Tigerlily Read online

  “No. Definitely not. In fact, I don’t mind telling you. I’m starting to suspect that I’m imagining you.”

  “How would you know for sure?”

  He stood, as he spoke—though somehow him doing so didn’t make her want to skirt away. The knife had become a secondary concern, somewhere in the middle of this conversation from fantasy land.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Do I look real?”

  He looked so real it hurt to stare at him too long. She could see his firm collarbone, jutting out between shoulders broad and interesting. Dark hair covered his chest and belly, almost too thick to be pleasing but somehow all the richer for it.

  She thought of the woods, for some reason. The smell of mown grass and pollen motes dancing, in the swelling summer light. She thought of things fertile and vibrant, pulsing against this creaking cabin she called home.

  “You look…too real.”

  It took a moment to register that he was walking towards her. Though he didn’t seem to be walking, exactly. Or even something as sinister as slinking or creeping. He just was, as bright as anything in her dim little kitchen.

  Before he could get within poking distance, she snatched a fresh towel from the drawer, and wrapped it around his waist.

  Unfortunately, doing so only put her closer to him. Now they stood within licking distance, his eyes on her heavy and dark, her hand somehow around his waist, in order to pinch the towel-skirt closed.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t do anything like reach. There remained a very apparent strip of firm thigh, exposed the way that young girls in split skirts exposed themselves.

  She wished more than anything for him to not be exposing himself. And maybe also for some extra material to magically appear out of nowhere, along with the naked man and the strange sense of foreboding.

  “So do you,” he said.

  She felt herself flush, from the roots of her hair, to the ends of her toes—though she couldn’t say why. He was very attractive, and also very weird—just the way she liked them—but that didn’t account for the sudden heat rolling off him, and all over her.

  She caught a hint of his scent, like something mossy and febrile and good. Masculine, but somehow light and perfume-y, all at the same time.

  “We should…find you some clothes.” The words took some yanking out of her—but ultimately, it was for the best. Imaginary men needed to cover their naked bodies, before crazy ladies decided to molest them. “I think there’s some clothes that belonged to—that will fit you upstairs, somewhere.”

  It was a nice bucket of cold water, over the head. She skirted around him, uncaring of the towel which immediately dropped, and crossed to the archway between the kitchen and the living room.

  And only stopped, when he said in a voice grave and sweet, all mixed up, “You won’t feel bad forever, Mae.”

  Chapter Two

  There were two things impossible, about what he had said. She considered them, as she rummaged through old clothes that did, indeed, make her feel bad.

  He had known her name. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she hadn’t told it to him, but he had spoken it anyway.

  And he knew about her parents. He knew about the terrible, awful thing that was making her feel bad. Somehow he did—though what “somehow” really meant was only this: he wasn’t real. Her mind had made him up. She would go back downstairs and find him gone, and then there would just be silence and emptiness and the scent she thought he had, hovering in the thickly warm air.

  Really it had just been an air freshener she’d forgotten she’d turned on, all along.

  Which is why it made her jump near to the ceiling, when he knelt beside her on the bedroom floor. Still naked, obviously. Clearly modesty didn’t factor into any of her daydreams about hot guys who wanted to puncture reality.

  He didn’t look at her. Instead, he ran his hands over old sad cardigans and too colourful ties. It made her tremble, oddly. It made her want to reach out one shaking hand, just to see if his flesh still felt real to the touch.

  It did. It seemed warmer than hers, in fact.

  When he quirked one silky black eyebrow at her, she almost laughed with outrageous nerves and disbelief and all of the things a person was supposed to feel, when things that couldn’t possibly happen, happened.

  “I’m fairly certain I’m really here,” he said, as though he had read her mind. But then if he only lived inside her head, he had front row seats, didn’t he? He could probably see that time she’d panicked in the middle of town, with so many people crowding in at her and everything just too much, too much—dear God, aching loneliness in the middle of nowhere made her feel so much better.

  And likely he knew whether or not she really believed that, too.

  “Can’t you tell me anything about where you’ve come from? A cult in Chiswick? A mental asylum in Bradford? Anything?”

  She could see him straining, now. Chasing memories that weren’t there. It seemed entirely possible that he was about to make things up, just to give things an edge of reality, but then he spoke and it didn’t sound like anything her own mind would invent. Her own mind would never mention words like “believable”, when trying to be just that.

  Her own mind just wasn’t clever enough.

  “You want something believable,” he said, after a moment. “But I don’t think I have anything believable to give. It’s far away, my home, though it’s like here. I can almost see it, when I close my eyes.”

  She could almost see it, too. It looked like insanity.

  “Maybe we should call the police. They could check the missing persons database.”

  He didn’t look like he thought the missing persons database was something they should be focussing on. Though granted, his focus priorities didn’t seem to be about anything good. Too much intense staring at her was going on, for it to be about anything good.

  “I don’t think you want to listen to me, do you.”

  He even tossed her a little rueful smile. Clearly, trauma caused by crossing over from scratchy world was starting to lose its hold on him. The real person was beginning to show through—though how real he was remained up for debate.

