“Did you and Pickett get to talk?” he asked Emmie.
“Uh-huh. We crept upstairs by ourselves for a few minutes. It felt good to talk. How about you? I saw you and Aunt Lilly Hale go off together,” she teased. “Did she manage to have her wicked way with you?”
“I fought her off. Told her I’d promised to be loyal and faithful to you.” He took one hand from the wheel to squeeze her shoulder. “Hey, I didn’t know you could sing.” Do-Lord cut off her disclaimers. “One of Pickett’s sisters told me you’d never been willing to sing before. Why tonight?”
“Aunt Lilly Hale is so thrilled to have two great-grandchildren who are musical. I knew she wanted them to perform, but they’re both at awkward stages. So I said I would as a gift to their great-grandmother and asked them to help me. And, of course, they wanted to—if someone would make it legitimate.”
“If someone would assume leadership.”
“Have you ever seen such gifts? Aren’t they incredible? Hannah’s voice hasn’t matured to its full resonance yet, but when it does…”
“Is that why you had Hannah sing the last verse solo?”
“Not entirely. I can’t sing the last verse. Literally. When I come to ‘Be near me Lord Jesus/ I ask Thee to stay/ Close by me forever/ and love me, I pray’ I start choking up—” Her voice cracked. “—just like now. By the time I get to ‘Bless all the dear children/ In Thy tender care’ I can’t croak out a note.” Emmie sniffed and laughed self-consciously. “I can’t believe I have such a sentimental streak, but there it is. My guilty secret.”
Tender laughter threatened to stop his heart. She was so courageous, so unwilling to complain, he doubted if she knew what she had just revealed. She had laughed earlier about wanting her missionary parents to be dedicated to her, not to God. Emmie had been the twelve-year-old exile who begged for someone to stay with her forever and love her. With one hand he stroked the silken softness of her wet cheek.
Emmie laughed again and rubbed away the evidence of her vulnerability.
“Did you see the dishes set on the warming tray?” She changed the subject. “They were all gluten-free dishes prepared for Pickett. Dressing, rolls, gravy, everything! Pickett and I almost had a meltdown over that. We couldn’t look at each other, or we’d start bawling.”
“How did that happen?” Do-Lord thought he knew. He’d have to ask Jax the next time they popped a beer or two.
“I don’t know whose idea it was. Several people said they had brought a dish and asked her how she liked it.”
“Okay,” Emmie asked after awhile. “Are we going to talk about Charlotte and Vicky showing up tonight?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Right.”
After that they talked about the food. Do-Lord asked about people he had met. Together they wondered about relationships, retold funny incidents that had happened.
Sessoms Corner was about twenty miles off the interstate that would take them back to Wilmington. Theirs seemed to be the only car on the two-lane country road. The heavy moisture in the air thickened to patches of swirling mist and then to a drizzle, and their voices rose and fell against the slap-swish backbeat of the windshield wipers.
A fantasy stole into Caleb’s mind. He was driving through a rainy night, driving home with Emmie, sleepy children in the backseat, talking about the party at Aunt Lilly Hale’s… suddenly, not five feet from the car, there was a deer in the middle of the road—
He could see the upright ears and wide staring eyes of the deer so clearly. He braked hard enough to cause his shoulder harness to tighten. Time slowed. He felt the antilock brakes sense each wheel’s traction on the wet surface and send more or less brake fluid. Things slid around on the backseat.
“Wha—?” Emmie said.
There was no deer in the road. For as far as the head-lights could penetrate the silver curtain of rain, there wasn’t any hazard on the shiny blacktop. But the feeling of time split in two continued. He ignored the inner voice (that was in what he knew was real time) yelling at him for letting his imagination run wild. He was in the other time. No power on earth would have made him let up on the brake, until the truck was stopped.
With a tiny errk the truck halted. The second it did, not five feet from the bumper, a large buck bounded onto the highway, followed immediately by two smaller deer. Something thumped onto the floor from the backseat. He hoped it wasn’t the tinfoil-covered plate of leftovers.
Time went back to normal.
He had the truck moving again, its big motor purring, the tires swishing on the wet pavement, before Emmie broke her silence.
“How did you do that?” Intense curiosity vibrated in her tone, but not a trace of fear. “You stopped the truck before the deer appeared.”
He could tell her he had great peripheral vision. She might believe it.
He could tell her the truth.
Some guys in the teams could handle it. Some couldn’t.
It was funny. Jax had psychic ability himself. He knew what people could do. Do-Lord had seen it too many times to doubt he was using some sort of extra sense. Jax didn’t deny it, but he had absolutely no curiosity about it. When Jax asked Do-Lord to visualize placements, they both knew what he was asking Do-Lord to do—but they had never discussed it.
Lon knew. He, himself, had what he called a feel for things. He had a degree of insight into people and their motivations that was nothing short of uncanny.
He’d never talked about it with either man.
From the passenger seat, Emmie mused, “Peripheral vision, with headlights in the front of the visual field and darkness at the sides, is practically useless.” Well, there went that explanation. “With the windows rolled up and the wipers going, I can’t imagine you heard them.” Scratch that one too. “It wasn’t great reflexes. You reacted several seconds before the deer were there.”
