by Aja James
He was looking out of them, his profile towards her.
And what a magnificent profile it was. All sharp angles and hard lines and intriguing hollows. Stark contrast between pale alabaster skin and long dark hair.
She almost envied him his hair. If her tresses, in which she rather prided herself, were “molten gold,” his hip-length mane was a waterfall of obsidian.
Yeah, she was that corny. Good thing she was an artist and not a writer.
Speaking of which, Clara dug out her sketchbook from her small backpack, along with a well-used stick of charcoal, and flipped to a new page.
But before she started to draw, a mad-hatter notion filled her head, madder than the other disturbing thoughts she’d been having thus far:
What if she confronted her stalker (if indeed he was that) and asked who he was, what he was doing following her around, and if he gave satisfactory answers, ask him if he’d mind sitting for a few portraits?
The output would be way better than if she furtively sketched him from the faulty memory of stolen glances.
Clara had never been the passive sort. She liked to take the bull by the horns, so to speak.
And this particular “bull” was going to be no different.
*** *** *** ***
“May I sit next to you?”
The man whose own name he could not recall looked up with barely concealed surprise at the young woman he’d been following for the past few days like a love-sick puppy.
A love-sick puppy who suffered from severe retrograde amnesia.
Either that or insanity.
The first time he’d seen her was when she’d been strolling, hand in hand, through Central Park with a little girl, whose red curls were a brighter, bouncier version of her own auburn waves. Though the heads of both females shone with streaks of gold in the setting sun.
Like twin beacons of light that had mesmerized him.
She cocked her head when he didn’t answer with word or gesture.
Belatedly, he spread his hand to indicate the seat beside him, and she sat down, with enough distance between them that she could angle herself to face him more directly.
“I noticed you a few times—near the park, in the subway, in front of my studio, and now here,” she said cheerfully, as if her recitation didn’t describe the disconcerting pattern of a stalker.
For what else would you call someone who was a complete stranger, who showed up creepily every time you looked around?
“I thought I’d introduce myself, since we keep bumping into each other. That way, the next time we meet we don’t have to pretend we don’t know each other.”
Why would she want to know him? He didn’t know himself. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know himself.
So he just stared mutely back at her, drinking in her fey loveliness, delicate like dragon flies’ wings on the surface, but with an inner fiery strength hot enough to melt diamonds.
He didn’t know how he knew what was inside of her, simmering beneath the innocent surface.
He just knew.
“My name is Clara,” she went on, undeterred by his rude silence and expressionless unwelcome.
“And you are…?”
She gazed at him expectantly.
He wet his lips to lubricate their movement for speech, since he hadn’t spoken but a handful of words in the past few days.
Her eyes zeroed in on his mouth, and her pupils dilated rapidly until they almost eclipsed the rings of topaz blue.
Watching it happen took him from semi-hard to galvanized steel.
As in—erection. About to punch its way through the fabric of his trousers.
True, the man suspected he hadn’t been laid in a very long time, but he was pretty certain he wasn’t a virgin. His instantaneous reaction to this female, however, made him feel like he’d never known passion before her, never tasted sensuality.
Never indulged in sex.
More likely, he just didn’t remember. Or was purposely trying to forget.
He shifted his position slightly to hide what was doing in his lap and answered the first thing that came to mind.
“E.”
“Eeee…?” she drew out the letter encouragingly.
Did she want more than the one letter?
One of the few pieces of information he’d discovered about himself thus far was that his name appeared to be E. Weisman. He just didn’t know what the E stood for.
“Eeee…lie,” he finally finished, as his brain flipped through possible name combinations that began with a long-vowel E.
“E. Lie,” she repeated as awkwardly as he said it.
“Your name is Eli?”
“Yes?” He meant to say it definitively, but the word came out as a question.
“That’s a really nice name,” she enthused. “Did you know that it means ‘ascended’ or ‘uplifted’ in Hebrew? One of my students told me that, when she and her family decided on the name for her first grandson.”
He merely stared back at her, not sure whether or how he should respond.
He didn’t know much about himself, but he had a feeling he wasn’t the type of male who suavely made idle chitchat with strangers. Or perhaps he was, but he no longer had the talent for it.
He was still figuring out which skills he possessed and what his natural inclinations were.
He knew, for example, that he instinctively didn’t trust anyone; he only trusted his own judgment. Had he been hospitalized for his condition, he wouldn’t have gone home with the first person that visited him just because they told him they were some relative or significant other of his. Even if they had all the proper documentation, he would still have doubted them.
On the other hand, if the person was this woman sitting beside him now, perhaps he would not have objected if she took charge of him. And if she lied, he might have been perfectly content to corroborate her lie.
He wanted her to take him home with her.
“Do you know where your stop is, Eli?” she asked as the bus paused at one of the several stops they’d already had en route and started moving again.
“You wouldn’t want to miss it.”
“I won’t,” he said. Because he was getting off wherever she was getting off.
And then what, he didn’t know. Would he continue following her now that she’d confronted him about it?
