Portal to Passion: Science Fiction Romance

by Amber Stuart

  I immediately set that picture as my phone’s background. Lottie started to protest then laughed at herself and said Eric was probably the only other person who would ever see that picture anyway.

  We sat under a beach umbrella and she started building a sandcastle, because even at twenty-three, Lottie would do things like that. I watched her for a while but she was driving me crazy. The whole thing was structurally unsound. So we rebuilt it together and a couple of kids passing by stopped to admire it; Lottie loved kids. She couldn’t resist. She surrendered our sandcastle to them. And I absolutely worshipped her for that.

  We walked down the beach, occasionally wading into the water to see what was floating in there. It was usually just dead jellyfish, which can still sting and it hurts like hell, or a piece of trash, but Lottie liked to look for seashells even though she never kept them. Part of the fun for her was just to see if I could identify what kind of animal it used to be. I wasn’t particularly interested in marine animals; I just had a photographic memory.

  I was about to get to the part of this dream where Lottie found a shell I didn’t recognize, which always excited her, and she was so fucking adorable in the way she teased me about it, but then I woke up.

  I hated waking up from those dreams. I resented my brain for tearing me away from the only place I had ever wanted to be. Slowly, I had to force myself to relocate. The empty bed. The quiet room. The soundless apartment. The time on the clock. 3:30 a.m.

  It was often 3:30 when I woke from these dreams. No. I was not with Lottie. Not in Galveston and not here in our apartment. This was my afterlife. I had died two years ago. And there was nothing for me to do now except get up and go to work.

  I guess I should have moved. Maybe a different apartment would mean living with fewer ghosts. They were all Lottie, but different Lotties. She was everywhere within these walls, in this building, on these sidewalks, on these familiar streets. And especially at this intersection. I drove through it every morning on my way to work. This intersection, where a few seconds had torn open a hole in my universe, had left a gaping wound within me that could never heal.

  That morning, I sat at the corner of Kirby Drive and Main Street, as I waited for the red light to change. Sometimes, I would imagine the wreckage of Lottie’s black Passat, tangled into an angry snarl of metal and plastic. The car that had hit her was a white Ford Mustang. The driver was speeding, not paying attention, and didn’t see the red light. And in those precious few seconds, my life had ended – just a few different seconds and everything would have changed, and my world would still be whole, Lottie would still be alive, I would not be living in this Hell.

  Her best friend had been in the car with her. Another innocent life shattered by the impact of that Mustang as it slammed into the driver’s side of Lottie’s car. The only person who survived the accident was the driver of the Ford Mustang.

  Distantly, I could hear a horn honking. Someone was honking. I gradually realized they were honking at me. The light was green. It was 4:30 in the morning.

  How long had I been driving around these streets, looking for a ghost? How long had I been at this intersection, wishing, perhaps, I had it in me to take someone’s life without it being part of my job?

  Sometimes, I was afraid that I did. Because I wanted him dead. I wanted to kill the man who had taken Lottie from me. I had thought about it. Eric had as well. He had offered to help me. But I was at the hearing; I watched him break down; I watched him as he suffered with the guilt of his past. And I told Eric we should let him live – death was too easy a punishment.

  I took my foot off the brake and drove through the intersection. I needed to hit something. I needed to run or fight or kick and beat. After two years, I had exhausted the spectrum of ways to feel pain. It was channeled now into aggression. It was the easiest outlet, the most convenient. Given what I did for a living, there were often opportunities to get rid of it. But today, I would be in my office. There was a gym in the building at work; I would beat the shit out of something there.

  Almost two hours later, showered and changed but still feeling just as angry and irritable, I decided to walk a few blocks down to the coffee shop. I didn’t often drink coffee. That was Lottie’s obsession. Eric would sometimes arch an eyebrow at me and ask me, with the most deadpan sincerity, if I weren’t genetically required to love coffee. I never even knew who my father was, so I would offer, with equal mock sincerity, that I must only be half German.

