Wishing in the Wings (17 page)

I caught my tongue between my teeth. I thought I was being cautious, but I held the trowel at too steep an angle over the first one. A score of seeds flooded across the top of the dirt.

“Easy!” Ryan said. He tugged off his work gloves, needing finer motor control than they permitted to gather up everything I’d spilled.

“I’m sorry!” Even though I hadn’t meant it that way, it sounded like I was back to apologizing for Teel again.

Ryan looked at me quickly before bending back to the task at hand. “Why don’t we just set aside those two words, all right? You won’t say you’re sorry any more, and I won’t hold anything against you.”

I knew a good deal when I heard it. I nodded and said, “Deal.”

He tipped the reclaimed seeds back into the trowel and said, “All right, now. Just five or six.”

I started to tilt my wrist, but quickly realized that the angle was still too steep. I stopped myself just before I dumped the entire lot into a new, unsuspecting pot. “I’m s—” I started to say, but I caught myself just in time.

Ryan nodded. “It gets easier the more you’ve done it. You’ll get the right feel eventually. Here. Let’s try this.” He set his fingers around my wrist.

His skin was warm against mine as he applied just enough pressure to bring my hand over the cups. He used his fingers to tap against my wrist, jiggling the trowel so that five tiny seeds rolled off the lip into the fresh earth that we’d prepared. His subtle guidance brought the trowel over the next cup, completing the task smoothly, calmly, without disaster.

Ryan Thompson might dress like a geek. He might grin like a bashful schoolboy. He might be unsure and uncertain in challenging social situations. But he knew a thing or two about teaching, about reaching out to people, showing them how to help themselves.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d read However Long. I knew the passion and vehemence that he’d brought to his job in Africa, that he’d carried home from the Peace Corps.

As I looked at the cups we’d successfully completed, the tiny bones in my wrist seemed to heat up. Irrationally, my heart started pounding in my ears. I felt like I’d accomplished something heroic, something magnificent, something infinitely more significant than placing some cabbage seeds in dirt. My flesh thrummed beneath Ryan’s hand, as if he’d crushed lush velvet against me. I wondered if he felt my surprised start, and that wondering raised a blush on my cheeks, a hot wash of color that only an idiot could have missed.

Ryan Thompson was no idiot.

He stepped closer to me, and I forced myself to relax my wrist. I ordered my hand to yield to his. I reminded my lungs to breathe; I willed my sudden flaming blush to fade.

And Ryan led me through filling the rest of the peat pots perfectly. Five seeds in each cup. No spills. No disasters.

When we were done, I said, “Thank you.”

He looked at me for a long time. I felt him shift toward me again, a subtle movement, barely perceptible in the purple glow of the grow-lights. I saw him measure the new intensity behind my gaze, calibrate the tension as I froze beside him.

And I saw him remember that we were working together. Professionally. At the Mercer.

Not to mention the fact that his mother—his mother!—was somewhere nearby. He stepped back and dusted potting soil from his hands. “You’re welcome,” he said.

Before I could say anything else, before I could rekindle the moment, the hope, the expectation that had sparked between us, there was a shuffle of footsteps, and Dani emerged from her bedroom. For the first time since I’d met her, she seemed depressed. Defeated. She displayed her empty hands as she crossed over to look at our work. “Lucky for you,” she said to Ryan, with a rueful smile. “I can’t find the cauliflower seeds anywhere.”

“Lucky for me,” Ryan repeated. But he kept his eyes on me as he said the words.

I WAS STILL thinking of that moment—the sound of his voice, the piercing quality of his gaze—as I stood in front of my own door, fumbling once again with my key in the lower lock. As always, the top one and the middle one had slid back without a problem. It was just…this…last…one that refused to budge. I gasped in exasperation and threw my key onto the carpet, knowing that I was acting like a baby, but needing to indulge a momentary temper tantrum.

“If I could be of assistance?”

I whirled around, half expecting to find Ryan standing behind me. Even as I turned, though, I realized that the voice had not been his. The timbre was too low. It was the rumble of a giant cat, and the words were iced with the faintest hint of a British accent.

