Thoroughly Kissed (18 page)

“I'm really only thirty,” she whispered.

“You lied?”

She shook her head.

“What, do you all live in cocoons or something?”

She shook her head again.

“Then what do you mean? How could you be thirty and be born 1040 years ago?”

“I was spelled,” she said.

“What?” His voice had gotten louder. She opened her eyes. He looked like a man who had discovered that aliens were real. And maybe, in his mind, he just had.

“Please,” she said, “keep your voice down.”

“Sorry.” He said that softer than he had said anything else. “Please explain this.”

Emma pushed away her salad plate. She wasn't even going to try to eat at the moment, not while her stomach was churning. “Remember I told you about my mentor?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she cast a spell on me that lasted for centuries. I don't remember anything from that time.”

His face held his concern. “How long was that?”

“A thousand years,” she whispered.

“A thousand years,” he repeated. “I would think you're yanking my chain, but you haven't done that. And my life has been so strange since I met you, that I'm beginning to believe anything you say. You're telling me the truth, aren't you?”

She nodded.

“How old were you when that happened?”

“Twenty,” she said.

“Twenty.” He ran a hand through his hair, tousling it. It made him look younger, more vulnerable. “My God. You wrote your book from memory, didn't you?”

“And found the sources who had found corroboration in your time,” she said.

“My time.” He picked up his wine glass and drained it. “My time. No wonder your book read like a novel. It was biography and memory.”

“Yes.”

“And I said you had made everything up.”

“And I told you that everything was based in fact.”

“And it was.” He sighed. “I'm a fool.”

She shook her head. “You're just a man who needs a lot of proof.”

He smiled. “Still, you think?”

She shrugged. “You had quite a few rationalizations for the furniture. And I seem to recall a mention of David Copperfield and student pranks.”

He sighed. “I did have some rationalizations, didn't I?”

It was her turn to smile. “Yes.”

“That seems like a long time ago. I'm amazed at how much I've learned since then. It's as if I'm not in the same world anymore.”

“You're not. You're in my world now.”
And
I
was
wishing
I
could
stay
in
yours
, she thought, but did not say. She had lost the twenty years she had been hoping for, and no amount of wishing would get them back.

“It can't be such a bad place,” he said.

“Imprisoned for a thousand years,” she said softly, “turned into a toad, sent into a world I knew nothing about, and now all this. I don't think it's a wonderful place.”

“I didn't hear about the toad. You were a toad for a thousand years?”

“Only a few hours,” she said. “That was long enough.”

“I don't understand.”

“Of course not.” She dipped her bread in the olive oil. “It's a long, confusing story.”

He was silent for a moment, as if he were thinking. “This acquiring of magic, it's like puberty, isn't it?”

She dropped her bread in the oil. “What?”

“I mean, we all want to grow up, but we have to go through puberty first. Boys have incredible growth spurts, and our voices change—always at the wrong time—and we have embarrassing emissions.”

She smiled at that.

“And girls—well, everything changes for you, too, doesn't it?”

“I guess it does. I didn't think about it much.”

He studied her, as if he were trying to comprehend all of this. “You went through puberty over a thousand years ago.”

She nodded.

“At a time when there was no concept like ‘teenager.'”

“No,” she said, “either you were a child or you were old enough to have your own children.”

Her voice was flat. There were a lot of memories of that time, memories she didn't care to explore.

“And girls got married at thirteen, were parents by the time they were fourteen.”

“Or dead in childbirth,” she said.

His intrigued look faded. He leaned forward slightly. His hand moved on the tablecloth as if he wanted to touch her, then thought better of it. “So when you were put in your magic sleep, you lost more than parents. You lost a husband and children too.”

“No.” Her voice was soft. “I was an old maid.”

He frowned. “I have no idea how someone as beautiful as you could be an old maid.”

She flushed. Why did this man always make her blush?

He saw the color rise in her cheeks. “You know you're probably one of the most beautiful women in the world. Don't you?”

She felt her flush deepen. Her skin was so hot she wanted to pour water on it. “How am I supposed to answer that? If I say yes, I'm vain, and if I say no, I'm fishing for more compliments.”

“I'm serious, Emma,” he said softly. “I don't think our idea of beauty has changed that much in a thousand years.”

“Oh, I don't know,” she said. “When I was a girl, a fat woman was the envy of all.”

“Because she was rich,” he said.

She nodded. “Plump women were beautiful. Full-figured girls were desirable because they could have babies. These skinny models would have been considered horribly ugly.”

“But Emma,” he said, “I wasn't talking about your figure—which, I think, would have been acceptable in either culture. I was talking about your face.”

“The face that launched a thousand ships?”

“Yes,” he said.

She leaned back. “I told you that you weren't ready to teach my classes. That was Helen of Troy. I'm not that old.”

To her surprise, he laughed. “I like your sense of humor.”

“It comes in handy,” she said. “Although it's not as effective as my temper.”

“It is less annoying.”

“I suppose.” She picked up her bread, then dropped it. It was soaked in oil—the bread actually looked green. She picked it up and dumped it in her salad.

“No one wanted to marry you?” Michael asked.

She wondered why he was focusing on that point. “Well, someone thought he did.”

“Thought?”

Her smile was small. “It's part of the long story.”

“We have days.”

She nodded.

“And you don't want to talk about it.”

“Michael—”

The waiter stopped in front of them, a tray balanced carefully on his left hand. He lowered it, and removed their dinners. Michael was having some sort of chicken. Emma had ordered beef tenderloin marinated in a wine and mushroom sauce. The meal set before her was an artistic concoction of beef, mushrooms, and sauce piled on mashed potatoes, with some steamed asparagus on the side.

