by Tyra Lynn
I felt a little childish, but he looked so cute. I took a few seconds to check him out, looked at the back of his head, his shoulders, down his back to his…
“I can feel your eyes, you know.”
My eyes jerked away and I blushed. I was glad his face was in the pillow. I shot my hand straight out over his right shoulder. Before I even had a chance to stop moving, he spoke.
“Right shoulder.”
“Hey, I didn’t even stop moving yet!”
“I know, but I can feel every move you make,” As he was speaking, I started moving my hand as if I were moving down his side. “And you moving your hand down my side feels very much like a caress.”
I jerked my hand back and he laughed. “I don’t know what else to do then.” I said.
“It’s not as easy with just your eyes. Your eyes usually have to focus clearly before I can be certain of their location.” He laughed, and I knew why.
I raised my hand and made a ‘smacking’ gesture above his butt. He flinched and then it was my turn to laugh. “This makes me feel like I have super powers!” I pretended to tickle his side and he wiggled. “This is so cool!”
He flipped over quickly and startled me. “My turn!”
My first thought was that he intended to get even. “I don’t know if I can do it.” I said.
“It’s not something you necessarily do. You’ll see what I mean.”
I traded places with him and buried my face in the pillow. I was nervous. What if I couldn’t do it? Would that be a bad thing? I kind of liked the whole ‘magnetic match’ thing, for some reason… “You’re not allowed to touch, that’s cheating.” He interrupted my thoughts by putting a hand on my thigh.
“I’m not touching you, Jessie.”
“Yes you are, I can feel your fingers.” I could distinctly feel them, four fingers, a thumb, and his palm. Every part of his hand, including the warmth.
“I’m not touching you, Jessie. Concentrate on what you feel, and slowly look back.”
I concentrated on the feel of his hand, and slowly raised my head, turning it to the side.
He wasn’t even near me. He was close to four feet away, with his hand out. I could still feel fingers on my leg, even the heat, and it was somewhat unnerving. I turned to look at my leg, and I could feel his hand move down to my knee. I reached back with my own hand and touched the same place. There was nothing solid there, but I felt the energy.
“How can you do that?”
He dropped his hand and the sensation was gone. He walked back over to me and sat down. “I can control it, for the most part. It’s like releasing energy, and controlling how much is released.”
He held his hand over mine. At first, I didn’t feel anything, but then I could slowly feel a subtle change, as if his hand were moving closer, even though I was watching, and it never moved. It was the heat I felt first, the warmth spreading over my hand, then a little weight, and my skin tingled. As he continued, I began to feel every finger, individually. I wiggled my fingers, and it felt like his hand moved with my movement. His hand that wasn’t there.
“Can you do this to anybody, to everybody?” I asked.
“Not like this.” He smiled.
“Can you feel other people?”
“Not like you.” His head tilted toward me slightly.
I kept my eyes on his, but I thought how I would like to pull him closer, feel his lips on mine. I already knew how they would feel.
“Only if you mean it.” He whispered.
I felt my eyes widen. “If I mean what?” The words barely came out.
“You tell me. You direct me. I will follow.”
My heart rate doubled. Could I? Should I? I tried to keep my eyes focused on his beautiful blue ones. I didn’t want to give anything away. I imagined him raising his left hand to my cheek, and then watched as he moved, just as I imagined.
I imagined him being pulled toward me by an invisible force, and as he shifted closer, I could sense that he was allowing my pull to be stronger than his. I could feel the energy, I could feel myself pulling him, and I could feel him yielding. I imagined our lips touching gently.
I could feel the kiss before we even touched. When our lips met, it made fireworks seem dull and boring. I kept it slow, and I knew I was in complete control. I was in complete control because he allowed me to be. I stopped, but didn’t move, left our lips together, breathing him like air. My lungs never felt so full.
This had to be the closest possible thing to heaven on earth. Almost. The moment the thought crossed my mind, I felt him take over. It wasn’t just his energy that took control; he physically placed his arms around me, released my lips, and pulled me tight.
“Be very careful what you try with that. I’m not as strong as I should be,” His breath was ragged, and irregular. “And you are stronger than you know.”
Everything about him, the way he held me, the way he smelled, the taste of his lips, the feel of his skin—it was all coming back. How had I forgotten? How was I remembering?
“Gabriel, I still don’t understand. I need to understand. I remember you, the feel of you; I know I’ve been here.” I felt on the verge of tears. “I just don’t know how I remember. I don’t remember anything but you. Am I losing my mind?” Oh, god, that felt like a real possibility.
“You’re not, love, you’re not.” He stroked my hair.
I felt surrounded by energy and warmth and calmness. I could feel it envelope me, draped around me like a warm blanket on a cold night. Like a blanket wrapped around us both. I knew he was doing it, but I didn’t feel manipulated, I felt cared for, loved.
CHAPTER XXIV
Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.
—Albert Einstein
There was a soft knock on the door, and it broke through the magnetism long enough for me to feel a chilly rush of air and I shivered. “Come in, Father.” He said quietly.
