Coincidence
As soon as Lorona found a stolen moment, she looked up Kestrin's email in their college student directory and prayed that it still worked. Yuki had finally gone to bed at 3am and Lorona seized her chance. Each keystroke pricked her fingers like a forbidden trespass.
Staying up late had a knack for plaguing Lorona with vague guilt. As she formed the words on the screen, they almost conjured Kestrin's presence in the room. She felt the sweeping, gentle, inescapable burn of his eyes, his softened voice as he apologized for the party dare's embarrassment, for the kiss, and then she felt the strength of his arms lifting her out of the loud, oppressive house and into the quiet night.
Lorona pushed away from her computer desk. She was in no state to be writing anyone an email. She pressed a hand to her forehead to check her temperature. It was normal.
The weather icon in the lower right of her screen flickered with an announcement. There was a meteor shower peaking in the next half hour. She was halfway to her window when her cell phone rang. She dove for her nightstand, trying to silence it before the clatter could wake Yuki in the other room. The number was unknown, but local. “Hello?”
“Lorona, it's Kestrin.” She recognized the voice, but its smoothness was gone. He sounded nervous, like he was sitting in the bucket of an old wooden roller coaster, bracing himself for the big drop.
“Are you okay?” she asked, checking herself for fever again.
“Yeah, I'm…I don't know. Can I come over?”
Lorona hesitated. She wasn't aware of allowing herself to say yes, but her lips formed the words and her lungs blew the air behind them.
“Thanks. I'll explain more when I get there.”
“Okay.”
He hung up and she threw her phone into her pillow. “What are you doing?” she hissed at herself. She grabbed a handful of hair and pulled until her scalp stung. “Are you out of your mind? People don't just meet up in the middle of the night like this!”
He was coming to see her. If she wanted to keep Yuki out of it, she'd have to avoid walking past her door where the squeaky floorboards lurked.
So now I'm planning a clandestine late-night rendezvous.
Lorona wanted to beat her head against the wall. The next moment she wanted to laugh. Was he coming to say something so wonderful, he could only say it in person?
She caught herself checking her hair in her mirror and stopped, surprised.
Get control of yourself. But the next moment she was smiling dopily at her reflection. She promised herself she wouldn't change her clothes for fear that Kestrin would think she was putting on a show for him. He could talk to her just as she was if he was so excited to see her, Lorona decided with a firm nod.
She remembered the meteor shower, wrapped her bathrobe around her t-shirt and pajama pants, and pushed her window open to crawl onto the fire escape. Yuki wouldn't hear her if she never passed the other bedroom.
The stars in the sky hung still in a frigid sky. The moon stretched bright and full and contented. The swing set in the playground in the park hung motionless. Everything in the world was holding its breath for him. She willed herself to stop shivering, wondering where her overabundance of fever had gone.
She didn't notice the car pull up, but she heard its door slam and his walk across the gravel parking lot. There was a noble, proud curve to his spine. He had both hands balled around something he held in front of his chest. His black dress shirt was loosely buttoned and his jeans were torn at the knees. They might have been the same pair he'd worn at the restaurant earlier. He shook, not like a person who was afraid, but like a man who'd gotten used to the crazy rock of a ship on the sea, and then tried to walk on land. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe he was in a storm at sea and didn't know which way was up. Lorona smiled. Either way, she'd done this to him.
When he drew close enough for her to see his face, he turned his eyes up very slowly, deliberately, almost reverently. He opened his hands to reveal a small navel orange, glowing like a tiny sun.
Kestrin felt his teenage asthma, absent since soccer days, return in violent force as he watched the maiden descend her tower.
Lorona's hair glistened in the starlight as she glided down the fire escape and crept toward him. He felt the pale moonlight wrapping him in gossamer strands, tugging him toward Lorona as she moved haltingly over the gravel in bare feet, gasping quietly. He wanted to pick her up or take off his shoes and make her wear them, but he had the feeling that any quick movement toward her would make her frighten, fly away, and vanish like a dream.
But that was just it. She was part of his dream. She was part of his fate. These weren't things that evaporated. By the time Lorona was close enough to take the orange, Kestrin's mouth was sandpaper.
“I keep craving these things like crazy,” he croaked as she took the orange. The line would definitely not have made it onto the list of top ten most romantic things to say to a woman.
At least I'm not stuttering or drooling.
He added, “I bought a whole crate of these wholesale from the restaurant. They think I'm—”
“I finished a whole carton of orange juice the night of the party,” she interrupted, smiling with encouragement.
“Lorona, I—” he stepped forward, unable to keep still.
She drew back, eyes wide, and clutched the orange. She was nervous, but something tied her here.
Kestrin smelled orange oil and, with Lorona standing right in front of him, it was impossible to avoid reliving the kiss. He'd relived it a million times just to give himself courage for this moment.
What if she says no? He shoved the thought away and mentally kicked it down.
“Lorona,” he began again, his voice softer. “I came to ask you something. This orange craving is driving me insane. I think it's more than us both simultaneously deciding that we have a new favorite fruit.”
She nodded. Her breath was quickening and hiccupping, almost like she was crying, but her eyes didn't tear up.
