by P. Kirby
The recollection was hers, hers to share only if she chose, and Adam had no right to it. She stared back at his violet-blue eyes and struggled against the mysterious tug she felt, drawing her, everything about her, to him like a lodestone. His strange magnetism flowed over and into her and peeled away her resistances. “Yes,” she said finally, broken. “With you, I wanted more, I wanted to know you.” Though it felt like a hollow defiance, she added, “But I was seventeen years old. I had no idea what I was doing.”
Mouth quirked in an ironic smile, Adam leaned toward her and reached for her chin, lifting her face to his. “You’re not my type, Maya. Funny how that worked out.” His thumb traced a circle on her chin. “What about Black? Any teenage fantasies about him, a desire to walk on the wild side with the bad boy?”
“No.”
“Have you slept with him yet?”
Irritation spiked through her at the question but the natural response—“That’s not any of your business”—was brushed aside by whatever had stripped away her free will. “No,” she answered.
“You’ve gone and fallen for him, haven’t you?” He smiled and while his smugness made her angry, her mouth quirked and smiled stupidly back. “I tried to spare you that. I told my associates to give you something else to think about. But their stupid distraction backfired.” At this his gaze wandered over to Delilah’s aquarium. Anger shaded his eyes, and for a moment his hold on her loosened.
Then he composed himself, and the brilliant smile returned. “You’d fuck me, wouldn’t you?” His lips brushed hers and she moaned in agreement. “You’d do anything I wanted.” He kissed her hard with no affection, his tongue spearing into her mouth.
The heat of his kiss, his magic blistering her mouth, stripped her bare of any defenses. Her need for him ripped through her, laying open a yawning hunger that could never be filled. All that remained of Maya was stupid, savage lust. He withdrew enough to laugh against her mouth. And though she knew he was laughing at what he’d reduced her to, she nearly screamed with joy when he shoved his hand up under her sweater, under her bra and pinched her nipple.
He had just started to pull the bottom of her sweater up when his phone rang. “No, leave it,” Maya protested as he pushed her away and fumbled for the phone.
Adam held her away from him, hands on her shoulders, studying her and oozing satisfaction. “I have an appointment, otherwise I’d take you to bed just to spite Benjamin.” Despite something that still cried out in protest inside her, she pushed toward him, frantic with need. “Enough,” he said. “I need your help, Maya.”
“My help?”
He released her and she rushed to him, sliding her arms around his waist. He smiled down at her, running his fingers through her hair, leaving tingling paths on her scalp. She shivered and he said, “With something only you can do, Maya.” Tilting his face so that his mouth was inches from hers, he spoke in a throat whisper. “Anyone can help me with sex. Only you can create others like me.”
Hot desire and buried anger warred in her mind. “Others like you?”
“Yes.” His dry laugh vibrated his body against hers. “Like me, and preferably not like Black.”
A small piece of her genuine self surfaced at Benjamin’s name. “You don’t like him.”
With a tiny shake of his head he said, “I think he’s a brilliant young man forever crippled by a desire for mediocrity.”
“I don’t follow.”
Adam drew back again, hands on her shoulders and holding her at a little less than arm’s length from him. “The life too ordinary, Maya. A house, a wife, a kid. He’s not like us, not like you and me.”
Distracted by the loss of contact between them, Maya could only stammer, “W-what…?”
“You and I want more.” His head turned as he looked around the living room. “Look at this place. Nice furnishings and obviously a recent very expensive renovation, right?”
Maya nodded. The previous owners had renovated everything in the historic adobe home. She knew she’d paid too much for the house, but she’d loved it the moment she’d seen it.
“And one of these days, you’ll want something even more. You’ll take your equity and roll it into something bigger. The same is true with your career and the men you date.” His smile broadened to expose his teeth. There was something rather feral about the expression. “I did some checking. Only doctors and lawyers for Ms. Maya Stephenson. Nobody gets in your bed unless they have a string of initials after their name.”
