The Space Between (The Book of Phoenix)

by Kristie Cook

  “I don’t know her,” I said. “Just met her. Definitely not my girlfriend.”

  Green eyes looked over my shoulder then back at me right as my phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked down at the text from the model behind me: “Club room in 5 mins. right?” Goldie-locks glanced at the screen, then gathered her bags and walked off.

  Her body mesmerized me as she seemed to glide across the floor. Her long, hippy-like skirt and loose pink top hid what I’d seen last night at the show. She didn’t have a traditional dancer’s body—her arms weren’t long and spindly, and her legs were thick with muscle, but shorter than most dancers’. And, although softer than it should probably be, her body curved in all the right places. I knew from my time spent with wannabe professionals that big tits got in the way when dancing and narrow hips made better lines, whatever that meant. They could have their boy bodies. I’d take the curves on this one any day.

  I shook myself out of it—again—ran to grab my carry-on and, ignoring the model, sprinted after the girl who’d really captured my interest. And much more, if I dared to admit it.

  After several steps of matching her pace, I finally got her to stop and talk to me. As soon as those green eyes were on me again, I faltered, once more losing my mind. I forced my brain to focus.

  “Please let me replace your coffee,” I insisted. “You don’t have to sit with me if you don’t want to, but let me do this.”

  She hesitated as her gaze swept all points around us as if avoiding my face, then finally it returned to me. She nodded and followed me to the café down the terminal. I bought her a cannoli to go along with her cappuccino—last chance for a true Italian one, I told her. After paying for our order, I found a small table with two spindly chairs and barely enough room for our carry-on bags. I was admittedly surprised when she sat down with me.

  “So what do I call you? I’ve been thinking goldie-locks in my head, but those curls are really caramel colored.”

  She blushed again, and I could literally feel the heat from her skin. The girl would drive me insane.

  “L-E-N-I,” she signed.

  “As in L-E-N-N-Y K-R-A-V-I-T-Z or as in—” I made the sign for lay and pointed at my knee.

  Her mouth opened in a broad smile and by the way her body shook slightly, I knew she was laughing. She told me it was the latter.

  “I’m J-E-R-I-C,” I shared before we both dug into the creamy goodness in front of us.

  The cannoli might have been a mistake. I had one hour with her, only sixty minutes, but it was impossible to sign with ricotta-covered fingers. Watching her suck the sweet cheese off, though, made it worth it, although it also made me hard.

  “How do you know the difference in sounds?” she asked when she was finished. She must have seen the confusion in my eyes. “Like how to say my name.”

  Ah. She was perceptive.

  “I haven’t always been deaf,” I replied. “I was in an accident eight years ago. I was fourteen, so plenty old enough to remember sounds.”

  Her face darkened. “I’m sorry. That loss must have been difficult.”

  I didn’t tell her what else I had lost—so much more than my hearing. We had an hour, and I wasn’t about to make it a mopey hour of depression.

  So I shrugged and made light of it. “I gained some superpowers, so it’s all good.”

  She laughed again. “And what would those be?”

  I tapped my temple with a finger. “I can read minds.”

  “Oh, I see. And you did such a good job with the bartender a few minutes ago.”

  I smiled, trying to think fast. “I hear thoughts, but can’t speak my own.”

  She tilted her head again in that way she does, a gleam in her eyes. “So what am I thinking right now?”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “Do you really want me to say?”

  Her skin flushed even deeper. As if to distract herself—or me—she picked up her coffee cup and tilted her head back to finish the last drops. What was she thinking?

  “You’re thinking you’d like more cappuccino,” I signed.

  She laughed. I wished I could hear it. “Nice guess, but I’m good. I’m hoping to sleep on the plane, not bounce around it on a caffeine high.”

