Let's Get Intuit, Chapter 7

Chapter 7
Like the days before, she set out to follow the wind. Delilah needed all the help she could get with this so anything that helped her along was just fine. The wind was blowing crisply away from the shopping district so she followed it, enjoying the feel of its strength on her back as she let it push her along, an unseen hand.

She had been walking for almost fifteen minutes, smelling only the normal street smells, and feeling nothing extraordinary, when the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She reached up and brushed a hand across the nape of her neck quickly, hoping to shake whatever was giving her a wary feeling. But it didn't work - the hair continued to prickle beneath the hem of her woolen cap.

She turned in a circle, wondering what, if any, intuit significance this had. Maybe it was just something normal, she mused, like someone staring at the back of her head or a chill finding its way underneath her clothes and against her skin. But the minute she moved her hand it stood up again, a veritable forest of sensations demanding her attention.

She stopped and turned, completely unprepared for what she might find there. Madge had somehow missed this, amongst the many other things she said she’d fill her in on later; she had gotten no briefing on what this was supposed to mean. She needed an anatomy book to understand what was happening to her body, felt like a prepubescent girl standing in front of a mirror and wondering what all the changes were supposed to mean. She had already been there done that. It had been a hard enough time in her life to live before; she dreaded going through it again now, alone.

So she turned, still unsure if it was danger or delirium that she would find there, and was caught completely off guard at what turned out to be standing there.

"Don’t I know you?" Jensen asked with a quarter smile, really just a twist of his mouth, that reminded her of how truly good looking he was, not that she needed much of a reminder. Had her nose led her here, really?

"Hi," she answered. She had to turn into the wind to face him and was doing her best to keep her hair from reaching out to him in the wind. At the rate it was growing it would probably succeed if they stayed talking longer than just a few minutes.

It took just a moment before that flirtatiously distracting version of herself was able to take a breath and move forward. "You forgot me already. Haven’t you been waiting by the phone for me to call you?" she asked with an amusing light in her eyes.

"No. Gentleman that I was, I was waiting patiently for you to be cured."

"You didn't want to be forced to make-out with a petri dish of germs?"

"Is that what I get to look forward to?" he asked, his own eyes lighting up and giving her lips a look just a second longer than needed so that she felt the urge to cover them up, her cheeks starting to redden at his scrutiny. "I thought the point of foisting you off on Stephen was because you wanted me looking at you," he said, leaning in close, almost seductively so, to whisper in her ear, against the wind.

"Was it?" she asked, meeting his eyes, already so close to her own that she couldn't manage to look away even if she had wanted to. Leaning so close, she could smell sandalwood and dark chocolate. The back of her mind was trying to decipher it, reconcile those two things but they wouldn't fit. Which one was real and which one was just in her mind? Frankly she didn’t care – rolling together they smelled delicious.

"So," he said, interrupting the electrically charged moment with a shake of his head, bringing them both back down to reality, "what are you doing over here, out in this horrible wind with that cold of yours?"

"Um, I'm all cured," she said, appearing anything but as she hugged herself tightly, trying desperately to stop her hands from getting away from her. They seemed to want nothing more than to reach out to him and pull him back, close enough for her to embrace and breathe in his scent again. Maybe she couldn't understand what it was supposed to mean but she understood that it was intoxicating, making her woozy standing so close to him.

"Are you?" he asked. "Well then I changed my mind. No more gentlemen from me. I think I might want my number back if you’re not going to use it."

She looked at him sheepishly. "Maybe I lost it," she said, all evasiveness, trying to appear both coy and ashamed at the same time in an attempt to steer him away from the truth.

"Maybe you should learn to keep better track of your things."

"Well maybe if you give it to me again I'll remember where I put it." Her hand made a break for it and reached out to rest softly against the rough suede of his jacket.

"Maybe you'll learn that sometimes you have to work for things you want."

She huffed and snatched her hand back. "Who says I want it?"

He just laughed, stepping a little away from her and under the eaves of the building. The wind howled towards them at that moment, a huge gusty sweeping of leaves that threatened to overturn them both. He was quick, like a panther, and grabbed her arm, pulling her under the eaves as well and out of the way of the debris rollicking along the street.

His hand was warm, strong, and his smell, of sandalwood and dark chocolate assaulted her again. She stared into his eyes and was reminded of the way his voiced had tripped across every one of her nerves last week, the way his fingertips had lightly caressed her back and the things she'd wanted to do to him because of it. She licked her lips and it was almost as if she could taste his heartbeat speeding up on the air. She was suddenly finding it hard to breathe again.

He must have been feeling something too since he didn't let her go immediately, his breath unsteady as their eyes met, as the wind howled around them, as she felt him move just ever so slightly closer to her, bending against the wind and into her.

A horn honked, kids in a passing car whistling and laughing, and it cracked the moment open wide. They stepped away quickly and his half-cocked smile was back in place. "You know Stephen warned me to be careful of you," he commented as they both watched the car speed away.

She turned back to him, part surprised, part intrigued. "Really? And what did he say?"

"That you break hearts faster than I could mend them," he said, looking at her a bit pensively as if trying to decide if it should be believed.

"That's a gross over exaggeration," she murmured. "I always give plenty of time for mending."
He shook his head and laughed a bit self-deprecatingly, shaking his finger at her. "I'm not sure what to make of you, miss,” he replied after a pregnant pause.

"If you're lucky maybe you'll find out," she said, backing away from him and the smell that was serving to slowly drive her insane.

He raised his hand in farewell as they both kept on backing away, two warriors calling a truce, neither one wanting to turn their back on the other. By the time she rounded the corner, Delilah was no longer letting her nose do the leading. She knew exactly where she wanted to go but needed to create a wide arc around the downtown district so as not to run back into the Pouty Practitioner that she just couldn't seem to keep her hands off of. If she'd indulged in letting her body do everything it wanted to do the kids in that car definitely would have had something to honk at.

It took her a half an hour before she reached Madge and her orange shop, her cheeks full of color from all of the activity. Anyone looking at her now never would have recognized her as that same sickly girl from a week ago, worn out from the buzzing and sneezing and symptoms she just couldn't shake. Magical Wasabi, it turned out, was not only cleansing but one of the best energy supplements not on the market. It gave her a jolt of oomph that it was hard to come down off of. She didn't know whether she could, but she desperately hoped that she wasn’t about to become addicted to a Chinese root – it sounded positively flower power flighty – but her body was starting to crave it just as much as Jensen's touch it seemed.

Delilah pushed the door open, feeling the clang of the bell in every cell in her body. It caught her off guard and she froze for a moment in mid-stride through it, closing her eyes to try to catch her breath and steady her soul.

"Hey there! Do what do I owe this pleasure?" Madge called across the shop. Delilah opened her eyes to find the place almost empty, just Madge and a broad shouldered man standing at the counter, looking every inch a straight-laced marine and seeming drastically out of place in such an unzipped store as Colin All Alternatives was.

"I . . ." she began, her eyes shifting restlessly to the brooding man with the buzz cut, leaning against the counter but still seeming to have perfect posture until she wondered if he required a ruler to get that way.

"Oh, Delilah! You haven't met yet, silly me. This is my cousin Brody. He works over at the Lift It! gym over on Cypress."

"Personal trainer by necessity, bounty hunter by desire. Nice to meet you," he said, coming across the store to shake her hand (and present himself for inspection it almost seemed). Even through his clothes she could tell that he was ripped, a very fine male specimen, from his broad shoulders all the way down his tapered waist and muscular legs. His eyes, while not the vibrant shade of an Intuit, held something different in their dusky brown depths, some small sparkle of the gypsy that bound him and Madge together. His lips stayed pursed together in a straight line, not much of a talker it seemed.

"Oh, well, nice to meet you," she said, finally able to move. She caught another whiff of dark chocolate as he escorted her over to the counter. So the sandalwood had been all Jensen, she thought with a tiny smile.

"What’s up?" Madge inquired again as she wiped down the display case in front of her. Delilah cast her eyes at Brody and looked away quickly. Madge spoke up before she had even finished the sweep.

"Brody, why don't you go and remind the kids of that reward of the pet shop now. I think that they've spent enough time pretending to clean their rooms."

"Sure cuz," he said. "Pleasure to meet you." He turned and gave a stiff little bow to Delilah, clicking his heels together as he did so, before bounding up the stairs three at a time, a commanding voice preceding his long stride.

"So, what's so bad you can't say it in front of Brody?" Madge started, setting down the window cleaner and cutting right to the chase.

"How did you know that I didn't want to talk in front of him?"