Gabriel didn’t let me go. I had a moment of feeling extremely awkward and embarrassed. I didn’t know his father, and here I was wrapped in his stranger-sons arms. Thomas. The realization slapped me in the face. Thomas. Call me Thomas.
I buried my face in Gabriel's chest to hide my blush. I imagined his hands coming up to shield me from prying eyes, and his hands followed where my thoughts lead. “It’s okay, Jessie, I promise. Father knows everything.”
I heard the footsteps enter the room. It was silent, no words exchanged, and then I heard a loud sigh. Thomas. “How much does she remember now?” His deep voice asked. Call me Thomas.
“She remembers me.” Gabriel replied, his arms tightening noticeably.
“I didn’t come to take her away, Gabriel, don’t suffocate her.” He chuckled, and I felt Gabriel relax slightly.
I was torn between staying exactly as I was, or turning to face Thomas Knight. The internal struggle was painful, and I was beginning to feel a little panicky. Few things made me panic.
“Jessie, you’ve met my father—many times—you should get reacquainted.” Gabriel whispered. He still had me in the near headlock I had wanted, but he let his hands begin to slide away. I mentally stopped him for a moment, and he complied.
“That’s much more than you exchanged before, Jessie. We must be on to something.” It was Mr. Knights' voice.
That made me look up. I knew those eyes, and they were kind, concerned even. I hadn’t looked in them in the gazebo. I kept my arms tightly around Gabriel, my anchor. “Hi, Thomas.”
“Hello, Jessie.”
They had convinced me to go to the library. I recognized everything in it. Memories had flooded back the moment I had walked in the door. When I was comfortable enough, Gabriel had left me with his father and gone to the kitchen. There was still dinner with my dad, and they felt it was important.
Thomas had explained so many things that my head was spinning. They wouldn’t tell me the number of times that we had “repeated” this, but I could figure out from the looks they had exchanged
that it was a lot.
I still didn’t understand most of what they told me. They threw around names like ‘observers,’ ‘travelers,’ and ‘interceptors’—mostly when talking to each other—and instead of helping me figure things out, it mostly made me more confused than ever.
“I’m sorry this is so difficult, Jessie, I truly am.” Thomas said, sitting behind his huge wooden desk. “Gabriel seems to think that we have made a mistake by not telling you everything possible, and I am beginning to think he could have been right.”
“Why? Is there something different?” So far I had mostly listened, not asking questions.
“Yes and no.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “But I can’t say for certain the reason. Gabriel is more sensitive to an impending time-shift than I am. Maybe it’s my age.” He laughed.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“There is a ‘hiccup’ here. We don’t know for certain how long it’s been taking place, but it could not have been long—we don’t think. Our theory is that somewhere we missed something important.”
“Who did? Who missed something?” I asked. “What kind of something? I’m not getting this at all.”
“Gabriel and I explained that I am an ‘observer.’ I study history, past, present, and future. A paradox, I know, at least to you.” I nodded. “That’s what I do, nevertheless. I am to find significant inconsistencies in future history. Changes that should not have taken place.”
He pulled out a desk drawer, removed a piece of paper and a couple of pens with different colored ink. He drew four large black dots on the paper, equally spaced apart, in a line from side to side.
“These dots represent the unchangeable things. These things are inevitable, immovable, the entire foundation of time its’ self. There is nothing anyone anywhere can do to remove them, and they are relevant to every single person on the planet.”
“Fate.” I said.
“Based on your understanding of the word, yes. Fate, destiny, and unavoidable.” He agreed. “They can be shifted, however, and the outcome is not always good.”
He drew a few more dots, smaller and more random. “Think of these as ‘possibilities.’ If this were your ‘time-line,’ then all of these smaller dots would represent major choices in your life. Choose one side, and your line goes this way, but inevitably it ends up at the same place.” He scooted the page closer, where I could see it.
“All the little movements between are irrelevant, at least according to your destination, and the destination of the world as a whole. The smaller dots are relevant to you, specifically.” He seemed to think deeply for a moment. “Let’s say you were born on ‘big dot number one.’ The next dot, the small one the black line goes through, was your decision to go to college. ‘Big dot number two’ is the worlds' decision that anyone with a college degree earns maximum wages, the rest only minimum wage from that day forward. You can live a comfortable life from then on because of your earlier decision.”
“You can’t lose your degree, and while all the larger dots are inevitable, whatever they may be, any other decision cannot undo the first, and that first put you in a wonderful financial position. Your life can be happy, all the way to the end of it.”
I liked that idea, but it also made me nervous. Suddenly decisions seemed much more important than they ever had.
He took back the paper drew with another color, and shoved it over for me to see.
“Let’s say this red line represents your simply living life. College wasn’t even a consideration, not that you necessarily chose not to go, but the decision was irrelevant to you personally. You get to ‘big dot number two’ with no college degree.”
I wrinkled my nose at the paper.
“Since a college degree is now of paramount importance, only those with the means can afford the education, the wait is long, and they only take the top students since there is now limited room. That one choice, or lack thereof, has now sentenced you to a probable life of poverty. If nothing else, it has made life more difficult, and caused you to make other choices down the road that you otherwise would not have made.”
