Val lifted her arms above her and wove her hands around the back of his head, curling her fingers through his hair, pulling him closer. His lips traveled up her neck, to her ear, where his tongue caressed her earlobe. His hands slowly slid across her flesh, drifted to her front, and cupped her breasts, his fingertips tracing arcs across her nipples.
His left hand moved down her torso, and a jolt of lightning shot up her spine when his fingers slipped between her legs, then inside her. She moaned as he caressed her in slow, deep strokes, her head nestled into the crook of his neck, his flesh against her lips made moist by her breath. Her hips moved to his tune as he played the string that threaded its way through her gut and into her spine, until she danced at the precipice of climax.
No—it was too soon.
“Stop,” she said, breathless, and he did. She turned to face him. His face had gone slack like a drunk man’s, though his gaze gripped her with an animal intensity. Her fingers traced the contours of his rough mouth, the cut healing at the edge, wetness gathering where she skimmed the soft inner flesh of his bottom lip with the tip of her thumb.
Don’t kiss him, she ordered herself. I owe Robby at least that much. I’m only doing this because I have to. Stay focused on the real goal. Get the vision and be done with it.
Before he could pull her flush to him, she grabbed the bottom of his sweatshirt and yanked it up to his chest. She helped him work the hoodie and T-shirt underneath over his head, slipping the clothes off his skin with the same satisfaction she felt when peeling the lid off a pudding cup to get to the sweet insides. She pressed her bare chest to his and slid down his torso, gentle over his patchwork of bruises. Falling to her knees, she unbuttoned his jeans and pushed his pants and underwear to his ankles. Her eyes followed the thin trail of black hair that led from the faint fist-sized diamond on his chest, through the hard folds of ab muscles, to his erect penis.
He inhaled sharply when she wrapped her lips around him. A steel rod in a velvet sheath, he tasted like she imagined he would—sweet and salty, musky and hot. Her hands traced the soft slopes of his backside, leaving goose bumps in their wake. She played him like he’d played her, sliding her tongue up and down his shaft in long, luxurious strokes. The essence that leaked out was delicious because it was his, and she lost herself drinking it up.
She nearly fell forward when, without warning, he stepped out of the clothes bunched at his ankles and away from her. He backed up and sat at the edge of the bed.
“What are you doing?” she asked, still catching her breath.
“It has to be like this.”
Oral wasn’t enough? “But…you’re hurt.”
“So be gentle.”
“We don’t have protection.”
“I can’t have kids. And I don’t have any STDs. Do you?”
“No.”
“I guess we’ll have to take each other at our word then.”
He might have been lying, but she didn’t have the mental strength to argue. Even if she did, she trusted him completely. It was herself she didn’t trust. She needed to stay focused, make this act more than a lust-fueled romp. If he was inside her…well, she’d have to concentrate harder. She stood and walked to him while he watched her, motionless except for his heaving chest. For a moment all she could hear was his breathing.
“Think about the accountant,” she said. She gripped his muscular shoulders and swung her leg over his lap so she straddled him.
“Okay.”
Max grasped her hips, slid his hands along the small of her waist and up her back. He pressed his face to her chest and she felt his mouth engulf her nipple. A wave of dizziness hit her. She cradled his head in her arms and clutched his hair as she struggled to stay upright and concentrate on anything that wasn’t him.
“Think about…the Pacific Science Center event tomorrow,” she said, her voice strained as his lips worked their way up her neck, tugging at her skin with such force it almost hurt.
“Mm-hmm,” he mumbled into her flesh. He cupped her backside in his hands.
“Think about—”
Her words caught when he pulled her onto him and thrust deep.
“Oh, God,” she muttered as every nerve in her body seemed to fire at once.
He rocked his hips into hers and she matched him, deeper each time, clutching his chest to hers until she thought she might melt into him like a stick of butter left on a hot stove. The furnace of his mouth breathed a cadence into her ear, his stubble branding her cheek, and before she could stop herself, she’d let him take her mouth with his. He kissed her deeply and she kissed him back, long and hard and desperately, as if they were lovers who’d been apart for years and not strangers who’d met only two weeks ago. The wisp of self-control Val had left slipped away, and he dominated all her senses. In the brown of his eyes she watched flecks of glittering amber, like embers from a fire, pop in and out of existence as he moved through her, gazing into the depths of her being as she gazed into his, looking for something that’d been missing in their souls and finding it in each other. He’d finally released the inferno she’d sensed in him, the fire he struggled to keep hidden. It was hers now. And in that moment, she was completely his.
His thrusts became stronger, faster, deeper, until he moaned and his eyes closed. His hips stopped; he was climaxing, and in the midst of a vision. Though her body screamed for him to continue, at the very edge of her own orgasm, she took a few seconds to observe his slack face—this was what she must look like when she climaxed, like she’d slipped into a trance. Now she knew.