"Your eyes. Plus you're just exuding discomfort so quickly it had to have been seeping out of your pores. And hello, it’s my business to know what the people around me want so give me a little credit, huh. What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," she said, running her finger along a groove in the counter and avoiding her eyes, "it's just . . . okay, there's this guy -"

"I knew it!" Madge whooped, clapping her hands in mid-air. "Hooo, I knew it."

“It's nothing to be so broken up about," Delilah mocked, giving her an amused eye-roll. “I’m just getting these weird feelings when I’m around him.”

“What kind of weird feelings? You’re getting a lot of those now you know.”

“I know,” she murmured, crossing behind the counter and dropping down into an easy chair hidden in the corner and out of sight of customers. “But, I . . . okay, maybe it’s nothing but the first time I saw him was right after I saw you the first time and when I was with him I just . . .”

“Just what?” Madge laughed at her inability to articulate.

"It's just that I feel Everything."

“Everything?"

"Everything. Intimately. Everywhere. I feel his smell, I feel his eyes, I think I might even be able to feel his heartbeat and it's freaking me out. Oh and what emotion smells like dark chocolate?"

Madge just smiled, chuckling a bit to herself. "What?" Delilah asked in exasperation, just resisting the urge to slam something to show how serious she was being.

"Honey, you're just horny," Madge said simply.

"I . . . that . . . come on," she replied in disbelief.

"Your senses are heightened now, you know that. Dark chocolate is attraction, lust. You must just spark when you're together."

“Spark?" she asked quizzically, "Is that a good thing?"

Madge laughed out loud and patted her knee in comfort. "That’s a Very good thing."

"Oh stop it," Delilah said, waving her hand in the air to try and wave her attitude away as she stood. "I'm serious. I don't know what to do. I can't control myself when I'm around him. I can't control myself ever anymore it seems. I don't want this any longer. I don’t like being an Intuit and I just want it to go away."

"Tsk, tsk, you don't mean that," Madge said with a slight narrowing of her eyes. "And you should be careful what you wish for. You know that was almost the truth, right?"

"What do you mean?" she asked, sinking back down into the chair at the serious look on Madge's face.

"Remember when you came in here that first night and I told you that you were close to the deadline. I meant it, literally. If an intuit doesn't put on the necklace before their 25th year is over, it's gone. I thought, well we all thought that you had decided that you didn't want any part of this stuff which is why we'd never heard from you. If you had unpacked those boxes one day later you wouldn't be able to do any of it. You're very lucky."

"I don't feel lucky," she murmured, dropping her forehead into her hands.

"Yes, well, it's because you don't like to be unsure. You're new at this and it kills you to not be perfect at something."

"How do you know that?" Delilah asked, wondering if people's pores really did leak their secrets out all day long.

“Because you're so much like your mother," she mused with a forlorn little smile.

“Tell me about her," Delilah asked, drawing her legs up off of the floor and under her chin. It was the question that had been on the tip of her tongue for the last week.

"Oh,” Madge began, "your mother was a firecracker. She had a personality that would just light up any room. She was always getting us into wild schemes and pushing us to do crazy things. We went cliff-diving once near Gilded Hill, that almost killed us. And she used to have this hugely infectious laughter that just, well, you couldn't not smile when Genevieve was around.

"She got it into her head one summer that we could find the Sacred Dais, supposedly the birthplace of the Intuit and the keeper of all our secrets, and had us searching from hell and back looking for it. That was an interesting time I'll tell you that." Madge shook her head. "And when it was over, that's when she came back with you."

"What was my father like?" Delilah asked before she even realized that she had wanted to know. Her mother had never talked about him. Whenever Delilah asked about him her mother would just tell her the story of a girl being left in a cabbage patch, even when she was well into puberty and had been schooled in the ways of the birds and the bees.

Madge looked sad. "I don't know honey. I asked of course, we all did, but she always said that it was her business and everyone else didn't need anyone to know. She said it didn't matter anyway because she'd gotten what she wanted and she wanted nothing else but you."

Delilah sighed. She had no father. She had known nothing real about her mother. It felt like her life really had been a lie, a house of cards that was going to come tumbling down around her, just a bunch of trick mirrors throwing her off balance. What was the truth? Would she ever know?

"Your mother's letter didn't clear any of this stuff up?" Madge asked from the main floor of the store as she rearranged items and restacked books in the proper order.

"I didn't open it yet," she confessed with a sigh, wiggling her toes in her shoes and trying to be preoccupied with them.

"Why ever not?" Madge asked, looking startled but only for a moment. "Ahh," she said with a knowing look, "still scared of change and full of indecision."

"Is there any way I can block my emotions from you?" Delilah asked a bit crossly, wishing there was some part of her that wasn't an open book that everyone around her could delight in reading, something that was only hers to know.

'Well you can't tell what I'm feeling can you?" was her evasive response.

"That's not an answer," she said, "because I couldn't tell the difference anyway. But is -”

Whatever else Delilah was going to ask was cut off by a stampede of people barreling in from the back room.

“Soldiers,” Brody yelled in an authoritative voice, “ten hut!” The children snapped into a straight line in front of their mother, grins on their faces.

“Ahh, so we’re being presented for inspection are we?” Madge asked with a grin. “Well, let’s see. Have our rooms been cleaned.”

“Yes Mommy!”

“Even under your beds and the toy box in your closet?”

“Yes Mommy!”

“And you didn’t leave anymore surprises for Daddy in his office did you?”

The children giggled at the memory but replied again. “Yes Mommy!"

“Okay,” she said, turning the sign on the door from opened to closed in a flourish, “then let’s go get that ferret.”

“Ferret?” Delilah asked out of the corner of her mouth as the kids were corralled towards the door.

“Yes, well, ferrets are pretty susceptible to Intuit eye tricks so I figure if the kids won’t listen to me at least I can have one thing in the house that will.”

Let's Get Intuit, Chapter 6

Chapter 6
“Where have you been all day?”

“What?” Delilah tried to deflect unsuccessfully.

“Where have you been all day?” Amelia repeated, pushing into the apartment like a bloodhound trying to uncover some hidden fox. “Or rather should I say all week? You have become impossible to get a hold of. What did you wake up cured and decide that you had to immediately go out and do all that living you’d been missing out on since you’ve been cooped up in the house. Well if that’s the case you could have at least waited for me to tag along.”

“How’s Bubblegum doing?” Delilah asked, trying to steer them off course again.

“Nice try at changing the subject but no go. Where have you been?”

Where had she been? She’d been . . . confused. It had been a week since Madge had sat down and had the talk with her over family dinner on the ins and outs of her "gifts" but she was still having a hard time believing that it was true. The whole atmosphere just seemed wrong to her the least of which was the fantastical abilities; what was throwing her off more was seeing a happy family, having Madge check up on her and wonder how she was managing. It was been a long time since someone besides Amelia and the Conrads had worried or wondered over her and it was a hard thing to get used to. Belonging somewhere did not come naturally to her.

Neither, it turned out, did being an Intuit it seemed. Madge called them growing pains. Delilah just called them accidents. Every day she started out with a hazy plan of walking around the city directionless and letting her nose take the lead and tell her where to go. By early afternoon she kept ending up at the same place, Papa Taco. The only smell she could make out with any distinction was the Triple Chile Verde Burrito. Nothing nefarious or heartwarming about that, though tasty to be sure.

What she really wanted was some kind of Oxford Olfactory Dictionary that could translate what she was supposed to smell into what it all was supposed to mean. Trying to reason out her sense of smell was starting to give her not only headaches but complexes as well. When she sniffed burnt toast did that mean that she had burnt toast, that a neighbor had burnt toast, that burnt toast was a figment of her oppressed need to complicate simple things or did hunger smell like burnt toast. These were the kinds of things that were constantly tripping her up. Delilah feared it was about to get to the point where there could be a fire in her building and she'd burn to death, thinking that the smoke was really all just a figment of her intuit imagination and she was already dangerously close to reaching it after only a week.

Madge assured her that it would get better, easier, and that after they made their pilgrimage to the mecca that was Gilded Hill everything would make more sense (though when that would be nobody knew since it seemed like Delilah had the busiest mentor known to man and she might have to take a job in her shop just to see her). She'd said it was like her brain, or senses, or feelers, or whatever just needed a little reboot. Like a software update for a computer and Gilded Hill was the computer store. Delilah had dealt with tech support at big box stores enough to know to be wary of that analogy.