Kestrin thought of her kiss on the night of the party, strangely fervent for a sober, never-been-kissed, good girl. There was a passionate woman lying trapped somewhere beneath, like an exquisite red dress stuffed into an old oak chest and bolted with a lock. But as he watched her standing there, looking just as scared and moonstruck as he probably looked to her, he was sure he was seeing a scrap of the red dress again. It would resurface if he could tug gently. If he yanked, it would tear and be ruined.
Don't mess this up. A voice in his head snapped.
If it's fate, do I even have the option of messing up? he shot back.
His legs buckled and the skin on his kneecaps was bleeding into the gravel. He looked at her hair. Her long braid was coming unraveled. She was unbelievably beautiful and he was sure she wasn't trying.
“Kestrin, what are you doing?” she whispered.
He was on his knees, his hands limp at his sides, his eyes clear. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing.
“Lorona, I'm not going to ask you if you believe fairies will find you inside a circle of mushrooms, but I'll say this—I dream things that come true. I've dreamed for the past ten years, a repeated dream, about the woman for me—the one and only—and, bit by bit, I've discovered who she is and how to find her. I've had a lot of failures on this quest, but you need to know that the night I kissed you, I knew you were her. But that wasn't enough. I went home and dreamed about you. I dreamed that I would ask you what I'm about to say.”
“What's—”
She broke off as he put a trembling finger over her lips. “Please, please, let me finish. I don't know if I can keep going if I don't say it all at once.” He continued, “I dreamed of the night my grandmother died and I dreamed of when my cousin conceived her first baby, even when the doctors had decided she was infertile. I know when I see the truth to come.”
Lorona pressed a hand to her cheek. She was on fire again, but the rest of her body convulsed in shivers.
“I can get my coat from the car,” Kestrin offered.
“Are you kidding? I thought you said you wouldn't finish if you got interrupted?” She looked at the orange in her hand. She'd gouged the rind with her fingernails.
Kestrin took a deep breath and without ceremony said, “Marry me.”
“You're crazy!” Lorona's blood raced so fast in her veins it should have given her internal friction burns. An excited one-syllable word rang in her head. It sounded a heck of a lot like yes. She laughed unbelievingly. “We can't get married. We've known each other for two days. It's…” She trailed off, watching him nod his head, almost sadly, in agreement.
“I know it sounds crazy. But I really believe this was meant to be.”
“But my dad…my tickets to Europe in April…my…” All of the excuses quivered and then lay still, content, in the steady pure light of his eyes. “I believe you,” she said.
“You'll find the next part even harder to believe. The reason I've always had short, burnout flings with others is they meant nothing to me and I can't bear to hold close something that's meaningless.” He paused. “But I think, no, I know that I could hold you forever.”
Lorona let the orange fall to the ground, reached for his face, and kissed him. Her fingers stuck lightly against his cheeks with orange juice. Prickle from with a day's growth of stubble pressed back into her palms. She stepped away and watched Kestrin visibly restrain himself from pulling her back to him.
The air around them hung suspended, like a hurricane's eye. Lorona grabbed for words that would pull her out. As her handholds vaporized, one after another, Lorona felt the twinge of one tiny spot that had yet to yield. For the sake of her own integrity, she had to say something more.
I'm living in the Twenty-First Century, for goodness sake.
Kestrin said, “I'm entrusting you with my heart.” He put it so simply, with no implied expectation or overbearing demands, which made it a billion times more overwhelming.
Lorona gulped, “But I'm self-centered and I don't trust people. Yuki told me what you said to her after you put me in the car. That our costumes were mixed up and I should have been the angel. But I'm not perfect. I'm stuck up and frightened of too many things. I'd be a terrible wife.”
There. She'd said it.
“I want to be with you till the day we die.” If he'd heard what she'd just said, he didn't care.
“You're not just going to divorce me when you decide you're done?”
It must have been the word divorce that triggered it. Of all the moments for Lorona to remember the perfume her mother had worn the day she left, this was one of the worst. Her nose burned and she gulped cold air to cleanse it. Her heart beat so hard, her head ached.
Kestrin was shaking his head. His eyes made a more convincing dismissal of the fear than his words could have. He was listening and he was cognizant. She was again struck by his certainty that he knew what he was doing. He was scared, like her, but he was sure.
Kestrin said, “This is forever.”
He listened to her words, watched her body language, and registered every inflection. He filed them all mentally for later perusal. He treasured the tender fright and joy, the delicacy of her green eyes, freckled with the reflection of stars, full and tearless in their wonder. Later he'd analyze all these things, but at the moment every pore of his skin was held open, cupped to receive her answer.
Point at something. He begged silently. This would be her answer. In the dream, when he'd asked her to marry him, she'd replied by telling him to look at something.
The sky behind Lorona exploded in a streak of starlit rainfall as the meteor shower struck the atmosphere.
She was whispering something. There it was. See, see, see. Kestrin turned his eyes to the falling stars, the shower of light he'd also seen in his dream, then jerked his gaze back to her face as he recognized the warm accent shaping her lips and throat. She was speaking in her mother's language, the part of her that believed in folk tales and fate. Si. She was telling him yes.
