Rogue Touch

by Woodward, Christine

  “I won’t let them.”

  “If they catch you again, you may not have a choice. I can’t risk it. Not for you. Not for Arcadia.”

  “So, even if you send me back, what makes you think they won’t just track me again?”

  He stood up and went down belowdecks. When he came back, he held a little box in his hand. It buzzed and hummed louder as he came toward me. Before I had a chance to ask him what it was, he held it up in front of me, moving it all around, while it clicked and clicked.

  “OK,” I said, when he’d finally put it down. “What the hell was that?”

  “Something I’ve been working on,” he said. “It changed the structure of your DNA, the way it’s read. Changed the design of your fingerprints, too. So you can’t be traced.”

  “How do you know it works?”

  “Because you’re not the first person I’ve used it on.”

  Of course. Cotton. It wasn’t just me that Touch had to keep safe. I hadn’t even realized how fast my heart had been beating. Now it slowed down. I reached out my hand and took his, wishing that when he’d engineered this suit he’d thought of a way for me to feel the skin of his hand through it. To make up for it, I gripped him very tight. “I wanted to be here,” I told him. “But if you want to come back with me, to my time, well then that’s OK. I don’t care where we are. Hell, take us all the way back to caveman days. Before that even.” I almost loved this thought, me and Touch, like Adam and Eve before the dawn of time. “It doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “So long as we’re together.”

  He put his hand on top of mine, and pressed down just as hard as I pressed his hand. “But Rogue,” he said.

  Dang. Dang and damn. My eyes filled with tears. Nothing I said would do any good. Because of course he didn’t mean to come back to the past with me. Not my past, not any past. He meant to stay here, and fight for Arcadia, on account of a force way stronger than me. A force so strong, it kept a very evil woman from being completely evil.

  “She showed me his picture,” I said, through tears. “He’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” Touch said, real quiet. He had tears in his eyes, too.

  “I’d fight for him,” I said. “I’d fight for all of you, if you’d let me stay.”

  For one long, quiet minute, I had hope. In that minute I saw a whole world—the past, the present, the future, none of them having anything to do with any place in the galaxy or the space-time continuum other than my own heart. Here we sat, in the midst of the one great ocean. Never in my life had I seen the ocean, and now it was all I could see, on all sides of me. I sure did want to see what it looked like, lapping over a beach. I wanted to walk out into the waves and ride them back to shore.

  Touch sat looking at me, his big blue eyes full of love and anguish. I barely even saw his handsomeness when I looked at him now. All I saw was what I felt. Love. And the rest of my life moving forward with him, exactly with him, because anything else felt exactly unbearable.

  “I love you,” I said, trying to make the force of my voice match the force of my desire.

  “I love you, too,” Touch whispered. And I can’t tell you how much I hated it, the danger I posed, not only to the man I loved but to his whole entire way of life. The lethal skin, one thin layer away from the world, could bring the whole thing crashing down.

  So you see, pretty much all my hope had melted away even before we were surrounded by great, bursting, flashing lights, and Alabaster and King appeared on the deck with us, along with what seemed like a hundred of their minions.

  If only I’d been born into this world in the first place. Then I could’ve been something different. Not a freak or a monster, but a person with a place to go. But such was not my lot in life, and right now all hell was breaking loose. For one thing, that crazy language of theirs. I sure wish Touch had thought to give me one of those translators. Because no matter how many times it happened, I couldn’t get used to these thugs that called themselves aristocrats appearing out of nowhere and whistling away.

  In the blink of an eye, Touch turned and ran down belowdecks. I could hardly believe he would abandon me, and my first instinct was to run to the side of the boat and dive in. No orange balls whizzed through the air, just the sound of a powerful electric current. It seemed to slow me down somehow, as if the air were super-thick, too thick to move through, and too hot. I gave up on running and turned around. There stood Alabaster, her hands outstretched, silver light bursting from her fingers and coming toward me, but it wasn’t meant to whisk me off to safety. Instead the light was trained on me real steady, melting away the suit Touch had made—the suit that protected me from the heat—thread by thread.