Her hand twitched with the need to slap him, but she didn’t move, frozen by whatever compelled her to need him and shove aside genuine desire for Benjamin.
“You’ll never be satisfied with a guy like Ben Black.”
But I will, said the tiny portion of herself that had evaded Adam’s strange charm. “Benjamin’s a good guy,” Maya managed to say.
“Benjamin? He’s Ben to everyone else. Do you think that makes him yours, calling him Benjamin?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You’ve got work to do for me. And if you do a good job, I’ll see to it that you get a house that makes this place look like a closet. Together, you and I are going to accomplish a lot.”
Like a petulant child, Maya said, “But I have a job.”
“You’ve got more important things to work on now.” Releasing her, he reached into an inner pocket in his jacket and pulled out a slim stack of folded papers. Handing them to her, he explained, “This is from a book called The Lore of the Formed. I copied the parts that discuss the creation of a Formed entity.”
Against her volition, Maya took the papers, and stared blankly at the photocopied pages. “I can’t. It’s wrong. I—”
“Of course you can. You’ve already done it twice. It should be easy this time.” He smiled and more molten hot charm poured from his violet eyes into her. Maya stood, empty-eyed as he told her what kind of people he wanted her to create. Along with a physical description of Adam’s ideal employee, his words crammed her head with a compulsion to pick up a pencil and start sketching, to overflow blank paper with the ideas that were flooding her mind.
Adam’s presence filled her and yet she felt hollow, consumed by a bottomless hunger to do what he asked. This is wrong, whimpered a voice inside her, but it was drowned out by the roar of creativity that threatened to burst her skull.
“Understand?” he said at last.
She nodded, eager as a child, heart pounding as though she’d just stepped off the stair machine at the gym.
Removing his hands from her shoulders, Adam stepped back. “And one more thing.” Maya waited, ready to please, although her true self recoiled in apprehension. “About Black.” He grinned. “Benjamin. You don’t need to see him anymore.”
“No.” Like a chick thrusting its beak though its eggshell, a portion of her senses surfaced. “You can’t tell me who—”
Power buffeted her mind as Adam’s chin dropped toward his chest and his brilliant violet eyes glared at her. The little bit of self-control she had regained was washed away, replaced by a delicious euphoria, yummy warmth filling her consciousness with the comfort of hot chocolate—Mexican style with a cinnamon stick—on a cold winter day.
Stern expression fading, Adam wagged a finger at her, his smile mocking. “No more Benjamin.”
Maya smiled vacuously and gave him a boneless nod.
As soon as Adam left, Maya scrambled back to her studio. She pawed around in the darkness for a few minutes, looking for the right pencil, before her spell-warped mind remembered she needed light to see. Flipping on the light switch, she went through her cup of pens and pencils, finding her favorite sketching pencil.
Then came the search for paper. In her mania, nothing satisfied her. The paper in one pad felt too slick; another too rough and toothy. When she finally found one that suited her, she sat on the floor, and started drawing.
Next she wrestled with the problem of getting the chaos in her mind ordered and into a coherent form on paper. She felt like a b
eginning art student, lost in the minutiae, obsessing on the curve of a back, the line of a nose, long before the basic gesture of the figure had been sketched out. It was like sending a plumber to install faucets before the home’s foundation had been poured. The pencil slid over the paper, following a trail that outlined a biceps and Maya would sometimes get stuck, running over and over the line, feeling the muscle beneath, but not going on to draw the rest of the arm.
Four hours passed and pages of disembodied limbs, chins and other parts lay strewn around her on the orange saltillo tile floor. Undeterred by the grumbling of her stomach—although on some level, she felt piqued at Adam for not even taking her to dinner—she worked on a small dry-erase board. For some reason, the smaller workspace and temporary nature of the medium forced her to draw more than bits and pieces, tying her scattered thoughts together into a cohesive form.
