A/N: Yesterday I posted a different version of this chapter, but after re-reading it a couple of times, I decided it was weak and took it down. This is, I hope, a better one. If you read it yesterday, the ending is rather different than before. Comments and suggestions are welcomed…
I've collected some interesting propositions over the years (some people are kinky for people with missing limbs, lots of white guys have Asian chick fantasies) but never an actual proposal. Until now. A proposal of sorts, anyway.
And there I am, with a traffic jam of reactions in my head, my libido cheering 'Yes! Now! Yes!' and my sense of self-preservation slamming on the breaks, my common sense trying to get a word in, and every other aspect of me weighing in at the same time, and what comes out of my mouth?
"Would you please kiss me?"
Yeah, that came from the same compartment as 'I had no idea you would look like this when you were young.'
"Yes," Erik said. He smiled wider than I have seen him smile yet, stepped forward, took my face in his hands, and kissed me.
I have kissed guys before, and done more than kiss, but…again, it goes back to the paroxetine. I kissed them, and it was nothing to me, no more arousing than if their lips were those wax novelties with sugar syrup inside, (except that the syrup would have tasted good, unlike some of their breaths). All in all, when it came to kisses, give me the chocolate kind wrapped in a twist of foil any time.
Not this time, though, because that kiss was everything I could have wanted a kiss to be, and yes, I remembered who this was, and that in fifty years he would not look this good and in fifty-one years he would be dead and…
He broke the contact, and asked, "Wintergreen?"
"Ye-yes," I said, because he had to have tasted it on my mouth. "I had a leaf in my mouth, it grows wild here—mmph." You can guess why I said 'mmph', only now instead of around my face, his hands were around my waist, and he pulled me closer, and…that could be his belt buckle, or it could be…
"Wait!" I pushed him away to arm's length, because I did not want to. I wanted to do more, and go further, but I still possessed some grain of sanity and it would be awfully hard to convince him I did not want to marry him after helping him take my panties off. This wasn't 2013, after all, and there were so many, many other reasons why it would be a bad idea.
He didn't look angry. He looked happy, so in the hope that he could take this well, I continued, "This isn't a yes. I don't think we know each other anywhere near well enough for this. We met less than twenty-four hours ago!"
"It doesn't seem as though we just met," he pointed out. "Not with how we talk to each other. Not with the way we understand each other with just a look. Certainly not just now—."
"I can't account for that," I said, a little wildly. "And I don't think a relationship that begins with planning a homicide together could possibly turn out to be healthy in the long run. Look at Macbeth and Lady Macbeth for a start. One little murder, and their happy marriage just came to pieces."
He chuckled. "This," he said, gesturing to his face. "This is why I think—no, why I know—there is something between us, something worth the wait, something that will last. Yes, we've known each other less then twenty-four hours, but in that twenty-four hours, I have smiled, genuinely smiled, I've even laughed, I've talked as I haven't in months. Years, in truth. You—lighten my heart."
"Oh, god," I groaned. That was because I knew how to make Mr. Magnussen smile and even laugh on occasion. I knew what to talk to him about, and how he would respond. "Maybe I'm just a naturally humorous person. In any case, I would make a terrible wife. I am sorely lacking in practically every traditional wifely skill. I'm not good at sewing, and the only time I scrub a floor is if I spill something—stop looking at me like that!" He looked as though he were highly amused.
"I'm not looking for a housekeeper. In any case, I'm not asking you at this time, so how do you propose we go about getting to know one another better?" he asked.
In ways that didn't involve touching, I thought, because it would skew my judgment. "I think that telling each other things we think the other ought to know and asking questions is working just fine, so how about we continue that and continue walking at the same time? I think there must be a clearing or a road or something up ahead, because it's a lot brighter that way."
"Very well. Hmm—what should you know about me? While I don't have the formal education you and Charles have, I've audited courses in various universities across Europe as my agenda permits. My powers give me a unique knowledge of certain aspects of physics."
"I was wondering if it would be something like that, since you were keeping apace with us in discussions."
