by Selena Scott
So instead he just leaned his head back against the roof of the car and absorbed the blindingly bright sun beating down on them. It felt good. Like fire. “I can’t say for sure, seeing as that’s never happened to me before.”
“Wager a guess.”
“I think that was our ‘what if’.”
“Our what?”
“If.”
“Our ‘what if’.” Her voice was blank.
“Yeah.” He pushed off from the car and shook his hair back. “That was ‘what if we don’t get in our cars and drive our separate ways’.”
“You’re saying if we get in the same car, we’re gonna end up making out on a snowy cliff somewhere?”
He grinned at her. “Oh, the grandeur.” He laced his hands through the air like an old-timey showman. “The drama.” He leaned in close and waggled his eyebrows. “The passion.”
She gave him a dry look just short of rolling her eyes. “I think I’ll pass.”
He shrugged. “Your prerogative.” He turned. “Hey, kid! You got anything cool to drink? I’m parched.”
The redhead’s son looked up from the phone and glanced at his mom. Definitely unsure of what to say to that.
“Are we giving him a ride, Mom?”
O turned and looked at her. “Yeah. Are you?”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked back and forth at the two of them. “What, you’re just gonna leave your car by the side of the road and come and ‘what if’ with me and my kid?”
O flopped down in the stubby grass next to the kid and watched him tap out a rhythm on the screen. O leaned over and did some fancy tap work, saving the kid from an untimely death in a lava pit.
“Hey. Thanks! How’d you do that?” The kid’s eyes filled up his whole face. Just like his mom’s.
O turned back to her. “You honestly think there’s even a tiny fraction of a choice between staying with the car and going with you two?” He looked back at the kid and then at the mom. “I’d choose you two 100 times out of 100.”
The kid paused his game and looked up at his mom. “I dunno, Mom. It’s up to you. He seems kinda weird but he doesn’t give me the creeps or anything.”
O took that as the high praise it was. It was the best he was gonna get right now. Maybe he was just chasing a feeling. Maybe he was abandoning his quest to find the mysterious man who could battle the king. But all he knew was that this was the best he’d felt in months. He’d barely even noticed the pain in his side except for a few twinges here and there.
As an oracle, he didn’t really believe in signs. There were no signs for him. There were concise visions that were usually as clear as water. But considering how frustratingly handicapped his powers had been since the accident, he was willing to go on instinct for a little while now. And his instincts were screaming. Get closer to the redhead.
CHAPTER FIVE
Well, she’d gone crazy. That was the natural explanation. The only explanation for why she was currently sitting on the beach watching a strange hitchhiker launch a Frisbee into the waves for her son.
A hitchhiker who’d willingly left a working car on the side of the road just so he could bop along in the back seat of their non-air-conditioned Hyundai. A hitchhiker who had screeched at his first sip of cold Coke. He’d said it had been like battery acid. But, like, in a good way.
Ike had said he knew exactly what he meant. And the two of them had been chatting ever since. They chatted all the way down I-15 and straight into Santa Barbara. Melanie had tried to ignore the man’s eyes on her from the back seat. He’d found a baseball rolling around in the back seat and tossed it between his hands. He air drummed along with the music and traced the passing shadows with his fingertips. And the whole time he had been watching her in the rearview mirror. She had felt something zip down her spine when he stretched out his long legs on the console between the front seats.
And she felt something tighten inside her when they pulled up to their little Airbnb. This was it. This was when she had to tell this whacko to hit the road. There was no way he was staying there with them. But how to tell herself that she wanted him to go? Because she didn’t want him to go.
Why didn’t she want him to go? Why did she feel like something had clicked into place the moment they’d touched? It was insane. A mother couldn’t afford to take risks like that.
The man had taken care of the awkwardness of that moment when he’d reached into the back seat of the car, pulled out their Frisbee, and yelled, “Go long, kid!”
“Ike!” Ike had yelled as he launched himself after the projectile. “My name’s Ike.”
