by Eden Winter
“Would you like to leave?” he asked in a whisper. I smiled but tried to hide it by biting my lip and looking down at my feet. The coils of my black hair danced around my face, and I hoped my hair was doing a good enough job of hiding the fact that I was feeling so giddy inside.
“Yes, I would, but what about everyone else?”
“Always thinking of everyone else, no matter who the ‘everyone else’ is,” he said. I blinked at him. I couldn’t believe it was something he noticed even though this was only our second time spending time together. I hadn’t even truly noticed that about myself until Peter spoke. He pulled away from me then. “I’m going to tell Baylee we’re leaving. She can let the others know.”
“Okay,” I said. I watched him as he walked away.
And then out of nowhere, there was a bright flash that came into my field of vision. It started on my left side, but in less than a second I was surrounded. It was too bright for me to tell what it was. I heard the sounds of pops and fizzles, and Peter turned around. His eyes were wide with shock, and it took me a while to realize I was now completely surrounded by flames.
I looked all around me. The rowdy pixies were looking at me and screaming. One of their wands was still shooting sparks, and I realized what had happened. The feint magic that was in all the wands people got at parties must have mixed with one of the concoctions in the potion bottles they had. Some magic was just not meant to mix together.
I covered my mouth with my hands. The fire was so hot that it made my eyes water. I couldn’t see a way out that didn’t involve being burnt. There were so many people screaming that I wasn’t even sure if I was one of them. My throat was burning. It could have been from the fumes or screams—or both.
The fire was too hot. It was coming closer and closer as it spiraled around me. I could no longer see any faces or anyone beyond the fire.
I was going to die. I was sure of it then. There was nothing I could do. There was too much toxic smoke from whatever the potion was. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, and fear had paralyzed me. I didn’t want my last moments to be moments of agony, but all I could think about was a painful and terrifying end.
But then it occurred to me. I couldn’t die. I couldn’t die because I still had a vision of Peter in what was more than likely his apartment. There would have been no point in showing me a vision of the future if I would not be alive to witness it myself.
I staggered. It was difficult to keep my footing with the flames drawing nearer to me. I coughed and covered my whole face. It was too hot and too much.
Too much.
And then, everything changed. One minute I was standing inside a ring of fire, and then I saw Peter leaping into the flames. He picked me up and flung me over his shoulder before diving back through the fire wall. He moved as far away as his legs would take him and then released me. He put me down gently and held my face. He’d had that same expression at the lake. It was a mixture of ‘are you crazy?!’, ‘I was worried!’, and ‘I am livid because you almost died in front of me!’
I tried to speak, but my lungs were filled with toxic air. I heaved and coughed for over a minute. The fire was still burning, but people had come with water and spells to put it out.
“You…” I choked, “You saved me. Again.”
“Are you okay?” was all he asked. He held my face in both of his hands and he was inspecting me. I didn’t feel any pain on my skin, so I didn’t think I was burned.
“Are you hurt?” I asked. I would have hated to see that he had gotten burned because of me while I was unscratched.
“I’m more afraid than anything. I’ll live. Sam… I don’t know what keeps happening to you, but I think you should go to a doctor.”
“I’m fine. I just…” I started.
“Holy cow, lady! Are you okay?”
“I’m so sorry. Man. Oh, shit. Lady, I’m so sorry!”
“Do you need to go to a hospital? I got my dad’s car. I could take you.”
“Oh, shit. Oh, shit. I’m sorry. It was an accident. I’m sorry.”
The pixies were surrounding Peter and me. One was pacing back and forth and kept offering apologies. He was obviously the pixie with the faulty wand, the toxic potion, or both.
“Should I call an ambulance?” someone yelled out.
“No!” I shook my head wildly and sat up. I coughed, but I still had more to say.
“I’m fine. I just need some water and rest.”
“Are you gonna call the cops?” the apologetic pixie asked me. They all looked so young—definitely younger than Baylee.
“No,” I said. I didn’t want to involve the police. I’d had enough of the paramedics and the police to last me a lifetime. I never wanted to rely on either again unless in an emergency. I was now just tired. All I wanted to do was drink water and sleep.
“I got water!”
Another pixie was racing toward us from inside the club. Quite a few patrons had come outside. The fire was out, but word must have gotten out—or in this case in—and curious people from inside the club were emerging.
The pixie handed me a glass of water, and drinking it definitely did the trick. My insides were raw from the coughing, but they no longer felt like they were on fire.
“Let’s go,” I said to Peter.
“What?” The only expression I could see on his face was telling me I must be crazy.
“There are too many people. I don’t want to have to keep telling everyone I’m okay. I don’t want to call the police. It was an accident. Please, let’s just go,” I said. I struggled to get on my feet, but once I was standing, I realized how weak I was.
“Okay,” was all Peter said. He stood up as well and followed me. I walked through the parking lot and over to where I remembered Peter had parked his car. He didn’t say anything else until he was about to open the door.