  Another reminder she was leaving. We both were. Life was a bitch. This girl fascinated me. Not only did she affect me like no other female had in my extensive foray with them, but she was literally the girl of my dreams. I’d been sketching her for years, and here she was in the flesh. I licked my lips. I couldn’t help but wonder what that flesh tasted like.

  Her hands moved again, returning me to reality.

  “Why Italy?” she asked.

  Heh. Good question. I studied her face as I debated how much to tell her about my screwed-up life. She stared back, waiting for my answer with genuine curiosity.

  “I’d planned to see family,” I hedged, and added, “but didn’t find what I was looking for.”

  “In Sulmona?”

  Of course this question would come up. The coincidence was too . . . coincidental.

  “I ended up in Sulmona yesterday after spending a few days on the eastern coast. It was a place to stay on my way to Rome.”

  She nodded, but a shadow flickered across her eyes, and I could tell she wanted to know more, but she didn’t ask. Which was good because I wouldn’t tell her, but I didn’t want to come off as a douchebag. Not when I might have finally won her over. Even if it was for only a few more minutes.

  “So where to now?” she asked, changing the subject for me.

  “I’m on standby for a flight to Paris. There I hope to catch a flight to Miami.”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  “Yes,” I said. The real answer wasn’t so simple, but no need to get into details. I wanted to know more about her, but here we were talking about me. I needed to change that. “What about you?”

  “Atlanta. Home’s just outside of there.” And now I imagined her words with a sweet Southern accent. “For now anyway. My dad’s company moves him a lot, so I’ve lived all over.”

  So much for the accent.

  “And what were you doing here?” I asked.

  Her eyes drifted away for a moment, taking on a distant look.

  “Chasing a dream,” she said as her gaze returned to me. “I’d always wanted to be a dancer, since I was a kid. Life didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, though. You know how it is.”

  I grimaced. I certainly knew how it was. I’d had my own dream once, but the accident had killed it. I wasn’t cut out to be another Beethoven.

  “My great-uncle arranged for me to spend a month over here to dance with the company of a friend’s son,” she continued. “I take care of him, so he said this was the least he could do for me in return.” Her eyes glinted again, and she smiled mischievously. “Truth, though? I think he just wanted to spend some time with his lady friend.”

  “Can’t blame a guy.”

  She wrinkled her nose and laughed. “He’s eighty-three years old!”

  “All the more reason. When you only have a limited time, a guy has to make the most of it.”

  She locked her eyes on mine, and once again, they trapped me. Her head tilted, as though asking if I spoke of myself as much as her uncle.

  “How do you know how to sign?” I asked.

  “My uncle. We learned together. He said he was too old to learn a whole new language like ASL, so we learned Signed English. I was pretty relieved to see you using it. You’d have to go slow for me to follow ASL.”

  I nodded with understanding, but I didn’t get a chance to say anything else, because my phone vibrated on the table, startling the hell out of both of us.

  The airline had a seat for me on the flight to Paris.

  Was it
bad I enjoyed the look of disappointment in Leni’s eyes when she saw the text?

  We both stood and gathered our things. My gate was on the way to her own, so she walked with me. I eyed the line of passengers waiting to board, and the thought of getting on that plane—of leaving the Beautiful Girl of my dreams—nearly threw me into a panic. Damn. I needed to get on the plane. Not only to get back to the States but if I didn’t break this . . . whatever it was . . . with Leni, I thought I’d be jacked up for life. She was that kind of girl, but I was not that kind of guy. She put her stuff down to sign, then looked up at me with wide, green eyes and a small smile. Ah, shit. I was already jacked up for life. How would I ever be able to forget her?

  “It was nice to meet you,” she signed. Then she held out her hand. I didn’t want a handshake. I wanted to yank her into my arms, press her body against mine, hold her, grab a fistful of those caramel curls, kiss her like she’s never been kissed before, taste her mouth and her skin . . . I cleared my desert-like throat and took her hand.