Val kissed his unresponsive lips, wrapped her arms around his neck, and rolled against him. Still hard and throbbing inside her, his taste still ripe on her tongue, she buried her head in his neck and fell over the edge into orgasm—and saw fire.
Chapter Twenty-four
I’m in a park. Wet, brown leaves litter the ground. I feel the heat of a vicious fire behind me. People are screaming. I run from the flames, following a paved path that winds around a big white building underneath wide arches. The Space Needle looms straight above me. I round a corner—right into a clutch of terrified bystanders.
“It’s her!” one of them yells. “She set it off!”
Someone else yells, “She’s got a gun! Help!”
“Put your hands up!” a man orders me from behind. I turn to face a plump-cheeked police officer, his baby face twisted in fear as he aims a pistol at me. His gun shakes. I raise my arms. The gun goes off. My chest explodes as a bullet rips through my heart—
Blur.
I’m running away from the fire. I cut to the left, off the paved path and away from the group of people I know are around the corner, one of whom will flag down a police officer who kills me. I skate along the back
of the building until I find an unlocked door. I go through it and enter a dimly lit storage area, metal shelves with tagged boxes and knickknacks dividing the room into slender hallways. I cut down the middle at a quick trot, panting from the adrenaline coursing through my veins. Suddenly I stumble and fall to the ground; a searing pain tells me I’ve been hit in the head from behind. I try to get up but I’m struck from behind again. I collapse flat on my face. Bony hands flip me over, and an older man with a gaunt face, thin smirking lips, and a shiny suit looms over me.
“Miss Shepherd, I presume?” he says.
My head is swimming and my body stays limp despite my desperate pleas for it to move.
He checks his watch. “I’ve got a few minutes. Let’s see if the carpet matches the drapes, shall we?” He pulls down my leggings and starts to unzip his slacks.
“No,” I moan as shear panic grips me. “No!”
He frowns and puts a hand over my mouth. “We can’t have that.” He lifts a crowbar above my head—the same one he likely hit me with from behind—and brings it down with crushing force—
Blur.
I hug the wall of the storage room, gun drawn, scanning for the man I know is lying in wait to rape and murder me. I see movement to my right. I spin around just in time to catch him lunging at me with the crowbar. I shoot him three times in the chest. He crumples to the ground, dead. Resisting the urge to spit in his face, I continue through the room until I get to the other side, where a door leads out to a service hallway. I run through the hallway, past stacks of pallets stocked with merchandise for the gift shop. At a fork I make a left, and go through another door into a space exhibit that’s been closed off for renovations. I search frantically for the exit, trying to navigate the maze of displays in near total darkness.
As I’m making another lap around the Mars section, I run straight into Norman Barrister. Before I can raise my gun, he clocks me in the face so hard I fly backward and crash into the wall. My gun falls out of my hand and disappears somewhere on the ground. He grabs my sweatshirt in both hands and throws me against the wall again. I pound his chest with my fists and kick him in the shins, but his massive frame absorbs the blows with more irritation than pain. He lifts me in the air and slams me into the ground, knocking the wind out of me. Then he wraps his giant hands around my neck and squeezes. I claw at his hands but they’re like metal vises, and his grotesque face, warped in homicidal fury, fades from my vision as blackness closes in—
Blur.
“You know what you must do, and yet you keep dying.”
I’m in a high-rise penthouse office. Walls of glass surround me. A city of neon glows in the night outside. Not Seattle—Shanghai or Tokyo maybe. The city provides the only light for the sparse office composed of a single desk and a couple of chairs. A woman with silky black hair and an all-white skirt suit stands in front of the glass wall, her back to me.
“Who are you?” I ask. “Do I know you?”
“We have always known each other,” she says. She has a strong English accent, and speaks slowly with the high-pitched breathiness of a child but the deliberateness of a sage.
I address her blurred reflection in the glass. “I don’t want to die.”
“Nor do I. But some things cannot be avoided.”
“I can’t. I need to…I was…” I try to recall how I got here. What I’m doing here. I can’t. “I was with Max—”
“Excellent.”
A kernel of memory pops in my brain. “Barrister. Norman Barrister. I need to stop him, expose him. How?”
“By living.”
“But how?”
“Pray at the base of the mountain that touches heaven.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Consider what happens if you do not.”
Blur.
I’m standing on the balcony of Max’s house, the balcony where he threw his father to his death. The sky is overcast, the water is black. All of the glass is cracked, and trash is strewn everywhere. At my feet I see a weathered newspaper with a headline that reads:
President Barrister Declares War.
Before I can check the date or read the article, the brightest light I’ve ever seen bursts in the sky and mushrooms upward. I hear and feel a rumbling that grows louder, shattering the glass around me, until a shockwave hits and I’m engulfed in flames—
“Val.”
I’m screaming as the fire chars the flesh off my body and roasts my bones—
“Val!”
