The next day, Derek was at the security desk with his arm behind one of the big TV monitors, doing a check through their electronics. The entire process required gutting the whole system, touching each connection, understanding that the wires lead from this station port to that TV and then back to one of the VCRs and finally to the synchronizer which kept everything working on the same time. Derek’s fingers followed the turns and coils of wire that lead from the monitor to the heart of the system, the synchronizer. When he reached the end, he unscrewed the cord and watched the light on the station light up, calling for the companionship of the network to be returned. He screwed it back in, moving from the station to the monitor just in front of Gene. He felt a tap.

“What’re you doing?”

Price turned, still straining with his arm behind the monitor. “What?”

“You already checked those. They’re fine.”

Quietly, Derek’s fingers went back to the wires leading to a different monitor and began to unscrew that wire, anticipating the little green light on the display.

“You already checked the whole system,” Gene said to his partner’s back.

Derek continued unscrewing the wire, watching the green light on the station port turn on. After a second, he plugged it back in.

“You look a little restless.”

Derek sat back in his seat, quiet. “I’m going to check the fire alarms.”

“You already checked them today.”

“There are the vacuum cleaners to—”

“You already did it,” Gene said. “Twice.”

Derek just sat, facing the lobby doorways, the winged Pegasus on the glass panels behind the rotating doors, and staring at the brisk, speeding traffic outside.

Gene looked at him. “Are you all right?”

“I’m just bored. Can’t wait for the shift to end,” Price said as he saw someone pass through the doors. Gene looked ahead, and just as Price was going to stand up, a sharp sting in his toe held him down in his seat. A small tack was lodged in the top of his sole. He started to pull it out when a familiar voice asked the information desk, “And which way is that?”

Derek looked up instantly and saw a woman with long dark hair, facing away from him. The receptionist pointed to the elevators and said, “Third floor.” Price stared and started to stand when the tack, still in his shoe, stung him again. He quickly ripped it out, dropping it carelessly onto the floor. The woman had nearly passed him when he finally looked up at her. She’d rounded the security desk and had pushed the button for the elevator, waiting patiently with both hands on a bag she carried. Price sauntered over to the elevators, determined. The elevator bell dinged, the doors opened, and she stepped inside. He arrived at the elevator just in time to see her toss a long black lock away from her brown eyes. Not her.

Gene blinked. “You okay, man?”

The walk back to his seat felt long with a small measure of embarrassment warming his cheeks, and he knew why he was restless: Julia. For the rest of the day, Derek was determined to go to Starbucks, knowing with an unfamiliar certainty that she would be there. If she wasn’t, he could call her. In fact, that’s exactly what he would do. He’d go to Starbucks, and if she wasn’t there, he’d phone her. He had to see her. But why? Suddenly, his own thoughts were alien to him, invaders pronouncing an uncomfortable message. Why did he want to see her so much? Was she really more than a friend or acquaintance after only one night? Could she be more than that, or was he only someone he would never meet again? Price nodded—there had been many acquaintances he would never meet again. There was nothing for him to do but wait and let the events unfold.

When after his shift had ended and he drove to Starbucks, Derek found Julia sitting at the same table they had talked at before. Between them, a saxophone was being played over the politely quiet crowd. Her eyes from the masses of people caught him, and she waved. Without a word, she turned to face the music. He went to the empty chair opposite her.

Price leaned forward to say something but couldn’t think of the words. “How are you” would have been just as cliché as “Hey.” Talking about how he was going to call her would be mindless babbling. Telling her that she was all he thought about today was more than he wanted to reveal. What then, could he say?

Julia turned as though she had heard all of those thoughts and casually put a finger to her smiling mouth, “Shh,” and then turned to watch a harmonica join with the saxophone. Heat rose for the second time in his day, blushing. He spent so long waiting to talk to her again, but now that she was here, he couldn’t—the music had her attention. Silence gave way to the addition of a deep-sounding bass, and it frustrated him. Derek resettled his jacket and turned to face the trio, resigned to his defeat.

That was when he felt it. At the foot of the harmonica player, a little boy was swaying his head, and the musicians in time with the boy. The feet of all the musicians tapped the ground in the same beat. None of this was strange to Derek, yet. If he stopped to look beside him, he might have seen Julia looking at him with a knowing smile, a verdant twinkle in her green eyes. But he remained fixed to the synchronicity of the triad. Gradually, the instruments moved together and, upon touching, melded to one another, making the three musicians play together on one technological impossibility, with the music flowing out of a giant opening like smoke wafting from a cigarette. The boy’s head swayed with the tapping of three pairs of feet. But then, three became one, tapping from a single pair of shoes, and the sole, amalgam musician sat taller than everybody else, still managing to play the bass-harmonixophone with clear ease and skill. Derek stared, his sense of reality flowing away with the jazzy tune. The merging hadn’t stopped, but it was calmer now. Almost without any perceptible change, Derek soon couldn’t separate musician and instrument. It was merely music, pulsing, and with its eyes closed, letting itself be, it spread through the shop. Derek watched the crowds, acting as though the musicians were still in their seats and not morphed into the glowing, jazzy smoke that blew through the shop. While the saxophone surfaced alone for the crescendo, it seemed that the essence would break open the building with its magical presence.