“So where do you come in? Do you mess with my dots?” I was glaring at the paper.
He laughed, a deep rumbling sound. “Not exactly. Your dots are mostly irrelevant. Average people, living their lives from day to day make no significant changes.” I was glaring at him now. “I’m not saying you’re irrelevant as a person, Jessie. You do have to think of things on a larger scale than that, though.”
“I don’t get it. If the big dots are inevitable, and the little dots are irrelevant, then why are you here? What makes you relevant?” I was a little annoyed with how this was going, and not understanding made it worse.
“My job is to keep balance.” He twisted the paper sideways a little. “If everything points down hill, and these big dots were balls, they would roll faster and faster to the bottom. If I twist it the other way, like this,” he turned it the opposite way, “It would also go faster and faster, because the big dots would get closer together, having in ways the same effect as time became compressed. Different reasons, similar outcome.”
“The end of time?” I asked.
“Possibly.” He shrugged. “Or the beginning of something else.” He pulled a book off his desk and flipped through some pages. “Have you ever wondered why Hippocrates described the symptoms of pneumonia over two thousand years ago, yet we only found a reliable treatment around fifty years ago?”
“Not really.”
“For most of history, we, my kind, believed we were doing the right thing by ‘slowing time down.’ It’s not just a matter of balance, we have the ability to delay things, and we attempted to change things that would slow the progression down.”
He reached into another stack of books and pulled out ‘The Complete Predictions of Nostradamus.’ He slid it across the desk to me, and watched my face. I picked up the book and opened it. I got an inexplicable shiver up my spine.
“Have you ever wondered why his prophecies endure, even to this day?” He looked at me pointedly.
“Are you trying to tell me he was like you?” I looked down and read a small portion that was circled in red ink.
‘Earthshaking fire from the center of the world will cause the towers around the new city to shake.’
“What could be the purposes of prediction, do you think?” He asked.
“To prevent, or sometimes to prepare. I guess to prepare more than anything else.” I had never considered it before.
“If you look at history today, you would correctly perceive an acceleration in knowledge and accomplishments over the past two hundred years. The last fifty years have accelerated exponentially compared to the previous thousands.”
“Does that mean something is wrong with time, then?” I asked.
“It means time is correcting itself, or trying to. I believe part of it is because, for centuries upon centuries, we interfered with the natural progression of time. However, there is now this ‘hiccup.’ Something has been changed, and neither my colleagues nor I can find the source of the anomaly. Our reason for existing is to keep things on track, keep the balance. It took millennia to understand our true purpose.”
“I still don’t get it. If things are inevitable, if there is fate, and if those big dots are going to happen no matter what, then you should just be able to leave everything alone and things will happen like they’re supposed to, right?”
“In theory.” He got a thoughtful look on his face. “Do you believe in the Bible?” He suddenly asked.
“Umm, yeah, mostly.” I thought of my mom’s face, but heard Gabriel’s voice, ‘we give thee thanks, O Lord.’ “I believe in God.”
He smiled. “The hardest thing for some people to reconcile is the fact that we are given free will, yet God clearly left prophecies and warnings. He foretold what has and is to happen, knows every choice we will make, the last breath we will take, and the impact we will have. He planned
our path before we were born, nevertheless we choose. It is the greatest enigma in history—yet we believe it, we have faith.”
He leaned back in his chair, contemplating. “For all our learning, our technological advances, for the knowledge accumulated throughout time, we are still but fools in the universe, fools with no knowledge at all but what has been allowed us.”
He sat forward again, leaning across the desk toward me. He held out his hand, and I could feel the pull, I knew what he was doing. I lifted my hand and placed it in his large one.
“There. I did not impose my will on you, I merely suggested, and you chose.” He squeezed my hand slightly and I felt an intense but painless charge. “There are things never meant to be understood, Jessie. Things which cannot now, nor ever, through any means, be deciphered. Not through dreams, nor tests, nor divination, nor science, nor speculation.”
“Time has been resetting, without our interference, for several years, randomly. We have all been in search of the source. Something significant was changed, by accident or malicious intent, and we cannot locate it. We have to assume it was accidental and therefore unrecorded, or we would have located it by now.” He shifted in his seat a small bit, and then leaned even closer.
“When Gabriel first saw you, he insisted I purchase the mirror immediately. That is one of the things we do, and I will explain more on that sometime, but not now, not this time... When he saw you, he told me the pull was so strong he well nigh went through the mirror, straight to you. Good Lord, I’m glad the boy is disciplined.” He chuckled.
I wanted to know what any of the other stuff had to do with me, and what did he mean time was resetting without interference, for years? “Wait, wait. Are you saying that time can reset, and no one on the planet knows? Wouldn’t things change? Wouldn’t something change that someone would notice?”
I had been mostly silent, but a million questions popped into my head. “What about that end dot? If that were the end, then wouldn’t everything stop? Like you and Gabriel, would you catch up, or would it just stop? If there is time ahead of me, which I have to assume there is, then will I stop when they reach the end dot, or do I just keep going until I get there too? Where is the end? Is it just the end for some or the end for everybody— like a race, but first one there means the game is over?”