And then there was the letter from her mother, hidden unopened inside her pillowcase. When Delilah had been distracted by the play the children were putting on in her honor, Madge had tucked the letter between the pages of her mother's book for her to find. And she did, as soon as she got home that night. But there were so many things that she wanted and needed for it to say that she couldn't bring herself to open it and see what was inside. The anticipation might have been killing her but the eventual letdown would destroy her even more. She’d wanted to talk to her mother again for ten years; now that she was getting that chance, no matter how staid, she didn’t want to have to face all the things she needed to hear, needed answers to, and wasn’t about to get. So she set it aside to ruminate over what it may or may not say before she found the courage to pry back the lip and peek inside. It was so bad that even she could smell the vinegar in the air and, novice that she was, had little trouble figuring out what it must mean - nerves.

"I've been . . . around," Delilah finally answered Amelia with that evasiveness she only ever barely got away with.

"Don't tell me, you've been out on the town with Dr. Hard Body haven't you?" Amelia asked with a supposedly knowing twinkle in her eye.

Delilah had been out with Jensen all right but only in the naughtiest corners of her mind and the shadowy recesses of her dreams. When she woke up she'd always reach for the phone, stare at it sitting in her hands for a moment, and then replace it in the cradle, phone calls left unmade. She wanted to see him but there was so much upheaval in her life already that she couldn't imagine what adding him into the mix might mean, no matter how much Madge and Colin’s story had made her yearn for a fairytale of her own.

Delilah pretended to laugh. "I wish. He hasn't returned my phone calls," she answered, turning from Amelia so she couldn't see her add silently to herself 'because I haven't made them.' There it was again - vinegar.

"Hmmm, well he does not know what he's missing. I'll go down and rile him up a bit if you want me to," Amelia offered with her trademark cock-eyed grin.

"NO!” she protested a little too vehemently, a little too loudly. “No, it’s perfectly fine if he wants to see if absence makes the heart grow fonder. We'll just see if it does. No guarantees my heart will still be here to grow while he's gone," Delilah continued, still in something of a panic but at least a little less hysterical. All she needed was Amelia to start chatting up Jensen and find out she hadn't called. Cornered with that information she would have no choice but to come clean with all of it - the hair and the nose and the eyes and the necklace. She'd be forced to lay bare the intuit truth and Delilah wasn't ready for that yet. She still barely believed it herself, how could she expect anyone else to? Wasn't sure when she'd be ready for that considering she couldn't stage a demonstration or boast highly magical skills for her trouble. She hadn't even managed to convincingly see the future . . .

Suddenly, as if the universe knew what she was brooding about and strove to prove her wrong, Delilah banged her knee into the table in her entryway as she was following Amelia past it. As she leaned over to see if her clumsiness had bruised anything other than her sense of balance, she spied a particularly ugly gash blooming across the side of her knee in spectacular colors of blue, black, and purple. As she peered down to get a better look, it happened.

Without knowing how she did it or what it meant, she found herself somewhere else. It seemed like the world had gone dark, like she’d closed her eyes but knew she hadn’t. It felt cold and dark but safe, the smell of grass at dusk with the biting chill in the air adding to that strange sensation of security descending over her. But she didn't have a chance to grasp at her surroundings, or lack thereof, because feelings were assaulting her in grandiose fashion, like images trying to be downloaded into her brain, no waiting necessary.

A kite. A yellow string. The letter X. Angst. The buzzing of a bee. The sun smiling. Knitting needles. Jubilation. A star is born. Surrender.

And then she was back. She hadn't moved, was still leaning down to get a better look at the bruise she no longer had any interest in examining. She had seen the future though she was disappointed to find out it made as little sense as her other Intuit senses did. She'd hoped that she'd have been able to see people or actual moments from the future. Even snapshots of latent images, a picture to take back with her would have been better, something more akin to a box of photos spilled across the floor than the words or impressions that stamped themselves against her consciousness, evidently no explanation necessary.

All she got were the words, the feelings, pressed into her. Nothing as magical as what she had seen on movies and TV shows and at carnival stands with fortune-telling superstars. Madge could do it, with all the flashiness of Gemini cards and crystal balls, but she was a gypsy. All Delilah had was the intuit ideal of telling the future, just another thing not living up to its expectations.

"De, what are you doing?" Amelia asked, looking back from the couch at her tragically clumsy friend in such a comical position that she didn't know whether to laugh or fear for her safety.

"I just bumped into this damn table and I'm hopping up and down in pain. You could join me you know." Delilah smiled on the inside at managing to cover in an adequate fashion.

"In what - the hopping or the pain?" Amelia was laughing at her but that wasn’t anything new really. Amelia was always laughing at her; she did predictably ill-advised things that always ended hilariously.

"The hopping of course, it's good for the soul."

"So is kale but you don't see me indulging in that, do you?"

"Well anytime you want to I'm sure you could just pull apart a few layers of Bubblegum's clothes and you'll be all set."

"Ooh, snap," Amelia laughed, resting her chin in her hands, elbows propped to support her, and staring at Delilah over the back of the couch. "Are you sure you're okay De? I haven't seen you since I took you to see Stephen and you weren't doing so hot then."

"Did I thank you for taking me there? I really appreciate it," Delilah said, looking at her best friend tenderly across the room. "And no, I wasn't doing well but I'm doing just peachy now." She hated lying to her, even a lie of omission, but this was definitely not the best time to tell her. She'd be supportive and kind but she'd also be researching shrinks and mental hospitals the minute she left. Just as likely to go pour over research at the library to prove her right as to go enlist the aid of Stephen and the scientific community to prove her wrong. She was like that, always wanting to help, always wanting to be prepared, consistently a mass of contradiction.

"Okay well I just stopped by to make sure that you are still joining us here in the land of the living," Amelia sighed, obviously satisfied with Delilah's answer or she never would have gotten up off of the couch and thrown her purse over her arm, all ready to leave. "I was coming past here to scout locations for the photo shoot at a dog grooming salon - don't ask - and figured popping in would have to get your attention."

“You know you always got my attention Amelia girl.”

“Try returning some phone calls every once and awhile then.” She took her by the shoulders and gave her three quick shakes, a smiled alighting upon her face. It was something that she’d been doing since childhood, always trying to shake some sense into that girl. They hugged quickly at the door, Delilah holding on a moment longer than was necessary, having a clear look at the concerned look on her friend’s face when they pulled apart. "Remember, anytime, you know that."

"I know that," Delilah answered with a smile and a nod of her head. When the door closed it soundly loudly throughout her apartment, sealing them on different sides of the door with shades of foreshadowing and finality that made her want to open the door and scream the truth at the top of her lungs to make sure that it never got between them. There were a lot of things that Delilah had lived through and a lot more that she could take but separated by a divide thicker than a piece of paper from Amelia was not one of them.

With Amelia gone and the lovely distractions along with her, Delilah sat down at her desk and tried to work. Kiki had emailed her, asking her to be a reference at a new job she was applying for and her heart started racing. This could be the break she was waiting for. If Kiki found another job, Delilah could slide right into her first assignment as a reporter. If Bianca was to be believed of course. It was something that she had been striving for, for so long it made her giddy to consider it.

"I'll try again," she vowed anew, determined to figure out how this intuit thing worked. Determination, it seemed, paid off. She ran to her bedroom to put on more layers and caught a glimpse of her hair in the mirror. It was already noticeably longer even after just a week, reaching farther down her back than it had since the third grade. She combed her hands through it and was surprised at how soft and supple it felt, like silk and straw. Maybe having five feet of hair wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Skipping Ahead

I'm not sure if it's cheating but it is definitely a first for me. I have skipped ahead in my story and have started writing part of it out of order.

There was just this scene that came to me today when I was having lunch with Diane and Heather. We were talking about this funny nickname for a person that we "know" but who I maintain doesn't exist and I told them that I was going to put it in my story. So out of desperation (I was starving) a chapter was born.

BUT, how was I going to put a spy (37 year old, 6 foot tall African American by the name of Asian Daniel) into my story? Well, I couldn't put it in chapter 7 (the one I'm currently writing) because Delilah hasn't figured out her 'desitny' yet, hasn't partnered up with a brooding bounty hunter to solve a major crime AND discover important cultural artifacts. It's not like a misnomered spy could just waltz into the herbal shop and start telling everyone who he was. So, my jump ahead was born.

Right now I have no idea how I'm going to get there. BUT at least I was writing tonight, right?

Let's get Intuit, Chapter 5

Chapter 5
Two hours later Delilah found herself at Madge's kitchen table, surrounded by her large, overwhelming family, and definitely in over her head. She hadn't been sure before if she believed any of it or if she even wanted to but there was something more important that she wanted - that letter from her mother. What would it say? Would it explain any of this? It had been hidden in the back of an unreadable book so hopefully it wasn't just your run of the mill tearful goodbye that she could have copied from any tragic Lifetime movie showing on the television every weekend. Though even that would be good enough for her, so much left unsaid when her mother died, they never did have even your most saccharine, run of the mill sappy goodbye. She didn’t have even one cliché to hold onto at night.