  I went to this coffee shop because Lottie had loved it – the chain had originated in New Orleans, and even though the coffee tasted just like Starbucks to me, she claimed it was far better, as only a good Louisiana coffee can be. I’m not even sure what that meant.

  Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who thought it was better coffee – or maybe Americans just really loved their coffee – because it was always busy. It was just past 6:30 in the morning when I opened the door, a line of people tapping at their phones stretched back toward me while a group of baristas called out orders and scribbled names on paper cups.

  A half smile threatened to pull at my lips at the thought of the frazzled, college-aged girl behind the counter trying to figure mine out, let alone how to spell it. I didn’t even know what I would order. I looked at the puzzling options listed above the baristas’ heads and wondered whose brilliant idea it had been to rename coffee sizes from small and large to tall and grande. Same fucking thing, except now people just sounded pretentious and arrogant.

  Despite the overwhelming smell of brewed coffee that always fills coffeehouses, I briefly caught the hint of a more familiar, sweeter scent – the only scent that had ever had any meaning to me. It was strange. Maybe that’s just how people worked, our bodies, pheromones, or whatever, but no matter what shampoo or deodorant Lottie used, she always smelled like pears and honey to me.

  When we first met, I thought it was her perfume. She had laughed and told me no, the only perfume she ever wore was Clinique’s Happy, and she hadn’t been wearing any perfume the night we met. The next day, at the mall, I found a Clinique counter and asked for a sample of Happy. Bright, citrusy. A smell that easily fit her bright and cheerful personality. But it wasn’t her smell.

  I swallowed. A hard knot had formed in my stomach and I suddenly felt like coffee was a terribly bad idea. I wasn’t sure I could keep anything down. I never cried. I had been sick – quite literally – for weeks after Lottie died. I vacillated between numbness, rage, and depression. But that five-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his drug-addict mother couldn’t cry. Not even for the woman who had rescued him, had given him a purpose and taught him to feel more than hatred and anger. But I could be sick. That’s how my emotions apparently chose to manifest – most people just cried it out. I threw it up.

  I turned to leave, edging my way out of the growing line, and in my peripheral vision, caught a glimpse of a high messy bun, tendrils of wavy brown hair loosely falling down around a perfectly smooth, pale neck. I knew that hair, that messy bun. I knew that neck. How many times had I kissed it, buried my face against it to breathe in that scent of pears and honey?

  She was sitting at one of those high tables, her short legs dangling off the tall chair. At only 5’3”, she was too short to reach the ground from one of those chairs, but always sat in them anyway when she could. I used to tease her about choosing to sit somewhere that must have seemed like it was made for giants.

  She was absentmindedly stirring her coffee with a wooden stirrer with her right hand, her left hand, ringless but hers, I knew it, clasped loosely over a phone on the table. An old habit. She was a bit clumsy and was convinced that if she spilled her drink, she would have time to get her phone out of the way if she kept her hand on it. That morning, I had gone looking for ghosts and found one.

  I was staring now. Frozen. I tried to get my mind to find logic – logic, reason, discovery, it’s what I do – but the more I scrambled to find some thread to begin unraveli
ng what my eyes were telling me I was seeing, the more convinced I became that I wasn’t imagining things.

  Approach her, I thought. She’ll turn around, you’ll see it isn’t her, it can’t be her. Lottie is dead. Embalmed. Buried. It was physically impossible. It seemed easy enough. An exceptionally easy plan, actually. Just go up to her, say her name, and when she turned around or when I got close enough to her to see it was someone else – it isn’t someone else – I would apologize and get the fuck out of here. If I didn’t move soon, people would start staring at me, like I was some stalker or pervert. Just move, Dietrich. Talking to a ghost isn’t the weirdest thing you’ve ever done.

  I moved. I stopped a few feet behind her and she must have sensed me. Her hand that had been stirring the still-too-hot-to-drink coffee stopped and her body tensed, her head lifting and staring straight ahead, her back straightening. She knew me. God, what was happening to me? I had finally lost my mind.