  “Look—you were right. Not long ago, something bad happened to me. So bad that I’ll probably never get over it. And sometimes, when bad things happen—”

  “I know what happened to you. Fire and metal and pain. And then you shouted—I think you called my name. But I can’t remember what it was.”

  She could feel her heart sinking, sinking. Down through her chest, to her boots. Odd, though, how her heart doing so didn’t stop that strange, underlying heat. It seemed to be falling out of him, and all over her. She could almost see it making little cartoon heat waves in the air.

  “Well gee, I wish I could remember, too. Because all I can recollect is shouting for Dr Herschfeltz to give me more morphine,” she said, and knew it was the truth. It definitely was the truth. So why did this little squeeze of familiarity take hold after she’d said it?

  Like she’d seen his face before. In the hospital, maybe. Doctor…Doctor…Hottie No-Name. Doctor Aversion To Clothes. Maybe another patient, with wild eyes and wilder hair, and a penitent for riding imaginary horses.

  None of which seemed any more or less real than this, right now.

  “I can’t wear your father’s old clothes, Mae,” he said, when she handed him something she would never make him wear. And somehow, that just made everything worse and even more crazy. She could feel all of it rising up inside her and when it broke, it tasted bitter and too loud. Much too loud.

  “Why not?” She realised she was shouting, a second after doing so. “Why not? And how come you know these are my father’s clothes, huh? How? If you’re one hundred percent real, how do you know my name when I’ve not told you?”

  It was a shock, when he laughed. It made her feel pretty stupid, what with all the stridency and the clothes bunched up in her fists.

  “You must have to
ld me, or else I wouldn’t be here.” He paused, dredging again from the bottom of some impossible memories. “You say my name three times, when the moon is fat and the fields burn. On dakshinayana, at midnight, after the shadows have met their true halves. And then I say your name back, and come to you.”

  Something spilt down her cheek. It felt wet, barely there.

  “I’m dreaming, aren’t I? This is a dream, all a dream.”

  When he turned his gaze to her, his eyes filled up the room. She thought of all the stories she used to write, about other worlds, far off places. The stone key you had to find, for the lock in the mossy bank. The words you had to say, when the moon was fat and the fields blazed dark fire into the indigo sky.

  “I don’t know. You tell me, Mae.”

  The spell broke. She turned back to the clothes, swiping absentmindedly at her cheek.

  “We really need to find you something to wear,” she said and felt his breath sigh, against the side of her face.

  * * * *

  She dreamt of running, in fields of tall grass. Someone whooping, behind her, far behind her—but he wouldn’t catch her. He never caught her. He was always too slow, skinny little tigerlily that he was. He said, Soon, I won’t be new. I will grow old and old, while you stay young.

  Though I won’t ever look it.

  She snapped awake, just as the grass parted. Thinking of feral teeth bared, a boy waiting to pounce.

  I have you now, Mae.

  But when she got up, and padded through to the spare room—he wasn’t there. She had left him curled amongst the covers, happy and absolutely sinfully delicious looking. Just one of those warm pulses rolling off him—it almost made her think he was sending them to her. Like sex waves, or something no more or less ridiculous than all his mumbo-jumbo talk.

  Not that he needed sex waves, or mumbo-jumbo talk. The covers had ridden very low, on his lean sinewy body. So low that she’d received her five hundredth glimpse of his thick cock, and a lovely look at the twist of his hips.

  Just waiting, she thought, before shaking it off. It wasn’t right to cavort with either a) imaginary men or b) confused mental patients who liked to ride imaginary horses.

  Though she couldn’t imagine why horses, imaginary or otherwise, kept coming into it. Her Mum had taken her pony riding once, when she was a kid, but that connection seemed morbid and tenuous, at best. And there had been that time when…had there been a boy at school, with one of those wooden horse things? The little things that were really little more than a broom, with a crude head on the end.

  She felt there might have been a boy. Like the one in her dream, with the running, and him saying, I’ll catch you, if I’m riding my stallion. You can’t hide from me, you can’t hide, and I’ll catch you, Mae, and then—

  She turned, when she realised she could hear running water—coming from the bathroom, next door. Not surprising, really. He was probably covered with the spit of evil men. Or evil creatures that he claimed were no longer chasing him. Or imaginary horses.

  She thought of her dream, and the feral boy in the long grass. With eyes as big as great dark moons.

  “Um…mystery guy? Are you in there?”

  It seemed only polite to knock. She imagined the police or the doctors finding her, knocking on doors for people who weren’t there.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m in here. Should I not be in here?”

  He did say some odd things. And his accent, so…without inflection. So smooth and cool, like an icy river, only somehow warm at the same time. Probably fed by hot springs, she imagined.

  “No—that’s…fine. I just wanted to make sure you were…”

  What? Okay? Still in some sort of existence? She thought about calling Susan, from the office. Where she’d worked, before all of this happened. Before money she hadn’t wanted to inherit promised to last her until the end of time. The end of time of being here, alone and unable to work her way back into society.

  Susan would be able to ascertain whether he was real, or not. In fact, she could just phone Susan, and get her to talk to him! She highly doubted that she was capable of doing a convincing deep, icy river man-voice.

