Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
I'm driving silently down the highway back toward home with a blue man in my passenger seat, and I'm trying not to glance over at him.
I'm pretty freaked out. But also, not freaked out. I don't even know how to explain it.
I also can’t explain what possessed me to offer him a place to sleep tonight. He was just out there in the cold, looking at me with puppy dog eyes, once I got close enough to see all of him.
One minute, he’s telling me he’s been in the woods for two weeks, and the next minute, we’re walking back to my truck in utter silence.
“Here.” I reach into the backseat, keeping one eye on the road, and hand him the blanket that I keep back there.
“I am not affected by the temperature,” he says, “but thank you.”
The blanket stays suspended between us. I clear my throat.
“That's, um, that's fine,” I stammer, tossing the blanket into the back.
I wasn't so much worried about whether or not he was cold—seeing as how he was wandering the forest with no apparent signs of distress—as I was the fact that he is still very naked.
And extremely beautiful. Sculpted like a statue of a Greek god.
And I've been trying hard not to look at things that I have no business looking at. But it's kind of difficult.
I try to avert my eyes, but then I realize that the color of his skin is changing, and I can’t seem to look away. It's now sort of a muted gray.
I look out the windshield.
His skin is the same exact shade as the sky.
“I think I need to know what's going on here,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, “of course. I apologize.” He sets his palms flat on his thighs, and I look away quickly from those muscular, hairy legs. Is he even human? He looks very, very human. Apart from the blue skin.
“There was some sort of catastrophic event.”
“Catastrophic event?” I ask, following the highway signs back to Black Forest. “What do you mean?”
He turns his head to look at me, his eyes dark in the shadows of the truck. “I believe you are familiar with the ley lines. I believe that is why you were out in the woods, is it not?”
“Yes,” I say, though I don’t know how he would have known that.
“This happens sometimes. It is as if the veil between your world and mine thins.”
“So, you've seen this before?” I ask. “You've had this happen…?” I gesture to him, to his perfectly-formed human body.
He shakes his head. “No, I have not. But I have seen things happen to other people. Witnessed strange goings on during these times. It is rather common. But it has never happened to me.”
“What happened exactly?” I ask quietly.
His eyes slip slowly over to me, like he’s not sure he should say. “Some weeks ago, I saw you in the woods with a map and a woman.”
“Mackenzie,” I say on instinct, even though I’m not certain it matters. “My sister.”
“Mackenzie.” He says it slowly, like he's sounding out the word, feeling it in his mouth.
He pushes his golden hair out of his eyes.
It's longer than mine. Wavy. Beautiful. “I saw the two of you, and I felt… I am not sure… Compelled, perhaps. Felt is not even entirely the correct word. It was almost involuntary, but I know, also, that it was my own doing.”
“What was?”
His gaze holds mine. “I reached for you.”
Something about the way he says it sends a fizzle through my chest.
“You reached for me?”
He nods solemnly. “And when I did, I fell.”
“Fell from where?” I ask, even though I’m pretty positive I already know the answer.
“From the sky,” he says. “Technically, from the atmosphere. I… am…” He seems to not want to confirm it aloud for some reason.
“You are the sky,” I finish for him.
It’s so quiet in the cab of my truck that I hear him swallow. “A piece of it,” he says. “It is quite hard to explain. My previous existence…” When he trails off, I glance over. His eyes are staring off into the distance.
“What?” I ask.
His gaze travels over to me, eyes dark as starless midnight. “I am not sure how to get back. Not sure how I got here in the first place, really. It is the magic of the lines. Unexplainable.”
We fall into silence, and I get the urge to break it, to, I don’t even know, comfort him?
But how can I? Between the two of us, he seems to know more than I do.
But I still feel almost… protective. Is that why he’s in my truck right now?
Is that why I couldn’t leave him to figure this out on his own?
When I glance at him again, he’s wringing his hands nervously. He doesn’t even seem to know he’s doing it.
“Hey,” I whisper to him. Something possesses me to reach over and put a hand on his wrist. But when I realize how close my fingers are to his crotch, I pull it back.
His hand comes up, like it’s chasing mine, and then drops back into his lap.
“We're going to figure it out,” I say. “Everything's totally fine.”
Maybe if I say it enough, I’ll start to believe it.