“And mine is Mel,” she’d said, tucking her hair behind her ears.
“Let’s go to the beach, Mel.” The beautiful man had cocked his head to one side and gestured for her to follow. And, god knows why, she did.
And now she struggled not to be charmed when the Oracle executed a particularly ugly backwards belly flop into the water to catch a Frisbee that Ike had launched. She could hear Ike’s hysterical laughter from 50 feet away, over the wind and the surf. Shit. She was really, really charmed.
“Mel?”
Mel raised up her sunglasses and looked over. “Sue? Hi!”
One of the nicer mothers at Ike’s school was walking toward her in a modest, baby blue one-piece. “I thought that was you! What are the odds? I take it you needed to get out of the Vegas hell hole as badly as I did.”
Mel stood. “We needed the beach. And a little less blistering heat. Are Micky and Noel here?” Mel asked, referring to Sue’s twin boys who were in the grade above Ike.
Sue gestured to the surf where the two boys were wrestling over a lone boogie board. “Yes, the boys are at large. And driving me insane. I swear they can’t get along for longer than ten seconds. I literally had to wear headphones on the drive here.”
Mel laughed. “Where are you staying?”
Sue pointed behind them toward the umbrellas and loungers of a nice hotel. “Just up at the hotel. We were lucky they had a last-minute availability. Rick is joining us this afternoon after work.”
Mel ignored the little twist in her gut. Two incomes must be nice. Meant you could afford stuff like a hotel on a beach. “Sounds perfect.”
“Nearly. Except for the boys driving us both insane.” The two women watched her boys wrestle and cackle in the waves before looking up and seeing Ike not 20 feet from them. The three boys raced over to each other, the wonder of running into one another away from school sparking in the air between them. Mel could hear their little excited voices rising up over the waves.
Apparently the Oracle decided to let the boys have a few moments on their own because he stepped out of the water and shook out his wet hair. Mel dragged her eyes away from his tan chest. He was just wearing a pair of shorts since he didn’t have a bathing suit. Mel felt something dangerous uncurl in her belly. Shit.
“The boys could come stay with me and Ike tonight,” she told Sue. “We’re staying in an Airbnb just two blocks from here. We could get them out of your hair for a night or two.”
Sue opened her mouth to say something back, but clapped it closed when the Oracle approached the two women. Mel watched the older woman scan the Oracle from head to toe in lazy perusal. She supposed there was a lot to take in. God. Even his knees were good-looking.
He grabbed a towel from Mel’s beach bag and started drying off his hair with it. “Hello,” he said to Sue, reaching out a hand for a quick shake. “I take it you’re a friend of Mel’s?”
Her hand travelled lazily from his up to her hair, to the straps of her bathing suit, back to her hair, and then just kind of hung at her side. Mel bit her cheek to keep from smiling. Sue’s husband, Rick, was a winner, sweet and funny, but she supposed Rick was gonna get a nice little surprise when his wife got home, all revved up from meeting people on the beach.
“This is my friend, Sue. We know each other from Ike’s school. Our boys ride the same bus.” Mel hesitated. She knew she was suppose
d to be introducing him to her now, but what the fuck was she supposed to call him? She couldn’t exactly introduce him as ‘the Oracle’. Her world had gone crazy over the last five hours, but not that crazy.
“I’m O,” he said simply and flashed a goofy, white smile that had both of the women holding their breaths.
“Nice to meet you. Are you Mel’s boyfriend?” Sue looked back and forth between the two.
O waved the word away with his hand through the air. “More like soulmate.” He flopped down on the towel next to Mel and played with a little of her hair. “Destiny.” He grinned up at Sue as Mel swatted his hand away. “Although I’m still working on convincing her.”
Sue laughed and fluttered a hand up to her sunglasses. She was obviously as charmed as Mel was trying hard not to be.
“He’s not staying with us,” Mel said stoically, looking up at Sue. “You wouldn’t have to worry about that if you sent the boys over tonight.”
