by Zoe Chant
“All it takes is one bozo making idiot claims on the Internet, and next day, ‘everybody knows’ it’s true, because they read it online,” Ann said, peering over the glasses she’d just put on. “Sounds like the patrol car is a block away.” She’d tapped her tablet to life, but dropped it into her purse, then she turned to Jen. “Unless you want to be part of answering questions, why don’t you take off before they get here? And thanks very much for your help.”
Joey patted Nikos on the back. “You, too. Unless you have your ID on you.”
Nikos’s brows rose. “I do not.” He turned his head, surveying the quiet street beyond the half-ruined parking lot. “Which way?”
When Nikos turned that smile onto Jen, she smiled back, still heady with adrenaline, and the words just came out: “Are you hungry? I could make you a sandwich.”
Nikos bowed slightly. “Thank you. I’d like that very much.”
The wailing was getting louder. Jen realized she and Nikos were way inside the yellow police tape still marking off the unstable palisade. Joey, with his university credentials, clearly didn’t regard that as a problem any more than his professor friend did. But Jen had no real reason to be there.
“This way,” she said, indicating the low fence to their left. She broke into a jog, wincing slightly as her feet struck the cracked pavement. She hadn’t been in a real fight for years, and was starting to stiffen up as the adrenaline began dissipating at last.
Well, running would help a little. Nikos fell in step beside her, his breathing easy. They passed behind the closed-down parking lot attendant’s box and crossed to the hedge side, then into the alley between two big garages belonging to apartment buildings.
He kept pace with her as they passed a residential street, crossed a park full of dog walkers and people pushing baby strollers, then—their feet hitting the pavement in easy rhythm—they ran the six blocks to her tiny beach house.
Her house of nearly twenty years. Suddenly intensely self-conscious, she felt her steps falter as she eyed the place as a stranger might.
As Nikos might.
It was built in the fifties, the same model Doris had had before she moved in Joey’s much nicer ranch house. It was pretty much a box—kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom—inconvenient in a lot of ways. The windows and closets were tiny. The electricity had been cheapo in the fifties. But Robert had felt that five hundred square feet was plenty for two people who mostly lived out of backpacks, and subpar fifties wiring encouraged them to keep their carbon footprint small. They’d kept the same shabby but functional furnishings left behind by the previous owner.
About all you could say in its favor was that it was shelter, and it was clean.
“Come on in,” she said, torn between a wish that she’d kept her mouth shut back at the landslide, and a weird desire for him to not find the house as bad as she was afraid it really looked.
He followed her inside. She was glad he couldn’t see her face. The sixty-year-old beige carpet had never looked uglier, the institutional white walls cheerless. The only touch of color was the little orchid planter in the kitchen window, a gift from last summer’s self-defense class.
She turned, and saw Nikos’s dark eyes taking in the kitchen. “I keep meaning to transfer the orchid outside, but I kind of like the shiny green leaves with their slow-curling tendrils, and the occasional flowers—”
She was babbling again. Deep breath! “So what kind of sandwiches do you like? I have some sliced turkey in here, and I still have a chunk of ham that Bird gave me as leftovers a few days ago. I can slice that up. There’s, um, an end of a rye loaf here, and in the freezer, I still have some whole wheat.”
She reached for the fridge, wincing as a muscle twanged that she hadn’t realized she’d pulled during the fight.
“You got hurt,” Nikos said.
“I’m fine.” She turned to find him closer than she’d thought. Close, but not crowding. The opposite, really—she found herself taking a step toward him as she breathed in his scent, a heady mix of the sea salt and clean masculinity.
She stepped hastily back. “Just a little tweak behind my shoulder blade. It’s been years since I was in a real fight, and that was outside a bar in London—ah, never mind. People who go on about their personal history are boring.”
“I don’t think any experience you’ve had could be boring, but I won’t press,” he said as he eyed her shoulder. “Judging by the way you’re holding yourself, I can tell you’re in some pain. I believe I could work out that knot. I am regarded as very good with such things. Before I came into, that is, before I assumed my present duties, I studied Eastern Medicine. It’s very useful when my young students sustain injuries.”
Jen took another step back, startled by the sudden rush of hunger sheeting through her body at the idea of his hands on her. Acutely conscious of her own sweaty state, she forced a laugh that sounded to her ears more like a gulp, and said, “It’s okay. I’m fine. Used to twinges from the studio.” She turned away, reaching for the freezer door in order to root around for the frozen bread, but as she did, the twinge sent a sharp spasm straight up her neck.
She winced, straightening up.
“Five minutes,” he offered. “I’m getting sympathy pangs. The sandwich can wait five minutes, surely?”
Sympathy pangs? “Can’t have that,” she managed, and dropped down into her kitchen chair, her head bent forward. “Thank you.”
She heard his step behind her. Heard his light breathing. Then her own breath hitched as his fingertips ran lightly over her shoulders, pausing to press gently on the muscle pads at either side of her neck.
Her work T-shirt lay between his skin and hers, but that thin fabric might not have been there at all. She sucked in a breath. “Oh.” She shivered at his touch. “Ooh.”
He chuckled, low in his chest. “I haven’t truly begun yet.”