I would have heard Ryan approach anyway, would have heard his door open. Startled by the newcomer who had somehow appeared from nowhere, I started to scream, but I caught the sound at the back of my throat as the man held up his hands in a disarming, reassuring gesture. He took a slight step away, adding a soothing smile to his lips.

He was dressed in a perfectly-tailored tuxedo. The satin stripe down the side of his pants glinted mellowly in the hallway light. His pleated shirt gleamed white, sharp, stark against his flawless cummerbund. Onyx studs marched down his chest, echoing the glint of his perfectly knotted bow tie.

As if he’d consciously chosen to dilute his unmarred image, the man’s dirty-blond hair was ruffled; it looked like he’d just fought his way through a gale. His glacial eyes watched me with some amusement.

“I’m rather good with locks. Perhaps I can help?”

He extended one sinewy hand, palm up, and that’s when I saw it. Brilliant gold flames, picked out in shimmering black ink. The tattoo looked as if it had come to life, like it was gathering in all the light in the hallway, transforming the very air around us into sunshine cast back at my dazed eyes.

“Teel!”

He cracked a self-deprecating smile. “You were expecting James Bond?”

I clutched my keys like a lifesaver. “Go away.”

“Don’t be like that,” he purred.

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do. I really, truly do.” I gaped at him, though, amazed by the transformation he had worked on his own body. A subtle energy vibrated off of him, drifting toward me like musk. I remembered the way Ryan had originally reacted to the Marilyn Monroe monstrosity who had met us in the coffee shop. Was this what he had felt? Was this how Teel’s manifestation had seemed to him—compelling? Alluring?

As I stared, Teel raised his hand toward his earlobe. His fingers were blunt against his coarse hair as he tightened his grip and tugged.

The metal key in my hand jangled, as if it had passed through an electrical field. I felt the motion, knew that something was changing, but I felt no actual pain. At the same time, my door whispered open, as if someone had actually taken the time to fit my new key into the stubborn lock.

“How did you do that?”

“Magic,” he said with a self-deprecating shrug. “Consider it an apology. A peace offering. A wish I’ve granted for you, even though you didn’t ask.” He extended his arm, inviting me into my own home. “You’ll find the lock won’t give you any trouble now. I fixed it permanently.”

A little stunned by how easily he’d made the repair, I walked into my living room. The late afternoon sun streamed through the tall windows, painting the couch and love seat with great swaths of buttery yellow. At any other time, I would have been floored by the beauty of the scene. I would have felt indebted to the genie who had given me such a perfect home.

But I was still angry.

I closed the door and set my hands on my hips. “You can’t do this,” I said. “You can’t just pretend that other incarnation never happened! You waltzed into my life and acted like an idiotic maniac, even after you told me, you promised me, that you’d appear as a student. An ordinary, everyday student. Teel, you can’t go around sabotaging my job. This is my life—the only one I have—and you’re ruining it!”

I drew a deep breath, ready to continue with my tirade. Before I could say another word, though, there was a flash of darkness, a sudden screen of black snapping down across my vision. I closed my eyes in reflex, flinching backwards, and when I opened them I was nowhere.

Well, I was somewhere, but not anywhere that I could define. There was no floor below me, no ceiling above me. I looked to the left and to the right, but as far as I could see, there was only endless, featureless gray.

I was back in Teel’s Garden.

I whirled around, and he was standing behind me. “I didn’t give you permission to take me here!”

His sapphire eyes widened, and his jaw dropped, as if I’d tossed the perfect shaken martini into his face. “I thought you liked it here!” He glanced longingly to his left, and I realized that the gate must be located there. The gate that only he could see. “I thought you loved it here as much as I did.”

I couldn’t exactly tell him I’d been lying. I was firmly ensconced on the moral high ground, and I intended to stay right there. “Even if I thought the Garden was the Taj Mahal and all that, I wouldn’t want you just whisking me away without a word of warning!” At his crestfallen expression, I said, “Come on, Teel! This can’t be news to you! Kira didn’t want to be here either! I heard her! She made you promise never to bring her here again!”

Teel took a step forward, curling his fingers around thin air, around the Garden’s invisible fence. “But Kira couldn’t see it, not the way you can. None of my humans has ever been able to see it. You’re the only one.”

