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  Andrea laughed in understanding and grasped the proffered hand. “Hi. I’m Andrea—” That was as far as she got when another feminine voice interrupted.

  “Is anyone sitting here?”

  Startled by the directions of the coolly voiced query, Andrea and Alycia drew their hands back and looked up. The woman standing beside the booth was about their age, beautiful, and, at that moment, obviously out of patience. Andrea repeated her flicked-hand invitation.

  “Just us,” she replied. “You might as well bring the number to three.” Andrea grinned. “I’m Porthos.”

  “I’m Athos,” Alycia chimed in.

  “I’m bushed.”

  There was a heartbeat of silence as the three women gazed at one another. Then they burst into spontaneous laughter.

  “Sorry if I sounded rude,” the third woman said when the laughter had subsided. “I’m Karla Janowitz,” she continued, offering her hand to each as Andrea and Alycia introduced themselves. “And I really am beat... bordering on depressed.”

  Alycia nodded sagely. “It’s going around.”

  “I think I’ve been exposed to the virus.” Andrea sighed.

  The spontaneous laughter erupted again.

  “What do you think the chances are of getting waited on in this crush?” Karla wondered aloud when their amusement again died down.

  “Slim,” Alycia began.

  “To none,” Andrea finished.

  “But I’m parched!” Karla groaned, slumping against the back of the booth. “I’ve been pounding the pavement all day looking for a room.”

  “A cubicle,” Alycia inserted.

  “A closet,” Andrea concluded.

  “You, too, huh?” Karla shifted her gaze from Alycia to Andrea, then slowly shook her head. “I suppose I should’ve bypassed independence and gone directly for on-campus housing.”

  “The same thought occurred to me,” Alycia confessed.

  “Ditto.”

  Karla and Alycia stared at Andrea, and then all three again broke into tired laughter.

  “You know, if I were a witness to this little scene,” Karla observed a moment later, “I’d deduce that the three of us were doing an impression of an old Marx Brothers comedy routine.”

  “It beats sobbing all over the table,” Andrea replied. “Sobbing is so ... so ...”

  “Immature?” Alycia interjected.

  “Yeah.”

  “Right.”

  “But I must admit,” Alycia went on, nodding at her two companions, “I do feel like wailing right now. How . . . how, I ask you, did I ever convince myself that finding a room would be a snap?”

  “Don’t ask me!” Karla yelped. “I’m rowing the same boat.”

  “With one oar in the water,” Andrea agreed glumly.

  “One oar is an apt description.” Karla grimaced. “Do you know what I actually did?” Without waiting for a response, she proceeded to tell them. “I actually made an appointment to look at an apartment! I mean, am I getting flaky or what? Hell, on my savings, I can’t afford to maintain a small bachelor unit, never mind a three-bedroom apartment!”

  “Three bedrooms?” Andrea leaned forward, her expression alert.

  Alycia perked up. “You made an appointment?”

  Karla didn’t disappoint them by being slow on the uptake. “Do you think we could swing it?” she asked, hopefully.

  “If we set our hearts and minds to it,” Alycia said, her voice soft with yearning.

  The two girls regarded Andrea across the narrow booth table. Andrea smiled, then shrugged. “I think the arrangement will work.”

  It did. The friendship that was forged between the three women that day not only endured through four years of college, but grew into a bond as strong as any shared by the closest of sisters.

  Memories flicked through Andrea’s mind like the ruffled pages of a book. Laughing times, somber times, scrimping end-of-the-month macaroni-and-cheese-three-nights-a-week times. The memory pages grew fewer in number and more vivid. Memories of the previous spring and the event that broke up the mismatched trio, physically if not emotionally.

  Andrea moved restlessly on the bed as she relived the fear and anxiety she and Karla had shared on learning that Alycia had been injured in an automobile accident while driving to Williamsburg during the college spring break.