But she'd sat studiously and taken in everything that Madge had to say about her suddenly heightened sense of smell, about how her hair was going to grow impossibly long, about the necklace she couldn't take off and the meaningful scars that were going to crop up all over her skin. She wasn't very excited about the fact that she'd have to carry some of that wasabi in her purse since a neophyte like her could become besieged by sensations any moment but being able to tell what others were feeling and thinking might come in handy, if she could ever get a handle on it that is.

Hearing about her gifts hadn't been a straightforward endeavor with Chad, Jordan, and Jam running and yelling down the stairs every few minutes with interruptions and questions and requests for ponies cropping up. They finally retired upstairs, closing the shop and leaving all pretense of work or weighty things down with it.

"Sorry about this," Madge had said as she led her up into her apartment which wasn't exactly what Delilah had expected after the rich warmth of the shop below. Her house was all clean lines and straight edges, mostly white and steel with pops of color here and there, a mirror to the space below where white was hiding behind bookshelves and under tables as best it could.

"I really should have taken you to The Gilded Hill but you caught me by such surprise and I feel like if I abandon Colin I might not have a husband to come back to. The children are more than capable of locking him in a back room and succeeding at mutiny." To show their agreement, the lot of them scampered through the hallway, pitching themselves at their mother for hugs before they started chasing each other around the room.

"Taken me where?" Delilah asked, stepping over cars and dolls scattered about the otherwise spotless entryway.

"Gilded Hill. Where we were for a second this morning when our eyes met and you caught me off guard."

"So I wasn't hallucinating about the grass and the hill?" Delilah asked, not sure what to make of this information. She knew that weird things had been happening to her but had written off before as, well, before: before she understood what was going on, before she had learned about things she hadn't even guessed at, before she had been cured of all of her hard won delusions. Before.

"No silly, of course not. We can go there anytime we want. And it would be nice to get some Peace And Quiet," she said loudly towards her rambunctious brood causing them to quiet down for just a moment before giggling started up and mingled with the pitter patter of their feet running farther into the apartment, "but when you have so much stuff on your plate like I do it's hard to find time to jump over there whenever the mood moves you."

"How do you get there?" Delilah asked.

"Well it's a little complicated to get there by yourself but it can be done, with practice. But usually, like this morning, it happens when Intuit eyes meet. Our senses are heightened and we can see things that others can't and when our eyes meet, unguarded, we can see inside each other, inside our gifts and our purpose and that place is Gilded Hill.

"We'll go there soon and you'll see what I mean about it being special. It really is a wonderful place to relax. Ah, how I do need a vacation," Madge murmured, slipping down into a chair at the kitchen table. Colin was behind her stirring the spaghetti in a pot. He turned at her comment and placed his hands against her shoulders, massaging lightly. She leaned her head back to look up at him and he smiled down at her.

"What's that I hear? Vacation for a Super Mom like you? The world couldn't get by without you," he said, placing a quick kiss on the tip of her nose. "I couldn't get by without you," he added, placing a longer kiss against her lips. “The children would kill me.”

Madge swatted him away and laughed. "We have company you know," she said, waving a hand at Delilah.

Colin just wiggled his eyebrows and his smile grew as he returned to the stove. "She's horribly mean to me the rest of the time. I need witnesses around to keep her honest."

"Well I never," Madge murmured, grabbing a towel off of the table and swatting him with it. He hopped out of the way at the last minute and just laughed.

Delilah was happy to see this, a happy family. After everything Madge had told her about wild places and fantastic abilities and sensational origins, stories that sounded like they were only told in hushed sentences over smoldering campfires or other such places with legendary notions, she worried that her life would never be anything resembling normal again. Madge and Colin gave her hope that this didn't mean her life was over but instead that it was just beginning.

“Do the kids know?” Delilah asked, interrupting the teasing looks and words Madge and Colin were exchanging.

“Know what?”

“About being an Intuit and everything.”

“Of course,” Colin answered with a surprised look, “You think any of you women can keep an adequate secret? And with the crazy things that go on around here and the fortune-telling. Remember when those crystal balls came in the mail and starting whirling around like tops because they weren’t unpacked quick enough? There aren’t any secrets around here.”

“He’s right,” said Madge as she assembled a salad in the kitchen, Delilah being slightly disappointed that she did it with her hands and not her mind. Not that such things were intuit gifts but for someone who was just told that she was somewhat magical, the fact that she had a super sense of smell really wasn’t living up to the super part of the equation.

"Are you kidding? How could I explain about not only the weird things always going on but the weird things happening to them? Jam has been able to smell trouble since the age of two. Of course she likes the smell of trouble which is why she's always getting into it." They laughed.
"And the boys?" Delilah prompted.

"Well, being an intuit is generally a thing that's passed between mother and daughter but I wouldn't be surprised if one or both of them have a few surprises up their sleeves. Chad's eyes are made for this and Jordan is definitely taking after me with the fortune-telling."

"But that could be more gypsy than intuit," Colin reminded her.

"I know, I know," Madge sighed, circling the table and setting it for dinner.

"You sound disappointed," Delilah said with a laugh.

"I am," she replied, setting her hands on her hips. "I want them all to know they're special and it wouldn't hurt if I could show up Samson Matthews at the same time, would it?"

"Who’s Samson Matthews?"

"Her old boyfriend," Colin said, leaning over towards her conspiratorially. "He dumped her well before we got together. Told her she wasn't gifted enough to produce special males so he couldn't be having her around anymore. She's still peeved about it. She’s constantly trying to get Brody to coax some kind of fantastical thing or another out of the boys so she can prove him wrong."

"Well," she said with a harrumph as she dropped down into a chair. "Just look what happened when he set up shop here. Everyone's crediting him for revitalizing the neighborhood and it just sticks in my craw."

"Wait, are you talking about the owner of Samson's Department Store? You know him?" Delilah was awed for a moment. He was said to be an infinitely charming man that had broken as many hearts as piggy banks when his stock skyrocketed and made a lot of people very, very rich.

"So did your mom actually. They were hot and heavy for awhile. Oh, he made his rounds with all of us, taking it in his head that he could breed a superior intuit or something of the sort. We smell danger, we're not bloodhounds for goodness sakes."

"Don't get so fired up about it dear. You know you won, right?" Colin asked, taking a seat next to her. "Kids, dinner," he yelled. A stampede of little feet started towards them. "Don't forget to wash your hands first." They groaned in unison as their steps retreated towards the bathroom.

"I know that," Madge said, smiling sweetly at her husband and taking his hand in hers to give it a reassuring squeeze, "but it doesn't mean I still don't want to see that pompous, arrogant man eat his words."

"Yes dear," Colin replied, yanking his hand back and massaging it, mouthing a silent ‘ouch’ to Delilah that had her trying to stifle a giggle.

"Well how did you two meet?" Delilah asked. And out of nowhere, Jensen's face swam across her mind as she remembered when he had entered the exam room earlier that day and she could barely breathe. Was it like that for them?

"I bumped into him on the street - literally," Madge said, rising from her seat to help the kids, who had just breezed into the kitchen in their pack, get situated and served.

"And she is always telling me I have my head in the clouds," Colin said, dropping small mounds of spaghetti and salad onto his assembly line of plates.

“Mom can I have fried chicken for dinner?” Jordan interrupted, his big owlish eyes looking up at her.

“Only if it’s practicing to be spaghetti,” Madge answered, bopping him quickly on the nose with her finger. "I had just gotten out of rehearsal - I was in the chorus line of a very small production of The Wizard of Oz, really it wasn't much of a chorus line but what are you going to do - and I was rushing home with this new set of Gemini cards that one of the stagehands had given me and I bumped right into him after illegally crossing the street."

"The cards went everywhere," Colin continued, picking up the thread as Madge filled cups with milk, water, and juice, "and she was looking so pretty like a little drowned rat in that puddle that I took mercy on her and told her I’d help her up and wouldn't turn her into the police if she told me my future."

"And I told him that there would be dire consequences if he didn't treat the frazzled, wet lady in front of him to warm meal in the form of . . . ?" Madge looked at Colin for help.

"Locusts," he answered, "locusts and male pattern baldness if I remember correctly. And well, ever though I could pull off the no hair thing I really didn't want to chance it so there you go."

"When did you tell him about the intuit thing?" Delilah asked, wondering if there really ever was a good time to reveal such a thing.

"He met me flinging knock-off tarot cards around the street - I'm not sure he ever believed I was really all that normal."

"Nope, never," he reassured with a smile.

“I don’t think you’re normal at all Mommy,” Chad piped up as he tried to fit his whole plate full of spaghetti into his mouth all at once.