We reached the bright area, which turned out to be a wide meadow of tall grasses mixed with self-seeded wildflowers, mostly goldenrod and scrubby wild asters in purple and white. Across the meadow was a band of loose shale and other stones, followed by a tall chain link fence topped with both barbed and razor wire. "You know, I think I hear either a busy road or a fast-moving river," I said, heading out into the meadow. "Doesn't it smell nice?"
"Yes," he replied. "Tell me, why do you keep on wearing those artificial arms when you don't need them at all?"
"You mean, do I have a reason other than not wanting the normals to freak out? Yes, I do, but a woman has to have some things she keeps to herself alone." Grasshoppers and crickets leapt up as we approached, whirring off into deeper grass.
"Stop a moment," he said. "You've picked up a passenger."
"Have I?" I stood still, craning to look over my shoulder. "Just as long as it isn't a tick…"
"It's not, and that's the wrong shoulder." Of course it would be on the side where I couldn't see. Reaching me, he carefully picked something off my arm and held it out where I could see.
"A praying mantis! I love these guys, they're like miniature T. Rexes. Tyrannosaurus Rex, that is. Doesn't it have beautiful eyes?"
"I prefer yours," he said. Which was how we wound up kissing for the third time, because our faces were so close together. At least his hands were tied up with holding the mantis.
"Erik, this is happening too fast for me to be comfortable with," I said when he pulled away. "I feel pressured and confused. If you're sincere, please give me some breathing room."
"I'm sorry. I don't mean to frighten you. There!" He tossed the mantis into the sky, and it spread its wings, flying off. "You are as free as it is."
"Thank you," I said. "I'm not so much frightened by you, though, as by myself. No, no more touching right now. Please. Let's check out what's on the other side of that fence. Climbing it isn't a problem, not for me, anyhow. A chain link fence might as well be a ladder when you have small feet and you're lightweight, and I can hold down the wire at the top."
"Schff," Erik made a scoffing noise. "Too time consuming." He made a gesture, and the fence unknitted itself, top to bottom , the edges curling back.
"Show-off," I accused him, and we went through the gap. Past the fence, the landscape suddenly took a downward slope to a good-sized river below. "If we can get down to the water, and getting down is just a matter of not going too fast, then once we reach the water, there's no longer any problem. I don't know how well Raven can swim, but I can keep her afloat even if all she can do is doggy paddle."
"Then that's one aspect of escape solved," Erik said. "The next problem is money. How are you situated as far as cash is concerned?"
"No problems whatsoever. I'm flush from Vegas." I told him.
"To the tune of—?"
"Well, I sold my car, withdrew all my savings, and hit the casinos. When you can move things without seeming to touch them, there's almost no limit to what you can rake in—you're nodding." I broke off. "You've done it yourself."
"The roulette tables at Monte Carlo. I can make the ball do anything I want it to. The trick is not to win too much all in one place, to lose some of the time, and to have your way out planned before you go in."
"Of course! I also hit the craps tables, and—oh, we have got to hit Atlantic City. As a group." I added hastily. "Raven would handle the money transport, because nobody would be able to follow her. I bet Hank could learn to count cards for Blackjack, and Charles—."
"A born poker player," Erik said. "Except he'd be too ethical to cheat other gamblers. We'd have to find some game where he plays only the house."
We chatted about that as we went back inside the fence, which knitted itself back together, but with a difference. "Here," Erik pointed out. "Just undo this bit of wire, and it'll spring open again. You know, of course, that it's not enough to have the money if you don't have it on you…Now you're nodding."
"I fixed that," I told him.
"How—ah. Don't tell me. Your arms."
"Now you know my secret. I borrowed a few items from Hank on the grounds that I needed to fix them, which I did. They needed oiling. They're hollow inside, so I filed them open and sealed them up with epoxy filler afterward."
"Very clever."
"Thank you," I replied, and we started back across the meadow. Halfway across, something just popped out of me, and it was something big. Something I had never even told Mr. Magnussen.
"I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen. It was a very inept attempt, and it obviously failed, but I did try."
"What?" Erik asked.
"It's something you ought to know about me. To give you the background behind why I wanted to die, I have to go back to something which happened six weeks before that…" I explained about the attack in the girls' locker room, the toilet, and my teeth getting knocked out, and I did it as undramatically as I could. I mean, here he was, a Holocaust Survivor. What was my bullying incident compared to that?