  Then the memory page turned, and Andrea relaxed with a relieved sigh. She and Karla had laughed and cried and hugged each other on receiving the news that Alycia was at last fully conscious after nearly a month of drifting close to the dangerous edge of coma. They rejoiced when Alycia was brought home from the hospital by the drawn but obviously relieved Sean Halloran, the man Alycia had fallen headlong in love with a mere week before the start of spring break.

  A soft smile curved Andrea’s lips as she recalled the incredible story Alycia had seemed compelled to relate to her and Karla soon after returning home.

  While drifting in and out of consciousness as she lay in a hospital bed in Richmond, Virginia, Alycia had felt herself caught in some sort of time warp, transposed in spirit to eighteenth-century Williamsburg. And as if that alone wasn’t weird enough, Alycia claimed to have met a man— an eighteenth-century man, no less—who was an officer of the Virginia Rangers, attached to General Washington’s staff, and the breathing image of Sean Halloran. The man’s name was Patrick Halloran. Alycia further maintained that, quite naturally, she fell in love with Patrick and he with her. But they were forced to part when Patrick’s duty leave was over, and Alice was forced to await news of the battle he was heading into, and whose outcome she already knew. The battle was engaged at Brandywine Creek.

  Much agitated, and in wide-eyed seriousness, Alycia had told Andrea and Karla that news eventually reached Williamsburg of Washington’s defeat at Brandywine and his subsequent retreat to Valley Forge. Notice was also received of the death of Major Patrick Halloran. Tears had brightened Alycia’s horror-filled eyes as she recounted her grief to Andrea and Karla. And tears had overflowed Andrea’s eyes as she heard and identified with the pain in Alycia’s voice.

  “I couldn’t believe that fate would be so cruel as to allow me to love and lose the same man, not once but twice. I was wild with grief. Late that night I crept out of the house and saddled a horse, determined to find Patrick, or his grave. I could not get to Sean. I had left him in the future. But I knew how to get to Brandywine. I had to find Patrick!” Alycia’s eyes were wide, but looking in, not out.

  “I rode through the night, hours, hours. There was a storm. The horse bolted and plunged into the forest bordering the road. I struck my head on a low-hanging branch and was thrown from the saddle. I screamed for Sean, for Patrick. When I awoke, I was in the hospital in Richmond. And Sean was there, holding me close, holding on to me as if he’d fight the devil before letting me go.”

  Karla, the earthbound realist, had remained skeptical throughout the retelling of the strange experience. When Alycia finished on a cry of “Did it happen or was it all a hallucinatory dream?” Karla relented enough to offer words of assurance; but even those were thinly veiled with cynicism.

  “Of course it was a dream, Alycia. A very understandable dream. You had been studying the Battle of Brandywine Creek for weeks before you left for Williamsburg. In addition, dare I remind you that you met and fell in love with Sean a week before your departure? You suffered a head injury in the accident.” Her smile held a hint of superiority that had become endearingly familiar to both her friends. “I can see that the dream would seem very real to you, under the circumstances. But I’m positive that it was only a dream.”

  Deeply moved and oddly affected by the tale, Andrea wasn’t nearly as certain as Karla appeared to be. “I don’t know,” she said softly, unashamedly brushing the tears from her cheeks while grasping Alycia’s hand tightly with her other hand. “Come to that,” she went on more strongly when Karla snorted, “who actually does know whether or not it’s possible to travel through time on some sort of
warp?”

  “I give up!” Karla rolled her eyes in exasperation and turned to walk to the door. But she paused in the doorway to grin at them over her shoulder. “It’s a good thing I genuinely love you two,” she said wryly. “Because you both really are eccentric yo-yos, you know.” Then she was gone, her soft, indulgent laughter wafting back to them from the stairway.

  The memory of Karla’s achingly familiar laughter echoed inside Andrea’s head, bringing a sleepy smile to her lips. Images flickered and flared, and her smile softened as the resonant echo of laugher became the voices of Alycia and Sean on the glorious May morning they exchanged vows of marriage.