She didn’t sound upset. And he felt the way he often felt afterwards. Athletes called it “in the zone.” A feeling of perfection, of surpassing ease—like your life had power steering—ordinary rules and conditions were transcended. One of those moments when you could ask for anything and get it.
Emmie twisted in her seat to look at him. “You do know something happened, don’t you?”
He laughed. A great, big, free laugh that shook something loose in his belly. He lifted her hand from her lap and brought it to his lips.
He liked the satiny-cool feel, the slight lemon scent. He liked it so much he kept it there and rubbed it against his lips.
“If you’re communicating in sign language, you need to know I can’t read it.” Emmie’s dry humor carried a touch of asperity.
Her tone let a bit of the helium out of his balloon. God, he didn’t want to blow this. Psychic stuff scared the hell out of some. She was a scientist. She admitted she dealt with logic better than faith. He tried to calculate which way his chances with Emmie were better—talk or don’t talk.
What the hell. Talk.
“Something happened,” he agreed, and suddenly he was laughing again. “Shit. It’s almost impossible to put into words. It sounds so ludicrous.”
“I was there. Remember? Nothing you say will be less believable than what I experienced.”
“You’ve got a point. Okay. I saw a deer in my mind’s eye.”
“You mean, before you slammed on the brakes. Was this what they call precognition?”
“Precognition is an after-the-fact label. It doesn’t describe the experience. When it happens, there’s no awareness that I know the future. It’s like there’s this split in my consciousness, and I’m in two realities, two places in time, at once.”
“You’ve had experiences like this before? This is fascinating.” In his peripheral vision he saw her shift in her seat so she could look at him face-on. “How do you know you’re not imagining things?”
Whenever he’d tried to discuss his experiences, that question had been asked, usually with a skeptical implication that he couldn’t tel
l the difference between what was imagined and what was real. The inquiry was usually a precursor to dismissing everything he said. Emmie hadn’t freaked out yet. And now that he thought of it, people frequently asked him how he did it—just as Emmie had—but no one had ever asked him if he was aware something had happened. That was Emmie. Seeing events in her own unique way. He wondered now why he had been worried that she would reject him or his experience.
“There’s a feeling…” He struggled to find the words. “I knew there wasn’t a deer in the highway in this now. But I knew there was in that one.”
“The now… where… the deer… was.”
Caleb grinned at her struggles to understand. “See how strange the sentences get? I warned you.”
“It’s a communication challenge, all right.” Emmie shook her head and giggled helplessly. “Here,” she held out her hand. “Maybe we should go back to the sign language.”
God, she was a darling. Other people freaked out when they encountered something beyond their frame of reference. Wanting her ratchetted up another turn. “Got a better idea.” He felt for his phone, unclipped it and touched speed dial. Emmie’s phone rang.
Emmie shot him a glance and pulled the phone from her purse from the backseat where she had tossed it. “Hello?”
“Is this Emmie?” he enquired politely.
“Speaking.”
“Is it really you?”
Emmie slanted him a puzzled smile. “Um… yes?”
“It’s just that I’ve been waiting for a chance to call you for hours. I can’t believe I finally got you. There’s something I need to ask you.”
She glanced at him again, out of the corner of her eye. “You certainly have my complete attention, now.”
“Okay. I’ve been at this party all evening. I was hoping—I know it’s last minute to ask for a date—the thing is I was hoping you would go out with me.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight-tonight? This night?”
“Sure. It’s not late. I can be at your house in twenty minutes.”
“What a coincidence,” she observed dryly. “I’ll get there at the same time.”
She should have known she couldn’t rock him—not at his own game.
“Hey! Perfect timing! What do you say? Is it a date?”
Emmie gasped. She connected the dots. “I get it. If I say ‘yes’ this will be our third date.”
“Y-y-y-y-y-ep!” He drew the word out and exploded the p with the self-congratulation of a man popping the cork out of a bottle of champagne.
Chapter 27
DO-LORD PLAYED WITH A PIECE OF EMMIE’S HAIR. ONCE at her cottage, they had agreed they didn’t want to go out and opted instead for glasses of Baileys. Now they were ensconced in the big blue chair again. There was only the one chair, so he had pulled Emmie into his lap, which suited him just fine. “What’s your favorite color?” he asked.
“Prussian blue.”
“What color is that?”
“A deep blue that has no hint of red. The chemical name is iron ferrocyanide. It was the first synthetic paint pigment. Like a lot of discoveries, it was the result of an experiment gone bad. The chemist was actually trying to create a synthetic red. This chair is pretty close to Prussian blue.”
“What was your mother’s maiden name?”
“Crenshaw. Thank God, my parents don’t follow the tradition of giving girls their mother’s and grandmother’s maiden names—like Pickett’s family does.”
“Is that how she got the name Pickett?”
“Um-hmm. Her grandmother on her mother’s side was a Pickett.”
“Is Emelina your first name or middle?”
“First. My middle name is Theodora.”
“Emelina Theodora?”
Emmie gave one of those bubbly chuckles he loved. “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I think Crenshaw would have been worse, aren’t you?”