A sly look came over Sue’s face. “How about we go the other direction and you send Ike over my way tonight?” She turned and gestured to the boys flipping and diving in the waves. “They’ll have a whole adjoining room to themselves, a TV, an indoor pool, continental breakfast. It’ll keep Micky and Noel from fighting if they have a friend there.” Sue tucked her tongue in her cheek. “Plus it’ll give you a little time to realize your destiny.”
The Oracle hooted and leaned back on his hands. “I like you, Sue.”
“What’s not to like?” Sue asked.
This was getting away from her. Mel wasn’t sure if she wanted to put the kibosh on the idea or stand up and kiss Sue for being such an innovator.
She thought of their humble little cabana Airbnb that was waiting for them up the block. Just one window unit of a/c and not even a TV. Ike had never stayed in a real hotel in his entire life. And certainly not alongside two good friends. She sighed. She wasn’t going to deprive her son just because she needed him as a shield from whatever she was feeling for the long, lean, golden tanned surfer enigma stretched out on a towel beside her.
“Let me talk to Ike,” she said, rising to her feet and brushing sand off of herself. As she walked toward the water, she didn’t have to turn to know that the Oracle would be grinning.
CHAPTER SIX
Mel was not a fidgeter. She never let the world make her nervous. Or wiggle around. She knew who she was. She’d known who she was when she’d gotten pregnant at age 18. When she’d raised her boy as a single mother. When she’d fought and scraped for every last penny. She’d done all of it without a single apology to anybody and screw ‘em.
So instead of unpacking her things or playing with her hair, or getting up to check the views out the windows of her little Airbnb, Mel sat, one leg crossed over the other, and tented her hands.
Ike was four blocks down having a pizza party in the Marriott, happy as a little frickin’ clam. And she was sitting in a tiny living room while the Oracle was strewn across the sofa, shirtless, one leg over the back of the couch, perusing an old issue of Cosmo.
What the fuck was her life?
“Have you ever had a professional bra fitting?” he asked.
“Excuse me?” Mel untented her hands and laid them on the arms of the lazy boy recliner she sat in.
“Well, did you know that if you’ve never had a professional size you, then there’s an 80% chance that you’re wearing the wrong bra size right now?” He flipped through the pages of the magazine. “Although it looks like your bra fits you pretty well, so I think you’re probably in the clear either way.”
“Excuse me?” she asked again, unable to come up with anything more intelligent at the moment.
“Oh,” the Oracle said and lowered the magazine. “Was I supposed to be pretending that I hadn’t been looking at your chest?”
Mel opened her mouth but couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.
She cocked her head to one side and studied him. His lazy pose, his hair flipped off to one side, the ends sun kissed and golden. His light eyes. He looked utterly relaxed, comfortable.
"You're not an evil genius, are you?"
He looked up at her, amused, intrigued. He fluttered his eyelashes like a southern debutante. "Come again, darlin'?"
She looked out the window as she spoke, collecting her thoughts as she went. "The way I figure it, this whole thing shoulda played out a lot differently. Most people would have probably played the whole 'oracle' thing pretty close to the chest for as long as they could. Probably till I fell in love with you. Then it would all come tumbling out and the whole thing would blow up. But here you are, lazy as a daisy, stretched out on my couch like you couldn't be less concerned whether or not I'm keeping up with all this." She gestured between the two of them.
"So the way I figure it, oh wise Oracle, is that either 1. You're an evil genius who has figured out the exact right way to put me at ease before you, I don't know, suck my brains out my ear. Or 2. You’re crazy like a fox and you know exactly how insane this is. But you also know if you keep things honest but light-hearted I'm much more likely to come around. Or 3. You have no plan whatsoever, you're just doing whatever you want and are, in fact, unspeakably dumb."
The Oracle threw his head back and laughed.
"I think most people would say it was number 3."
Mel flipped her hair, still damp from the shower she'd taken after dropping Ike off. "I'm not particularly concerned with popular opinion.”
