by Amber Stuart
I groaned. The thought of Eric having sex with anyone, let alone Lydia, was the last thing I wanted to think about.
“Alright, sorry,” she laughed. She turned contemplative again and pulled a few more blades from the ground. “How long can you stay?”
“As long as you’ll let me,” I answered quickly.
“Well,” she said, looking back up at me, those shimmering hazel eyes both scared and excited. “I guess we just start there.”
Chapter 6
Eric had insisted on coming into my room that evening. He sat in the same chair, his elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped in front of him, as he told the same story from the party, at least what he could remember of it. The rational part of my brain tried to acknowledge it did seem like he had meant the kiss innocently enough, but perhaps because he was drunk or because he was lonely or because it was just Lottie looking as beautiful as ever in her dark blue sweater dress with black filigree designs that he made a stupid mistake. A very stupid mistake. One that I at least wanted to hit him for. Eric told me I could. Somehow, when someone gives you permission to hit him, it takes the satisfaction out of it. I passed on the chance.
For now, I told him the best I could do was treat him as Eric my coworker, not Eric my friend. I think part of him had suspected I would say that and there was nothing he could say at this point to change my mind.
He unclasped his hands, leaned back in his chair, folded one leg over his other knee and asked, “So, do you want to hear what I learned from Lydia?”
“What happened between you and Lydia? Don’t fuck this up for me and Lottie.”
“What do you…? Oh, Christ, Dietrich, you’ve met her. She’s sweet and all. I mean, really sweet. That’s the problem. It took all of about five minutes to feel like I was talking to my little sister. I’m not trying to fuck her.”
“Your sister’s not that sweet.”
“No. But point remains. Do you want to hear this or not?”
I nodded. I still wanted to hit him… sort of… but I also really wanted to hear what he had learned from Lydia. And I was secretly exceedingly glad he wasn’t going to try to sleep with her. Something told me if Lydia’s heart got broken, I would get at least partly blamed. After all, I had told him about Lottie. I had brought him here.
“She told me how it works, kinda. It was actually fascinating. I mean, like Lottie, she’s not a scientist or whatever so the mechanics and all are a mystery even to them, but they’re just girls who wanted different choices than they had at home. It’s crazy, you think of a society that’s capable of doing something like this, you’d think they at least have equal rights and shit, but apparently girls there are just… I don’t know. They don’t have a lot of freedoms, I guess. There’s a lot of classism, too. Lottie’s family had money so she was well educated and then she taught Lydia whatever she could, but that’s why they don’t understand how any of this happens. That’s why even working at a bookstore is liberating for them. Lottie’d never had a job before.”
“Why would they even let women come here then?” I hadn’t wanted to interrupt him, but Eric’s stories often had a tendency to start somewhere in the middle, loop around to the beginning and then jump to the end, all while leaving out details I thought might be important. Given his job and training, he was incredibly observant, so why he still held onto this relic of his past, this annoying habit of his to tell stories in such an upside down and inside out kind of way, often irritated me more than it confused me.
“Oh, I asked her that,” of course he had, “and she said it’s not like when women are treated like second-class citizens here. It’s still about power, but they’re not really trying to control women as much as they are trying to exclude them from certain things.”
“That’s the same damn thing, Eric.”
He brushed it off. “She didn’t seem to think so, but maybe she just hasn’t been here long enough. This is one of those things, actually. It’s not easy to get approved to come here if you’re a woman. There are other places, places she didn’t know much about but this is where Lottie had wanted to come. She still doesn’t know how Lottie got it all worked out. She made it seem like she knew somebody. Kyrieana did, I mean. Lydia was nice and all, but there were some things she wouldn’t tell me, and sometimes, she pretended not to know something, but she obviously did. I think she knew how Kyrieana got this worked out so they could both come together.”
“Holy shit, so it is mostly men here?” I asked. I didn’t like the sound of this.
“Yeah. You ask me, I think they don’t like letting their women out of their control, no matter what Lydia says. So it’s mostly men, but I don’t know how many. She wouldn’t say; she claimed she didn’t know. How can you not know how many people from your planet have traveled across the universe to live on another planet?”
I shrugged. “And why? Why are they coming here?”
“Well, I asked her that too.” I rolled my eyes now. He was a fucking intelligence agent. He didn’t need to keep telling me he knew how to ask questions. But he ignored me and kept talking. “And she insisted we had nothing to worry about. They’re not aggressive. They don’t even have armies. I’m not buying that. But she said for some, it’s scientific curiosity, just like Lottie told you, and for others, it’s wanting an adventure, or opportunities, or whatever. And they’ve been doing this for a very long time.”
I waited. He was actually going to make me ask him. I sighed heavily. “How long?”
“She guessed it must be hundreds of years.”
“Holy shit,” I said again.
“Oh, and I got a name for her too, even though it doesn’t seem as important since there’s no confusion. I mean, Lydia’s just Lydia but I was curious. So I told her Lottie had translated her name as Kyrieana, and she thought about it for a while then said her name would probably be something like Lyr-he-ana.” He emphasized each syllable in case I was having another slow-English-day. “All girls have that same ending sound to their names, which I think is kind of cool, and she chose the name Lydia because it reminded her of at least part of her name.”