“It’s not safe for someone like you, alone, so late at night,” he said, involuntarily attempting to explain his actions.
Then he realized that what he just said could be interpreted as threatening rather than protective, depending on how she perceived him.
She regarded him closely, trying hard to perceive.
He didn’t know what she saw when she stared so intently at him, but he knew what he saw:
A beautiful faerie with dark red tresses, brilliant blue eyes, a curious mind, and a passionate heart.
He’d seen it when he first spotted her walking through the park with her young charge, full of laughter and undiluted joy.
He’d seen it when he followed them inside the subway station, when she’d looked fiercely protective, like a lioness, hurrying the little girl onto the train to keep her safe from the likes of him.
He’d seen it when he loitered beneath her apartment every night since, having tracked her by her very scent on the wind, as she sometimes danced in her long sleep shirt in front of her bedroom window with rhythm-challenged exuberance and childish abandon.
For a man who felt dead inside, this woman—Clara—represented the spark of life that inspired him to keep breathing, keep walking, in the hopes that, one day, he might emerge from the darkness that ever surrounded him.
That he might feel again.
“I know how to take care of myself,” she smiled, having come to a decision about him. “But thank you for protecting me.”
He was trying to protect her, he realized, when he followed her this particular night.
But the other times he’d followed her had
n’t been about protection. They’d been about satisfying an undeniable need within him, like the cold, lonely moon chasing after the bright, hot sun.
And then there were the other needs that seethed unfulfilled within him, as if he were a savage, predatory animal:
The need to hunt.
To feed.
To fuck.
*** *** *** ***
Clara got off the bus in Brooklyn, close to the Eastern European hoods, three blocks away from the Little Flower Orphanage.
Eli got off with her, but followed her at an unobtrusive distance of several yards.
Strangely, she was no longer worried that she had a stalker. Not when it was Eli anyway. She always trusted her instincts, and they told her quite firmly that he didn’t mean her any harm.
Even more bizarre, she felt safer knowing that he was there.
It was very late at night. But a few people still walked the streets. She passed by a couple of vagrants, a couple of homeless people huddled on brownstone steps or sleeping on benches.
A large, burly man swaggered his way toward her from the opposite direction and turned to give her a hard look, even though her clothes and posture didn’t invite attention, and she never used makeup to accentuate her features.
Even so, her long-sleeved T and her capris pants didn’t hide her feminine curves, or the fact that she was slender and small, at five-foot-five and one hundred and twenty-five pounds.
In other words, she was easy pickings for a larger male if he chose to harass her.
But then the man looked beyond her, and it was almost comical how his face immediately changed from “interested” to “oh, is she yours? My bad, no trespass here.”
The man even gave Clara a wide berth as they passed each other, his head turned away from her.
Clara smiled to herself. Oh yes, she definitely felt safer knowing Eli was behind her.
She arrived at the orphanage in one piece and paused on the front steps, looking down the street from where she just came for signs of her follower (stalker seemed an inappropriate descriptor now that she felt certain Eli had no ill intent).
He’d disappeared.
She craned her neck to look farther, but there was no trace of him in any direction. It was as if she’d imagined his presence all this while.
Clara mentally shook her head, stamping down the feeling of disappointment that welled within, and was just about to use her key to get inside the orphanage when the front door opened to reveal Jaimie Lin, on her way out in a hurry.
“Thanks for coming so quickly,” Jaimie said in a rush. “I wouldn’t have called you here on such short notice, but I have a family emergency and—”
“Go, go,” Clara urged her, shooing her from the steps. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll keep an eye on the kids. Between Joanna and me, we’ll be just fine.”
Joanna Baker and Jaimie Lin were the resident supervisors who stayed with the dozen or so little boys and girls who called the orphanage home. They always tried to maintain the numbers around or ideally below a dozen, encouraging children to go into foster care, and facilitating their adoption.
Jaimie practically lived at the orphanage twenty-four-seven, opening it up in the morning and working as the receptionist and assistant supervisor all day and night. She devoted all her time to the children, and always fretted when she was away from them. She never took any vacation that Clara knew about. So this truly must be an emergency to take her away.
Jaimie rushed off at a brisk walk, almost a jog, in the direction of the nearest subway station.
Clara went inside and locked the front doors with efficiency. She checked the locks twice before heading up to the third level where all the bedrooms were.
Joanna was waiting up for her when she got up to the third floor landing.
“Everyone is asleep,” she said in hushed tones under the dimmed lighting of the hallway. “I don’t know why Jaimie had to pull you out of bed in the middle of the night. I would have been fine on my own.”
“I know,” Clara said. “It’s not because Jaimie is worried about your ability to handle things, it’s just how she is, needing to do everything by the book. Precautions and all.”
Joanna sighed. “Well, I’m glad you’re here. It will be a lot easier to get everyone dressed, washed and fed in the morning with your help.”
Clara grinned. “Happy to be of service. It’s been ages since I’ve slept here.”