Then, lightly, he began to knead the muscles that had stiffened to rocks and gravel and glass shards behind that shoulder blade. But under his expert touch, the rocks crumbled to fine sand, the gravel polished smooth, and the glass melted into silk.
She had once treated herself to a massage on the suggestion of a doctor after she’d fallen on a steep trail zigzagging up a cliff in Nepal. The massage had sometimes been painful, then blissful. She’d not so much walked as floated out of that clinic, and had slept sixteen hours straight.
This was very like that massage. Nikos’s strong, smooth stroke with his thumbs, and the gentle circles he made with his fingers until the knots flattened to ribbon, and the ache receded—all of it left her increasingly, acutely, aware of a different sort of ache deep in her core.
“You’re really good at this,” she murmured, grateful, but also to distract herself from that new ache.
“You are a very good patient,” he replied. “But some of these knots are old.”
The comment was lightly spoken, not quite a question, but for some reason she felt impelled to answer. “I don’t notice. That is, I notice, but I figured aches are a part of being over fifty.”
“You have never had such work done before?”
“Oh, yes. Once. After a fall. But . . .”
“But?” he asked, gently, his fingers working down along her spine. There was nothing suggestive in it—she sat on her chair, head bent forward, and he had not so much as slid a finger beneath the neck of her T-shirt, but that ache was beginning to pulse with need.
“But . . . well, my partner—my husband—he hated this kind of thing. He was the kind of ticklish that hurts but you laugh anyway . . .” Did that sound like she was complaining about Robert? He would have been the first to suggest they find the money if she’d wanted to indulge herself with massages, but that was the essence of the problem. To him, such things would have been an indulgence, and she always felt she was letting him down if she spent money on herself. It was all right when they did things together.
When he suggested them.
She hast
ened to say, “He lived in his head, you might say. Very intensely in his head.”
“He sounds like an interesting man.” One last slow knead, then he lifted his hand. “Try stretching a little. See if that’s any better.”
She already knew it was better. The knot had long since unraveled, her focus zeroing in on the touch of his hands, even through the fabric of her tee. She was giddy, as if her head floated a little above a body whose veins ran with pure sunlight.
Nothing in her experience had prepared her for this whirlpool of sheer sensation, and so she fought against the tide lest she get pulled all the way in. “I feel great,” she said. “Thank you!” and stood up from her chair so firmly she sensed him stepping back. “Speaking of that, let me show you something.”
Why was she doing this, she thought wildly as she led him into the living room, where she’d left her laptop. He followed politely. She could feel him a few steps behind her. She sat on the couch while her trembling fingers punched the keyboard.
The screen came to life, and there was Robert, at his most famous interview with a national talk show host. How did he suddenly look so young? He hunched forward in his chair as he’d done when he was really involved, talking with enthusiasm. She looked at his familiar face, the snub nose, the crinkled eyes, bright when he was enthused, as he was then, and the horrible haircut that even the studio people hadn’t been able to tame. Not that he’d given them much of a chance. Wasting time had always given him the fidgets.
“I don’t see you,” Nikos commented.
“I didn’t want to be interviewed,” she said. “That one was really his project, from beginning to end. I knew nothing about dams at the time, or corrupt government contracts. While he climbed mountains with surveyors and the like, I ended up spending most of that gig in the villages that would have been flooded if that project hadn’t been halted. It was a terrible summer weather-wise, lots of poor village kids sick, and the volunteers from Doctors Without Borders needed extra hands.”
She paused, her throat tight; in her most secret heart, that had been the happiest summer of her life. How she had loved each day spent holding babies and teaching small children, their eager faces blossoming at a kind word! “Though nothing I did changed the world in important ways, each healed child was a triumph. So was seeing a gap-toothed seven-year-old who had one garment to her name grasp the idea of multiplication. . .”
She realized she was choking up, and tried for a more casual tone. “I happen to like kids, so I ended up spending most of the summer teaching in the village school . . . well, anyway, you can see he’s wearing his one good shirt, which he bought when his dad got remarried in 1972—look at that awful seventies collar—and that haircut cost six dollars. He was a geek’s geek—I don’t know if you know that word—”
“I do.” Nikos smiled.
“He just didn’t care about . . . things. Body things, thing things. He lived in his mind, all the time. And when he started talking, he was just like that.”
On the television, the camera panned the audience, all rapt, listening, as Robert described being chased by two jeeps full of paramilitary guys trying to run him off the road above the construction site.
Nikos nodded soberly, then turned to her, his gaze warm. Sympathetic. Understanding. “The world needs more like him,” he said, sincerity obvious in his tone. “I can see why you loved him.”
“I did,” Jen said. “Very much.”
However . . . she had sensed it all along, but had never seen it until now, this day, at age fifty-five, thirty-some years after she first encountered Robert in the Stanford library. She sat in the house she and Robert had shared, her body alight with the touch of another man’s hands, aware that she had loved Robert. With a single-minded admiration when she was in college, sometimes more, sometimes less, as the years had streamed by, until love had become more of a habit that she was careful never to look straight at.
Because she would have seen the truth: she had loved Robert—everyone who knew him had loved Robert—but she had never been in love with him.