“Thanks Tiger.” She smiled at him. “Remember we’re supposed to chew our food, right, not inhale it.”

“Oh yeah, right,” Jam said with a wide-eyed smile like she’d forgotten and was so happy that she’d been reminded even though she had yet to touch her plate. “Thanks Mommy.”

"So one night,” Madge continued with an affectionate look at her daughter, “we were on our way home from somewhere and we walking down the street and we were talking about the weather and I said it was going to rain tomorrow and when he asked me how I knew that because the forecast was for sunshine for the rest of the week I just blurted it out.” Delilah looked at her startled. “I told you that honesty just kind of bursts forth from me like a fountain? Well that wasn’t an exaggeration.”

“No, it wasn’t” Colin laughed. “In the beginning I kind of found it endearing that she thought she could smell danger. Though I didn’t believe it I liked that she thought she could, that she was eccentric since everyone I knew was exactly the opposite. And when I realized it was true, well, I figured it might come in handy so I kept her around.”

“Kept me around, eh?” Madge asked, a little bit of attitude poking through.

“Like I can get her to leave,” Colin told Delilah. “Oh honey,” he cooed back at his wife at the stormy look she was getting, “you know I’m just kidding.”

“Hmm,” she replied, “he won’t have any problem with me bothering him tonight, that’s for sure.”

Delilah just tried not to laugh.

Let's Get Intuit, Chapter 4

Chapter 4
When she regained consciousness, Delilah found herself lying on the floor. But this was not the first thing she noticed. The first thing she noticed was that she could breathe again – there was no more clogged sinuses, no more tickled throat, no more vague knocking at her temples. It appeared that she was cured. A feeling of satisfaction and glee descended over her before she even realized that the coolness she was feeling up and down her back was because she was spread out across a concrete floor.

She opened her eyes and found five sets of owlish gazes staring down at her. “I don’t think I introduced myself before. I’m Marjorie Sage but everyone just calls me Madge,” she nattered, reaching down a hand to help Delilah up off the floor.

“Whatever that was it sure packed a punch,” she murmured, putting a hand to her head to try and ward off the dizziness that was descending. But it wasn’t normal dizziness – it was something else entirely. She wasn’t having a hard time balancing herself; it was her senses that were throwing her off. The air seemed to be swarming around her, enveloping her in a tornado of sensations until she felt like she was a little girl, spinning and spinning in a circle out on the grass in her front yard before crumbling to the ground and watching the world try to right itself around her.

Delilah found herself being pushed into a chair. “Easy does it,” Madge murmured as she handed her a glass of water. She took it and drank greedily, parched as soon as the glass was in her hand, and it was refilled three times before she had had enough.

They were all still staring at her, looking more curious than concerned. “Well,” Delilah began, more as a way to fill the awkward silence than anything else, “just let me know how much I owe you for the miracle cure and I’ll be going.”

“Okay, off with the lot of you,” Madge said, shooing the collected crowd away as they exchanged worried glances.

“But Mom we want to stay,” one of the little boys whined, turning a very vivid blue set of pleading eyes at his mother.

“Yeah, we want to stay Mom,” the younger boy chimed in, his eyes magnified by the wire frames balanced on his nose.

“Mommy,” the little girl said in a stage whisper, “are you going to tell her about the necklace?”
Madge shook her head in agreement and the pigtailed little one grinned, showing a missing front tooth and the cause of her precious lisp.

“Can you keep them busy?” Madge asked, turning to the tall man beside her with sandy brown hair and a set of glasses that matched the little boy’s perfectly.

“Of course,” he replied in an overly confident voice. “Because we’re going upstairs to make dinner!” The kids cheered. “And to clean our rooms!” His enthusiasm stayed; the children’s waned. They made a racquet trudging up an unseen set of stairs, voices of descent floating back towards the two of them still in the shop.

Delilah stood and walked around to the front of the counter again, opening her purse as she did so. “How much?” she asked before adding, “and what about my necklace?” Her hand automatically went up to touch it and that trademark calmness descended over her again.

Madge looked at her for a second before sliding something across the counter to lay between them. “You came in here carrying this,” she said running her fingers gently over the cover. “Was there something you wanted to ask me about it?”

“I found this inside of it,” she said, taking the picture out of her pocket and placing it on top of the book.

Madge took it in her hands and a smile instantly appeared on her face. “I remember this,” she laughed, angling ever so slightly so that they could look at the picture together. “We were meeting to talk about the Bonfire and Petros had brought a camera. That’s me, Falen, Giorgio, Persephone, Kacie, and of course your mom. Oh, look how young Antonia looked with that hair.” She giggled.

“We had just convinced her to chop it all off and she had hated it short for the first few days but you know it saved her hours in the morning not having to pleat that long hair of hers. How she lived with five feet of hair for so long I’ll never know. I kept mine only as long as I had to and not a moment longer.”

Madge looked at the quizzical expression on Delilah’s face and stopped the tangential conversation before it started. She could tell the poor girl was confused and restless and they didn’t need any more random comments to have them straying into crazy conversational territory. It was a hard urge for Madge to fight but she could do it if her purpose was important enough and tonight it was.

“Delilah did your mother ever talk about me, about any of us?” she asked, gesturing towards the smiling faces in the picture.

“No,” she replied, taking it back and peering intently into their faces once more, “no I’ve never heard any of those names before.”

“And those names you’d remember,” Madge murmured to herself. After a moment she started rambling again. “Okay, I’m not good at this. As I’m sure you know we’re not good at lying and I never did master the art of evasiveness. Honesty just seems to like to sit on the tip of my tongue and jump out at people as they walk by which, you know, at times isn’t really great for the palm reading but that’s not the point.”

“Honey,” she tried again with a deep breath, “didn’t your mom ever tell you about the things that she could do?”

Delilah had gone from intrigued to slightly frightened. That sounded ominous; the whole conversation was ludicrous and it was starting to scare her. Because maybe she was still hallucinating, not hearing Madge correctly when she was spouting about waiting for her and having five feet of hair. What if she hadn’t walked into an eccentric little shop but some half-baked nightmare and was never going to get out of it.

Madge laughed. “Now, now, calm down there’s no reason to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid. Why would you say that?” Delilah gulped, trying to sound at ease and almost making it.

“I can smell it on the air. Can’t you? That sharp, metallic taste like aluminum.” And then, she could. She could feel it, the alloy on the back of her tongue and in the air. For a second as she pulled it to the forefront she couldn’t breathe, started choking on the intensity of it.

Madge grabbed the clay jar again and held it up under her nose. It didn’t make her pass out this time but she did swoon just a bit as it chased the tangy taste of metal away.
“What is that?” Delilah asked again as a stool appeared behind her and another glass of water was pressed into her hands.

“Honey, where’s the spaghetti?” a voice yelled from upstairs.

“In the pantry where everything else is,” she replied to her husband before answering Delilah. “It’s a form of the wasabi root that’s vapors are so potent you don’t have to eat it, just inhale. The Japanese think its magic and don’t use it in their regular cooking. In fact that’s what we call it, Magical Wasabi. It acts like a palette cleanser, the same way someone eating a fancy dinner would chow down on sorbet to get ready for the next course.”

“How did ‘Magic Wasabi’ get rid of my cold?”

“Well when it’s a magic cold, remedies are a little different.”

Delilah just stared at her, her gray eyes narrowing ever so slightly. No one else would have noticed but Madge did, her own eyes moving imperceptibly to match. “Oh, I’m not good at this,” she relented, throwing her hands up in the air. “Here’s the skinny. You’re special, just like I’m special, just like your mother was special. We can know things, feel things, understand things that other people can’t. Honey, you’re an Intuit.”

There was a pause. “I’m the maker of small business accounting software?” she asked slowly. Delilah shook her head and got up to leave, throwing a ten down on the counter as she did. “For your Magic Wasabi” came out dripping with sarcasm.

“Wait,” Madge said, stopping her before she had reached the door. “You forgot your book.” Delilah trudged back over to get it but when she laid her hand upon the cover Madge’s hand held hers against it. “Read the cover,” she demanded.

“It’s written in gibberish,” said Delilah, growing weary of these strange little games.

“Read the cover,” Madge insisted, locking eyes with Delilah again. The air started to hum around them again.

“Fine,” she relented with much attitude, grabbing the book to hold it in mid-air. “We smell the blood before the wound is struck. We see the rent of the arm before the arrow strikes. We hear the thud before the apple falls. We know whence danger comes before it takes a single step. Into you, Into all, Intuit.”

She dropped the book and it created a loud thud, reverberating not only along the counter but along the walls, along the building, along space itself. “Honey, you okay down there?” that male voice called from above again as items shook from their places and crashed to the ground.