  I looked down. Piece by piece the material was disappearing, leaving my skin exposed, leaving me naked. Didn’t they know then, what my skin could do? Remembering all that Touch had told me, I guessed that was the point.

  That sun bore down and the heat closed in. With every thread of the suit that was removed, the protective coolness left, and it became more and more like someone was pressing a fist against my larynx. I could hardly breathe. It felt like I would melt.

  Where was Touch? If only I could step forward. The material now had melted from my hands. Alabaster stood before me, her perfect white skin somehow untouched by the sun, and oh-so exposed by her usual skimpy outfit. If only I could jerk out of these rays she pointed at me, I could land my hands on her and suck the life out of her.

  But I couldn’t. I mean, even if I could, I couldn’t. Mother of Touch’s child and all.

  Anyways, at that moment my morality was a moot point. I couldn’t move. The nameless men had formed a barrier, all standing in a ring against the railing of the boat. From downstairs, King emerged, holding Touch by both elbows. For the first time in this world, Touch was wearing that long leather coat, and my mind leaped to what magic items he might have in his inside pocket.

  Alabaster lowered her hands. Her work was done, me sinking to my knees from the heat, hardly able to breathe, wearing nothing but my underwear. King kept coming toward me, holding Touch like a shield, and I saw the plan in an instant. To make Touch put his hands on me, long enough for me to absorb everything he knew, all his talents, all his knowledge. Leaving nothing but an empty shell in his place.

  “There’s no use in fighting,” King said, and since I could understand him, I knew he was talking to me as well as Touch. “If only you hadn’t fought against what was rightfully yours.” His voice sounded quavery, like maybe he was actually having a moment of regret over killing his own son.

  “Don’t worry,” Alabaster called to King. “Your grandson will inherit all that he was meant to have.” The two of them, so greedy they even had to gobble up this moment, talking to each other. Congratulating themselves on their own future riches.

  It was so hot. I was losing my ability to concentrate. All I could see was Touch. Coming closer and closer. When I looked up, it felt like looking at him from across that sauna, steamy and foggy, but about a million times hotter. Hotter. So damned hot. I choked on the very air. As King propelled him toward me I barely had a moment to wonder why Touch didn’t fight, and overpower him, before I saw that same sort of silver thread, pouring out of King’s fingertips, Touch’s own magic stolen and perverted to do him in.

  And me. I was the other piece of the puzzle, the second part of the weapon, meant not only to destroy the world he loved, but him. Petty human that I was, I had to admit, I cared about the second part more than the first. I could almost live with destroying a world that wasn’t mine. But destroying Touch? Never.

  From somewhere deep inside, I summoned something strong enough to let me look into Touch’s eyes. Let me read his mind the way he always read mine. And I knew that I hadn’t been alone since that day under the tupelo tree with Cody. Ever since I’d had him—Cody—inside of me. And then I’d had the kitten, and Wendy Lee, and the wildebears, and Tawa. And in a different way—the most important way of all—I’d had Touch. So it
wasn’t with my own strength, but the strength of all of us, that I hauled myself to my feet and stepped forward. I reached past Touch, my naked arm dangerously close to brushing his face, and placed my hand flat on his daddy’s cheek.

  King shuddered. He spat a little. As soon as he staggered back—letting go of Touch, losing the silver threads spraying out from his fingers—I pulled my hand away. For a moment I could feel it, the rush of another person coming in. The last thing I wanted on Earth was King’s memories or feelings, but I barely had time to think on it. The heat came crashing in again. I could hear Alabaster’s voice hollering something mournful and furious. And then Touch thrust something wonderfully familiar into my hand, and the two of us flew away into a nameless realm, the golden ring the only vehicle we needed.