  “Can you believe it? The water comes right out of these metal things,” he said, from the other side of the door. He sounded excited, though she would have known he was whether he voiced said excitement or not.

  Because it poured through the wood, in all of those little cartoon waves. It beat, like a dirty, wanton heart. It made her not want to think about him not knowing what “taps” were.

  “I can believe it…” She paused, trapped, at the end of an incomplete sentence. It needed a name, to finish it off—but he didn’t have one. “What should I call you?”

  He took a moment. She could hear the “magical” water being splashed, probably on various parts of his gorgeous body. Maybe he was using the soap, to work a creamy lather into all that luxuriant chest hair. And other things.

  “I don’t know. I think I’ve always wanted to be called Sam.”

  “All right. Sam it is.”

  It seemed as good a name as any. After all, it spoke of a solid, dependable sort, who did not magically appear in back gardens and had skin that healed in a natural amount of time. Sam was your buddy, Sam was your pal, Sam didn’t suddenly open the door to the bathroom in a way that made her not know where to put herself.

  He was still naked, of course. And now his thick dark hair stood straight up from his head, glistening wet.

  “I was thirsty,” he said, though whether he thought that explained the hair, she couldn’t say. “I could feel the water, so came in here.”

  Better to just breeze right by that one, she felt. And maybe move on to the fact that she hadn’t offered him anything to eat, or drink. All that running—he was probably starving!

  “Oh—well I could get you some food, and water. You don’t have to…use this.”

  She reached forward and turned off the cold tap, but that seemed to be a mistake. It only put her closer to him and the magical sex waves.

  “I’m not hungry for food,” he said. He was kind of looking down at her, again. She supposed it was a necessity, being so tall. He seemed even taller than before, too, which should have been disturbing, but as with everything about him, just wasn’t.

  “Oh, really? Okay. Okay, so—”

  When he stepped forward, and rested a hand on her arm—just lightly—she was certain he grew brighter, and darker, all at the same time. She thought of the healed scratches, his knowledge that he couldn’t know, and suddenly it didn’t seem so weird that her bathroom was filling with this strange sort of muggy heat, or that she could hear his heartbeat, ringing in her head.

  Though that last one did seem to push some sort of boundary. Around reality, and other things, too. She could feel her nipples tightening beneath the thin cotton of her sleep shirt, for God’s sake. Boundaries were getting stuffed up their yin-yangs.

  “Um—I—maybe you should…step back,” she said, and though he didn’t obey, the fact that he remained too close for comfort wasn’t threatening. In truth, the longer he stayed standing over her, the hotter and more syrupy she felt.

  She tried to stop herself glancing up at him—that sure wasn’t going to help with the whole weird melting into summer feeling—and failed. He was breathing hard, half-smiling, though without any sort of mockery in his eyes. And his face was as flushed as hers felt, this time.

  It looked good on him. Warm pink, spreading through milk pale.

  “I don’t think you want me to step back.”

  Why didn’t that seem threatening? It sounded like the start of every gritty drama about a woman’s struggle with sexual assault, ever. Apart from the fact that he was right, absolutely right, and he was just waiting, waiting, waiting.

  Not only that, she knew what he was waiting for. He wanted her to catch up. He was waiting for her to lead the way.

  Into what, however, God only knew. Sex? Did he think she was going to have sweaty
, dirty sex with him, right there on her bathroom floor? Or maybe up against the door, hard and slick and fast until they both collapsed, exhausted? Or maybe—

  She shoved at him, and he went easy enough. His expression remained one hundred percent bemusement, however. As pure a question as ever she’d seen on someone’s face—that was so nice. Why would you stop it?

  “What is that? What is it that you’re doing to me? I know you’re doing something to me, okay?” she finally managed, and watched, as he searched his internal database. Though clearly, he wasn’t any sort of robot. Unless they were building Intense Sexual Magnetism models.

  “I don’t know. Did it feel like I did something? Maybe it’s a clue to who I am!”

  He sounded genuinely excited. Though she was starting to doubt he knew anything other than genuine. It was his default setting, apparently.

  “Why are you holding your hand like that?” he asked, before she realised she was doing so. Though as it turned out, he was right.

  “Because I’m trying to block your erection from my field of vision, while we discuss these important matters.”

  He glanced down, as though only just realising it was there. Comical, really, but no less disturbing for it. Though she wasn’t about to start fretting over the disturbing-ness of spontaneous erections, when he seemed to be giving off sex waves.

  Grief-stricken insanity or not, that was definitely what they were. There simply didn’t seem to be any point in denying it. Even closing her eyes to block out his weirdly handsome face didn’t stop them coming.

  The bathroom felt like a furnace. The smell of summer was now so strong, she wondered if catching hayfever from it was possible and/or likely.

  “We have a strong connection,” he said, as though such a thing had made his hard-on possible. Stiffy, brought to you by weird bonds with people you hardly know.

  She wanted to sit down again, but moving seemed difficult and sluggish, and the whole thing kind of felt as though she really, really needed a wee. Pinching her thighs together, to try and ward it off. Unable to go very far, in case some sex leaks out. Terrified out of your mind, by sudden and inexplicable…