PART EIGHT

You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
From Robert Frost’s ON LOOKING UP BY CHANCE AT THE CONSTELLATIONS

Broadway or Seventh, a choice to be made. And for some reason Liz thought of Alex, and his Robert Frost poem—of all the Robert Frost poems that seemed to touch her life, whether roads not taken, or snowy evenings, or constellations in the sky. Choices, marching ever onward, moments standing still like twinkling stars in the midnight tapestry overhead.

Manhattan, so cold and empty, despite the thrumming streets and taxis. Despite the friends nearby.

Liz tightened her jacket around her, shivering as she waited for the light to change, her eyes unconsciously searching for Max, as they always did, especially in New York, for reasons she couldn’t quite pinpoint.

She thought of Robert Frost again, as she watched the endless throngs of businessmen and tourists pressing all around. And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs….

That’s what you did in a city like this one, you kept on moving, kept on breathing, kept on filling your lungs one more time, Liz thought, stepping out into Seventh Avenue. That’s when she saw him, just on the other side. Sculpted arms and shoulders, leather vest. A glorious warrior. Her love.

And she was furious, as she half-skipped across the street toward him. "Alright," she demanded, all but floating up to him. "What are you doing here, Max?"

He steadied her by the arm, his eyes narrowing a bit. "Liz, it’s me," he laughed quietly, as businessmen moved past them, cutting a neat swath.

"No, see, I know that, Max," she cried, the anger welling like a hot geyser in her stomach. "What I want to know is what you’re doing here."

"You asked me that once before, Liz," he chided gently, glancing around them at the passing cars. "In fact, more than once. A long time ago."

"You’re not going to tell me, are you?" She stomped, as a Japanese man lightly bumped her shoulder, moving past her. She dropped her Coach briefcase to the sidewalk, folding her arms over her chest. "You ruined my life, you know--" But he cut her off, lifting his fingertips to her lips, causing a shower of electricity across her face.

"I’m going to tell you that I love you," he answered quietly, his eyes suddenly unspeakably melancholy. "I’m going to tell you that you’re the only one I’ve ever loved…that I can’t let go. How could I?"

Liz pressed her hands over her ears, needing to silence him. "Stop it."

He moved his hands around both sides of her head, cradling her face tenderly within his rough palms. More heat answered beneath his weathered touch. "I’m going to tell you that you’ve got to live," he continued in his quiet voice.

"Shut up!" She cried, jerking backwards away from him.

With that, she turned from him, running out into the current of cars and taxis, as the sound of blaring horns filled her ears. But Max yanked her by the arm, right back onto the curb, as a taxi screeched to a halt, barely missing her.

He spun her to face him forcefully, amber eyes flashing with emotion. He drew his lips right against her ear, slowly stroking the hair back from her face. So close, she could feel his warm breath fanning against her cheek. "Liz, live. Eight years is far too long to mourn."

"I don’t understand why you’d tell me this," she cried, leaning her head against his shoulder. "You of all people."

"But you do, Liz. Your heart already knows," he answered, stroking her hair beneath his open palm. His touch was indescribably soothing, filled with love. "Your mind just has to figure it out."

****

11:38 p.m.

Liz’s eyes fluttered open, and her small living room came fuzzily into view. She’d dozed off on the sofa, while nestling on her side by the fire. Now the flames had cooled to mere embers, and a chill had descended over the room. Liz shivered, pulling her sweater tightly around her shoulders.

Her computer screen provided an artificial glow, spilling across her hardwood floors and adobe walls.

And that light was a clear invitation. She’d checked her email before settling on her sofa some two hours earlier, yet there’d only been a few business e-mails. Now the luminous screen drew her like a beacon with the possibility of David Peyton’s reply.

With the possibility of his explaining the painting she’d opened just before her nap.

It was a small work, oil on panel, yet even as she spied it now across the room, just resting on her desk, her pulse skittered.

Windows to the Soul.

What was David trying to tell her, she wondered, as she rose slowly to her feet and padding through the darkness. The bluish light of her monitor altered the colors of his work, gave them a ghostly, surreal tint, when in fact they were vital and pulsating with life. The panel was of a window, nearly straight out of Segue to Dream. There was only the small border of gray wall around the edge, and then a man’s hands were splayed on each side—as if he were gazing out beyond his cell. Outside the window spread the gorgeous pinks and purples and yellows of Segue.

Only this time, on a very distant cliff, the woman stood again, the dark-haired phantom from the Ms. Parker painting. As Liz stared down at the panel now, at the otherworldly hues and light, she grew just as breathless as she had before, felt something nearly forgotten course through her body. Something sensual and womanly.