“Well.” The Oracle scratched his stomach and stretched. “I could tell you that’s it’s probably a little more 2 than 3. But there’s a little 3 mixed in. If we’re being honest. But then, I could always show you.”
“What do you mean show me?”
From across the room, the Oracle held his hand out to her. The sun was setting over the ocean, turning their room orange, but dusky blue in the shadows.
Mel studied the hand. Studied the man holding it out to her. “You mean that if I touch you, I’ll get some kind of vision again?” she asked, her voice full of curiosity.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure exactly. Last time caught me by surprise and it kind of got away from me. But if I concentrate, I think I can show you who I am this time. I’ll show you exactly what’s in my heart. Who I am.”
The thought of doing that for somebody was horrifying to Mel. The vulnerability. Ugh. “Why on god’s green earth would you ever do that?” she exclaimed.
“Because I don’t want you to be confused by me. I want you to know me.” His eyes were guileless, clear, honest. Kind.
She was sunk.
Mel walked across the small room like a woman on her way to the executioner. If the executioner was a beachy babe with a lion’s smile and pecs to die for. And she was in serious danger of tumbling over the lust cliff for her executioner. She knelt next to the couch with a deep sigh.
He grinned at her as he reached out with his hand and she couldn’t help but grin right back. It was like he pulled it right out of her. She laid her palm against his and immediately braced for the rush and whirl of image and color. But it didn’t come this time. He must have been really taken by surprise last time, because this time, there was a controlled rising of feeling, not a tornado. He kept his eyes light and on hers, but she turned her own inward. Feeling what he was showing her.
There weren’t images or memories, but somehow she was inside his life. She felt a childlike, intense love for someone. A father. She felt a full-bodied missing feeling for a mother who wasn’t there. She felt his fear when he’d realized how different he was from everyone else. She felt confusion and power as he grappled with his first prophecies. She felt him growing, noticing girls; she felt him making friends, annoying people and getting a kick out of it. She felt worry as he started to learn more and more about the fates of people he loved. She felt the low, constant hum of outrage at injustices of the world he lived in. She felt him gear up for battle. What battle she had no idea. But she felt his fear, determination, courage. She felt what it
felt like to protect his friends. To fight and fall. She felt him soaring through the air in a way she could barely comprehend or imagine. She felt pain, frustration, and fear and more fear. She felt his pain. And then she felt determination again. She felt calm. She recognized her own energy entering the scene for him. She felt how she made him feel. Calm. Happy. Impossibly aroused. Safe. Protective.
Her eyes fluttered open and she focused on the here and now again. “Never anger,” she whispered. “You never really feel anger, do you?”
He said nothing, and through their linked hands she could feel him decide to answer honestly. “I don’t know.”
“Holy SHIT!” Mel stood up and traced her hands through her hair. She wandered briefly. She stumbled away from him and toward the bedroom. Falling backwards she landed on the bed. “HOLY SHIT!!!!!”
“What?” he chuckled, tumbling onto the bed next to her and playing with her hair again. “What are you holy shitting about?”
She rolled over so that they lay on their sides facing each other. “Holy shit, am I in love with you?” she asked him, half exclamation, half genuine question.
He laughed and painted the ends of her hair over her forehead, down along the line of her nose. “I don’t know,” he said again. “But,” he tossed her hair aside and went on all fours over top of her. “How about I kiss you and you kiss me and we just kinda see what happens?”
“Yeah,” she said, her feelings whipping out of her chest like a flag in the wind. She’d never know how clearly he could feel what she was feeling. That she was throwing it out into the world like heat from an open oven. That most people never threw any feeling into the world with that much vigor. “Yeah, let’s try that.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
O lowered his mouth to Mel’s and simultaneously lost and found himself in one fell swoop. He was here, but he was also there, under himself, he was her. She was a part of him. Warm and fragrant and copper-colored. She opened her mouth to his and he discovered a flavor that marked him forever. Tattooed him.
