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Date Posted: 00:27:20 12/21/08 Sun
Author: Odelle
Author Host/IP: CPE000f1f760f01-CM0019477f48d8.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com / 99.229.244.122
Subject: When A Time Comes (Chapter 10)
In reply to: Odelle 's message, "When A Time Comes" on 13:03:27 12/03/08 Wed

(Sorry for the delay everyone: 'tis the Season for stress and chaos, and I really wanted to get the next few chapters to tell the right story. Enjoy. -- Odelle :) )



Michael had practically danced out of the restaurant, once he and Nikita had parted. He couldn’t have driven back to his apartment – he simply couldn’t stay still long enough to sit for ten minutes. He walked the streets of the city instead. His grin was perpetual, infectious. It made is sighs feel like laughter. Each time he tried to pull back his emotions, they would burst forth all the more – untamed expressions of joy. Because his very soul was beaming.

Nikita.

Her phone number rested in his breast pocket; he felt it against his chest in a warm presence that made him feel sure, confident. The number was committed to his memory from the first time he saw it – yet now that he was repeating it in his mind again and again, he half-feared he had forgotten every other number ever stored there.

The memory of receiving it invaded again, and he pinched the bridge of his nose in memory, shaking his head. Damn it all, his voice had cracked like a teenager when he had asked – to his manhood’s utter mortification. But it had made her laugh. And for that, he would endure a thousand embarrassing moments of vulnerability.

The rest of their evening had drifted by like a dream. Soft, unhurried; as if they were examining one another in reverent assurance of a next-time.

At her request, he had given her more revelation about his relationship with Adam; just little stories from the years gone by. She was clearly interested in hearing them. Yet he knew that, emotionally, she was as locked down as the embassy about the issue. He couldn’t read a thing from her – or, rather, she didn’t let a thing show. Nothing. Her eyes sparkled with a mysterious transparency and allowed a very real clarity to her thoughts – yet not one surfaced to that clear pond of brilliant blue. Nothing floated up into that carefully constructed, welcoming surface. Not that he was expecting to find a woman as open to read as a book. Hardly – Section, and now the Centre, had undoubtedly caused her to erect a fortress around every individual thought, feeling, gesture, and emotion. So that the surface was like the sudden blinding glint off a diamond – beautiful, inviting, alluring, but completely independent and concealing. She was more self-contained than even he was. Compartmentalized down to the very cell.

His jaw clenched with self-doubt and unease. Frankly, he himself would have read more like a Harlequin to her than the enigmatic man she remembered. He felt soft, pliable. The steel had run out of his veins, at some point. Being a father – and nothing more – for all the past years had made him...human. Where once he was a machine with a soul, now he was a human with a soul – self-conscious, fallible.

That’s not to say, however, that Nikita had appeared as a machine. No, she was, and has always been, all flesh and blood – and spirit. It’s just that now...now he could see that what began during their time together -- a distancing, a depth of canyon between each part of herself and between herself and everything else -- had taken root and blossomed into chasms wider than the imaginable. Complete with walls, moats and heavy artillery. It would be impossible to traverse; dangerous, threatening.

He stopped. The feeling that floated through him at that thought was as old as war, and entirely male. What man didn’t love a challenge? It sparked a possessiveness and determination in him that he barely recognized. Yet it returned like an old friend.

He would take down those barriers, one by one. The only question would be...where to begin his initial assault?

************

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