What do you even do with that?
SIX
NIKOS
Our mate wants us, the unicorn trumpeted.
Yes.
Nikos wasn’t even going to try anymore. Useless now. He’d known it was useless the moment she shot him a little grin at the beginning of that scrap with Cang’s minions, and he’d seen the young Jen in that grin.
They had fought as partners. No, they’d fought as if they had trained together all their lives—which shattered his old assumption that a mate would have to be protected at all times.
Then there was the powerful love in her voice as she talked so briefly about teaching village children, a love made poignant by the longing she tried so valiantly to hide. She seemed to need to speak. It was his honor to acknowledge that need as she talked about this man she had lived beside for so long, gone these four years. Nikos sensed that this talk might be a path to emotional healing for her—whatever happened between the two of them.
It is more regret than love that I hear in our mate’s voice, the unicorn observed as Jen gave Nikos a wide-eyed, startled look, her pupils huge. She was clearly one breath away from flight.
Nikos responded, I’m no longer denying the bond. It’s too strong, at least from me to her. But we’re not going to do anything except be there as much or as little as she wants. Right now she’s torn between the old loyalty and the possibility of a new.
His unicorn—always straightforward the way animals were—tossed his head. But she wants us. And with that came a vivid image of a unicorn mare prancing about in a field, flirting her tail as she looked back at a likely stallion.
In the world of horse-related creatures, the next step was obvious. But Jen was a human, and Nikos was in his human form. Humans are complicated, he reminded the unicorn for what felt like the thousandth time. What our bodies want might not be what our minds need. Both have to be in sync. Whatever is going on in her mind is not in sync.
Human minds are full of noise, the unicorn sighed, and then came that internal head-toss. But our mate is still our mate, he stated. And you knew I was right all along.
Smug is not a good look on a unicorn, Nikos retorted, and the interview on the laptop changed to loud clapping, then ended, leaving him sitting in silence with Jen.
He’d known the moment he began working on her smooth, strong muscles that he was going to follow this bond to the end, whatever the cost to himself. He could handle that cost, the way he’d handled everything else life had thrown at him so far. He’d call a halt the moment he risked hurting her.
He watched as she bit her underlip, sensing that she was poised to withdraw. As her gaze flickered to the laptop in uncertainty, he said, “Thank you for sharing this video of what was truly a valiant deed. I enjoyed it.”
And he had.
Her expression brightened. Her gaze touched his then slid away before she reached to slam down the laptop lid. Then she said, “I’ll get at those sandwiches—”
At the same moment, his phone buzzed. The vibration was loud in that silent room.
His hand dived toward his pocket, then he snatched it back.
“Please, go ahead and get that,” she said immediately. “It might be Cleo and Petra, though I’m sure they’re having a great time.” She got up and headed toward the kitchen. “I’ll be in here making lunch.”
Nikos pulled out the phone, and recognized from the local number that it was Joey Hu. “Nikos here,” he said in the dialect of Chinese he had learned when doing his Eastern Medicine studies, as he knew Joey spoke it.
“Where are you? Did you stay with Jen?”
“Yes. Don’t worry. I made certain we were not followed.”
Joey let out a sigh of relief. “That was unfortunate. Not her help, which was excellent. But neither of us wanted Cang’s gang seeing her. Also, we weren’t able to nab at least one of the minions to be taken to the imperial city for questioning.�
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“I thought of that just as they stampeded in retreat.”
“No help for it. We now know that the site is being watched. We’ll have to watch it, too. Until we can figure out how to free the stone.”
Nikos had one ear turned toward the kitchen, where little clinks and splashes signaled Jen making lunch. “Right.”
Joey must have heard a shift in his tone, because the foxy cheer was back as he said, “I’ll let you go.” And hung up.
Nikos stepped into the little kitchen, which was small and spare, like so many on his island. But this one was a little sad, even dreary, with only the one tiny plant in the window, rather than full of herbal and flower pots, with onions and fruit and vegetables hanging in nets overhead, and icons or mosaics brightening walls and the floor.
Jen turned away from the counter with a plate in either hand and set them down at the tiny table, at which only two could sit. He did not have to ask if there had been children in this family—there was no sign of them, or place for them.
Jen indicated the table, which had a number of condiments, each with a knife. The plates contained a sandwich, a spray of grapes, and sliced orange. As he sat down, she said, “You can put what you want on the sandwich.”
“Thank you. This is very thoughtful,” he said. She had toasted the bread lightly, which would freshen up stale bread, and had sliced the meat thin. She might claim to be a bad cook, but such little touches argued differently.
Jen’s cheeks pinked. Her gaze dropped to her plate as she said, “I was married to someone who put ketchup on absolutely everything. And I loathe the stuff. So I’ve always been conscious that people will like different things.”
He bit into the sandwich. Someone had baked the ham well, and the cheese was sharp, the way he liked it. “This is perfect,” he said, and meant it. When she blushed more, he backed off from the compliments, and tried to ease the atmosphere, which he couldn’t quite read. “I’d heard Americans are fond of ketchup, but truth to tell I haven’t seen much of it so far.”