It smelled good.

The waiter told them to enjoy their meals, and left swiftly. Michael watched him go. “Do you think they're told to escape the tables quickly or do we just frighten him?”

“I think we frighten him,” Emma said, picking up her fork.

He picked up his silverware and pushed at the chicken. It was covered with some sort of peach-colored glaze. “A thousand years,” he said softly.

“Michael, I don't—”

“Want to talk about it, I know,” he said. “But I have only two more questions.”

And she had an entire plateful of food. She was going to be with him at least a half an hour. She had to be civil. “All right, two. Then we change the subject.”

He nodded, and cut into his chicken. As he did, some rice skittered across his plate. His meal looked a lot less appealing than hers did.

“You said that you were in a magical coma for over a thousand years, that you were twenty when it happened, and you were born a thousand and forty years ago, and you're thirty now. So that means you were asleep for a thousand and ten years, and you've been out of it for ten years, right?”

“Right.” She took a bite of the steak. It was juicy and rich, just like she expected. There were a lot of perks to this modern world, and good food was just one of them.

“So did you wake up with a complete knowledge of everything that had changed?”

She remembered that moment in the glass coffin when her eyes opened. The air was stale and old. Apparently she hadn't been breathing in her magic state. She had taken a thick mouthful of air, touched the coffin's walls, and panicked. Somehow she had managed to push it off. She sat up—

And there was the strangest looking woman, petite with blond hair, helping her, a woman who spoke a foreign language, and had Emma trapped in a metal cave, which Emma later learned was a VW minibus. Everything had been so different. And terrifying. That first afternoon, the car ride, the entry into Nora's loft apartment. Discovering sinks and refrigerators and tea that seemed to make itself.

All in the space of maybe an hour.

“No,” she whispered. “I didn't wake up knowing anything had changed.”

He stared at her so long that she was afraid he could see right through her. He was probably imagining how ignorant she had been, how she had to learn elementary and personal things. He would probably be appalled to know that she had cried through her first shower, and had been terrified of the noise a toilet made. How she had believed that people actually lived in the television set, and that the only thing that really soothed her in those dark early days was the quiet rumble of Darnell's purr.

“My God,” he said finally. “I was trying to imagine it. I can't. Not really. It must have been awful for you.”

Her gaze met his. His eyes were a soft blue, and this time, he did take her hand. She was trembling. She wanted to pull away, but he held her tightly for a moment. Then he squeezed and released her fingers.

She slid her hand back. “You saw the world I came from.”

“That was your home?”

She nodded.

“You went from living in that village to being a history professor—a famous history professor, with a bestselling book—in ten years?”

She eased her fingers into a protective fist. She knew what was coming next, and she didn't want to hear him say it. So she asked the question before he could. “And you want to know how much magic that took?”

He glanced at her fingers. His hadn't moved. “You told me you didn't have any magic until two days ago.”

“But my friends do.” She kept her voice flat, and emotion off her face.

“You said there are rules,” he said. “I bet there are rules for this.”

She shook her head. “There are no rules for this. We're in completely new territory.”

“I wasn't thinking about the magic.” His voice was gentle. “I was thinking how remarkable you are. Here I was worried that everything was too easy for you, and you've lived through something that would have driven most people mad.”

Her breath caught in her throat, and she blinked hard. Then she looked down at her plate. No one had ever said anything like that to her before.

When she had woken up, she had panicked Nora. Nora was out of her depth. She had gotten help for Emma, but it took some time. Aethelstan was no help at all. He had problems of his own then.

So when she had come out of that spell, she had been a problem for everyone around her. They had all tried to help her, but none of them had really thought about what it was like for her, all alone in a world she couldn't understand. It was as if she had been born anew, with all her faculties in place, and expected to function like an adult when she was still a child.

“Emma?” Michael asked. “Did I say something wrong?”

She shook her head. She had to be alone, for just a moment. She had to have some air.

“I'll be right back,” she managed, and hurried away before she could see the expression on his face.

***

Michael sighed and watched her disappear in the direction of the ladies room. He wasn't quite sure what her reaction to his words had been. Her eyes had teared, then she blinked and the tears receded, but the sad expression remained.

Then she had left him.

He shouldn't have pushed her. She asked that he leave the subject alone, and he pressed for two more questions to satisfy his curiosity. He hadn't been thinking of her at all.

But a thousand years. He'd heard of people coming out of comas after ten years, and having trouble adjusting to their lives. She had been born into a world where England was composed of warring tribes. The Roman wall wasn't buried under mounds of earth, and London was a filthy, dirty city barely one square mile in size.

If she had been raised in any way traditionally, she wouldn't have been able to read or write. She hadn't even been out of her village for her entire life, and now she had driven in one day what would have taken her weeks to do by foot.

She was remarkable. And beautiful. And stronger than he had given her credit for. He had never met anyone who had survived the things she had—or who could have.

He valued intelligence, and she had used hers to carve a world in a place that was more alien to her than Mars was to him.

And now she was being surprised by a magic that she didn't want. She hadn't agreed with his puberty analogy, but he was beginning to think it was more and more apt. Or at least it put things in terms he could understand.

He knew how it felt to have his body disobey him, to lose powers he had had—the power of innocence, the powers of childhood—and suddenly be trapped in a growing, out-of-control body that didn't always obey his commands. Multiply that feeling by a thousand and he might get close to the way Emma felt now.