by T Nisbet
All I could do was stand there, heart racing out of control. I stood there and tried to breathe. I was acutely aware of how incredibly beautiful Ivy was as she let go of my arm wandering over to the bed and bounced on the mattress looking around the room.
Was this really happening? I’d never been with a girl before, the barmaid had been my first serious kiss. Girls liked me. I’d been asked out many times over the last year. But they didn’t want me, they didn’t even know me, they wanted to go out with the starting quarterback on the football team. It wasn’t that I wasn’t good looking, or ugly for that matter. It had nothing to do with my looks at all, and even worse, it had nothing to do with who I really was.
It had taken me a few dates to figure it out. I went out with a girl named Laura Waller on a date. Laura was a senior who was really pretty, and had a body all the guys talked about, especially after her parents got her breast enhancement surgery. She had told everyone that they had given it to her as an early graduation present, just like she told everyone we were going out. Like my accepting a date with her meant we were permanently together. I didn’t even know if she had a middle name or not.
She let me know over prime rib at Maria’s restaurant that I could do anything I wanted with her after dinner, and she had literally attacked me in the car on the way to the movie. She had pulled down her blouse and proudly showed me her new double D cup breasts. What kind of parent gave their daughter that kind of gift? What did they expect her to become anyhow?
Well, I promptly had a major panic attack and passed out. She thought I had faked it. It was a major disaster.
She told people about it at school the following Monday. If it weren’t for Carla and Ivy running interference and blaming it on food poisoning, I would have been branded gay for sure. It’s not that being gay is a bad thing, it just wasn’t my choice.
After that, I made excuses to avoid dating. But here I was with a girl that I’d known since forth grade, who I knew liked me for me, not because I was a popular high school quarterback. She didn’t like me because of my popularity, body, or looks. It scared me to death.
She stood up and smiled at me.
“Are you just going to stand there guarding the door, silly? Come on in. I’m going to get washed up,” she said pulling off her cloak and letting it drop to the floor as she walked to the door that led to the bathroom.
I couldn’t move. All I could think about was her body tightly pressed against me on our ride over the plains. Did she really think we were married?
“Jake, come look at this!” Ivy called from the bathroom. I thought about Laura Waller stripping in the front seat of my parent’s car and swallowed deeply. I forced myself into action and walked numbly over to the bathroom, eyes downcast, heart pounding in my chest.
I entered the bathroom and dared a look up. Relief and disappointment trickled through me. Ivy still had her clothes on. She smiled at me and pulled a lever on the wall. Water cascaded down from a shelf on one side of the large sunken tub.
“Isn’t that cool? It’s like showering under a waterfall,” she giggled.
I nodded.
“What’s wrong?” she said, letting the water run and coming over to where I stood.
I shrugged, looking away towards the sink.
“Jake, it’s okay to look at me you know.”
I looked into her eyes. God she was beautiful. I could see the love in her eyes as she smiled and put her arms around my neck.
“You are my destiny, Jake Gunn. Mother told me all about you before we ever met. She told me bedtime stories about the adventures we would share together and how our lives would be intertwined. About how we would fall in love.”
I couldn’t take it anymore and pulled away from her looking down once more.
“Doesn’t it bother you that destiny or fate seems to force all of our actions now? What about our choice? I don’t want to be Immortal, I don’t want to stay young and have to watch as you grow old and die, Ivy. Isn’t it our choice who we fall in love with?”
She stepped forward and put her arms around my neck again.
“Just because something is meant to be, doesn’t mean it isn’t our choices that make it happen. You love me, Jake, you always have. You were just missing the physical attraction part of the equation because of my wish. And no, I didn’t read your mind to find out. I just know,” she said as I recoiled.
“You have always cared for me, even when the people around you made fun of me. You stood by me, and accepted me for who I was. It was your acceptance that made my life, who I am… tolerable. I never asked to be a mage either, you know.”
“I know you didn’t Ivy,” I sighed. “This whole thing, this ‘adventure’ is so crazy. Being immortal? What the hell is that? How I feel when I look at you… fate?”
“You can look at it that way, Jake, or you can choose to look at it as the two of us making our fates.”
“Semantics,” I growled. “Either way I can’t choose to watch you grow old and die, Ivy. Toby, Carla… you saw Sir Nisbet. He died alone and lonely. He was desperate for it to end. How many women had he fallen in love with during his long life that he had to watch die?”
Tears filled her eyes, but she kept her grip around my neck. I couldn’t take seeing her cry and pulled her into my arms and held her tightly. She melted into me and sobbed.
“Oh Jake,” she cried.
How long we stayed that way I don’t know. My racing heart slowed and slowly my panic eased as we held each other. Finally, she pulled back and rising up on her tiptoes, kissed me warmly on the cheek.
“We’ll find a way to be together forever, Jake. I won’t leave you to face eternity alone.”
She smiled coyly up at me and slowly took her arms from around my neck. Walking over to the huge sunken bath and the wall of water spilling down off of the shelf into it, she checked the temperature.
“I know this will probably sounds strange coming from me, Jake, but I want all the tradition that goes along with being in love with someone. I want to go to the prom, to be asked for my hand. I want to be engaged for awhile before I’m married,” she said, then added. “I want my father to give me away, not some nomad.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Relief flooded through me. “I don’t think it counts unless you’re naked anyway.”
She stepped back from testing the water, giggling.
“You’re probably right.”
“Your water’s getting cold,” I said.
“You’re probably right about that too, I’ll save the cold water for you,” she laughed, winking.
I smiled back at her and muttered as I left.