“They have white mocha today.”

He turned to face her green eyes. Behind him, the music had deflated from the crescendo, and each instrument was its individual self again. A disappointed look passed over his face, wishing he had seen the reverting. “What?”

“You can order your drink today.”

Not feeling the need to be rejuvenated, he started to stand anyway. He stuttered, trying to recover from the shift between the dreamy world and wherever he was now. “Oh. I think I’ll—”

“Yeah,” Julia nodded. “Go ahead.”

Derek set down his jacket and walked up to the counter, but first he passed by the musicians, the three ordinary men with ordinary instruments. He dropped two dollars in their tip jar. “You guys are good.”

In suspicious timing, they answered together, “Thanks.”

Derek came back to his seat after two minutes of buying the white mocha and waiting as it was made. In that time, Derek had run through everything he could possibly say. And now, sliding back in front of her eyes, noticing her hair was let down and she was reading from the same play after the live music had stopped, he was ready. “I knew you would be here.”

She nodded, humming to herself the tune from earlier. “I know.”

“You did? I mean, you do?” She wasn’t following the script in his head.

Julia smiled, the sun breaking through clouds. “Of course, I did,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have known I would be here.” Before Derek could piece through the logic and reply, she set down her book and leaned excitedly to him. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About not liking Shakespeare.” She smiled as she talked, like someone anxious to reveal a secret plan. “I believe you don’t like Shakespeare because you haven’t seen him performed before.” Derek felt the routine of his day slowly departing, the anxiety of losing security, like a train drifting from its tracks. With a question, she derailed him. “What are you doing for the rest of the night?”

They left the Starbucks and drove to the nearest park, a place that Derek didn’t notice before. Perhaps it had been there the whole time or maybe it was some magic that she was using. As Derek followed the red lights of Julia’s car in his own car, he decided that it was a mixture of both. The park was half-lit from the baseball diamond on one end of the park and forested with shadows and trees on the other end, a small creek running beside both. After they parked, Derek found himself quickly following Julia as she skipped down the jogging path, empty in the dark. After a few bends in the path, she stopped at a thinly wooded slope and leaned against a tree at the back of the natural stage the slope had made. “Sit there,” she directed and pointed to the lower end of the slope. The night and wild brush made a thick curtain that throned her in the wood’s kingdom. A pair of trees marked the bounds of her stage.

Price folded his jacket under him as he sat in the pile of dead leaves. He felt unsure in this world, but combining the direction she gave and his trust of that direction, he was able to sit comfortably with an arbitrary wall between himself and the world of the wood. He felt particularly civil with his jacket-seat. Price felt even more civil when he looked up, but only because of the comparison, the wild dark of her hair in center stage, the green eyes brilliant through the curtain of dark. Abruptly, she launched herself into the opening lines of Two Gentlemen of Verona with a fervor only hinted at before. The moon shined benevolently with the mock daylights of the distant baseball diamond; these both gave her ample reading light, Price noticed as she glanced at the lines occasionally. Also, Derek noticed, the two lights gave the surroundings an eerie, cloudy glow, in which her green eyes twinkled verdantly. She swung around the trees, a thing from two worlds, standing in different places as the two men, Proteus and Valentine, argued about love’s true form.

Derek watched the actress flow competently, as far as he could judge, between the characters and voices, less often looking at the script. The wind started to blow, and he saw the trees dance with it. In the next moment, Julia was sharing her lines with the trees themselves, who in turn said their lines with deep thespian voices and wide-swinging gestures. The lament of a beloved who could not trust her lover’s heart was spoken on woody lips, and he knew, Derek just knew that it was happening again, whatever it was. The second tree chimed in, leaning to Julia as it spoke. The entire cast became assembled as neighboring trees joined in to play their parts; a play of one player became a performance of a woodland troupe, Julia in her proper role. When Act II ended, the trees solemnly strode to their first-rooted places—she stood for a breath, reeling, needing the intermission.

“It’s not over, is it?” he said, a little worried.

Julia beamed at him. “So you’re liking it so far?”

“Loving it.”

“I just need a minute.” She stood aside, breathing and leafing ahead through the pages. Derek straightened out his jacket, and as he did so, the urge to ask Julia became overwhelming. She was standing against one of the trees, pushing her dark locks out of her eyes, a wood nymph nearly melded in the bark and turning the pages of a grander story. Did she know that the wood table on their first meeting was alive? He wanted to know if the woman he stared at now had stared with the same kind of amazement at the band that became music itself. Did she know that she was leaning on her costar, a small maple? With what eyes did she see the things he saw, if she did at all? Maybe he needed to see a doctor.

