Knight Takes King #2
Dane smiles and gives a slow, farewell wink. He’s broken-hearted, but exhilarated, and he doesn’t realize how longingly he stares after Huff until Nomi’s palm cuts through his field of vision.
“Hello?” she says. “Wow, which one are you in love with?”
“I hope not Maisie,” Dane says. “She’s my sister.”
“Ah. Then you must be pining for the lovely gentleman.”
“I introduced them.”
“Aren’t you generous?” She releases her hold on his sleeve and puts her hands in her trouser pockets. “I’m starving. Can you pine and eat at the same time?”
They cram two little plates with appetizers and canapes, grab flutes of champagne and find a wide windowsill where they can munch and people-watch.
“I have no small talk,” Nomi says. “You can jump immediately into personal questions, but I do love gardening, and I love books. Either of those topics interest you?”
“Books.”
She smiles over her champagne. “What are you reading? Don’t be shy. I never judge.”
“I started Stephen King’s Misery.”
“You read him before?”
“No, first time. It’s freaking me out.”
“I read Misery like this…” Nomi puts a hand in front of her face, then peeks through her fingers. The sea-green eye has flecks of gold around the pupil.
“I was kind of in a situation where someone had complete control of my life,” Dane hears himself say. “It’s not a good read for me right now.”
“Absolutely not,” she says, as receptive and unfazed as a good friend would be. As if she knew already what the situation was.
“I should put it down and come back after a few more years of therapy. Maybe read Pet Sematary instead.”
Nomi vigorously shakes her head, chewing and swallowing. “You need a kinder, gentler intro to King. Try The Eyes of the Dragon.”
They stuff themselves and talk more about books.
Anything Dane’s read, Nomi has read or at least heard of.
By the time they’ve finished their snacks, Dane has scribbled a dozen recommended titles on a cocktail napkin.
He’s tucking it in his pocket when the gallery noise ratchets up a few decibels. Gideon Perfect has arrived.
“It’s the other man of the hour,” Nomi says.
Dane cranes his neck to see Gideon hug Maisie hard enough to lift her off her feet, twirling her in a circle. He puts her down and she gestures to Huff beside her. The two men shake hands.
Dane smiles, his heart full of a thousand things. Huff steps back and looks around the gallery, finally finding Dane’s gaze.
Thank you, he mouths again.
Dane raises his flute and finishes the last of the bubbly.
“I came with Ethan to the installation last night,” Nomi says. “So did Gideon.”
“Right,” Dane said. “Tonight is just a quick appearance.”
“I never met a celebrity before. It’s weird to see them slouch around, look at paintings, drink a Pepsi, blow their nose. Do all these human things. He was so normal. And he reads.”
Dane guesses he’s just heard Nomi Misteria’s highest accolade. He absently touches his pocket where the folded napkin is tucked.
“You and Ethan been together long?”
“We’re not together,” she says. “Just friends. It hasn’t been long, actually, but…”
“But?”
“Ethan is one of those people who imprints. He decides he likes you… No, not even likes you. He decides you belong in his life. Immediately. And he follows you, tracks you down, grabs your sleeve and begs you stick around so he can talk to you. And pleads with everyone else not to let you get away.”
“People like that can just as suddenly decide you’re out of their life,” Dane says.
“Tell me about it,” Nomi replies sourly, and Dane will soon learn this is a woman who was thrown in a dumpster as a newborn baby.
The crowd has shifted in Gideon’s direction, opening space around the paintings. Dane gestures ahead. “Join me down the rabbit hole?”
She fakes a yawn and a bored expression. “I’ve seen it,” she sighs. “With Gideon Perfect on my arm.”
Their sides bump and they lean a moment, laughing together. Nomi starts off and as she excuses herself between clusters of people, she reaches a hand behind for Dane. He takes it. All through the next hour, he thinks nothing of holding hands with this woman he’s just met. Yet it’s everything.
The evening will have much to remember. Much to think about later.
It’s an evening of bright color and photographic perfection that dissolves into impossibly fine brushwork.
A tapestry of long ears and sleek heads.
Round eyes full of wisdom, survival and longing.
Triangle noses and delicate whiskers. The soft vulnerability of rabbits and the tough, elongated strength of hares.
An encyclopedia of names and legends and tales across cultures.
“Check this out,” Nomi says, stopping before a large canvas with multiple hares and rabbits forming the Iberian peninsula.
“When the Phoenicians discovered Iberia, they found huge numbers of wild rabbits, which were unknown to them. They saw a resemblance to their native rock hyrax. The Punic word is shaphan.”
Thinking the Iberian coast was simply a large island, the Phoenicians called the place I-shaphan-im: Hyrax Island. When the Romans conquered the peninsula, I-shaphan-im became Hispania.
“So Spain got its name because of rabbits,” Dane says. “But it’s actually the name of an animal that never lived there.”
They travel along the exhibit, learning the word for moon in Sanskrit is ?a?adhara, meaning the one who carries the hare.
In Chinese folklore, female hares conceive through the touch of the full moon’s light, or by licking moonlight from a male hare’s fur.
West African trickster hares travel to North America on slave ships to transform into Br’er Rabbit and Compair Lapin. Native Americans have Nanabozho, the Great Hare. Wabosso the White Hare, the most powerful magician of all. And Ta-vwots, the Little Rabbit who destroys the world.
The Celtic goddess Eostre is a shape-shifter, assuming the form of a hare during each full moon. The Teutonic Holda and Norse Freya are both attended by hares. Kaltes, another shape-shifting moon goddess from Siberia, roams the snowy steppes as a rabbit.
Ostara, moon goddess of Anglo-Saxon myth, carries a white hare who lays brightly colored eggs, which are given to children at springtime fertility rituals. The forerunner of the modern Easter Bunny.
In Egyptian myth, hares are closely associated with the cycles of the moon: masculine when waxing and feminine when waning. All throughout ancient and modern cultures, across continents, hares are believed to be androgynous, shifting between genders.
Oh, Diane says.
Wow, Dane echoes.
The largest canvas is a trio of hares running in a circle. Each stretched long, noses to tails, their ears forming a triangle.
“It’s an optical illusion,” Nomi says. “Each hare has two ears, but it looks like they share only three.”
Dane is overwhelmed. Slightly outside himself.
The evening is spinning like those three hares, yet he’s simultaneously grounded by the feel of Nomi’s fingers and a list of her favorite books in his pocket.
Maisie flushed with triumph, smiling as Huff moves a stray tendril of hair behind her ear.
Ethan holding the tip of his tongue in his teeth as he writes his phone number on a piece of scrap paper, then makes a quick sketch of the three hares beneath it.
“Call me,” he says. “Tomorrow, all right? Promise?”
Dane tucks the paper in his other pocket and promises. All the way back home to Norwalk, he keeps his hands in his pockets, each closed tight around the things Nomi and Ethan love best. Wishing he’d offered something for them to fold up and carry home.
You did, Diane whispers. You gave them your eyes.