“I’m going to need it if you hug me like that again.”
I walked over to the bed and sat down. She wanted to get married to me someday, wanted me to ask her! I’d seen her heal and change the direction of the wind, but I still couldn’t get over how she’d managed to hide her beauty for so long. Would I have been able to become such close friends with a girl so beautiful? I doubted it. I would have been too nervous.
Maybe fate was a good thing. Why rebel against it, if fate was gifting me with someone as extraordinary as Ivy? Why fight it? The answer slammed up against my consciousness like a wave crashing against the breakwater. I didn’t like inevitability.
I couldn’t stand it when a team gave up because they thought the outcome was a forgone conclusion. They made a choice to give up, and not fight against losing or what they considered was their fate. There was always a choice wasn’t there? I never accepted that something was out of reach, beyond control or couldn’t be changed. I had to know there was a reason to try.
Looking back, wasn’t everything that happened fate? Was that how it worked? Was fate really only another way of explaining what happened in the past? Maybe fate was also self-fulfilling, because knowing you were destined to do something forced you to do it.
I shook my head as I sat there exhausted. This was a discussion Mr. Wrightwood, my English teacher, would ha
ve loved to sink his teeth into. He got a thrill out of challenging us in his Critical Thinking class. He encouraged argument, then forced us to switch sides and argue against our own opinions. It was infuriating at times, but I learned the lesson. You can only judge whether your opinions are correct, or form a better argument in support of your conclusions to an issue if you know the other side as well as you do your own.
So what was the other side of this problem? Destiny, the inevitability of fate was not something to rebel against because it has already happened? Even arguing and rebelling against predetermined actions would be my fate then.
In my confirmation class at St. Mary’s the priest had told us the God was outside of time. That he was the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. We had a lively discussion about it. I left class that night feeling a bit confused by it, but what I took away from it was that human beings were trapped in the flow of time while God was not. So he could look at any point in our lives, forward or backward, like a DVD player. It also meant that we had already been judged and were with him.
I had liked the idea of being fated to heaven. Why was I upset about being fated to Ivy? I realized my dilemma. I wanted the free will to choose what I did. I didn’t want to be a puppet expected to jump, or fall in love because it was my fate. I needed to choose.
There was a lot in life that I didn’t get to choose. I understood that. I didn’t get to choose this Immortality gig. It was thrust upon me without consent, without choice. What did it really mean though? If something, or someone didn’t kill me, I would live to see the sun expand during its death cycle, until it destroyed the world five billion years from now? Was that my fate?
I laughed at the ridiculousness of my train of thought, slinging my bow and quiver off my back. I took off my sword belt, setting Gwensorloth on the bed beside me. The question of fate was all a part of the mystery of life, and I wasn’t going to discover the answer to a question that had stumped the greatest minds in history. Plato, Socrates, DaVinci, Galileo, St. Augustine, St. Aguinas, Newton, Einstein and more had sought in their own ways to explain life’s mysteries and had failed to fully answer the unanswerable questions. Who was I to think I might find a solution?
Ivy emerged from the bathroom wearing a white robe, drying her hair.
“I tried to use all the hot water, but I don’t think I got it all, sorry,” she said, smiling at me slyly.
I felt my face flush a bit, but wasn’t hit with my usual anxiety. Surprised, I smiled back at her and walked around her to the bathroom.
“It’s okay, I don’t need to wash up. I’ll just splash some water on my face.”
“Oh yes you do, Dear Heart, I’m not sharing a bed with a smelly boy,” she giggled behind me.
Sharing a bed… geez.
I closed the door behind me and got undressed. The water felt amazing, I didn’t realize how tired I was.
“She really is something! I wish I could take her on as an apprentice,” said the voice quietly in my mind.
“You’re back,” I said aloud, forgetting. The warm water poured over my head but couldn’t drown out his quiet voice.
“I don’t ever leave, Jake.” Thallium’s essence laughed. “It’s part of the deal.”
“Things are so complicated,” I thought, then sighed aloud.
“Questions of the universe and fate always are my son. Don’t trouble yourself over them. Go with the flow as you young ones are so fond of saying.”
I could feel the amusement in his words.
“I will tell you this though, you are right about God being the master of time, and therefore, not being constrained by it, since it too, was part of his creation. Think of prophets as beings that can at times, poke their heads outside of the stream and view portions of the whole river. Not being God though, what they see is only a possibility, not a certainty, for the most part. Some prophets are better than others.”
“So Ivy’s mother didn’t see our fate?” I asked, both relieved and a little saddened.
“Mira Hlava is very talented. She is without peer at this moment in time. She may be right because she sees more of the river than most. Even though it guides us frequently, prophecy is seldom certain,” Thallium’s voice whispered in my head.
“Did Ivy manipulate my feelings Thallium? Did she make me love her?” I asked quietly dreading the answer.
“That is for you to discover, my boy, I’ll not be stepping boot into that quagmire. Besides you already know, you’re just afraid of the answer,” the voice said somberly.
“Great!” I said aloud.
“I am here to serve,” said the voice in my head, laughing as it faded away.
I turned off the water and dried using one of the fluffy white towels sitting on a brass bench beside the sunken tub, then put on a large robe hanging from the wall. Gathering my clothes I opened the door to find Ivy asleep on the bed, snuggled up in her robe. I stepped lightly into the room afraid that I might wake her and set my clothes next to hers by the door.
I was so tired, after the hot shower I could barely stand. Without really thinking about it, I lay down next to Ivy on top of the soft bed to rest for a minute.