Still she kept getting lost in the details, frustrated by the promise of perfection not quite attained, the set of eyes in a broad face that didn’t satisfy her visions, or the shape of fingers that didn’t feel right. She was about to erase her latest version when the phone rang. To her raw nerves, the sound was excruciating.
But driven by habit—phone rings, answer it—she climbed to her feet, her gaze lingering on the unfinished character. Relieved to be free of the ringing, Maya paused, phone in hand, before lifting it to her ear. “Hello,” she said, wondering if her voice always sounded so dull.
“Hi. It’s Benjamin.”
“I know.” The sound of his voice tied her in knots. She felt suddenly volatile, stretched apart by resentment and sadness.
“I, uh, guess you do.” His voice held a touch of uncertainty. “How are you doing?”
Her heart had started pounding and she was certain he could hear it. “I’m…wonderful.” I’m filled with light and sound and something dark. I’m confused.
“Wonderful? Good.” In his pause, Maya squirmed and seethed with suppressed emotion. Beneath Adam’s enchantment, she shivered with frustration, wishing Benjamin knew her well enough to recognize that the real Maya, not this empty version of Maya, was unfailingly polite. Maya would have immediately asked him how he was doing.
“I saw the craziest thing today,” he said. “There was this guy walking down Cerrillos Road, wearing nothing but a cutoff T-shirt and tiny shorts. You know, the kind of shorts that are so short they look more like underwear?” In Maya’s silence, he stopped and cleared his throat. “And in one hand, he was carrying a tub of lard. In his other he held a dog’s leash. Except there was no dog on the leash, just a collar that dragged on the sidewalk behind him. He’d stop every few feet and say something to the empty collar.
“Uh. Pretty weird, eh? Is he a local Santa Fe celeb, maybe?”
For a moment she hated him, hated him for calling and making her do what she had to do. Pushing her free hand through her hair, she clenched a handful and tugged, trying to find control in the pain.
“Maya? Are you okay?”
“I—” Her scalp burned and for an instant she was free. She blinked and stretched her neck, trying to work free the kinks in her brain. But it was as if her mind had been on fire and the flames only partially doused. A spark of Adam’s enchantment flared and rushed through her mind. A sharp burst of pain began to build before her eyes. Before she could stop herself, she said, “I don’t want to see you anymore. Ever.”
Her pronouncement was met by a brief silence and then Benjamin said, “Uh, what changed? Did I do something wrong?”
Even as she surrendered to the power over her mind, the agony of resistance gone, the shock and hurt in his voice sent a shard of pain into her heart. “You’re not what I need. I need more than a thief.” The words emerged from her mouth, though she felt like an observer in her own body. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice low.
Maya wasn’t sure if she even bothered to say goodbye. Instead the phone was back in its cradle and she was lurching toward the bathroom. Cold porcelain bit her hands and the smell of toilet bowl cleaner stung her nose as she retched, empty stomach clenching. Resisting the force that tugged her back to her studio, she went into her bedroom and stripped off her clothes. Though it brought back the pain in her head, she reached for the plastic bag that lay beside her bed. She pulled the pink pajamas on quickly, before her suddenly weak, wobbly limbs gave out altogether.
Clothed in the pajamas Benjamin had given her—a poor rebellion, but as much as she could manage—Maya hurried back to her studio.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been dumped. Benjamin would be the first to admit that cologne-model good looks didn’t insulate him from that particular aspect of dating. Of course, when compared to someone like Adam, Benjamin’s experience was limited. Before Isabel, his fiancée, he’d had two girlfriends. Both had broken up with him using nearly the identical line: “You’re a nice guy, but this isn’t working out.”
Thinking “nice guy” might be the kiss of death to a relationship, he had once asked Isabel, “So when do I get the ‘Nice guy, but…’ speech?”
Isabel’s green eyes had narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“Nice is boring, right? So—”
“You’re too tall. The thin air is getting to you.” Isabel had rolled her eyes. “If you weren’t such a nice guy, I would have dumped you a long time ago.”