Joanna smiled wryly, “The beds haven’t gotten any bigger, and the mattresses haven’t gotten any thicker, I can tell you.”
This was where Clara’s small stature came in handy. She could fit on the twin beds just fine, but Joanna, at almost six feet, didn’t have much room to maneuver, even with her specially ordered extra-long twin.
“I’m turning in,” Joanna said, gesturing down the left hall where her private bedroom was.
“Good night,” Clara said, heading down the right side where Jaimie’s room resided.
Once inside the small bedroom, Clara took off her shoes and took her phone out of her backpack, laying it on the bedside table.
Since she’d already completed her ablutions for the night, there was nothing to do but lie back in bed under the light summer quilt and go to sleep.
It didn’t take long to drift off, since Clara had always been a good sleeper. She could fall asleep anywhere and could probably sleep through a hurricane she slumbered so soundly.
But just as she was about to enter the world of dreams (in which she hoped a certain tall, green-eyed male would be prominently featured), the bedroom door opened an inch with a slight creak.
Perhaps that alone wouldn’t have roused her, but then, the door opened wider, and in slipped a small girl with carroty curls, holding a bedraggled looking Pooh bear against her chest.
“Annie, is that you?”
Clara pushed herself up into a sitting position and squinted in the darkness of the bedroom, seeing the girl nod in confirmation.
“What are you doing out of bed?”
She didn’t know why she kept asking questions as if she expected them to be answered. Annie hadn’t said a word since the orphanage admitted her weeks ago.
In answer, Annie shuffled to Clara’s bed and stood beside it expectantly, staring at her with those big blue eyes, framed by long, curling lashes, eyes so similar to Clara’s own that when they went out together, and when they had visitors at the orphanage, everyone thought Annie was Clara’s.
Daughter, sister, some kind of close relative, because they looked very much alike.
“You want to come snuggle up with me?” Clara invited, raising a corner of the quilt.
Eagerly, the little girl climbed into the bed and tucked herself against Clara’s side, the Pooh bear she held squeezed between them.
Clara wrapped one arm around Annie and lightly stroked her soft, silky curls. Within minutes, the little girl’s breathing deepened in sleep.
But now Clara lay awake, making plans.
From the first day that Annie arrived at the orphanage, Clara had taken an instant liking to the girl, even though Annie did nothing to invite friendship, never smiling, not speaking when spoken to, and looking around her with large, empty, spiritless blue eyes.
Perhaps Annie reminded Clara of herself when she’d first come to the orphanage. She must have been a couple of years younger at the time than Annie was now.
Most research said that people wouldn’t have memories before the age of four or five, but Clara definitely recalled her first day at the orphanage. How scared she’d been. How lonely and worried. Wondering what she’d done wrong to be sent to such a place.
Not that the Little Flower Orphanage wasn’t a perfectly nice place to be, certainly nothing like the exaggerated stories about orphanages in general. And the staff had been welcoming and empathetic.
But it wasn’t home.
Although, Clara had never felt truly home anywhere that she could recall.
Except in her dreams.
In her dreams, there was a beautiful green paradise, full of trees, exotic flowers with blossoms as big as her head, lavender scented air and mossy grass strewn with beads of amber that sparkled in the sun. In those dreams, a chubby toddler Clara was surrounded by music, interspersed with tinkling bells and lyrical laughter. Her playmates were fun-loving forest creatures and magical beings; she even had pet salamanders that lived in her pockets.
Of course, none of it was real, no matter how vivid the memories, Clara understood as she grew older. Over time, the dreams faded. But she could never shake off the sense that she didn’t belong. She didn’t fit.
Perhaps not anywhere in this world.
So, yes, she absolutely empathized with Annie.
Annabelle May Parker. Of the Long Island Parkers, a family that came from money and continuously, exponentially made more money off of their money.
Unfortunately, the buck stopped with Annie. The Parker family tree had gotten smaller and smaller as the generations went on. Annie had no living relatives that they knew of, and her parents hadn’t put together any special will for her in the event of their death. And now, a little girl, whose family fortune was worth over a billion dollars in assets, was sleeping on a bunk bed in a room she shared with two other girls at an orphanage.
In fact, Annie wouldn’t be getting a penny of that fortune. Almost everything the Parkers owned was tied to their cutting-edge robotics and technology corporation Me2.
Apparently, Me2 was taken over by a larger conglomerate recently, in what was reported to be a hostile bid. The house was mortgaged, and all of the liquid assets went to pay creditors and other constituencies that had dibs on the cash.
It took several weeks for the courts to sort out what to do with Annie even before she came to the orphanage. Clara didn’t know where the girl stayed or who with, but it must have been a very confusing and traumatic time.
Through all this, Annie hadn’t said a word.
Not to the police, not to counselors, not the judge, not anyone at the orphanage. No one.
If she continued on like this, and Clara had a feeling she might if she stayed where she was, then Annie wouldn’t make a smooth transition into foster care. Moreover, if she was unlucky like Clara had been, being in foster care might be the worst thing that could happen to her at this point.