“Emelina, gift-of-god,” he translated.
“That’s what my mother said. They thought they might be unable to have children.”
“Where were you born?”
Emmie craned her neck, attempting to see his face. “What’s going on? Are you trying to guess my passwords? I’m warning you, there’s not enough in my bank account to steal.”
He kissed the top of her head, hiding a smile. As usual, she had kept track of everything he said. “I just realized there was a lot you know about me, and I don’t know much about you.”
“Okay. I was born in San Francisco. Where were you born?”
“Rose Hill, Alabama.”
“That sounds like a nice place.”
“The best thing about it is that I don’t live there anymore.” Enough with minutiae. He had Emmie in his arms, true, but she’d been there twice. Just when he thought everything was a go, there was another condition to be met. Time to ask for the data he really needed.
“Emmie, the last guy you were with. How long did you know him before you had sex?”
“That would be Blount.”
“Blunt? Like blunt-force-trauma?”
“B-L-O-U-N-T. It’s hard to say. I’d seen him around campus for about a year. After all, we were in the same department. Then our class schedules coincided, and we started chatting for a few minutes sometimes.”
“Okay, how long, counting from your first date?”
“We never had a date.”
“I thought you said—”
“He never asked me for a date.”
What the hell? She had all but insisted on a notarized contract with him. Every attempt to understand her made him understand less.
“We ran into each other fairly frequently, and he liked to talk. And then we’d get together at his apartment sometimes. One thing led to another. “
She went to bed with the joker though, official dates or not. “Okay, count from whenever you like.”
“Five months. Six months. Maybe seven.”
It was as bad as he thought. A guy lived in her world. Had all the right credentials. Could see her every day. And it took him seven months. Five minimum.
“Did you fall in love with him?”
“Now that I’ve had time to think about it, strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that I fell in love. It was more like… wandered off.” Emmie chuckled. “Yeah, that’s it. I strayed into love. Oh, wait… I misdialed into love.” Emmie threw back her head, laughing. She would have tipped over backwards if Caleb hadn’t braced her with an arm around her shoulders. “Oh! Oh! I’ve got a better one: I got on the wrong bus into love!”
She was adorable. He dropped a kiss on her hair. Thank God, she wasn’t nursing a broken heart over the chump. “When did you notice your mistake?”
“There was a departmental dinner. A command performance. We didn’t go out together frequently, but I assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that we would go to the dinner together. Nope. He was going with someone else.” Emmie snorted. “Since he said our friendship”—Emmie made finger-quotes—“ ‘transcended the man-woman thing,’ it never occurred to him he ought to share his plans with me.”
Okay, the guy was a jerk. One who didn’t know shit about the family values Miss Lilly Hale talked about. Didn’t mean Caleb couldn’t learn from his mistakes. He was serious about Emmie. To make the most of their time together, they needed to talk over their plans and get on the same page.
“Just so you know, I’ll be transferred to San Diego in January,” he said.
Confident he would support her, Emmie leaned back to see his face. She pressed against his arm and grinned. “Are you trying to set me up for the great ‘been nice knowing you’ speech?”
That stung. Mainly because she could joke about it. He’d gotten mixed signals from the beginning, but the one clear signal, that she had insisted on making clear, was that if they had sex, a serious relationship was on the table. She was out of line, way out of line, to suggest he was setting her up for the kiss-off.
<
br /> “No, I’m just telling you now. I’m working on a game plan to get things started before I leave in January. I’m saying, Emmie, I don’t want to rush you. I’ll give you all the time I have, but I don’t have time for coffee together two or three times a week and chats between classes for seven months. I need an estimate of how many dates it’s going to take.
“And I probably better warn you. I don’t think we’ve got a chance of transcending the man-woman thing.”
Chapter 28
“UM… DATES.” THE PHONE CALLS TO ESTABLISH A record about the number of “dates” they had. And she had mentioned Pickett’s rule about never having sex on the first date. “Are you talking about a timetable for when we have sex?”
“Hell, yeah. You don’t think I want a long-term relationship without sex, do you? I’ve already told you I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that. What I feel for you isn’t in any sense platonic.”
Emmie said his words over and over in her mind. Her heart chugged violently. Her whole body shook with each thud. Her fingertips went cold. Even after all these years there were nuances other people understood because they were native to the culture in a way she wasn’t and never would be.
“Feel for me?” Emmie squirmed on his lap trying to get her feet to the floor.
He helped her to her feet, then stood himself. “Yes, feel for you. You want a declaration? Fine. Write it out. Anything you want. I’ll sign it.”
“But… you want a schedule?” Frantically, she pawed mentally through Grace’s lessons on projecting confidence, holding her value high, not making it too easy. Neither Grace nor Pickett had said anything about schedules.
Why did he have to talk about putting declarations in writing? This wasn’t romantic at all. He was good at being masterful. What she really wanted was for him to take her in his arms and overwhelm her with kisses—that would be a big step up from what she ever had before. This would be a good moment to sweep her off her feet. And she could just let it happen, without worrying about which date they were on. And pretend she was admitting nothing.
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