“That may be the most useless information you’ve ever told me.”
Eric just shrugged again. He was clearly enjoying this. “Anyway, Kyrieana got it worked out in some magical way that apparently Lyr-he-ana…”
“Stop doing that,” I interrupted. Eric ignored me.
“Has no idea how, and there’s just this room. That’s it. No tunnel, or bright light, or swirling portal. Nothing movie worthy at all. She said their bodies on their planet aren’t like ours; they’re not as… tangible… I don’t know. I didn’t really get that part because she didn’t know how to explain it, but they just waited inside this room for a while. It never moved or anything. It was attached to a fucking building, for Christ’s sake, but when the door opened again, they were here. And she could feel the loss of her energy almost immediately. It wasn’t huge, but they could both feel it. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were in Houston. They had been given instructions on exactly what to do and they were told they would have about one week – one Earth week, obviously – to find a body or they wouldn’t have enough energy left to revive it. Wait,” Eric held up a hand.
He knew I had a long list of questions, and attempted to answer them before I could interrupt him again. “No, I don’t know what all of her instructions were. I know some of them had something to do with getting to the morgue. They were very close to the hospital that Lottie and Jamie had been brought to, so that’s how they were able to find them so quickly. Hell, for all I know, that room they came out in or whatever may be in the hospital. It would make sense. And if they couldn’t find a suitable one there, it’s the fucking medical district. It’s easy enough to find a young female body somewhere. Anyway, once they saw Lottie and Jamie’s bodies, they stayed with them. They watched everything. We obviously can’t see them without a body. I mean, they could see each othe
r, but we can’t see them. This is a fucking trip, isn’t it?”
I nodded. What the hell else was there to do?
“How did they…”
How was I supposed to ask him how they had decided who would take which body? How had Kyrieana decided she would become Lottie? Did they roll a die? Draw straws? Rock, paper, scissors?
“Kyrieana, did she choose Lottie’s body?” My throat felt tight and stiff. Why couldn’t I have just gone crazy?
“Oh. I don’t know actually. She never said. I didn’t think to ask, sorry.”
It shouldn’t have mattered, but that was the only part of this story that involved my Lottie, so to me, there wasn’t anything more important.
“Doesn’t matter,” I mumbled.
Eric hesitated but then picked up with his story. “They watch everything that’s done so they’ll know how to undo it. That’s how they knew all sorts of formaldehyde and shit is put in those bodies that’s not supposed to be there. And you probably don’t want to hear all these details.”
I was about to tell him he was right. While I had wanted to know why Kyrieana had chosen Lottie, or if Lydia had chosen first and Lottie was just leftover, I didn’t want to hear how Kyrieana, even if I actually kinda liked Kyrieana, had taken over my dead fiancée’s body and brought it back to life. But then I remembered sitting by the lake with her that afternoon, the breeze gently blowing those long strands of soft, wavy brown hair around her delicate face, those slender fingers playing in the grass, that thrill of endorphins, and, well yeah, testosterone, when our legs brushed against each other as I reached across her to pluck away an invading spider.
“No, it’s ok. Tell me.”
“We were right about them needing help. A lot of help. Somehow, they’re able to let these guys who are here know what bodies to keep an eye on, then as soon as they have the chance, they dig up the bodies, rebury the casket, then get the hell out of there. Lydia made it sound like they start claiming the bodies, those are her words, as soon as they’re in the van. I told you they don’t have a lot of time. It’s like all this energy they have is used to fix all the shit that doesn’t work anymore. And all the crap that’s not supposed to be there makes it harder, they have to use up a lot of energy just to get that shit out…”
“How do you just get formaldehyde and methanol out of your body?”
Eric shrugged. “Same way we get anything out of our bodies when we’re alive. We know what killed them both. Lottie’s spinal cord was severed, some of her organs, like her liver was pretty badly damaged, she had a lot of broken bones,” Eric’s voice had dropped and he finally stopped.
We both sat in silence for a while. I already knew all of this. We had been told the full extent of her injuries at the hospital. We had also been told she had most likely died very quickly. I remember someone – some doctor, maybe an intern – telling me at least she hadn’t suffered. And then Eric was pulling me away, out of the room, and I had no idea why. I had a vague ghost of a memory of him telling me he was afraid I was going to kill that guy.
“Just finish,” I sighed.
“They both woke up in their new bodies several days later in a house in Waco. She described what it was like, waking up in a foreign body. She could remember her language, her life, everything that had happened, but she had no idea how to use this body. She had been watching people at the hospital, at Jamie’s funeral. The way they talked, moved, smiled, hugged, cried. But she couldn’t figure out how to do any of that. Lottie had woken up first and when she finally got her neck to move, to turn her head to look at her best friend, she saw her lying there crying.”
I held my breath. No. That wasn’t right. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like someone was holding a pillow over my face, suffocating me.
My Lottie.
How had this happened to her? What the hell had gone wrong? What had been going through Kyrieana’s mind when she woke up? Or was it Lottie’s mind? Did she know she was supposed to have died? That she was dead? Was she thinking about me? Her mother? I wanted nothing more right then than to leave that room, drive the short distance down Essen Lane to her apartment, to beg her to just let me hold her again, to promise her – even though I had no idea how I could ever fulfill it – that nothing like this would ever happen to her again.
