Her grip tightened as I followed her inside, and a voice started screaming in my head to back up, to get away from this chick before I did something stupid or got blamed for it. But I looked at her again, and the voice quieted to a whimper.
This woman wasn’t like anyone I’d ever seen before. She was tall, heightened by the dark tights she wore and the loose, bright top with swirls of green and yellow which might have been flowers that cupped her small waist and drifted nearly to her thighs. She reminded me of a bunch of balloons, the kind that jackass clowns twist into animal shapes to impress stupid six-year-olds. There was so much color and noise in this woman—the whiteness of her skin, the loud shade of her dark lips, the jingle of the stack of bracelets on her wrist, and the thick bundle of long chestnut-colored hair that hung in a riot of waves and curls past her waist.
But it wasn’t the chaos of colors she wore that kept me from bolting: It was the stare she gave, the pause before she spoke as though she knew exactly who I was and why I’d pounded on her door.
Hold up. Why had I pounded on her door?
I couldn’t explain the sensation if I had a billion words to describe it. It was something weird but familiar, something I didn’t recognize in her expression, in the slow, sweet smile that moved across her face the longer she watched me. Like she knew me. Like I was supposed to be right there standing in front of her waiting for something to happen.
Hell. I was sleep-deprived.
When she stopped watching me, when that little smirk vanished from her features, she squinted, looking over my head as though she was considering something, like she needed to figure out what kind of flaw I had.
“It’s bad.” She waved her long fingers over my head, swooping one hand up and down my body, breaking the moment and confusing the hell outta me. “It’s just the wrong color.” Another wave and I finally wrestled my thoughts under control enough to step away from this crazy woman even as she tugged me further into her apartment.
I finally found my voice and my reason. “That shit is too loud,” I said, mustering all the good damn sense I could, as I looked around her cluttered apartment.
“What?” she asked, her brown eyes wide, innocent.
My gaze settled on an old ass record player in the corner, spinning, with the needle up. “Your record… that turntable?”
She frowned, but more confused than unfriendly. She had one of those faces that tears and worry and rudeness wouldn’t, couldn’t, keep from being beautiful. And she was. For a tall, skinny white chick, she was damn beautiful.
“The turntable, the speakers, you got to cut that shit down. I can’t sleep as it is, but that fucking …”
“Oh, you shouldn’t curse like that.”
Again she reached for me, fussing at me, bossy as hell as she led me to what I guessed was supposed to be a sofa but looked like a stack of fluffy mattresses with the loudest looking blankets and pillows thrown around them. The entire place reminded me of a circus caravan—colors that were deep and rich, tapestries and blankets draped over all the furniture, covering the lampshades like some drifter’s wet dream. Flowers, both dried and blooming in vases, along the window sill and across the mantel. The thick scent of something that smelled a little like weed clouded in the air, something sticky and sweet, but too flowery to be anything worth smoking.
She stared me down, gaze hard, critical. I brought my attention back her, trying to dismiss the fact that I’d gotten nosy eyeballing her place but not wanting to give in entirely. “Um… mind your business about my mouth…”
“Sit.” When I folded my arms, keeping another curse between my teeth for God knows why, the woman moved her brows up, those coffee-colored eyes matching me pound for pound. I meant to tell her to fuck off. I thought about just rolling out without so much as a word to her, but that look on her face, the one that was both severe and tempting all at the same time kept me stuck in place. Damn, it would be a mistake to underestimate this woman, doe eyes or not.
After her glare went on for damn ever, she nodded at the sofa, staring at me like she’d lost her own shit a long time ago and hadn’t bothered finding it. A few seconds, several long, furious blinks and I gave up, too damn tired to fight with some woman I didn’t know.
I sat, damn the good sense God gave me. No one bossed me but this woman found a way to get me inside her place and on her sofa with half a dozen words, all of them bossy as hell.
“Now, I want you to relax and breathe deeply. I’m going to focus your aura…”
“Look, lady…”
“Just relax. I need to assess where the problem is.” Another glare and she relaxed her expression, her nose flaring as she inhaled deeply. “Now, close your eyes.” Even as she commanded it, she did it herself. I closed my eyes, but damn if I wasn’t still completely aware of her.
The image of her, the long cascading hair, the softly chiming bangles, the blouse shimmering around her body, all lingered behind my eyelids. She smelled like jasmine, a weird scent that I only recognized because Luke, my college roommate, thought he was Erykah Badu’s soul mate and was gearing up for the job by shopping at some funky head shop that sold all kinds of crazy essential oils. Jasmine was Luke’s scent of choice and of all the nasty oils he brought into our room, the jasmine smelled the least like ass. On her, it smelled... well, better than any damned oil, essential or not.
“There’s a misalignment in your auric field, I’m afraid.” Her voice went still, deep and as I squinted to peek at her through the half-light , I caught the expression on her face; all studious, the deep line between her eyebrows that hadn’t been there a minute before giving her a focused, worried look. She, at least, thought there something serious that needed fixing, and that something serious seemed to be me.
Her face was round, a sort of heart shape that made her look like a kid. But then I got a good look at her eyes and caught something in them that I hadn’t before—stories and legends. That’s what my gramps used to say of folk whose past was clouded right in their eyes. Stories that became legends; a life so unbelievable or sad, so lived that it showed in the stare someone had, how they held it, kept it as though every story would live in their eyes, but they’d never speak it out loud. You had to look, gramps would say. You had to look hard.
I didn’t even know this woman’s name, but inside of three minutes, I knew there was something belly deep she kept to herself.
“I just finished cleansing my aura.” It came out like an afterthought, something she said to fill up the space between us as she moved her hands around my body, motioning like she meant to rub my skin, but without touching me. Not once. She moved weirdly, hands and fingers stretching all over me; head, shoulders, chest, down to my knees and feet, then back up again, to my shoulders and neck, around my aura, whatever the hell that was, until she finally rested her fingers against my traps, exhaling hard as she worked her nails up and along my neck, her thumbs rubbing in circles just under the back of my head. “It’s probably why yours was so easy to notice.”
“That right?” I tried for skeptical, but my voice sounded far away. I forgot about the stupid music she’d blared through her apartment over the past four days. I forgot about the sleep that wouldn’t come to me. I forgot about all the worries and work that had kept me up, all gone as I gazed at her face. I’d never seen skin that smooth or freckles up close like that, lips that ripe. If I moved a little, brought her close, I could touch her mouth in a fraction of movement.