“Do you want me to take you home?”
“I don’t think I want to be alone right now,” I admitted. He wouldn’t have to say or do anything. Just knowing I wasn’t alone at home would be enough for me. Peter nodded but didn’t speak. He got into his car and waited for me to get in before shutting his door.
I reached for my seatbelt too.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. I said it low enough that I knew Peter wouldn’t have been able to hear me. There was a slight dizzy feeling that rendered me motionless for a second. Was it a vision coming? I waited for a bit, but nothing came. There was only the weak sensation and slight spinning, but I couldn’t see anything.
And that was when it occurred to me. I wasn’t always going to see something when I had a premonition. Sometimes I could just feel it because those were warnings. The dizziness without the premonitions were letting me know something. They were letting me know that the vision I had seen was just about to come true.
*
“I’m sorry about tonight,” Peter said. We hadn’t spoken during the entire ride over to his apartment. Peter pretended to be focused on driving, and I pretended to be preoccupied with whatever was outside the window. I played with my fingers the entire time and couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
We were standing outside his front door. We had walked through the door of the main building, hopped into the elevator, waited for it to take us up to the third floor, and then walked to his apartment before either of us said a word.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I said. “You didn’t do anything. I should be apologizing to you. You keep having to save me. You’ve… always been the one to save me.”
“Right place at the wrong time perhaps,” he said. We stepped into his apartment, and I stood close to the door while I waited for him to lock it behind us. It was nice, but then again, I knew that. I remembered how it was from the vision I’d had when I had gone to visit my dad. It was small, and it had a basic color pattern of brown, black, and white.
His kitchen was pristine even though I knew he must have spent a lot of time in it. I could smell so many foods an
d spices from where I was. When you walked into the apartment, you were immediately in Peter’s living room. Across from the front door on the opposite side was an island and the kitchen. I liked the open plan of his home. In my house, every room was separated by a large archway.
“I don’t want you to think you need to rescue me all the time,” I said in a soft voice. Peter was in front of me and walking in the direction of his living room. There was a black velvet couch in the middle of the room, and he scooted past it. He gestured to it to encourage me to sit, and I did.
“If you try to avoid getting into trouble, I won’t feel the need to save you,” he said. He took off his shoes and put them in one corner of the room. I wondered if I should have done the same. For someone who lived alone, his house was very tidy, but you could also tell that it was a bachelor pad.
“How is it that you keep getting into trouble anyway?” asked Peter. “The fire I can’t explain, but what was going on at the lake?”
“My life is like a terrible soap opera.”
“Does that mean I’m now a leading man in your life story?”
His back was turned to me, so I couldn’t read the expression on his face. It sounded like a joke, so I decided to treat it like one.
“I guess so,” I said. I chuckled to try to keep my cool.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. I didn’t notice just how hungry I was until Peter said something. I told him that I was, and he started taking things out of the cabinets and the refrigerator.
He hadn’t tried to delve deeper into my mind. He asked no questions about the lake or what was causing all of the bizarre and dangerous things to happen to me. I gave a silent sigh and watched him while he worked. He had a serious look on his face, but then again, he seemed serious so often that I was still having trouble figuring out his emotions based on just his expressions.
“So, tell me a bit more about you,” Peter said with his back still turned to me.
“How random,” I answered.
“Is it? I thought that was how people got to know one another.” His face turned so I could see him flash me a smile. It caught me off guard because it was the first time I saw him smiling with teeth. It was nice to see. Despite the near-death experience that happened not even an hour before, looking at Peter made me feel calm. I couldn’t explain how his smile calmed me down, while on the other hand being around him in itself was a form of mental and emotional frustration for me.
“It is, but I wasn’t expecting that right out of the gate. What would you like to know?”
“The things you want to tell me will come to the surface, and your words will move you from there,” he said. No one had ever said anything like that to me. People would sometimes try to be cute and say ‘everything’, as if that narrowed it down. And then there were those who would ask a list of basic questions, and to make them seem interesting and interested they would ask a not-so-basic question to throw you off and make you think. Peter simply said it was up to me to share. I liked that.
“I have an older sister. She’s my best friend, but we lost touch for a while. It was because of a guy—the same one Delilah was talking about when we were on the lake. He wasn’t a good guy. Shit. I should stop talking about him. This is about my sister. I don’t want you thinking that son of a bitch is the only major part of my life. My sister is Isabelle. She’s three years older, and she is the friendliest human being on the planet. When you meet her you’ll think it’s fake, but it’s not. She’s something out of a dream.”
I was rambling because I didn’t want to look Peter in the eye. He was pretty busy with the food he was preparing. I couldn’t see what he was making from where I was.
“Do you look alike?” he asked. It was an autopilot question. He heard me, but he was also preoccupied.
“Not really. She’s tall like a giraffe with these amazing legs. Her hair is super red. The only thing we have in common is our eyes. You can tell we’re related because of them.”
“I would really like to meet her one day,” he said.