“Huh?”
“Our kids will be tall, and with my luck they’ll all be boys. Because of you, I’ll be looking up at my sons when they’re twelve.” Her expression was grim, but her eyes filled with laughter. “If it weren’t for your big kind heart, I’d say, ‘Forget about it. He may be gorgeous, but I don’t want to be a midget in my own house.’”
Benjamin proposed soon after.
Tonight, after Maya’s callous dismissal, memories of Isabel rushed back. True, he’d known Maya less than a week, but she couldn’t have hurt him more if she’d punched him in the stomach. Because he couldn’t understand how he could feel so much for a woman he barely knew, he sought solace in stupid what-ifs. If Isabel had reached that intersection five minutes earlier, she might be alive tonight. They would be married and he never would have come to Santa Fe, would have never met Maya and wouldn’t be sitting in the dark moping over a woman who thought so little of him she couldn’t be bothered to come up the usual “You’re a nice guy” speech.
The strangest thing was that Benjamin wasn’t as angry as he wanted to be. He wanted to be furious with Maya. Anger should have been easy. Just a thief, not a doctor or a lawyer; not good enough for Ms. Fancy Pants. He tried running an angry dialogue through his head, but it didn’t ring true.
She was right. Smart, well-educated and classy, Maya Stephenson didn’t belong with a guy whose only honest paychecks had come from the occasional construction job and a stint in a pet store. And it made sense that she’d break off the relationship—what little there was—now, before things got too involved. “Quick, like pulling off a Band-Aid,” he said to the darkness of his living room. “No nice guy speech.”
But no matter how hard Benjamin tried to shut off his emotional response, to approach the matter in the cold, analytical manner that Adam might, he couldn’t do it. He already missed Maya. Since that foolhardy night when he had tried to force her to burn his drawings, she had been in his thoughts. It went well beyond sex, although Benjamin would’ve given a fortune for a chance to make love to her. With most women, especially women he didn’t know well, Benjamin said little, reticence driven by his total ignorance regarding the female mind. In Maya’s presence, however, he felt as relaxed as he would with a male friend such as Lane. Except conversation with Lane wasn’t punctuated with him wondering what Lane looked like naked.
Maybe it was because Maya knew things about him that no other human ever would. Isabel knew what he did for a living—though he left out any mention of magic— but he never told her what he was, an immortal who owed his existence to an artist with extraordin
ary magical talents.
With Maya there had been no lies. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Stupid, Black. Of course there’d been a lie. You lying to yourself that you and Maya had a future.
A tear traced a warm, wet path down his cheek and he forcefully rubbed it away with the back of his hand. Real men didn’t cry, but then again, real men didn’t get tagged as nice guys. Real men took action, marched into the saloon with guns blazing.
No amount of heroics would change Maya’s mind about him, but Benjamin still had one course of action left—EverVerse. That was the plan before his stupidity set him on a crash course with Maya Stephenson and it was once again the plan. It amazed him how quickly his desire to Fade to EverVerse had evaporated in the heat of his and Maya’s short relationship.
And now, spurred by his disappointment, longing for EverVerse galloped through his mind. If Maya could brush him off so easily, if the human mind was so fickle, then he could forget her just as easily, right? Even if he had to resort to breaking into her house again, Benjamin would get to EverVerse.
“Home,” he muttered. “I’m going home.”
Chapter Seventeen
The colors were right, the gesture full of energy and power, but the face that stared back at Maya had all the life of a lump of potter’s clay.
She had followed the directions exactly—if you could call the information in the papers Adam gave her directions— working up a character design, and then building a story around the character, imagining him clomping around NeoVerse, bound to her tale. Adam’s enchantment pressed hard on her mind, urging her on, but even so, she couldn’t help thinking of Benjamin, the NeoVerse version, trapped in her storylines, devoid of any emotion of his own. The idea repulsed her, but Adam’s compulsion spurred her on to continue her work.