“We’re just fine Colin dear,” yelled back Madge, never taking her eyes of off Delilah whose breathing had become quick and labored, like it was her body running a marathon and not just the thoughts in her mind racing about.

“How did you . . . how did I . . . ?” Her questions didn’t form, she didn’t let them, her mind dashing to find some non-magical explanation for why words she couldn’t read an hour ago she could read now, see as clear as day, as clear as glass, as clear as crystal. But there wasn’t one.

She didn’t move for almost two minutes; the world itself seemed to have fallen silent and she couldn’t bring herself to budge in fear that it would start tumbling again and the next truth would be even worse than the last. It was Madge who pushed her forward out of her hiccup in time, grabbing her hand and placing it against the cool orange stone at the hollow of her throat. A burst of energy surged through her, making her feel suddenly more alive and alert than she had before.

“This is part of it too?” asked Delilah, tracing her finger carefully around the edge.

Madge laughed. “That is all of it, the beginning and the end.” She reached under the neckline of her own blouse and pulled out a necklace of her own. Her stone was deep purple, shaped in a perfect circle, but they were the same. The same ornate frame, the same translucent look, the same glowing power.

“Hmm,” Madge said finally, taking a seat across from her. “You’re still not sure. Indecision is just hanging all over you. You can smell it, can’t you? Like mothballs in the back of a closet that hasn’t been opened for eons? I’ll just start talking and you can stop me when I’m wrong.”

Madge studied her face for a moment more before continuing. “You had that cold since the day you put on that necklace, I’d say the day before your birthday with only hours to spare if I’m not mistaken. And nothing you did could get rid of it, medicine and vitamin C and more bed rest than any normal person could take but your senses still buzzed and your head was a bit woozy and you just thought it would go away but it never did. And –”

“Mom, did you feel the earthquake?” the little boy with the glasses yelled, running into the shop at full tilt with a fire engine in his hand before seeing Delilah and stopping in his tracks.

“Jordan, what did I say about staying upstairs when Delilah is here?”

“That I should,” he replied, looking down with a guilty face and scuffing his feet against the floor in a truly endearing ‘aw shucks’ manner.

“That’s right, I did. Now what –” Madge began as she hoisted her son up into her arms.

“Sorry, sorry,” Colin interrupted, jogging down the stairs and grabbing the boy from his mother’s arms. Madge gave him a stern look with her vividly violet eyes but he didn’t seem affected, turning a helpless one right back at her. “I can’t help it. Chad and Jam created a distraction by managing to get spaghetti sauce on the ceiling. Plus they like you better, all your fault.” He smiled, gave her a quick kiss, and hoisted his son over his shoulder.

“Come on sack of potatoes,” he said, “maybe we should have you for dinner since you haven’t learned to obey yet. What do you think about that, huh?” Jordan’s laughter filled the whole shop as they trudged back upstairs.

“What a handful,” Madge said with apologetic eyes.

“Oh I think your kids are cute,” Delilah said with sincerity.

“Kids? I was talking about my husband. Wouldn’t be able to put his shoes on the right feet if I wasn’t standing next to him with the answer but he’s got the kids covered. Yeah right.”
“How long have you been married?”

“Fourteen years. He gets more handsome ever year, I get more harried but that’s how it goes I suppose. But we’re off topic. This is not what we’re supposed to be talking about. My love life, lord child you really must hate change to go there.”

“I don’t hate change,” she protested with good effort but Madge just laughed.

“I told you we were bad liars right? That’s because we can always spot lies, from miles away and that’s the biggest one to cross my path since Chad told me the rabbit dyed itself orange for Halloween.

“Hating change is good though,” she said as she reached under the counter and started placing different sized jars between them, “I can work with hating change. Much easier than being skeptical of the supernatural or rigid in your role in the world or agoraphobic. Yes hating change is positively a piece of cake.”

“Why?” Delilah asked, mesmerized by Madge’s quick hands combining things into a bowl, not even needing to keep her attention on them since her eyes were still staring at Delilah’s face.

“Well because I only need to point out that nothing is really changing. Your whole life you’ve been able to do this and it has been leading you to this very spot. Like a tree growing branches, you might not like it but you can’t chose to not grow. I used that one on Jordan to get him to wear the new glasses and it worked pretty well – he doesn’t like change either.

“Of course I also pointed out that he’d look dashing just like his Dad. Hmmm, I can use that one here too. This has been your destiny, passed down from your mother a long time ago, something very special that the two of you shared and will join you forever. Plus if you let me help you I’ll give you the letter she left for you.”

Madge opened the book Delilah had and turned to the very back page to where the picture had been. She tapped around the edge of the book a few times before stopping in the top right corner. She dipped her thumb in the purple powder she had made from memory while they had been talking and smeared it across the page while her other hand very lightly traced a line down the center of her own necklace.

Delilah was expecting something magical to happen with glowing lights or charged air or even some spiritual apparitions wafting up between them but nothing did. Madge just ran her fingernail over the corner, scratching away until the backing popped up and she could grip it firmly between her fingers. She ripped it like she was removing wallpaper from a crumbling old wall, all in one quick line, and revealed an envelope hidden behind it. The ink was glowing bright green against the faded parchment and Delilah could make out her mother’s handwriting, now small and flowery like she had remembered it, spelling out her name.

“Okay,” she said with a deep breath, “I’m ready. Tell me everything.”

Let's Get Intuit, Chapter 3

Chapter 3
Delilah wasn’t sure she wanted to go back. “I’ll go get it later,” she told Amelia for the third time in the last twenty minutes as they made their way back to her apartment. “Really, I will.”
“I could go pick it up for you if you want?”

“I’m a big girl, I can do it myself,” she laughed, pocketing the prescription and trying to appear unaffected.

“All I know is you better do it soon because the sooner you get better the sooner you can go out with Hot Doc and the sooner I can get all the details,” said Amelia with a salacious smile. Delilah grinned along but it didn’t really reach her eyes. What had gotten into her? She wasn’t one to come on so strong, or even at all – she’d always been much more passive when it came to matters of the heart. She had started acting so out of character, so strange that she just wanted to scream the question and demand an answer: What was happening to her? Instinctively she reached up and stroked the necklace around her neck, feeling better almost instantly, a calm seeming to descend over her just at the touch.

“I know, I know. And don’t worry it’ll get done faster than Bubblegum Peterson can say ‘tacky’ with fringe.”

“Ugh, did you have to bring her up. Well I better go – have lots of shopping to do – but only if you feel better.” She bit her lip in worry.

“I’m fine – now shoo!” Delilah cried, ushering her away from the apartment building with a wide, amused smile that sat tremulously upon her face. She walked up the stairs biting the corner of her lip in contemplation. She sneezed up the stairs as well, having to stop every three steps so she wouldn’t fall up or down them, neither direction would do.

“Maybe I should just go and get those herbs,” she murmured to herself in exasperation after standing at her apartment door for ten minutes, prevented from entering by a coughing spell probably triggered by a fly on the wall or the fact that it was late afternoon. She took the prescription out of her pocket and stuck it to the middle of the fridge with a bright pink magnet. She pushed everything else out of the way, creating a magnet pile-up on the edges of her refrigerator with all the brightly colored shapes. Taking a step back and leaning against her kitchen counter, she nibbled her nail in thought, not able to take her eyes off of the crumpled, illegible scrap of paper in the great white expanse she had made. What to do, what to do . . . ?

“Later,” she finally commanded in a loudly surprising voice. The longer she stared the less sense it made; she was going to get no revelation trying to decipher Stephen’s handwriting, uncover not one hidden message there. She sat down on her sofa, since it conveniently faced away from the kitchen, and drummed her fingers against her leg in thinly veiled agitation. Her eyes, roaming around the room at light speed to find something that would hold her attention, spotted a book of her mother’s across the room and in little more than a second the journal was in her lap.

The cover was unintelligible, a long title sitting deep into the leather that could have been written in some long dead language for all the sense it made to her. She fingered the pages reverently, treating them ever so gently, as if it was in fact a piece of her mother she had laid out before her and not a vaguely haphazard set of words and pictures that she couldn’t quite understand. Delilah had simply moved from one puzzle to the next, applying not only a loving eye but a critical one to the heavy pages and gilded words.

Delilah couldn’t decide if her mother’s penmanship was simply atrocious or if she was writing in some kind of shorthand that she didn’t understand. Something was tugging at her; that vaguely familiar feeling rustling the leaves of her consciousness again like little children jumping into well raked piles in the street and throwing it all into disarray. She flipped aimlessly, doing more wishing that it made sense than anything else, running her fingers down the length of the page, lightly tracing over the places her mother’s pen had touched. She bent down at times, so close her nose has almost pressed into the spine, trying to peer directly into its meaning, wondering if maybe just a knock would send a greeter out to open the door and spill all the secrets inside.