  It was a good thing that my mind was open to the crazy things that occurred in nature. Like time travel, or human skin that morphed into a weapon or a curse, or a race of humans so advanced they’d learned to harness energy in their actual fingertips. Because what happened from the moment Touch handed me that golden ring—it was the oddest thing of all. Not what happened so much as the way it felt.

  Honest to God, my first thought was that I’d died and gone to heaven. And I don’t mean that in the way Wendy Lee might say it, biting into a fresh éclair. I mean that I had this strong sense of leaving my body behind somewhere, and floating off, away from it, on my own. To say that I felt lighter than air would be an understatement. I felt lighter than lightness, like weight could never apply. At the same time my body was very much with me. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. I could feel the buzz of my bare skin, and the air against it didn’t feel hot anymore. It felt perfect.

  And time. Time didn’t matter. It was like I could actually hear it skidding to a halt. It didn’t exist on either side of us—not in my past or Touch’s future. All that existed was this moment, carved out of space—out of any continuum—for us.

  Me and Touch. On a beach. Me still wearing what I’d had on when he whisked me away, which is to say practically nothing. We stood just at the tide line, facing each other. Waves lapped over our feet. The shoreline sloped upward, and I could see, about fifty yards up, a little thatched hut surrounded by palm and banana trees. That perfect breeze brushed across us.

  “Your hair,” Touch said.

  I reached down and picked up a strand, examined it. Brown. I shook my head so that it fell like a curtain in front of my face. The streaks were gone. No white. Just brown, a color I hadn’t seen, all by itself, in ages.

  I pushed all that hair out of my face. “What about my eyes?” I said.

  Touch peered into my face. “Brown,” he said. “Dark and beautiful.”

  A smile came over my whole self. I closed the eyes, my own eyes, that Touch thought were beautiful. I let them look inward. Alone. Nothing else in there. No kitten or wildebears or Tawa. No Cody or Wendy Lee or—thank goodness—King. Just me. Anna Marie, plus everything she’d become. Rogue.

  “Where are we?” I whispered. My eyes fluttered open. Touch looked just the same as ever, except his hair was loose, and he had a cleaner shave. He wore baggy white pants and nothing else.

  “We,” he said, “are out there, traveling through time. It takes longer than you realize, you know.”

  I nodded, remembering my trip with King. “Ten thousand years is a long way to go.”

  “It is,” Touch agreed.

  “So,” I said, for once understanding right away, “our bodies are making the trip without us. They’re out there, spinning the years away. While we…”

  “We get to take a little time here. Together.”

  “And where is here?”

  “A place out of time and space. A place of our own making. Yours and mine.”

  It didn’t seem real, the possibility, and at the same time it seemed like the most real thing in any age, in any universe. Touch let a smile wash over him. I could see it form on his lips and move over his throat and shoulders to his elbows, flooding down his torso all the way to his toes.

  He took a step toward me. I took a step toward him. My hands trembled at my side, knowing absolutely, and at the same time not daring.

  By now it was pretty clear that between us, Touch was the braver of the two. He reached out both his hands. He placed them on either side of my naked waist. For a moment I feared that out here—in this place of our own invention, so far removed from either of our bodies—I wouldn’t be able to feel him. But I could. His hands. Strong and gentle and just the slightest bit chapped, his ungloved hands, the half-moon fingernails pressing against my skin. Setting off the most joyful fireworks inside my mind and body.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Touch.”

  And I threw myself into his arms, and he held me, our chests pressed together, his lips against my ears, his hands curved into the small of my back.

  Here’s what we did. Held each other a long, long while. There is nothing in the whole wide world like skin on skin. Then we took off what clothes we had on and swam out into the surf. We dove, and we splashed each other. He showed me how to ride the waves back to shore, and we did it again and again.

  The simplest thing in the world. Two people in love, so much so that the whole universe stops existing. After a while we found ourselves on the sand. I lay back. Touch sat there, looking at me awhile. And then he started in to touching me, everywhere he’d never been able to. Starting at my feet. Moving over my whole body. When he got to the top of my head, he very gently rolled me over and went the opposite direction. I let my face rest on my crossed arms, just feeling him, his lips and his fingertips. No way would I let myself think about where we went from here.