“Could she speak to her?” I finally asked. I already knew the answer. She hadn’t even known how to translate her own name. How would they have spoken to one another?
“No,” Eric said. “She understood what crying meant. She had seen so much of it at the funeral. But she couldn’t figure out why Kyrieana was crying, and she didn’t know how to talk to her. She couldn’t really move much. She wanted to make some sort of sound to let her know she was here with her because she thought Kyrieana was scared or that maybe she was hurting. That happens sometimes if a body is badly injured. They heal the worst of the problems but a broken arm is still going to hurt like hell. She couldn’t do anything though except lie there and watch her best friend cry in this strange body she didn’t even really recognize.
Anyway, after a while, one of the guys who had been helping them came in to check on them, saw they were both awake, saw Lottie crying. He figured she was in pain, so he started checking her out again,” Eric paused, he must have seen me flinch. “They weren’t like that, Dietrich. Nobody messed with them. He just checked for broken bones, visible bruises, listened to her heart and lungs, stuff like that. And he talked to her, in English, and of course Lydia couldn’t understand anything he was saying. But she said something weird kind of happened, but she didn’t really think anything of it at the time, because she was kinda dealing with a lot of shit of her own. But this guy, a doctor, I guess, was just talking, trying to be calming and soothing, I suppose, but Lydia was watching her the whole time and at one point, he said something and she swears it seemed like Lottie understood him. Which should have been impossible.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered. A hat trick of holy shits. This was one hell of a ride. “Did the doctor notice?”
“Lydia thinks so. He kinda looked at her funny but then just brushed it off, probably just assumed it was a coincidence because nobody wakes up being able to understand a language from a planet they’ve never been on.”
“So she woke up this way. From the beginning. She woke up as Lottie and Kyrieana.”
Eric just watched me. He had already reached that conclusion, but he didn’t want to agree or disagree with me. This wasn’t a detached interest in a remarkable discovery; this wasn’t even a good story you might tell over a few beers and a game of pool. This was a revelation that was threatening to kill me all over again, to drag me into a deeper part of Hell than I had ever known existed.
If we were right, then my Lottie, the love of my life, my only love, had spent the past two years trapped in her body as someone else. It would mean that she had always known who she was, and who she could never be again. She had awakened from death, resurrected, but no longer herself.
Had she wondered then, as she lay there crying in that room in Waco, Texas, if I had survived her death? If I would survive in this afterlife without her? Was she crying for me, knowing that even if she came to me, she wouldn’t be Lottie, not the same Lottie, and that I may not still love her? Is that why she had never tried to contact me?
“God,” I whispered.
Eric shook his head sadly. “God had nothing to do with this.”
I closed my eyes. No. This wasn’t God’s territory. This afterlife was not His.
Chapter 7
For the first time in a month, I had one of those dreams that night. We were sitting on the floor in our apartment in Houston, swatches of colors spread around us, and like jigsaw puzzle pieces, Lottie would hold two up together, squint, shake her head and throw them aside. I tried to help. I felt completely useless. I grabbed a swatch and flipped it over. Majorelle blue. I held it up to her, a little too much purple for her to make the immediate eye association,
but she grabbed it anyway, held it closer to my face with that God-she’s-so-sexy smile then shook her head.
“Nice try,” she tossed it aside. I didn’t care what colors she picked for our wedding, but I was not wearing a tie that matched my eyes. I had some dignity left. Somewhere.
Lottie was preoccupied with peridots and… hell, I didn’t even know. She was so focused, so intent on finding the perfect combination of colors. She said everything about our love was flawless. Our wedding had to be a reflection of that. I told her we should elope to Vegas and in the end, the result would be exactly the same. Lottie just smiled and held two swatches together again, asking me what I thought, and I had to bite my lip to keep from telling her that I thought we could be in Vegas in less than a day if we looked for flights now. Instead, I told her those two colors looked exactly like the two she had just shown me.
“Dietrich, the last two were peridot and ivory. These are peridot and creamy ivory.” She was fucking with me. God, I loved her so much.
“Hm. You’re right. That changes everything.” I reached over and grabbed the swatches from her hands, pretending to study them more carefully, but really, I was only studying her. She was studying me, too, that hybrid smile still on her face. This time, I knew what it meant.
I tossed the swatches aside and leaned over to kiss her, tasting the remnants of the pinot grigio she’d been sipping on while examining the spots of color all over our floor. My tongue pressed gently between her lips, and her hand clasped behind my neck pulling me down closer toward her, then sliding us down on the floor until I was lying on top of her. One hand cradled her head and the other began unbuttoning her silky red blouse, my fingers gently tracing over the goosebumps as they erupted across her flesh.
I moved my lips down to her neck, that smell of pears and honey always so strong there, licking her skin, tasting her as she pulled at my shirt. She pulled it over my head and let her fingertips glide over the contours of my chest, my nipples, my abdomen, to the edge of my jeans then up my back. She was driving me crazy.