Being With Him
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Synopsis:
Mila Adams has always known she was different. For as long as she can remember, she has had the ability to shift time, and who would believe that? Certainly not the obnoxious blind dates her mother keeps foisting off on her. But Mila can't help feeling there's someone out there for her, a soul mate who might understand her unique ability. And when she looks into the dark eyes of financial whiz Garrick McClellan, she can't but feel her time has finally come.
Any man would lust after a beauty like Mila, but the moment Garrick touches her--feels her shifting time just as he can--he recognizes her as his partner in power. Their connection is immediate, passionate, raw, and beyond anything either has ever experienced. But who are they? What is this gift that joins them so intensely? Are there others like them? And why do they feel that time is running out?
Book Excerpt:
In her dream, she isn’t alone. Not ever. Not in all the times she’s conjured it up from her subconscious. Always in the darkness, there are the other children, so many of them, their voices echoing in the small strange place that holds them.
Two of the children are somehow related to her, belong to her, are connected to her by blood or heart or time. She looks at them—turning her left and then right--but even in the dream, she blinks, unable to see them clearly, as if her eyes are filled with glue, cloudy and sticky. Are the children blond like her? Do they have dark eyes? Do they have long thin limbs? Do they always wonder who they really are?
She thinks she can see one of them—a boy—looking at her, saying something, his voice and face so serious and kind. She knows that she trusts him completely, but she can never hear his words, his voice a young, soft warble in the darkness. And she isn’t really sure that she’s hearing his voice as much as feeling it inside her head, her body. She knows he is talking with her, but is his mouth moving? Is hers when she tries to reply?
This dream confuses her. She doesn’t know where they are or who they are or where they are going. She knows they are moving because she feels the vibrations from some large engine, but it as if she is almost anesthetized, amnesiatic, drugged. She can’t figure out anything. How old is he? How old is she? Of course in the waking world, she isn’t a child, but in her dream, she forever is, trapped in time and place. Maybe she is about two or three. Maybe one. Maybe four. She’s not sure exactly, but as she sits with the other children, she looks down at her body and sees little girl legs, little girl arms, and strange little girl clothes, skirt and top a light shade of orange. But no matter the clothes or her size, she knows this is her body, her life, her experience, even though she is now twenty-eight, grown, a single woman with no siblings, an only child. Always the only child.
But in the dream, she doesn’t know where she is because it is dark and closed in and crowded. She is sitting, her back against something hard. This dark is a place she only sees in the dream. But it is not scary. It is a place where she is surrounded by the children and by adults, who talk in soft whispers. Everyone in the dark place is like her, can do the strange things she does. Can do the things she has to hide in her real life And even though there might be something outside the dark place that is bad and wrong—and she thinks there is—they are all protected. And as they sit and wait and watch, they are traveling, going somewhere she thinks will be better.
For an instant in the dream, she can almost see the bad people and the bad things they do. She lifts her small hands to her eyes, knowing she doesn’t want to see what she can remember, but the thin, wispy, bad bodies of the people slip into her thoughts. There are horrible, red, wet things that happen because of the bad people. This is why she and the other children and the adults are in the dark place, running away. The shape and sound of the thing the bad people do is lonely and black and hollow and empty, and the adults are trying to keep this from the children. But all the children know. All the children understand. All the children try to forget.
The boy next to her talks. The bodies of the other child presses close. The three of them are holding hands, shoulders together, small legs touching. The adults that are their adults aren’t there, but for now, in this dream, that’s okay because at least the three of them are together. They are still together.
The other children around them hold hands, too, talk in soft sad tones. Some cry, and others comfort them. Now and then, there is laughter. Sometimes, someone giggles. They love each other. They all love each other.
And somehow in the dream she knows this: there is another child in the dark place who is hers. Not in the same way of the two next to her, but in a way that is different, matched. She looks into the dark place, but she can’t see him, can’t see anything really. She knows he’s here, though. She can almost hear him think, can almost feel his mind in hers. And she feels his energy, the opposite of hers. Her magic in the mirror, backward.
As the place seems to shift, dip, move, adults come and lean over them, smile, wipe the children’s eyes and their own, hug them over and over again. The dark place rumbles, and the dream goes on and on in a gummy, sad sameness until it begins to break apart, turn gray and grainy, slowly slides out of view.
No, she cries out. Don’t leave me here. Don’t leave me again! Please come back. Please tell me how to find you! I’m lost now. I don’t know where to go.
But the dream pulls away like a rolled up carpet, and she turns on her side, falling into a dreamless sleep.
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Original Publish Date:
January 29, 2008
Formats:
Trade paperback
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