CURVED LINES IN SPACE

Ash comes back at the end of the summer, while she is trying to decide what to take to Nevada. (A mix, she thinks, of school things and night things, something appropriate for all of intellectual discourse, saving the world, and looking vaguely interesting next to a bunch of superhuman supermodel supergeniuses. But it's hard to decide between the smooth black skirt Rowan gave her at Christmas and the teddy bear Mom bought her when she was little; harder still to fit it all into a reasonable number of boxes, the reason for the hard decisions in the first place.)

Mark runs to tell her, but she knows, of course. She'd have known that tight expectant feeling anywhere, like that first burning sip of the hot French coffee Claudine makes every morning, sharp in her mouth and almost up her nose; like a willing loss of control, deep and dry and simple. Addictive. There have been a handful of times this year when she's felt this way, after picking up the telephone and hearing his voice or checking her email account only to find his name, immediately, among the dozen others waiting for her attention. Claudine always looks at her puzzledly for a few days after the phone calls, but the nice thing about Claudine is that she doesn't ask many questions; and she always warns Mary-Lynnette when he's on the phone. "Here he is," she'll say, shaking her head, "that nice boy you kicked. Why is he calling you?" although Mary-Lynnette thinks she really does understand. Claudine is good about giving space.

And Mary-Lynnette will find herself turning red and doing the taciturn teenage silence thing, which always bugs her in Mark; and taking the phone and hearing his voice without having to say, "Hello?" although she usually does, when she can find the breath for it. Sounds romantic, but it reminds her of the feeling you get when you've fallen really hard and can't get a breath for a few seconds: Panicky, childish, and shocked deep-down. Lightning, Rowan called the whole ordeal once.

Well, if so, she's Benjamin Franklin with a big damn kite.

The emails are different, somehow, maybe because she can't hear his voice -- and also because Ash is a terrible speller. He wrote her a letter she thought was both amused and maliciously gleeful, detailing an improbable love story between Quinn and someone called Rashelle (consequently spelt Rachel, Rashel, Rajel, and back to Rashelle again), and she'd felt just about equal parts confused and homesick for him, then. She supposes that his life hasn't exactly led him to spelling bees, although she also thinks it's ridiculous for someone who reads Jane Austen to spell that badly; but the emails make her fond of him when the phone calls sometimes just make her feel sad, or angry, and inevitably like someone's taken a blender to the better part of her heart.

Apparently, the soulmate principle works across wires; and, also apparently, it works across the mile and a half between her place and the girls'. She wonders if he's better at projecting or if she's better at hearing him, having waited so long clinging to the brief scraps of him that she can remember, the parts that were so impressed upon her mind that she can't help but think of him as a kind of grade-school collage of irritating, brave, bleeding, angry, solemn, sarcastic, beautiful. She wonders what he thinks of her, or more specifically what he'll think of her now, with longer hair, more freckles, and a better understanding of calculus.

The only comforting thing about the soulmate principle is the assurance that he does think about her. Mark has remarked jealously over the last year, usually when things were rough with Jade, that he wishes he could see Jade the way she sees Ash. Mary-Lynnette has been consistently unable to explain why she would never wish that on Mark, why the hunter's-eye view of the world -- Ash's view of the world, contorted to her own human eyesight -- is so disconcerting. There's just no way to tell someone that the planes of someone else's heart are frightening to her. But she's just a science girl-geek at heart, and one who finds romance in astronomical phenomena: It's entirely possible that she's the odd one out in the world of love, having never been in it before and having never had anything to compare it to, except for Jeremy Lovett, whom she killed and who therefore does not count.

She is eighteen years old and feels alternately eighty and eight.

Mark stands uncertainly at her doorway, watching her debate over the merits of a paisley scarf. "Aren't you going to go over there?" he asks, wheezing slightly from the run.

A paisley scarf has no merits. She tosses it into a pile near the closet. "No," she says, after a pause, "I'll wait for him here. I don't want a big scene in front of everyone." It's as close as she can get to telling him that there are things she and Ash need to say -- things that need saying -- that are private. Even secret. Even scary. But Mark will best understand not wanting a scene, since he hates being the centre of attention, and bristles under the slightest indication of the limelight.