  After a while we stood up and walked together toward the little hut, holding hands. When we got closer we could see a little shower stall just next to the hut. It had a great big barrel on top of it, for catching rain. We went inside and Touch pulled a string; rainwater fell down on top of us, washing away the sand and grit. There was some shampoo that smelled like coconut. Touch lathered me up, including my hair, and then I did the same to him. Then we stood under the stream of water, somehow the right temperature for both of us, pressing against each other and kissing, kissing, until that rain barrel emptied itself and only sun poured down into the shower stall.

  We went on into that little thatched hut. The two of us had waited so long. It didn’t even work, really, to call it waiting, because it wasn’t something we ever thought could happen. At least I didn’t.

  “Did you plan this?” I asked, as we lay down on top of the bed, white curtains blowing through the glassless window.

  Touch hovered over me, his face so close, the sight of my hands against his shoulders the most wonderful thing in the world. “I spent more than a year,” he said, “figuring out how to make a stop like this, if ever we had to travel through time again. I knew you could do it. Ever since you absorbed the Anasazi, you’ve been able to get onto an astral plane.”

  “Is that why you sent me into those ruins?”

  Touch smiled. “That was mostly for the strength. But I thought this might come in handy, too. Do you remember meeting me on the beach?”

  “That was real?”

  He nodded. “The first time I succeeded. So I knew I’d be able to do it again, when I needed to.”

  A whole host of new questions burst into my head. But I didn’t want to hear the answers to any of them. I just wanted to be here, and now. The only thing I wanted to look forward to was Touch’s lips on mine. The only question I wanted answered was what it would feel like when Touch made love to me.

  Luckily I didn’t have to wait long at all to find out.

  Evening, when it fell, took me by surprise. Touch and I sat out by the water, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the sunset.

  There was so much I wanted to ask him. Like Please take me with you, or Please come with me. I wanted to ask why we couldn’t just stay here forever, but of course I already knew the answer to that.

  An
d as far as the other questions, I knew something else. That when a person has given you the greatest, most enormous gift you are ever to receive in your whole life, what you don’t do is open up your mouth and ask for something more.

  So all I said was, “I love you, Touch, and I will my whole life.”

  He didn’t have to say I love you, too. He just had to risk everything in the world to let that blanket fall away, and put his arms around me, and kiss me, kiss me, till both sets of skin faded away, and there was nothing in all the universe except the two of us, blessed and enveloped, together. Touching.

  A little while later, back in the white bed, I said, “Will we still be here in the morning?”

  “No,” he said. “When we wake up, we’ll both be home.”

  “Then I’m never going to sleep,” I said.

  It might as well have been never. That night lasted so long, and we made love so many times. Until finally my strength drained so completely that never didn’t so much end, as it turned into never again. But I couldn’t even mind that, at least not as long as I slept in Touch’s arms, no clothes or blankets, no barriers at all coming between us, in this, our very own stretch of time and space.

  Touch and I must have had our last standoff with Alabaster and King high above what used to be the Great Smoky Mountains. When I finally woke up—a few minutes or a few hundred years after I fell asleep in Touch’s arms—I found myself on the very top of Clingmans Dome, all by my lonesome, wearing nothing but Touch’s long leather coat. The bed of pine needles I’d used for a pillow had left indentations in my cheek so deep I could feel the grooves when I ran my fingers over my face. I shook more pine needles out of my hair, and when I did, I could see the same old white streaks, and I knew I was seeing them with my green cat’s eyes. I could feel Cody inside me, and Wendy Lee, and the wildebears and Tawa. But search as I might, much to my relief I couldn’t feel any trace of King. Maybe it was because Touch had whisked me away so fast. Maybe it was because it happened so many years in the future. Or maybe it was just some force of will inside me, refusing to take such evil into my own heart. Maybe like Gordium I’d learned—at least for that one moment—to control my power.