  “Lottie?” It was a breath. It was supposed to be louder. How could she even hear me over the noise in here? But she did.

  She jerked around, her eyes wide and terrified.

  “Oh, God,” she breathed back.

  I’ve seen some pretty horrific shit in only twenty-seven years – hell, I’ve done some pretty horrific shit - and I’ve never come close to feeling like I was going to pass out. But staring back at my dead fiancée, everything I had ever read about people fainting – the room spinning, the nausea, the body weakness and tingling extremities, the inability to focus – all hit me at once. Don’t pass out, Dietrich. She’ll be gone when you come around and you’ll never find out what the hell is going on.

  I took a step closer to her and immediately realized that was a mistake. She jumped up from her chair, shaking her head, crying. Crying? Had she just started crying or had she already been crying? She had grabbed her phone and purse and I knew what was coming.

  I was prepared to beg her to talk to me, but then she spoke, quickly, quietly, between sobs, choking out, “I’m so sorry. You were never supposed to see me. This was so stupid. Oh, God, Dietrich, I’m so sorry.”

  And she darted past me and ran out of the coffee shop.

  I hadn’t woken up this morning planning on chasing ghosts through the crowded sidewalks and streets of the Houston medical district. I still expected at some point to awaken, to discover this was one of those dreams that seemed too real and blurred the lines of what was life and what was imagination. Or maybe I would catch up to her and this time, when she turned around to face me, I would discover I had been chasing a complete stranger and I was about to get arrested for harassing and assaulting some poor woman who was just trying to get away from some lunatic who may or may not even be speaking English.

  Normally, she wouldn’t have even gotten past me in the coffeehouse. People didn’t get past me. But when my dead fiancée is crying, apologizing for something – what the hell is she apologizing for? Dying? – apparently, my reflexes are slower than normal. She got a pretty good lead on me.

  By the time I followed her out onto the busy, noisy sidewalk, the sun was fully risen, bright and blinding, and it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. Unlike Lottie, I was not short, and I spotted her light brown bun, falling out now in long, loose waves, hurrying away from the coffeehouse, away from me. We were sandwiched between a parking garage and a hospital, so we were like two salmon swimming upstream as we fought against the swarm of bodies trying to move toward the hospital. Either visiting hours were about to start or it was a shift change. Or maybe both. Or maybe it was always like this. I had never tried chasing anyone down a Houston sidewalk before.

  She came to a cross walk, an orange hand forbidding her to cross and indecision played across her face; I stopped breathing. I dared to look away from her to watch the traffic, which had seconds ago been annoying background noise, and now seemed so threatening. Deadly. Could ghosts die? My heart was pounding in my ears, my temples. She looked to her right – construction crews had torn up the sidewalk and yellow tape marked it off. There was a narrow pathway right next to the building, just wide enough for one or two people to walk. She wanted to keep going. Her body language told me she was ready to run, those cars still buzzing past her in the intersection. But she had stopped. And I remembered to breathe.

  The light had just changed to a bright white walking man when I reached her. Again, she knew I was right behind her. She didn’t bother trying to cross the street now. Instead, her shoulders sagged, defeated, and even though I couldn’t hear her sighing over the noise of the busy Houston streets around us, I knew she had just done it by her body language: resigned, beaten. I gently took her arm and pulled her away from the intersection toward the corner of the building, out of the path of both pedestrians and cars. She let me.

  I expected her to try to pull free, to take off running or at the very least, use her free hand to start slapping the shit out of me. What did I think I was doing anyway? When a person runs away from you, that’s usually a sign they don’t want you around.

  She wouldn’t look at me, but she didn’t fight me either. She followed me to the side of the building and stood lamely by me, waiting for me to say something. Shit. I had been entirely focused on just catching up to her. I hadn’t actually thought of what I would say to her when I did.