  That feeling of the floor dropping from my under my feet hit me again, though not as strong as before. The word “dyad” returned in my mind and the feeling I knew this girl, much more than was possible, exploded again from somewhere deep within me.

  Leni licked those full lips of hers. “They’re calling your flight for the last time,” she mouthed since my hand still held hers. As though she might have forgotten, she slipped her hand from mine and signed the same thing. “Don’t want to miss your flight, do you?”

  Yes. I wanted to tell her.

  I gave her a smile and signed instead, “I can read lips.”

  She returned my grin with a sexy smile of her own.

  “Take care, Jeric,” she mouthed before turning and gliding down the corridor. My heart faltered a few beats at the thought of how my name sounded rolling off those lips . . . that tongue . . .. If I only knew what her voice sounded like.

  Once the plane was in the air, I reached for my backpack stuffed under the seat in front of me and pulled out my tablet and the used-and-abused, leather-bound notebook inside. I thought I’d look her up on Facebook, but realized I didn’t catch her last name, so I went straight to the notebook. I kept notes of my search in it, but also used it for communication when texting on my phone didn’t work and even had a few sketches in it. I was far from a great artist—my true talent was music. Or, at least, it had been before the accident. Now my talent lies in things much more sinister.

  I flipped to the picture I’d drawn a couple of weeks ago after waking from a dream, one I’d been having for years. As I had previously, I’d felt the need to sketch the girl who had me waking with a painful boner. Now that I’d met her in real life, I couldn’t deny the girl in my sketches depicted Leni—curly hair, exotic green eyes, full lips and breasts, dark-honey skin . . . As if the absolute best features of African and European heritage had been blended together to create my Beautiful Girl. The Leni I’d just met would probably never wear the leather bra, miniskirt, and knee-high boots I’d drawn her in, but damn if she wouldn’t look hot in them. The vision came to me clearly. Too clearly. I had to place the book over my lap to hide the full-blown stiffy pressing against my jeans.

  Damn. I needed a distraction. I needed to get her out of my head. Several airline bottles of rum dumped into my Coke weren’t enough to blur the image of Leni’s face in my mind. When the smoking hot flight attendant ran her finger over my arm then dropped a napkin with a message on my tray (“Meet me upstairs?”), I couldn’t resist. I snuck up the spiral staircase to the empty upper level and found her in the bathroom wearing nothing but heels and thigh-high stockings, tendrils of bottle-bleached hair barely hiding her fake tits. Flight attendants like this had made me a lifetime member of the mile-high club—they wanted nothing more than something to make the long flight more interesting. My perfect kind of girl.

  Unfortunately, my eyes only saw Leni’s body under my hands.

  The French babe who helped me through the Paris airport didn’t distract me either. I had a little easier time communicating—I could read her lips as she spoke French—because I’d spent enough time in France for work for a couple of years. I thought she might actually recognize me, the way she flirted in a more subtle way than most chicks. When she told me the flight to Miami had been cancelled due to weather and the next available flight to the U.S. left in three hours for Atlanta, I forgot what she even looked like. Atlanta. What were the odds?

  Not that I could really expect to see Leni again. Atlanta was a big city.

  I took the flight, making new plans as we crossed the Atlantic. My search for a piece of my past had become an epic fail. Except for a few clues I’d been given along the way, I’d been going completely on instinct, following my gut even all the way to Italy. My gut was usually pretty accurate, but not this time. The one person who’d cared enough to tell me what she knew lived right outside of Atlanta. I didn’t particularly want to see her because it also meant seeing her asshole husband, but maybe she knew more than she’d told me and a face-to-face was the only way to get any more info out of her. Of course, I’d changed a lot over the years—I didn’t exactly look like the kid she’d seen last—but hopefully she’d see beyond the larger build and the tats.

  Or would she slam the door in my face once again?