Pictures were stuck at random between pages, probably just a rushed hiding place but Delilah was excited to uncover them, greedily taking in everything that they had to say. Her family had never really been big on photographs; it hadn’t seemed like a big thing when she was eight but she still couldn’t shake that well of sadness that she didn’t have nearly enough snapshots of her and her mother, some physical reminder of memories she was sure to have forgotten. Every picture she came across was another smile on her mother’s face, another sparkle of her eyes, another thing to look on fondly and keep safe.

It was the last picture, stuck between the final chicken-scratched page and the back cover, that fell into her lap and caught her completely by surprise. It was a group shot; not of their family but of what must have been a gathering of her mother’s friends. It was taken from above, looking down onto a circle of people sitting on a patch of grass somewhere. Five or six faces were laughing up at the camera along with her mother’s, all of them looking happy and content whatever they were up to. And they had to have been up to something, the hint of mischief hanging about not only them but the scene as well.

Her mother, with her short mop of brown curls looked exactly as Delilah’s memory of her. None of the other faces in the picture looked familiar at first. She turned it over in curiosity, searching out a date or list of names on the back but there was nothing there. It was as she flipped it back over that another face caught her eye. In the bottom left there was only about half a face, really just a profile of someone looking over their shoulder and not prepared for the camera.

The longer she stared at it the more she was sure that she knew who that was until she finally gasped in surprise and dropped the photo like it was burning her skin. That woman in the corner with the short, wavy blond hair bobbed just under her chin, she had seen her before. Seen those vividly violet eyes and felt them boring through her. It was that woman at the shop, the one that seemed too familiar to be real; she was in the photograph, laughing with her mother and looking exactly the same.

Before she even realized that she was doing it, that a decision had been made in the back of her mind as the front had been preoccupied with the gasp and the shock and the disbelief, Delilah was halfway through the door. With one backward grab at the prescription on the fridge, she was hopping down the stairs and flying down the street, the book and photo clutched to her chest though whether out of safety or fear she wasn’t even sure.

It had taken what seemed like only a smattering of moments before she was suddenly out in front of the shop, almost as if instead of her rushing towards it, it had rushed towards her and she’d arrived here just by standing still. It was an unnerving thought but it had been the day for them so she just stacked it on the pile with the rest and continued fidgeting outside, the desire to enter and the desire to stay put fighting an equally matched battle inside of her. Her hand reached up to stroke the necklace and it suddenly became clear what she had to do next.

She didn’t even have to reach for the handle; the door opened up before her and she stepped inside with only a slightly hesitant backwards glance. After what had happened earlier, Delilah was suddenly much too aware that no one knew where she was at this very moment and a small trickle of nervousness dripped down her spine.

But the gypsy woman wasn’t waiting to devour her at the door and there didn’t seem to be anything else inherently scary waiting in the wings for her. For the first time she noticed the rich colors of her surroundings, deep orange walls here, deep purple walls there, serving as a vibrant backdrop for the eclectic things that had been strewn about. Glass bottles and figurines, most in translucent green and iridescent blue, set the whole place up to sparkle like a true diamond in the rough. It was as if the whole store was twinkling at her. The old books were still there where she could barely see them from the door, beckoning her over to the back.

Delilah was the only soul in the store so it should have been eerily quiet but it wasn’t; the place, the very walls and every object between them, seemed to pulse with its own energy, its own story. She felt the energy humming against her skin, running along the seams of her clothes and the tips of her shoes, but ignored it with little else than a buzzing white noise crinkling in her mind.

She was standing right in front of the long front counter, mindlessly running her fingers across the glass top when a rattling sound startled her. She jumped in fright as the gypsy came out from behind lines of beads and metal that separated the back and front parts of the quirky little place. She tried not to meet her eyes but the urge was too strong to see what would happen.

But nothing did. “Well, it’s about time I should say.” The woman smiled brightly at her and crossed behind to set her tray of interesting things down on the counter before leaning conspiratorially over on her elbows towards her. “How long have I been waiting for you now? Years, years I think. Ten if I’m not mistaken. Oh it must be ten, ten if it’s even one I think. Lots has happened since then, lots.

“What took you so long? I swear.” She shook her head in a bit of exasperation before looking closely at her face, like she was trying to read something off of the curve of Delilah’s eyebrows and the apples of her cheeks. “Well, I should say that you squeaked in just in the nick of time I think. Let’s be happy you’re not as bad as my kids. Then you would have tried to arrive ten minutes late, swearing you were actually here the whole time and that never would have done. Not at all. Lost forever then.”

She paused for a moment, for Delilah to say something probably but she was so struck by what was happening that she couldn’t manage to get anything out, didn’t know what she wanted to get out. She’d expected some kind of confrontation or some lying disguise. If she was such a friend of her mother’s than why didn’t Delilah know her, of her, about her? If she was expected and this close to her apartment then why had she been waiting on her just a few miles away?

“You don’t have anything to say?” the lady laughed as she straightened, the very color of her violet eyes seeming to crinkle with humor. “I do remember you being a tad bit more chatty miss.”

“I . . . when I came in here earlier and you . . .”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” she apologized with her fingers now drumming rhythmically against the counter, “but you caught me off guard. I know I said that I’ve been waiting on you for ten years but I’d written you off as not interested. Well, I hadn’t seen you before your birthday so I’d written you off in permanent black marker to be sure. And then you walk in here and, well, I was just so surprised I lost control. That happens to me sometimes.”

Delilah just continued to gape. “So what happened earlier – the wind and the hillside? You did that to me?” She nodded her head in agreement, looking only slightly chagrined as if for pretense’s sake. “How? Why? Who are you?!”

The gypsy tilted her head to the side and seemed to stare right through Delilah before her eyes appeared to lighten considerably, the dawn of a realization breaking across them. “My stars, you don’t know anything, do you?”

“About what’s going on and why you’ve been waiting ten years for me? Yeah, no clue.” Even though she felt so close, tiptoeing along the edge of a mountain ridge, she couldn’t bring herself to jump, to find out what was at the bottom because she knew, somewhere in mid-air, that everything would change. Delilah didn’t run towards change – she ran away from it.

“You know,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment to clear her head, “I don’t care. This is ridiculous. Nothing happened and you’re just agreeing with me, who knows why. I’m just sick, and it’s making me crazy. That’s it.” She took the prescription out of her pocket and handed it across to her. “Could you just sell me this so I can get rid of this damn cold and get on with my life.”

The old friend grabbed the piece of paper and a faintly knowing smile settled on her face. “I could sell you these but I have something even better for you. Guaranteed to work.” She turned and grabbed a small clay jar from a shelf above her head, just within her reach, and removed the lid.

“Here, take a whiff. It will clear you right up.” Delilah was uncertain but she leaned forward just the same. She couldn’t smell anything anyway so it didn’t much matter if it was something rotten – it wasn’t about to offend her stymied senses. “Take a deep breath Delilah,” the gypsy ordered. And she listened. And it changed everything.

Let's Get Intuit, Chapter 2

Chapter 2
Delilah shook her leg restlessly, causing tremors of movement on the paper beneath her with a screechy sound effect to match. She bit her lip nervously and reconsidered whether telling Amelia she’d be fine by herself had been such a good idea. But she had a cold, that’s it. She didn’t need Amelia there to hold her hand when Stephen prescribed more orange juice and bed-rest.

But in the ten minutes she’d been in the sterile exam room, staring at the loudly ticking clock and the stark white walls, worst-case scenarios were playing hide and go seek in the recesses of her mind. Every time she thought she’d uncovered all the reasons she should be scared and began to calm down she happened across another one and it sent her reeling again. What if she had tuberculosis or consumption? Been bitten by something and contracted West Nile virus or the Avian flu? Hadn’t she seen an episode of some medical drama where a perpetual cold meant cerebral fluid was leaking from the brain?!

And then there was that weird hallucination where she had pictured herself with that strangely familiar woman, standing on some kind of lush hillside. For a moment she could have sworn she smelt crisp grass and fresh morning dew and even an impending rainstorm in the air. Which was crazy on so many levels, not least of which was that she hadn’t been able to smell anything for the last three months thanks to this damn cold.

Should she even mention her ‘vision problems’ to Stephen? She wasn’t delirious due to fever – she’d made sure Amelia checked – so what did that leave? Crazy, insane, delusional, what? She could picture Stephen now with that same infuriatingly patronizing way his sister got sometimes. He’d listen to her story, say he was going to help her and then get her committed to the mental hospital for sure. He’d probably even help them throw away the key. She’d be better off confiding in Jack the Ripper than him. Not that Stephen was a bad guy; he was just hyper-rational. Evidently doctors had to be.