“She would like you. And I’m not saying that because she pretty much likes everyone. I really mean that.”
“Well, before my encounter with her, I’m already flattered.”
“Where did you move here from?” I asked. I didn’t want the focus to be on me anymore. I was still jittery from nearly being burned to death. If I thought too much about myself and the fire, it would stir up a lot of negative memories and bring up a lot of questions that I knew I wouldn’t have the answers to any time soon.
“I moved from the west coast, before that I lived in Switzerland, and before that, Korea.”
“Wow, you’re so well-traveled,” I said. I was a bit jealous of that. I hadn’t ever been too far away from this place.
“Well, my mother is South Korean. I was born there. My father is now a well sought-after chef, and my mother was a diplomat. We moved to Switzerland where my father is from, and that’s where my mother passed away. We didn’t have as much money after that. My father put my inheritance away so I could do something with it once I turned eighteen, and that’s what helped me when I eventually moved here. We lived in Switzerland until I was seventeen, and then we headed out west because my father became a private chef for a very wealthy family. He still lives there. I came here because I took a map of the country and threw a dart at it. No extravagant explanation about what brought me here, I just…” Peter turned to face me, and that was when I recognized the situation.
He wasn’t looking at me. Peter was looking at something on the other side of the couch. He was looking at my past self from when I had seen him while I was sitting on my father’s couch. Peter blinked several times and then closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry. What was I saying?” he said.
“You were talking about what brought you here,” I said. Should I have spoken up about what I thought he might have seen? How was I going to get closer if I kept hiding myself from him?
“Yeah, it was random. It was an exciting and bold step,” he said.
“Are you sure it was random?” I asked. I stood up from the couch. I didn’t ask him in a sort of ‘autopilot’ way. I was trying to tell him something.
Peter was facing me now. There were a ton of ingredients on his kitchen island, and he was in the middle of cutting up an onion. He stopped to look up at me. He understood the way I was asking the question, but not the reason why I was asking it. He had no answer for me just then. How could he?
“Peter… Did you just see me?”
“What?”
“That day at the lake, when you stopped and thought you saw something. And just now when you were looking over there,” I pointed to the edge of the couch, “did you see me?”
A complete look of bemusement came across Peter’s face. He cocked his head to one side and his eyebrows flickered up and down in confusion.
“How did you…?”
“I’ve seen all of this before. I knew I was going to meet you before I met you. I saw you and your friends at the lake. I was on the ground, and that was when you thought you saw me. And on the boat at the lake, I panicked because I saw the fire. I saw the fire that happened tonight before it happened. And I saw you… I saw you in your kitchen looking at me—the me I was when I was looking at you from a completely different time and place.”
I regretted saying everything the moment the words escaped my lips. It was too much and too soon.
“What are you saying?” he asked. He was looking around the room in a way that said he was trying to piece together what I had said.
“I’m saying that up until a few weeks ago, I was a normal fairy, and then one day I saw you. And ever since that day, my perception of life, time, and free will has changed. Everything I’ve seen has involved you, whether directly in the vision or because you’re involved in whatever the vision is.”
Peter had put the knife down and was moving around the island. I took several bold steps forward, and he was looking right into
my eyes from just a few feet away. I continued talking and made sure I was looking at him when I spoke.
“I don’t think you being here was random at all. I think that you and I were meant to…” My sentence was cut short. Peter had walked over to me and taken my face in both of his large hands. He smelled of spices, he smelled of a familiar feeling… he smelled of home. And then he brought his face toward mine and gave me a long, sweet kiss.
Chapter Six
Family Affair
I wish I could say that something more happened between Peter and I that night, but after that kiss, I made some pathetic excuse about needing to go home and I left. He didn’t argue or mention the fact that he was halfway into preparing us some food. He was disappointed, and it showed, but he offered to take me home anyway. I was grateful to him, but I felt a disconnect because he didn’t even ask me what had happened.
We rode in silence on the way to my house, and I leapt out of the car in order to avoid a messy or beautiful and painful goodbye. That kiss terrified me more than I cared to admit. I was still vulnerable and hurt because of my failed relationship with Alex. I had to learn that not everyone was like Alex, but tonight was not that night.
Peter and I weren’t really the phone type, so I didn’t message him right away. I was nervous about speaking up about what happened on the night I’d nearly burned to a crisp, but I also secretly hoped he would message me first.
What about the kiss? What was going to happen the next time we spoke or even saw each other? I played the scenarios over and over in my mind with too many different outcomes. I found that it was better not to think about it at all.
But how could I not? I had told Peter my biggest secret and then left everything dangling in midair—my visions, the connection between Peter and the visions, the small flicker of a new flame inside me that had begun to burn for him, and a kiss that could have meant something more.
I waited almost four days before I got in touch with him. The excuse I made to myself was that I was busy with work, but I knew I had been avoiding him. I chose to text because hearing his voice would have made me feel even guiltier.