So when Mark leaves, she packs, and waits, feeling him twinge in her head every so often; she attributes the twinges to things she thinks he'll hate, like Jade's pixie cut (Claudine's idea), the hole in the kitchen wall (Vic's idea, which earned him a broken nose and a visit to the sheriff's office), the pictures of hard rock bands Kestrel's been pasting all over the girls' house with something like admiration. She's spent more time than she wants to admit imagining his reaction to her SAT II scores, or her new car, or the zit on her chin that has grown so steadily over the last week that it's probably developed the ability to reverse the soulmate principle through sheer sentient force of will. Six phone calls, four emails, and a couple of days are all she has of him, and he's still looming over her shoulder, whispering in her ear, guiding her hand and her heart in everything she does.

Sometimes it's not fair; she didn't ask to fall in love. It's crazy, falling in love with someone you only knew for a handspan of time a year ago, like those few weeks stretched her heart so far that she's only now catching up with time. She's only almost eighteen. It's funny that she hasn't dreamt of him, but her subconscious isn't that cruel -- or kind -- or whatever the word is for things you want that are bad for your heart.

Now she knows she's going crazy, because she's just decided that Ash is like deep-fried Twinkies for her soul, and she can't stop moving or this will sink in, that she's going to Nevada with her soulmate to try to save the world and get a degree in astronomy. Maybe not in that order. Her head isn't the same when he's around, even when he's probably making fun of Jade's haircut or wondering how they transformed an old lamia's house into some kind of IKEA warehouse in the space of just one year. Mary-Lynnette supervised the redecoration with a blend of satisfaction, regret, and grief for the poor old lady buried in the woods out there.

She gives up on packing when she's holding the New Kids on the Block tape her mother bought her back when they were actually, you know, cool, and trying to decide whether she wants it or not. There was a time before Ash when she put those kinds of things in a box in her closet and let herself forget about them, but now -- whether it's him, leaving for university, or maybe both -- she can't seem to lose the feeling that her skin is raw. Like everything hurts more now that she's found her soulmate, not less; or that he just brings out the sadness in her, that old feeling she used to get staring up at the stars amplified into every aspect of her life.

It's funny that she doesn't realise he's standing right there until he clears his throat, and she jumps -- ungracefully. Her face heats, not because she isn't naturally elegant, but because she doesn't know if he's heard all the stupid things she's been saying to herself to take up the tenuous in-between time that came when he arrived but before she saw him. She suddenly doesn't have anything to say, which is silly when you remember that she's been thinking of things to say for months and months; silly and significant to the moment, because he does take her breath away, and oh, God, that does make her a stupid girl, doesn't it? Like the heroines in Claudine's Regency romance novels.

Guess that makes Ash the rake, then. Somehow it doesn't quite fit now, overtop the muted eyes and solemn expression. She has not pictured him as different, but the year has taken a toll: She can see work in his hands, now, and hesitation at her doorwway.

She realises with a start that he must be as nervous about this as she is. More. He's the one who's been off atoning for his sins -- sobbing bleeding girls, property damage, all things illegal, an accomplished rap sheet for a twenty-year-old -- and he looks worried. Whatever she had expected, it wasn't to see his catlike elegance faded and worn and world-weary, standing at her doorway like she needs to invite him in.

And that's the difference, in a nutshell. Now she does need to invite him in; this is her time. The ball is in her court. Your move, Mary-Lynnette. Otherwise this standoff could go on indefinitely, her looking at him, and he trying to recreate himself in her eyes, a changed man. She owes him this much. So she says, "Come in, why don't you," and tries not to sound like she feels: Awkward, awed, and a little bit stunned. But she does anyway.

He smiles and shuts the door behind him. Privacy. Wonderful. She wonders, then, why she feels trapped; but it's the confrontation, the oddness of being in love with this person without being close to him. They have no inside jokes, no easy camaraderie, nothing like she has even with Bunny Marten. What they have is lightning and fire, which is something she can't even begin to understand: Electricity, heat, anger, love, haze, tears, sacrifice, and Jeremy's death, all making the distance between them so much more than these few feet of worn shag carpeting.

"Hey," he says easily, sitting on her bed; she's still on the floor, fidgeting with her old tape without knowing whether she has the courage for this or not. It's not like calculus or biology. There isn't a way to know whether they can have that easygoing friendship she wants so much, or if they're stuck in this between-place. "How's it going? Packing for the apocalypse, I mean."

And she laughs; he's funny, when he wants to be, sarcastic and intelligent -- even if he can't spell worth a damn -- and she thinks it might be the first thing she really likes about him that has nothing to do with magic or lightning. "Not bad," she says, "but what do you wear to an apocalypse?"