  My jaw clenched and my leg bounced with agitation at the thought of what I had to do next. I had to—I was out of options. The guy in the next seat shifted, his eyes darting at me apprehensively with all the tension I threw off. Tatted up, muscular dude suddenly angry for no apparent reason must have freaked him out, especially on an airplane. I inhaled a deep breath, closed my eyes, and rubbed at my wrist, vaguely wondering why it had started to tingle.

  Leni’s face filled the backs of my eyelids, and I immediately calmed down. For one last time I allowed my imagination to run wild, promising myself I’d let her go before the plane landed. Once in Atlanta, I’d need to focus my energy elsewhere.

  When I saw the caramel-colored curls bobbing in the customs line at Atlanta Hartsfield, though, how could I let go? Maybe life wasn’t such an unfair bitch after all.

  Chapter 3

  As soon as Jeric left, I felt a strange sense of being lost. And lonely. In fact, I’d never felt more alone in this foreign land than I did now. My heart had been aching over this departure—I would miss the quaint villages, sidewalk cafés, and colorful buildings with their rows of windows hidden behind brightly colored awnings and flowers that made the façades look like beautiful tiered cakes. The theaters, too, some of them centuries old, where classic operas had once been performed in times when wigged men had played the roles of women.

  And my soul—it had never felt so free. Although I hadn’t made any lifelong friends while in Italy, I’d still been able to be me. The real me. Maybe because everybody’s expectations of me were so low anyway or maybe because I knew I’d never see them again, but I didn’t care what anyone thought here. I didn’t feel the need to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.

  Uncle Theo had given me the best gift ever, and I certainly hadn’t deserved it. But it was time to go and with Jeric’s departure, I suddenly couldn’t wait to leave, too, to get home to Uncle Theo, to my comfortable bed, to my familiar surroundings filled with people I knew.

  Well, not so much that last part. Most of the people I’d known had left. My parents had moved to Alaska, and all of my friends had gone off to college or to New York City to pursue their dreams, and I’d become someone they’d once known in high school. It was mostly just Uncle Theo and me, and sometimes Mira. But at least the neighbors were friendly and the people at the coffee shop and stores were familiar. By the time I boarded my connecting flight in London, I was as excited to arrive home as I’d been to embark on this journey five weeks ago, especially to see my uncle. As weird as it sounded, he had pretty much become my best friend since I’d
graduated high school. I missed his company terribly.

  I tried to sleep on the trans-Atlantic flight, but rest eluded me. My mind wouldn’t let go of Jeric’s face and kept replaying our entire conversation, focusing on the way his hands moved, his muscular forearms, the beautiful images inked on his skin. My own forearm burned as though it imagined what all those tats felt like, and I instinctively slipped my finger under my bracelets to rub at it. The woman next to me made a noise of annoyance at the jangle of my bracelets. I fought the urge to give her a dirty look. She’d kept her overhead light on for the entire flight as she flipped through magazine after magazine, not helping my sleep pursuit at all.

  I glanced over at her and became intrigued with the look on her face, then another cluck of her tongue. Maybe she wasn’t annoyed at me. I stole a glance at what had her panties in a bunch, and my jaw dropped. I bolted upright in my seat and snatched the magazine right out of her hands.

  “Excusé moi?” the woman snapped, but I ignored her.

  My full attention had been captured by the magazine ad depicting a perfectly sculpted masculine body clad only in underwear—the defined pecs, the washboard abs, the thick legs, the only part covered .... But even all this didn’t captivate me like the face did. Because I knew that face. I’d spent an hour at the airport looking into those same blue eyes. The tats were gone, probably airbrushed out, but I had no doubt. I burst into a fit of giggles. Jeric was a model. And not just any model. An underwear model. I’d had coffee with a freakin’ international male model!

  A few people around me made grunts of irritation as they shifted in their seats, annoyed my laughter awoke them. My conscience twanged with the old feeling of caring what other people thought, and the only reason I didn’t apologize was because I didn’t want to disturb them any further. The closer I came to home, the more Mama’s lessons were returning.