"—the girls' families settled out of court after our legal service explained that a jury would find me unusually sympathetic under the circumstances, and so did the school district. But I was…left emotionally quite fragile. I had panic attacks, bad ones, at random times and sometimes for no apparent reason—oh, and one of the girls who only stood and watched, she was the daughter of a couple who were friends of my parents. I'd known her all my life, I'd thought we were good friends. Well, she came over to apologize, and she cried and—I couldn't stand to be in the room with her ever again. I forgave her, but I couldn't keep from hyperventilating and passing out. So my folks wound up having to drop hers as friends, and I know that hurt them.
"So I wasn't sleeping and I hardly ate for weeks. It wasn't so much the physical attack as the weight of knowing what it all meant. No one would stand up for me while I was being tormented and half-killed. Not my friends, not my lab partner. No one. The thought of going through my whole life knowing that friendship was hollow and meaningless and that there was such darkness in everyone—I thought I couldn't live with it.
"One night, I got up in the middle of the night, after midnight, and I drank three-quarters of a bottle of liquid cold medicine, the kind that makes you sleepy. No suicide note, no hints or talking about it before hand—just glug-glug-glug, and never waking up again, I thought. But that stuff tastes terrible, and I was trying to take it on an empty stomach, so I threw up before I even got out of the bathroom. I remember looking at my vomit fanned out over the tile floor and thinking what a pretty green it was. The medicine was tinted emerald green, you see.
"My mother woke up when I puked—she has a sixth sense for when one of us is sick. She can tell from two states away, much less just down the hall. She came running, found me, and called an ambulance. I didn't need my stomach pumped, because it was doing a good job of emptying itself, but I did wind up in the psychiatric ward of our local Children's Hospital for the better part of a week. That was my own fault. When the admitting physician asked me why I tried to kill myself like that, I told him I would have cut my wrists but I couldn't find a vein. It turns out he didn't get deadpan humor, so he put down that I was seriously delusional, affectless, and potentially psychotic."
"Surely not!" Erik burst out. "The man was that unperceptive?"
"He was exactly that unperceptive. That was how I learned not to joke with psychiatrists. The psych ward—there are sadder places in this world than a psychiatric ward for children, but it's up there. When you're on suicide watch, they make you sleep in the hallway, so they can keep an eye on you. Like with the special kindergarten, I decided that was not where I wanted to be, so I sucked it up and put on a good enough face to go home, went to a number of therapists and tried out medications until they found one that worked well enough for me to function. And I functioned, which is a whole lot better than not functioning."
"Paroxetine," he said.
"How did you know that?" I stared at him.
"Don't you remember what you said last night, when you were dosed up with codeine?"
"No. What all did I say?"
"Nothing too terrible," he said. "Some of it—perhaps I'll tell you some day. Not yet, though."
"Now I know I really ought to know. What did I say?"
"Never mind that now. You never tried again?" he asked.
"No, it was the impulse of the moment, a very bad moment, and a very stupid impulse. I don't have any great life-affirming revelations to share from that experience. I got over that moment, and I was very lucky. Over time, I got better, and eventually I became a grown-up. It's rewarding being a grown-up; there's so much less drama. Then things got…complicated. I got mixed up in something that I can't talk about, not yet anyway. Now my family doesn't know I'm alive, and right now, that's how it has to be."
"I am quite glad you failed," he said, and his voice was gentle when he said it. "But there's part you left out, which is when you went off the paroxetine and your powers developed."
"It's not my complete history," I replied. "But I thought you should know about it. I've never told anyone about it, outside of therapists." By this time we were back off the deer trail and on the man-made path again, halfway back to the complex.
Then, just as abruptly as I'd told him about my failed suicide, he said, "You've told me your worst. Can I do other than share mine? Or part of mine; I have so much to choose from. I'm a widower. I was once a father, too."
Yes, another cliffie. TBC…. BTW, this is NOT my life story retold in any way whatsoever. I have never tried to commit suicide. This grew out of Joon-Yi's comment back in chapter 5 that she was a kid with problems, and I began to wonder what those problems were besides the obvious.
Thank you so much to reviewers Aislynn, Neon Knightly, Penguinsnuggles, and Trickster!