"Not that scarf." He gestures to the growing pile on her floor, and she grins, even though she liked that same scarf well enough when she was in middle school. Then again, it had actually been moderately in style back then. "So, hey. How've you been?"

For a whole year? Her head spins with a whole year's worth of mysteries and screaming matches and B-plus papers. But she finally settles on, "I've been -- good, mostly," and it seems like the worst answer in the world once she's said it, incomplete and unscientific, so she rushes on hurriedly: "And what about you? Fully reformed?"

He smiles lopsidedly. "I hope so. I've been good, too." Different context, brilliant disarming smile. But she knows it's true; even if she couldn't feel it like she feels her own humanity, it's written in the lines of his arms and at his eyes, which are shadowed every now and then with what she hopes she will one day decipher. Complicated, hard, real emotion, the kind without simple names or simple solutions. It's a change she wouldn't have thought he could make in a year -- she told him that, back then -- but he has, if you know where to look, and she does. He says, "It's been a long time, huh, Mare," and she realises that she is still sitting on the floor. She feels like a jerk, because he is definitely making an effort, and she feels -- what? Frigid? Frightened? Nervous? Relieved?

So she stands up, awkwardly, uncomfortably, because this is not what she imagined at all. It's not even close to her mental image of Ash's homecoming, which has been happy, angry, sad, and even nonexistent in her head; under the stars, in the rain, in the sun, in Nevada; but not normal, in her bedroom, surrounded by the christmas lights she strung up last year and didn't take down, and the low light of the setting sun through the window. It takes her a few moments to get direction from there, but she feels better standing, and when she sits next to him on her bed, they're almost at eye level. He's taller than she is, but she finds that's all right; there is no sign that he is looking down at her this year.

She examines him. He is beautiful, broad-shouldered but not too muscular, with sharp cheekbones and a solid jaw, but what strikes her most is the shift of his eyes from violet to grey as he watches her, trying, she figures, to get into her head the way she's been trying to get into his. That is, without any kind of magical understanding, which seems like cheating in the grand scheme of things. She's always wondered why his eyes shift colour, whether it's emotion or thought or just plain old nature.

They're circling, trying warily to scent one another out. She's seen the girls do it with someone they're not sure of; they even did it with her, once upon a time, though it seems like a thousand years since that nightmare summer. Now silence stretches between them mercilessly, without the distraction of pink haze or a murder mystery, and it's that much harder for Mary-Lynnette to figure out what to say.

"I didn't think this would be so hard," she says, with an embarrassed smile, looking out at the fading light across the hills.

"Well, you are a girl," Ash offers helpfully, and her gaze snaps back to him; she's caught somewhere between outrage and shock -- before she realises he's teasing her.

She gives him a shove. "And you're a jerk."

"Hey, I read Jane Austen. Give me a break."

"In bed, after partying, as I recall."

It's comfortable, continuing on in that vein, and when they lapse back into silence, it's not as hard or as uneasy. They have a lot to talk about -- but not now, while neither of them are prepared for soul-baring honesty or a long, serious discussion, not during this first shock of contact. The weird thing is thinking like this: That they have as much time as they need, because they're together from here on out.

"So what's the plan?" she asks. "When do we leave?"

When she speaks, he glances at her, although he's been discreetly looking around her room for a while now; his eyes are green, for now, but pale grey-green, without the jungle-cat hunter's sheen. "Well," he says, "that depends."

Mary-Lynnette resolves to be patient, although the curiously vampiric predisposition to lead people to their point inevitably, rather than saying it straight off, is enough to make her crazy sometimes. "On what?"

"Listen, Mare," he says, sighing. He looks tired and serious; there's a weight in his eyes that has settled since she last saw him, something that has offset his astonishing good looks with personality -- but she's so biased it's hardly funny. "I told another girl once. Well, she had a vision that I told her, anyway, same difference. Bad magic happens. More specifically, bad magic is happening. In Vegas. Now. And it's not a good place for anyone -- Night People, humans, whoever."

His eyes are cooling to blue in degrees. She nods, uncertainly.

"There are good people there -- that's Circle Daybreak for you, anyway. Lots of good people." He sounds vaguely ironic, definitely self-deprecating, but he plows on regardless. "But there are the kind of people who make the vampire Elders look like Girl Guides, too, and you have to know you've got a choice. You don't have to be there."

"Do you want me there?" Not that she gives a damn -- she is going to Nevada for school; her dorm is reserved and her classes are scheduled -- but this is important, too. Him not having the stereotypical white knight reaction to this will make things easier. She wants to touch him, just to put her hand on his, but there'll be time for that, and some of this is easier without the sparks, the pink haze.