Now he told me.

He raised his chin, and I could imagine that he was listening to some bird in the distance. For just a moment, I thought about Dani, about the gardens that she wanted to bring to the city. Maybe she worked so that some urban cave-dweller would get that same expression of perfect longing on his face. Maybe her guerilla gardens were a way of spreading light and joy, the same peace that Teel sought on this alternate plane.

When my genie spoke, his voice was soft, sing-song. “I thought that maybe I’d learned something at MAGIC. I thought that all of those seminars, all of those sessions, had finally taught me how to be a better genie. I thought that Jaze…”

“What’s Jaze?”

He turned to me, his brilliant eyes haunted. “Not what. Who. Jaze is another genie, someone I met at MAGIC.”

Wow. There were untold volumes behind that one sentence. I knew all about humans hooking up at trade shows, at out-of-town conferences. It had never occurred to me that genies might do the same thing. Truth be told, it had never occurred to me that Teel could have any sort of romantic life—not when he bounced back and forth from slick 007 look-alike to bimbo Slut of the Year to Con Ed lineman….

But there was no denying the longing in Teel’s face. He stripped his bow tie open. “Jaze is in there now. He granted his last wish a few days ago. I want to join him before he’s back out, back in his lamp for another full round.”

Great. It wasn’t like Teel was adding any pressure on me or anything. “Can you call him over to the gate? At least get a chance to talk while you’re here?” I was taking a gamble, assuming that the other genie wasn’t standing right in front of us. I’d see him, right? He wouldn’t be invisible, like the Garden was.

Teel ran his hand through his rough-cut hair. “She’s moved deeper inside, beyond the outer ranks.”

“She?”

Teel shook his head, distracted. “Sorry. She. He. Jaze. You may have noticed that we genies aren’t really tied to your human notions of gender.”

I smiled wryly, thinking of my confusion when Kira had referred to my female genie lawyer by a male pronoun. “Yeah. I did notice that.” Teel was barely listening to me, though. His eyes darted around—I was pretty sure he was checking out the shadows beneath trees, craning his neck to look beyond something that grew to shoulder height. “How long will she, uh, he, uh, Jaze be in there?”

With a visible effort, Teel stepped back from the gate. I could feel the power he put into looking away from the invisible Garden, into focusing on me. “Time flows differently for genies. I can’t tell you precisely—part of it depends on how deeply he goes into the physical space, how much magic she uses to conjure other imaginaries to keep him company. To entertain her.”

I shook my head, a bit dazzled by the rapid pronoun shifts. Apparently gender truly was immaterial to genies. “Are we talking a day, though? A year? A century? What’s the ballpark?”

Teel shrugged. “Maybe as long as a year. Just possibly two. This isn’t Jaze’s first time inside. He’s served at least two complete Fulfillment rounds in your human world. This is his third time in the Garden.” Teel sighed. “I have no idea if she’ll still be there when I get in. You still have two more wishes, and then I owe another four to someone.”

He sounded so sad, so lonely…. Even though I was still angry with him about the Union, I couldn’t help but take a step closer. I forced myself to ignore the strange feeling of moving through nothing, of trusting that there would be some floor beneath my feet when I set them down. “Teel…” I said, staring into the nothingness that hid the missing genie.

Teel sighed and clutched at his collar, working free the onyx stud at the bottom of his Adam’s apple before he offered me a tired smile. “Of course, if you made your two wishes right away, made them now, I’d be that much closer to getting in.”

“Dammit, Teel!” He might be a gorgeous guy in a tux, showing his emotional vulnerability, but he wasn’t going to sway me that easily. “Is that what was going on this afternoon? Did you purposely screw things up at the International Women’s Union so that I’d have to use an extra wish?”

“No!” To his credit, he looked horrified. “I would never do that! I could never do that—it would violate our contract!” I thought about asking which clause, but I knew he’d just rattle off an incomprehensible string of letters and numbers. Teel shook his head. “This afternoon wasn’t about Jaze. I just thought it would be fun, to shake things up a little in the meeting. You humans are all so serious all the time. That Eleanor Samuelson could certainly use a laugh or two.” I glared at him. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he sounded sincere. “I’m really truly sorry.”