She opened to him, and they made a new hinge, a place where the two of them bent, where we joined and bent and swung joyously up and up on the flat, level ground of their bed, flesh slapping flesh. Until she cracked at that hinge, cracked and broke open, calling his name as white fire rushed in.
After they caught their breaths, after they stroked and touched and smiled, he left to shut off the light. She almost dozed off. Darkness fell, then covers did—he’d tossed them over her before slipping back in bed. She told him, “Mmm,” and snuggled close and put a hand on his chest, where his heart beat slow and strong.
Mine, she told the world outside their room, the top half of her mind muzzy with sleep, still mostly sundered from words. It made perfect sense, floating there in the dark, sated and sleepy and clean as a garden after it rains. Mine.
SEVEN
RUBEN’S eyes jerked open on darkness. His heart pounded out a sick, runaway rhythm. A heart attack. Another heart attack. He reached for his chest . . .
And realized that he didn’t hurt. His mouth was gummy and sour with fear, his heart raced, but there was no monster crouched on his chest, cutting off air and life and possibilities.
There had been pain, though, huge and monstrous. Overwhelming. He remembered that, and the glimpse he’d had of his own familiar kitchen seen from the floor—the legs of the table, a shiny puddle next to a smashed coffee cup. But already the images and content of the dream were tattering under the focus of his waking mind, like dew evaporates under the regard of the rising sun.
Or like cockroaches scuttle into their cracks and crevices when you turn on the light.
Ruben drew in a shaky breath and listened to Deborah breathing beside him. She lay on her side faced away from him, but her rump crowded his hip. Her deliciously bare rump, he noted with a stir of interest. Her nightgown had ridden up the way it so often did.
The way he often helped it do . . . or used to. Not so much now, not with the doctor’s warnings lying between them, stiff and rigid like an invisible bundling board. One could get around that unwelcome board with effort, but the sheer furtiveness of joining themselves according to the new rules left him sad afterward, and Deborah too often felt guilty.
Yet he was still here. In spite of a clever and determined enemy’s efforts, he was alive this night. Tonight’s death had been a dream.
Ruben glanced at the clock. 4:05. How appropriate. Four A.M. was the traditional dark time of the soul, wasn’t it?
Slowly Ruben eased away from the woman at his side. Deborah slept on. He smiled at his sleeping lover, wife, dearest friend . . . Deb had always slept like a child, sunk so deep in dreams that the alarm seldom penetrated. Nor did other sounds. Touch her feet or her face, though, and she woke instantly. Other physical sensations could shift her up toward consciousness, bringing her close to awakening.
So he shifted carefully. He didn’t want her to stir and ask what was wrong. He didn’t intend to tell her, so there was no point. Deb knew about the other dreams, where he watched destruction and devastation rain down on so many all over the country. She didn’t know about this one.
Ruben rose with nary a twinge of pain. That remained a wonder to him. After years of increasing weakness, of aching in every joint, he could stand so smoothly now, and walk. Even run, if only for a short distance and in a lumbering manner that ought to make any bystanders giggle.
It had been metal poisoning his body all along. Who could have guessed?
Most families had their little myths, stories passed down through generations that held a kernel of truth, if not a fistful. On his mother’s side, the story was that some unknown ancestor had been sidhe—an elven lord gone walkabout, according to the tale, who’d encountered a young Jewish maiden drawing water at the family’s well back in the Old Country.
The nut at the heart of this tale was true. The elven lord might not have been a lord. The maiden may not have been maidenly. And there was no saying if a well had been involved, or even if their meeting had taken place in Europe rather than