David had painted her. Somehow she was certain of it.

And this time, the painting was far more erotic than any of the others. Just the way he’d rendered the woman, the promise in the tilt of her chin, the way her long shawl draped off her creamy shoulder, seductive and alluring. The painting all but whispered promises of something forbidden. Something that the man gazing out the window longed for with all his soul.

Liz shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. No artist had ever affected her this profoundly. Michael knew it, and that was the real reason for his unbridled jealousy. His work had always amazed her, captured her imagination and taken her places. But not like this. David’s brush touched something deep inside, something altogether different and intimate and impossibly forbidden. Almost as if David were making a strange kind of love to her.

Her eyes widened as she studied the pair of man’s hands on both sides of the window, because she noticed something that she hadn’t before. One of them seemed oddly…bent. Swollen, perhaps. Injured. It was a subtle detail, and didn’t strike her nearly as strongly as the beauty of the fingers, the long tapered shape. Only now, she could see that the left hand was certainly crooked.

What had happened to David Peyton, she wondered, lightly touching the hand with her fingertips. The stroke became a tender caress, as her fingers lingered against the painted ones, and for a moment, she swore she could feel his hand beneath hers, warm and vital. She closed her eyes and dreamed what it would be to just touch him that way. A man she’d never even seen, but whose hands beckoned her indescribably.

Suddenly, she began laughing as she withdrew her own hand sharply. "God, I’m spending way too much time alone lately," she sighed softly. But despite her declaration, she burned to know what David’s own hand would feel like beneath her own, just as she’d fantasized.

She flopped down in her desk chair, opening her home e-mail account, and sighed happily upon discovering a new email from him.

Ah, Liz
You persist in your desire to meet me. And what happens if you do? Right now, I’m anyone you want me to be…but then, I’ll only be what you see. I fear my paintings are far more appealing than you’ll ever find me. I fear that you are far lovelier than I can even imagine at present.

Though you fire my imagination indescribably already.
What of this, Liz? Not enough?
Yours, David

Liz’s mouth literally fell open at how bold he’d become. So quickly, and he was already speaking a lovers’ words in her ear. He was a lover who wished to remain a stranger. A lover who wished to shower her with paintings and suggestions and open her heart like a tiny box of jewels, like secrets he might hold in his hand.

She began typing.

David,
I doubt this can ever be enough. I want to meet you. Don’t even get me started on imagination and beauty and your paintings. Or you. I’ve seen your hands now.
L.

God, she was becoming a wily seductress, someone she hardly recognized at all. That’s what this stranger was doing to her. And yet, for reasons she couldn’t possibly fathom, she felt utterly safe in his hands. The hands that she’d glimpsed, one perfect and another slightly broken.

Liz yearned to sit at the computer, just waiting breathlessly for more. But it was late, and she needed sleep.

And the moment she dreaded more than any other awaited her. 4:34 a.m. Eight years without her soul mate’s heart beating in her own chest. Eight years of an empty connection, of feeling nothing of the one person she needed more than any other.

Eight years of feeling like a statue, marble and lifeless, forever reaching toward her love.

****

They were sitting in the Crashdown in a booth together. He had his arm slung comfortably over the back of the leather seat, smiling at her from beneath those long, thick lashes. And the golden eyes were lit with undisguised desire. Liz blushed, feeling thankful that her parents were upstairs.

"What?" she giggled, dropping her own eyes shyly as she sipped from her vanilla shake.

"Nothing. You just look so beautiful, Liz."

"I always look like this," she laughed, feeling her face flush with embarrassment.

"But I haven’t seen you in such a long time. I’ve missed this so much. You."

"Nobody asked you to go, Max," she countered seriously, feeling a sudden swell of anger at him. "Nobody made you leave with her."

"I didn’t want to go, Liz."

"Then you shouldn’t have gotten her pregnant."

"I didn’t."

"Oh, yeah," she laughed softly, glancing up at him again, as she rolled her eyes. His familiar leather jacket fell open, and she had the urge to leap across the table and just nestle her face against his chest, to find shelter in his arms once again. "Then who did?"

"Liz, there’s a lot you don’t know about what happened."

"I know that you gave up on us."

"But you’ve forgiven me for all that. And you know why I left. You saw it afterward in the granolith…in your vision."

Liz thought about what he said, and upon reflection, realized that he was right. She did know the reason he’d left, and it wasn’t to be with Tess. And he’d written her that letter…he regretted it all.