The door opened and she stopped shaking, as still as a stone. For a moment she thought she was hallucinating again – maybe delusions really had taken over her life and she was trapped in some perpetual dream sequence. Next thing you know she’d be liable to break out into show tunes and the medical staff would start doing a conga line across her exam room. Because the person that entered was not Stephen the doctor or Amelia her friend or even Nancy the nurse; the only way he could be described was Man of Her Dreams.

“Hi, I’m Doctor Michaels. And you’re Delilah, right?” He turned and gave her an affectionate smile, his mouth curving up into a deliciously provocative curl, and reached his hand out in greeting. For a moment she didn’t move, too stunned and speechless to react at all. When time finally did start again, her manners catching up with the pounding of her heart, she still could manage little more than a head nod and an apprehensive smile.

“You’re not Stephen,” she said, glancing nervously at the door like she was sixteen again and he was going to bust in and embarrass her in front of a cute boy.

“No, I’m not,” he smiled, leaning nonchalantly against the counter, ankles crossed, her chart open in his hands.

“Sorry,” she blushed with a self-deprecating roll of the eyes, “It’s just Stephen is an old friend and he was squeezing me in so I’m just a little surprised that it’s you doing the squeezing and not him.”

He smiled a little bit wider and his eyes crinkled just a bit. “We all try to chip in around here. And I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress.” He paused for a moment and a look passed between them though what is was supposed to mean, only the color expanding across her cheeks knew. “Well now, what seems to be the problem?”

“I just,” she waved her hand dismissively, an attitude so engrained by now she still couldn’t seem to make herself take her illness seriously whenever an audience was around, “have this little cold I think. But it’s been around for three months now and I just can’t shake it.”

“Hmm, three months. That is a long time,” he murmured, stepping closer to examine her. His hands came down on the side of her neck, his finger probing gently along her jaw line and that sensitive spot under her ears. She knew it was for some purely medical reason, probably checking for some grossly horrifying symptom of something deadly serious, but it took all of her strength to not start purring at the feel of his hands on her. It had been so long since anyone had touched her that she had to curl her hands tightly against the edge of the examination table to not reach for him or lean into his purely clinical embrace.

She peeked her eyes up at him and his face was deceptively close, his dark emerald eyes peering down into her own. She tried not to look too content but it must not have worked very well because he flashed his own smile, a quick slash of his straight white teeth, before dropping his hands away. “No swelling,” he murmured with a slight hitch in his voice. She bit her lip to try and stop a satisfied smile from breaking out across her face.

Never before had Delilah wished that her throat and back were sexy but now she did as the dreamy doctor peered down her throat and rolled up her shirt. “Oh, cold,” she yelped in surprise with a little laugh as he touched the stethoscope to her skin.

“Sorry,” he replied, pulling it back. Delilah turned to look over her shoulder and saw him raise it to his mouth and blow slowly, letting the warmth of his voice wash over it. “Is that better?” he asked as he touched it to her skin again, no longer that stinging cold.

“Mmhmm,” she answered, shaking her head. She couldn’t speak. She didn’t know what was coming over her but suddenly the moment just seemed provocatively sensual. She’d felt especially raw since she’d stepped into that store, feeling like she could feel and hear everything more than she did before. The colors on the sidewalk, the sounds in the silent exam room, and now the brush of his fingers against her skin.

“Good, now take a deep breath.” His voice grazed across her skin and she felt her temperature go up a few degrees. “Now out.” She felt like she was going to hyperventilate, forcing herself to close her eyes and concentrate on the feel of the air against her lips, small round bubbles moving against the current of her tongue.

He stepped back, away from her, and it all stopped. Delilah brought a hand up and ran it distractedly through her hair. He walked back around to the counter, leaning against it unconcerned, and started to talk to her but she didn’t hear any of it; she was too distracted by the images racing around in her head. Her walking across the room to take her chart out of his hand and throw it across the room. Running her hands through his wavy chocolate hair. Ripping open his lab coat, buttons popping here and there, to find him bare-chested and beckoning her to touch him.

She closed her eyes and shook her head to clear it away before opening them to find the good doctor staring at her quizzically. “Sorry,” she blushed again, even more color rising to her cheeks, “I’m just a little distracted. You were saying?”

“Well,” he started, moving across the room to stand closer to her, hoping that would hold her attention, “I was saying that I don’t think it’s a bacterial infection but I’ll do some tests if you like just to be sure. The strain this year has a little bit of Epstein Bar in it so it’s been hanging around a little longer than usual. I’m not sure it’s anything to worry about.”

“Just one thing,” she murmured in a low sultry voice, prompting him to step a bit closer to hear her.

“And what’s that?”

“If I don’t need any more tests then when do I get to see you again?” she asked, holding tighter to the table to stop the urge she had to slip his pen out of his coat pocket and scribble her phone number across some obscured part of his body that she’d have fun uncovering.

His eyes widened just a bit and he stepped back, seeing the need to clear his throat as he did. “You know doctors can’t date their patients.”

“I had heard that somewhere,” she responded with a smile. Their eyes met and she wasn’t quite sure why but she laughed a little.

“You know, on second thought I really think that Stephen should have a look at you. He was the doctor you wanted, wasn’t he?”

“Oh yes, I definitely want to see Stephen.”

“Okay, well, it was very nice to meet you. And if you ever feel like a change – of the medical kind,” he clarified needlessly with a highly charged look, pulling something from his back pocket and scrawling a number across the back, “here’s my card. Call me, anytime.” He flashed her a mega-watt smile and dropped his card into her outstretched hand. Their fingertips grazed each other and she felt electricity blow through her. From the look on his face as he exited the room, he had felt it to.

“Wow,” she exhaled shakily, sneaking a peek at the door like she could see through it and follow him around the building to his next patient. “Jensen Michaels,” she read aloud. “Dreamboat MD.”

She was only waiting a few more minutes before there was a knock on the door and Stephen’s head peaked inside. “Hey De – sorry to keep you waiting.” He looked at her for a moment with that clinical doctor detachment before he blew the image by laughing in that disbelieving way he had that stretched his mouth wide like a monkey. “Seriously, can’t you manage to keep the flirting to a minimum ever?”

“I don’t flirt with you,” she replied.

“Ew, stop being disgusting,” he said, opening her chart and starting to read. He looked up just in time to see her stick her tongue out at him. “Oh, very ladylike De-lirium.” She had forgotten he used to call her that. She didn’t used to have hallucinations, did she?

“Okay, even though he’s too easily swayed by a pretty young thing, looks like Jensen examined you fine. Common cold. Here,” he said, tearing a piece of paper off of his prescription pad and writing something down, “I can’t give you anything for it but some of our other patients have been swearing by these herbs that are helping with the symptoms.”

“Why didn’t Dr. Michaels mention these to me?” Delilah sniffled, staring down at the barely legible writing with a critical eye.

“Because Jensen thinks that holistic medicine is for quacks while I on the other hand am horribly enlightened.” He looked at her confused face and sighed, stepping a bit closer to her. “Seriously De, I wouldn’t be telling you about them if they didn’t work. Just try them out, they won’t kill you.”

He opened the door and she followed him, winding their way through the back towards the lobby. “Stephen what does this even say?” she asked, turning the square this way and that to try and make some kind of meaning appear between the lines of his horrible handwriting.

“It’s a mixture of Chinese herbs called Shen Ti Hao. You drink them in a tea. Evidently it tastes really good with honey and a splash of milk.”

“Thank you Ste. I really appreciate you getting me in here today,” Delilah said, having to grab his arm to deliver her thank you since he was already off to another patient.

The smile he returned was sincere. “No worries little one. I’ve got you covered. Don’t break too many hearts now and I need my partner so don’t wear him out.”

“Can’t make any promises,” she answered with a devilish smile. Stephen just shook his head and ushered her out into the lobby, waving his hand at his sister in a quick greeting.

“Stephen, wait, you didn’t tell me where I can get these?” Delilah remembered, sticking her head back through the door. He had already disappeared.

He popped up a moment later behind the reception desk, leaning forward so they could see him. “There’s this one place downtown. Has a funny sounding name. What was it, what was it . . . something with the word Alternative in the title. It’s right next to that organic ice cream shop and that old bookstore with the picture of Sigmund Freud out front.”

“I know where that is,” Amelia piped up, “Remember, that cute little orange shop with all the blown glass? In fact, that’s where we were earlier when you got sick suddenly. What a coincidence.”