  The mismatched trio had split to go their separate ways. A few hours after their wedding ceremony, Alycia and Sean drove away from the apartment amid a shower of laughter and birdseed, headed for an undisclosed honeymoon destination. Before the end of the following week, Andrea and Karla had finished packing their things and cleaning the apartment. Emotions running close to the surface, and unabashed tears streaking their mascara, they parted company, Karla to Sedona, Arizona, and the art gallery she’d plunged herself into debt to establish, and Andrea to her aunt Irene’s home in Lancaster, to anxiously await a response to her application for employment with NASA.

  The letter of rejection arrived from Houston one week after Andrea returned to Lancaster, and one day before the letter of invitation arrived from her aunt Celia.

  At loose ends, unemployed, and feeling more than ever like a stranger in her aunt Irene’s home, Andrea had accepted Celia’s invitation at once. Near the end of the initial two-week visit, Celia had extended the invitation, generously leaving it open-ended. And now the summer was nearly over, and Andrea was working with a whole new set of plans. She had taken a part-time job and had enrolled for post-graduate classes in a local college that was quite small but highly accredited.

  Memory was beginning to blur and dissolve in the mist of advancing sleep. Yet, even cocooned in the nether world of half-sleep, Andrea felt a pang of regret. She had geared her studies toward aeronautics and had looked forward so eagerly to working in some capacity with the NASA team planning future space probes.

  A soft sigh whispered from her throat. All but one of the memory pages and echoes were gone. And the one remaining page was the single memory Andrea had hoped to avoid. Her hope was shattered by the weakness induced by encroaching sleep.

  The memory spanned an entire year. At times lonely for male companionship, yet afraid to trust another man, Andrea had dreamed up a fantasy lover, a man unlike other men, perfect in appearance and character. At times her dreams had seemed every bit as real as Alycia’s experience seemed to her, but Andrea had never, ever considered the possibility of someday meeting her fantasy lover while she was wide awake.

  And yet she had seen him today with her own eyes, had registered his appearance with her fully conscious mind, had been given his name by her friend.

  It wasn’t possible! Moaning softly, Andrea struggled against surrendering to the shadowy wisps of sleep. But her struggles were weak, and she lost the battle. Reality retreated before billowing darkness of slumber. She was floating, cushioned by the cloud of unconsciousness. There was a hazy form in the distance, moving toward her with long, leisurely strides. The form took on substance as it drew nearer. He was very tall and incredibly, unbelievably handsome. His smile struck a light in her soul. His voice was a soft caress in her heart.

  “Hi, sugar.”

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  He held out his hand to her. Unafraid, she entwined her fingers with his.

  In slumber Andrea knew him. They had met like this throughout a year of nightly dreams. It was always the same: he came to her out of the mist of sleep clouding her mind. He held out his hand; she gave him hers. Every dream had begun exactly the same. This one was different.

  He had called her “sugar.”

  Andrea knew she was dreaming. The conscious part of her mind, still attuned to reality, registered a vague sense of alarm. Why had he used that particular endearment?

  As in all previous dreams, he turned toward a narrow grass-bordered path.

  The sense of unease expanded within the reality-oriented part of Andrea, and for the first time, she resisted being drawn completely into the dream. Fighting the allure of him and the path along which he would lead her, she struggled to wake up.

  But the sleeping part of Andrea had a mind of its own. Setting her sable-dark hair swirling with an impatient toss of her head, she clasped his hand tightly, as if to anchor herself in his domain, and stepped onto the path beside him.

  Looking past her sleeping self, he smiled with gentle understanding at Andrea’s conscious, resistant self. His eyes held the glow of ancient wisdom.

  “Come along. You know you want to.” His voice was soft, tender, coaxing. “Give in to the longing and need and desire you conceal so well.”

  While her sleeping self stood mute, waiting, Andrea’s earthly, conscious self fought an inner battle. She was afraid, afraid of losing herself; but she yearned to go, to lose herself with him, in him. The inner conflict was fierce between unconscious desires and the fear of disassociation.

  He ended her internal war by murmuring one word that was at once a request, a plea, and a command.

  “Come.”

  Unequal to the strength of her own unleashed needs, Andrea divorced herself from consciousness and merged with the essence of her own conscious, sleeping self.