Max’s face came into focus, his brow knotted in worry. He grasped her wrist with one hand while the other covered her mouth. With a shudder of relief she realized she was still in the boathouse, naked on his lap, her flesh uncooked. He removed his hand so she could speak.
“You started screaming,” he said.
“I died, over and over, and then I saw the whole world die…” She couldn’t get out any more before a wave of tears overwhelmed her. She buried her head in his chest and sobbed.
Max hugged her to him and lay down on the bed. Arms wrapped around his chest, she cried into his bare skin while he stroked her shoulder. As his essence infused her senses again and she remembered the ecstasy of being with him right before her horrible vision, her tears began to wane. She focused on the beating of his heart underneath her ear, the warmth of his skin against hers. When she’d calmed down enough to be coherent, she told Max what she’d seen.
“Have you ever had a conversation with someone in a vision?” she asked him.
“No, but all I see is numbers, so I wouldn’t know even if I did.”
“She said we’ve always known each other, but I’ve never met her before. I wouldn’t forget that voice. Then again, if she’s from the future, then maybe we’ll meet later? I don’t know how all this Back to the Future shit works.” She sighed. “What do you think ‘Pray at the base of the mountain that touches heaven’ means?”
“Mount Everest could be ‘the mountain that touches heaven.’ Or it could be another tall mountain. Or a metaphor for something else entirely.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s helpful. It’d be nice if she’d just spoken like a normal person, but I guess that would be too easy.”
“Maybe she has to interpret her visions, too, like I do. Ethan told me his were like flipping through the pages of a graphic novel—static images with captions and dialogue bubbles. He said sometimes they made no sense.”
“What were your visions like with Ethan?”
“It was an unending string of nondifferentiable numbers. After some research I realized it was two different fractals.”
Val took his hand from her shoulder, turned it over so his forearm faced up, exposing his tattoo. “Are these what you saw?” She ran her fingers across the intricate shape that repeated itself the closer she looked, like thousands of brilliant aquamarine snakes eating their own tails.
“Yeah, that’s one of them—it’s called the Julia set.” He held up his other arm. “This is the other—the Davis-Knuth dragon, also called ‘twin dragon.’ Ethan said they were important and I shouldn’t forget them, but it’s been six years and I still don’t know what their significance is.”
“What else did you see with him?”
“That was it. Just the one vision.”
She lifted her head and met his gaze. “Are you saying he didn’t rock your world?”
Max shrugged. “I wasn’t that into him honestly. It was an effort to work myself into just the one vision. And he insisted on being on top, and that I call him ‘big brother,’ which was fucking weird.”
Val buried her head into the crux of his shoulder and laughed.
“I’m glad you think it’s funny.” He ran a finger up her spine; she yelped and arched her back at the tingling sensation. “Just be happy I didn’t ask you to do anything bizarre.” He let out a long exhale and stared at the ceiling. “Even though I wasn’t attracted to him, I still begged him to stay. I was so tired of being alone.”
She lif
ted her head. His eyes met hers when she touched his cheek. “You’re not alone anymore.”
He cupped her hand in his. “And neither are you.”
“What did you see with me?”
He frowned. “The number pi until it terminated.”
That didn’t sound especially interesting, but Max’s sudden haunted look made her think it had some significance in the world of numbers that she missed.
“Will you get that tattooed on your arm, too?”
“I don’t have enough room for that unfortunately. Pi is a lot of ink.”
She rested her head on his chest and traced the outline of his abs with her finger. “Well, this is great. I saw myself die horribly a bunch of times and met a woman who talked in riddles, and you saw the number pi. Real useful, all around.”
Val adjusted herself against him. When her thigh rubbed against his manhood, she felt him harden. He must have the same accelerated libido she did, always craving something that remained eternally out of reach. She pushed herself up so she was face-to-face with him, his warm hazel eyes with their starbursts of green in the center studying her in that way that melted her from the inside.
“Do…you want to try again?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“You’re not feeling sick or tired or anything?” She pushed a lock of hair from his brow and searched his bruised face for hidden signs of distress.
Max bear-hugged her, and with a whoosh, he’d rolled on top of her. “I feel great actually.”
There was no way he felt great after everything that’d happened that day, but his full smile and the joy in his eyes convinced her, at that moment anyway, it was true.
“What about you?” he asked. “You sure you want to risk seeing something horrible again?”
“We need to keep trying until we have a plan. And as long as you’re on the other side, I think I’ll be all right.”
His lips seized hers, and Val didn’t consider stopping him this time. She hugged him close and relished his weight on top of her, her rock in the storm that raged around them. With her legs wrapped around his waist, he slipped into her and flowed in and out, slow and deliberate, prolonging the act. They both knew the journey to climax was the best part, the buildup, the falling into each other until she didn’t know where he ended and she began. Her fingers traced a lazy path over every soft hill of his vertebrae, up to his thick hair and the fine coat of sweat that misted his scalp.
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