  “Lottie, what… ?”

  Brilliant, Dietrich.

  She shifted her weight to her other foot, but still didn’t lift her gaze from the ground. A part of me had been hoping she was going to fill in all of the information I wanted but didn’t even know how to ask for, but that apparently wasn’t going to happen. I took a deep breath. Start basic.

  “What the hell is going on?” It came out sounding like an accusation. I hadn’t meant it to. I was tired from having woken up too early, stressed from two years of painful grieving that more often than not was really just me working too hard to try not to really grieve, and then the shock of… of what? What the hell was going on?

  It didn’t matter. I regretted saying it as soon as the words were out as those big, hazel eyes I loved so much started brimming with tears again, and she still wouldn’t look at me. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. Not even her… ghost. Should a ghost have a body, I wondered? I realized I was still holding onto her arm. Her very real arm. Very warm, very alive arm.

  I could feel the hard bone underneath the thin skin and muscle, see the blue-green veins underneath that porcelain complexion. I turned her arm over and softly traced my thumb over her wrist. Pulsing. Fast. Her heart was still beating fast. Her heart was still beating. She was alive.

  When I looked back at her face, I realized she had been watching me. Those tears had spilled over her cheeks but she didn’t try to wipe them away. She just watched me. Concern, sorrow, love, regret.

  “No,” my voice was hoarse, just a whisper. I’m not sure it mattered. I must have lost my mind, right? None of this was real. “I buried you.”

  Lottie never looked away.

  “I’m not her,” she whispered back.

  I know she must have seen the confusion that was suddenly written all over me, but she didn’t offer anything else. She just stood there, watching me, not moving, not looking away, crying silently. So much emotion behind those eyes, and I understood them all, because they were her eyes, her emotions. Of course, she was Lottie. I had lost my fucking mind but she was Lottie. Of the seven billion people on this planet, I would have known this face, this hair, this body, this smell, the feel of her skin against mine. I had known her in that coffeehouse, even when my brain kept echoing this is impossible.

  “Lottie,” I started, my voice finding itself again, and I reached up to wipe a tear from her cheek. She blinked in surprise but didn’t move away from me. “I would know you in a room of imposters; you know I could find you anywhere on this Earth.”

  She finally looked away then out toward the busy street, shaking her head at me but as silent as before. Occasionally, people passin
g by us would stare, some would even slow down, but I wasn’t really paying attention to them. If Lottie even noticed them, she didn’t let on.

  My hand had slipped down her wrist and was loosely holding her fingers, those delicate thin fingers. I was holding her left hand. Her ring finger no longer bore the tan line from her engagement ring, and I caressed it, wanting to ask but not wanting to know what had happened to her ring, to her promise to marry me, to become my wife. Even her ghost in this Hell of an afterlife would still wear that ring; I was more secure in that certainty, in the strength of our commitment to each other, than anything else in my life. I’m not her.

  “Lottie, your ring…” I said.

  She stopped me. “It’s not mine.”

  This was maddening.

  “Lottie,” I was exasperated. But something was clicking within me. Some spark of truth, an element of this isn’t quite right. Still holding her hand, I asked her, even though I felt ridiculous doing it, “Who are you then?”

  She cast her gaze back toward the invisible phantom on the street.

  “I’m so sorry, Dietrich. I swear I never wanted to hurt you. You never should have seen me. It was so incredibly stupid of me to even come here.”

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? I was about to ask her, but then remembered the hurt in her eyes, the pain I had caused her by speaking too quickly before. Tact wasn’t my strong suit. “Then why did you?”

  She glanced up at me again and a half-smile played at her pale link lips. God, I missed those lips. She shrugged and looked away again.

  “Goddamn it, Lottie.”

  I never cursed at her like that. I really must have lost my mind. She flinched but didn’t reprimand me or curse back at me. Other than a second of recognition of knowing I had said something reprehensible, she didn’t even respond as if anything unusual had happened.