  The dreamscape changed immediately. The shadowed mist evaporated in the sparkling sunlight. The scene was familiar to Andrea. She recognized the rough, tree-dotted terrain and the path that was just wide enough to allow her to walk beside him.

  In shade-dappled sunshine, they strolled hand in hand to a small grass-cushioned clearing beneath the wind-twisted branches of a large old tree. Pulling Andrea down with him, he dropped to the ground. He settled his back against the age-gnarled tree trunk, then drew her slender form into the embracing cradle of his parted thighs.

  Exhaling a sigh of utter contentment, Andrea snuggled into the haven of his warm body and rested her head on the pillow of his chest.

  “Are you now glad you gave in?” His breath ruffled the hair at the crown of her head; his nearness ruffled her senses.

  “Yes.”

  “And are you now happy?” His voice held a hint of amusement, as though he knew what her answer would be.

  Andrea didn’t mind at all—in fact, she shared his amusement. “Oh, yes!”

  “Then I’m happy, too.”

  They were quiet for a time, content to bask in their mutual inner emotional rhythms. Andrea could hear the music of a restless sea in the background. She had heard and identified the sound during the very first dream of him, yet in over a year she had never actually seen the source of the ocean song. The dream always opened in the mist at the beginning of the path and ended in that grass-padded spot beneath the old tree in the clearing.

  In her waking hours, Andrea carried in a guarded section of her heart and mind the memory of the tree, the clearing, the sound of a distant sea, and him. She had learned to know him in this secret place, had come to the realization that he was the representation of her ideal of male perfection. They had held long conversations in this shaded bower. They had laughed freely together.

  During the winter months of strung-together dreams, Andrea had come to trust him. And through that trust, and because her accumulated dreams slowly began to seem more real to Andrea than waking reality, she had come to love him. Inevitably, as her love for him grew and deepened, it added a new, anticipatory dimension to her dreams.

  His ultimate possession of her became the stuff of her unconscious and conscious longings. While going about her daily routine, presenting to her friends and acquaintances the Andrea they believed they knew, she lived for the nights, for the precious moments spent with him, secretly longing for his ultimate possession of her dream self.

  Strangely, though her dreams
became more erotic and his caresses grew nightly more arousing, he had never crossed that final barrier, had never fulfilled the longing that consumed her thoughts, waking or sleeping.

  Now, her waking consciousness submerged within the dream state, Andrea expressed all her longing in a soft sigh.

  “Andrea?” His long, elegant fingers brushed the length of her thigh in a feather-light stroke.

  “Hmm?” She responded to his caress by moving sensuously against him.

  “Why do you sigh, my heart?” His stroking fingers explored the curving outline of her form from her rounded hip to her shoulder; his fingers gently probed the hollow at the base of her throat.

  Andrea smiled and rubbed her cheek against the back of his hand. He had begun calling her “my heart” on the night of her arrival in California. Delighted with the endearment, Andrea had raised her mouth to his, initiating the love play between them. He had rewarded her bravery by breathing the endearment into her mouth. Would he reward her again if she confessed to the reason for her sigh?

  Temptation beckoned, and after a moment’s uncertainty, Andrea surrendered to it. “I love you,” she whispered.

  His fingers encircled her arched throat; his voice was a low siren song of enticement against her ear. “And loving me causes you to sigh?”

  Andrea searched for a way to explain, a way to tell him of her secret longing to be one with him. In desperation she cried, “I don’t even know your name!”

  “My name is love “ he murmured, gliding his lips to her mouth, “Your love.”

  Enlightenment washed over Andrea’s clouded senses. Of course! She had created him, weaving her fantasy out of the threads of her loneliness and longing. He was hers exclusively. He was hers to command.

  “My love,” Andrea breathed, testing the sound of his name on her voice.

  “Yes.” He brushed his mouth over hers. “Only two words are required, my heart. Say the words and I’ll open the door to paradise for you.” His voice went low, almost nonexistent. “Say the words.”