"You left to save me," she announced, as the truth came clear again.

"Tess could never have dragged me away from you otherwise."

"But all this time, I’ve been alone."

"No, Liz," he corrected gently, his eyes flashing with wildfire, as he reached across the table for her hand. "You haven’t. I’ve been right inside you. At least, a part of me has."

Their fingers threaded together, as suddenly Michael strode up in his familiar way, smiling at them both. "Hey, Maxwell." He announced it as if it were the most casual and normal greeting in the world. As if they saw Max like this every day.

Max beamed as he looked up at their best friend. "I’ve missed you, too," Max joked with a quiet laugh. But his eyes betrayed his joy at seeing Michael again—different from his response to her, yet genuine pleasure that lit his entire face.

"Not like we’ve missed you," Michael affirmed quietly, and slid into the booth beside Max.

Not like we’ve missed you…not like we’ve missed you.

Why did the cadence of that phrase feel so significant?

Max didn’t answer, just bowed his head thoughtfully, as Michael slipped an arm around his shoulder. "Liz can’t move on, Max." He was confiding in Max, even as he stared at Liz pointedly. "You need to let her."

"I’ve told her to live, Michael," Max agreed with an adamant nod of his head, and Liz felt her throat tighten. "But she won’t listen to me."

"Well, welcome to the club, man. She’s as stubborn as you are. No wonder you two fit together so well."

"But who will she listen to, Michael?" Max asked softly, cutting his eyes in her direction. "If not us, then who?"

"Oh, yeah, well that one’s simple enough, Maxwell," Michael laughed, planting his elbows on the table. "David Peyton."

****
Liz--
Yes, you’ve seen my hands now. And what do you think when you gaze at them? Do you know that I long to touch you, to run my fingers through your hair, sifting it like silk? Do you know how my left hand aches constantly? But that when I consider what it would be just to hold your hand in mine, the throbbing pain fades.
Yours, d


Dashing D--
What do I think when I look at your hands? That they paint the jewels you sprinkle over me. And I wonder what it would be to be touched by you.

Liz felt him then, just running his hands down her hips, then through her hair, caressing her cheek. Fingers lingered against her collarbone, stroking the place where her pulse throbbed, then wound their way lower, lifting back the front of her nightshirt. And he was faceless, unknown, yet so perfectly beautiful.

So incredibly beautiful, he whispered in her ear. My Liz, so beautiful.
And then she woke with a painful start.

4:34 a.m.

***

4:58 a.m.

Liz lay trembling in the dark, tears coursing her cheeks . Between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year. It was as if she’d expected a visitation on the anniversary of Max’s death. As if he might have given some part of himself from beyond the grave.

But she’d been kidding herself, dreaming as always, she now realized wistfully. She was just the young girl who’d waited a year after Max left in the granolith, believing he’d find a way home to her. The one who’d sworn that at unexpected moments, she’d felt him whisper against her ear, breathe across her skin like heat lightning.

She was still that same innocent who’d stared at the stars and believed in true love, in soul mates and destiny. Her own destiny, not some prescribed separation cast upon her like an evil spell.

But that had all changed one snowy night at 4:34 a.m.

Even so, she’d never been able to let go of that last bit of hope, had held it like a tight tether within her small hands. And it had choked her, as the chord of faith had wrapped surely and slowly around her neck, smothering the life from her lungs. Winding it’s way into her life subtly, until there was nothing left, except the shell of that eighteen year old girl, just sitting and believing for a day that would never come.

She would have accepted anything of him now. Anything at all to know he still loved her, no matter how small or insignificant the token.

She wiped the hot tears from her cheeks and blamed him for her fragile state, because he was the one who’d wondered if even death could separate them. And with those words, it was as if he’d cast an enchantment over her, kept her from ever truly letting go.

And maybe that’s why she still held on so firmly.

Maybe that’s why she’d expected him to appear to her at the precise moment of his death tonight. Yet, she had dreamed of him all night in more realistic detail than in years. He’d spoken to her clearly, she was sure of it, though it was hard to remember the specifics of what he’d said.

But, oddly enough, she did remember the last dreams of David’s hands. The way he’d caressed the length of her hair, winding his fingers through it appreciatively, just breathing in and out softly beside her. He’d remained faceless in her dream, but she’d certainly felt him, especially as his hands had come to rest upon her own.

At just the memory of that physical detail, she felt a strange fire sweep her body--and wondered why her dormant womanhood was awakening now. And why, after so many years, David Peyton was the one to rouse her from deathly slumber.