Her green eyes had pinned him. “What is it?”

There was an ocean of black around her seas of green, and the mood was trapped only in the green. She was staring at him, and he found it nearly impossible to read her face, like a man hypnotized by waves. “I was wondering if you knew what you’re doing to me.”

Abruptly, she laughed and set to the opening lines. Derek didn’t think she understood what he asked. It did sound very romantic, despite how he meant it. Something in him told him that there was no other way he could have begun his words, and that was all right. Act II, meanwhile, continued, easing into the magic, though it was quicker to accept the trees, as if their relaxed joints were eager to begin again. It was when Julia played one of the lovers traipsing through the dangerous wood that Derek noticed the trees had stopped moving. The stillness, unsettling and unmagical, cracked with Julia’s shriek. Only the wind moved, swaying the trees as Julia had disappeared, leaving Price alone in the wood, leaves and shadows rolling on. And two other figures behind the vertical height of the trees.

Derek was on his feet and running after them, pounding through the forest, and tackling the slower one. He moaned, a weak, unshaven man in brown and gray; his clothes smelled of sour vomit and cheap liquor. Desperate and homeless, but desperation sharpened the edges of his unshaven hairs. With no struggle, he laid there, almost glad of a reason to stop running. Derek took off. The rows of trees, once open and spacious, were now nondescript and ambiguous. He heard Julia’s cry again, and the way was a little clearer. As he passed through a thicket, he felt himself enter the magic again.

And there was Julia, whose familiar green eyes stared helplessly at Derek, tired and wild. Then he noticed a long, silvery dress, ornate with curls of sterling that wound down to the ground and hid the feet she ran on, had replaced the blue jeans and T-shirt. Her hair spun back and hovered as she faced the attacker and his grip on her arm. The beady eyes that looked back at him held a dawning fear. Haunted, the eyes were less ugly than the warped, yellow-green skin and sunken sores that stretched through his claws and face which was punctuated with jagged teeth. The clawed grip on her arm slipped; Derek charged forward.

He didn’t think about the odd clunk that weighed down on his footfalls, but he did see the moonshine on his arm from the metallic gauntlets which grunted only slightly when he punched into the inhuman face. As the body sank, Derek realized that he had taken for granted that he could just watch the magic and not have to do anything, a different window into the same world. He never imagined himself within the reality-twisting world that bubbled to the surface when he was near Julia. Now the world called on him to take part. The ratty goblin rose up again with a twisted dagger in his claw. In that other real world, Price had trained long to deal with weapons and those who used them, even before being put down to security guarding from being in the thick burn of society’s pyre. His hands and feet retained their old precision, still moving with instinctual fluidity in this world. Suddenly, the dagger’s gnarled handle was in his hand and tossed into the bushes, the goblin holding his wrist and hissing in gasps. They both stepped forward, and Derek’s gauntlet clinched, the goblin falling flat, its pale yellow skin blanched white.

Derek breathed, calming down the unexpected pressure in his veins, fire and steam. He looked down and saw his own costume. Dark leather boots covered the bottoms of textured pants that disappeared under the sloping curve of armor that plated over his chest and held two plates over his shoulders. Though his belt held no sword and his head was bare, Derek recognized enough to see a knight’s apparel. As his brain tried to swallow the incredulity, Julia ran into his arms, heaving all the breath that she held during the fight. He felt tears on his neck that fell down through and under his armor.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Let’s go.” Then, passing out of the enclosed thicket, the armor’s noise, the sparkles of the dress were gone. When Derek looked back, a dark shadow cast over the brown rags and beard. As Julia passed through a branch that Derek held open in the wall around the thicket, he looked back and saw a metal glint in the soft glow of the baseball diamond. A switchblade was the dagger he had wrestled away.

They returned to their cars and he stood by her door as she sat. He told her that he would meet her again the next night at Starbucks and that she should finish reading the rest to him sometime. Even though his mind was elsewhere, her smile cut through his thoughts, and she said two calm words: “Thank you.” There was no magic happening, but he still saw two hypnotically green eyes. She eventually broke the stare and started her ignition. As she drove away, his mind returned to the clouds that accompanied him on their walk to the parking lot. He had to tell Gene about her. Even as he thought that to himself, a small reluctance held him, but he didn’t know why or where it came from. He got in and started his car.

***
Youssef Sleiman, falling in line with everyone’s expectations of his occasionally Type A personality, works as an English Tutor in the Writing Clinic of the University of North Texas. He does this for two reasons: it’s a paid chance to correct everyone’s grammar, and he can work in a place that he can refer to as ‘The Lab.’