Ash laughs a little, flashing white teeth and relief. "Yeah. I mean, it's a nightmare, don't get me wrong, but with you there it would be less of a nightmare. And if you tell anyone I said that, we will have words, sweetheart."

She snorts, giving him a look that says, If you think I'm buying your macho posturing, think again, buddy. "Don't worry. I won't tell." She wonders briefly how Ash fits among the superheroes: Certainly he looks the part, but he isn't really a true believer. Then again, neither is she. How could either of them be, after last summer?

He looks at her, and now his eyes are a shade of blue she's sure she's never seen in nature, a clear high azure, like the blue in a too-hot Bunsen burner flame, or Crayola markers. Blue beyond blue. But then it's gone, and settles on a quieter blue for a while. "Things haven't been good in Vegas, ML. They haven't found any Wild Powers -- but everyone is looking. It's getting nasty. You'll probably wish you'd stayed home."

"Probably," she agrees. Funny how quiet it seems once there's another person in the room and neither of you are talking. "I hear college is like that anyway," she adds gently, to soothe the small cloud of dismay she can feel beneath the bright light of their soulmate link, that thing she has no better name for because there aren't words in any language to describe what it feels like at any given moment.

"I told a girl once," he repeats quietly, looking out her window at the sunset. His voice goes distant, and she can practically feel him curling up in himself, wrapped hard around this next point. "Bad magic happens; it turned out to be me. I'm not good news, you know."

Mary-Lynnette smiles at this. "You weren't good news," she tells him. "But you changed." She knows this with the sureness and torrential force of a hundred thousand storms.

"Same thing," Ash replies, in a voice that doesn't belong to him alone -- a voice that she doubts has been heard from him by anyone else in a very long time. Maybe never. Vulnerable. "I don't know if it's ever -- " He breaks off, embarrassed, mumbles, "I dunno," gloomily instead.

"Not quite." They pause; he shrugs; she stares at her jeans in momentary frustration.

This is tricky territory, a place she'd hoped to avoid for now, perhaps for ever: She wants to put a hand over his and just let him feel her faith in him, but somehow that would be cheap. That would be cheating. There would always be something in him wondering if it's just her -- so the point has to be made outside.

"Did you know," Mary-Lynnette says, "that the planets don't orbit the sun in a circle?"

"What are you talking about?" Ash asks her, frowning. "Of course they do. Everyone knows that. Galileo knew that, Mare. Vampires are not that behind the times. Mostly." He's staring at her moodily, trying to figure out if she's going to kick him again, probably.

Ha. "Actually," she tells him gently, "they don't. They're going in curved straight lines. Ask any astonomist." Just to bring the point home, she adds, "No matter what everyone -- including Galileo -- thinks."

Ash looks like he's been doused with cold water, outsmarted by her once again. Double ha. "Same thing," he mutters, though there's something in him trying to get the point.

She shakes her head, and says, "Not quite."

When she leans over to kiss him, it's only with the intention of repeating their last tame kiss; she doesn't expect him to melt (Regency heroine-esque) into her mouth, the way he does, but she finds that the needy hand in her hair, the press of his lips trying not to take too much of her with them, and the sudden slump of his shoulders are all things she doesn't mind. There's no pink haze, but the world is right with him on her lips -- right and wild and beautiful, in all the ways she has ever wanted and never wanted in the same breath. She can feel him shaking minutely.

In the end, she stops kissing him and holds him instead, carding her fingers through his soft hair.

He straightens, finally, and looks at her. His eyes are warm hazel, almost the colour of honey. "So," he says, blending back into his usual, casual vapidity, "about this road trip to Las Vegas. My sisters are definitely not allowed to come."

"If they want to come," Mary-Lynnette says mildly, "I don't see how you can stop them. Rowan's their legal guardian now, remember." That had taken some legal wrangling and a little bit of mind control on top of it. Very Party of Five, minus two. "Unless you really want to try out your patriarchal big brother crap on Kestrel," she adds thoughtfully, glancing at him in a way that's supposed to tell him this may not be a good idea.

Ash looks aggrieved. "How am I supposed to ravish you every night if my sisters are around?"

"In your imagination?" she suggests sweetly.

"I hate the new world order," he mutters petulantly, and Mary-Lynnette laughs, tilting her head back into the last rays of the sun.

It's good to be home.