The following morning, I met Rafe for more training. He wanted me at the store before opening to show me how to work the register. As such, we both arrived around 10 a.m, with me cautious of the look he held as I crossed the empty parking lot. He waited at the door with two Styrofoam cups.

"I wasn't sure what you wanted, so I left it black. Brought plenty of sugar and creamer, though." He rattled a paper bag.

I loved coffee, but I also loved to be stubborn.

"No thanks," I said.

"Um, all right, but do you think you can hold the cups while I unlock the door?'

I handled the coffee cups as if they were radioactive.

He turned away with knit eyebrows. "You know, I don't remember you being this stuck up."

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

I chose not to answer right away. He was my boss, after all.

Door open, we went inside. The usual goblins greeted us with their red LED eyes.

I couldn't bite my tongue for long:

"I am not stuck up."

Just averse to the idea of a man with no future is all.

Of course, I couldn't tell him this without explaining my power. That was a conversation I had only ever had with Rosalind. Not even my mother knew the full extent of my power, or how it worked.

It had crossed my mind that I could have tried reading his future again. However, I was scared at what I might see. Or not see.

"I remember a time when you were friendly. And if I can recall correctly, you used to love coffee," Rafe said. "There was also a time when you loved 'The Wizard of Oz,' and you would have appreciated that front display."

"Did you set it up that way for me?" I asked.

We were in the back office, a tiny space that made our discussion all the more uncomfortable.

"No, why would I do that?" He set one coffee cup on the desk, and slid the other into the trash.

I pretended not to notice. "I don't know. You're the one that brought it up. I haven't liked that movie for a long a time, and there's a reason for that. If you knew me as well as you thought you did, you would have known that, too."

Rafe met my gaze, and I withstood the compulsion to look into his future.

"What's the reason then?" He settled behind the desk.

"I'll tell you if you remove that stupid display."

"On the condition that you help me, sure."

"Well, I am your employee. I'm at your complete and utter disposal." Flirting with him was habit too.

"I'll keep that in mind." He gestured as if to say, now you go.

"Anyway, I hate that movie because...." Was I really about to explain to Rafe the details of Juliet's death and how it had scarred me for life? Did he deserve to know a deep, dark part of me? My mouth decided for me.

"Juliet. I hate that movie because when she died, it was playing in the background. Every time it comes on television, or I see a costume from the movie, it's one more reminder."

I wasn't expecting Rafe to say much after that, but he did. Not to say there wasn't a moment of awkward silence, because there was.

"Wow, okay. So...let's change it to a witch and wizard theme. That's easy enough, right?"

"That's easy enough, yeah."

What was easy was talking with Rafe and working alongside him. Replacing the display felt like another excuse for me to let my guard down and mess around with him some more. Unlike the previous day, time flew by, as did the friendly banter. The employee-employer relationship had transitioned more into benevolent territory. Though I didn't mean to, though I did not want to, my feelings for Rafe were growing.

Although, the conversation we had later in that day made me wonder about him.

It began when I said, "Can I just ask you something?"

"I don't see why not."

"Why a costume shop?"

"I was hoping it'd be 'let's have dinner tonight,' but all right. When I was little, my grandpa would take me to the costume shop in town, and I thought it was such an exotic place. Maybe it doesn't seem that way to you, but to a kid, masks, magic tricks, and capes are full of potential. Stuff like that can be a portal to a whole other world. I had the chance to be someone else, if only for one night."

"You don't like being yourself?"

"It's not that. But it is nice to hide sometimes."

"Hide?"

"C'mon, everyone hides once in a while. Everyone has secrets." He did not seem to say much about it after that, and I dropped the subject out of politeness.

For the rest of the week, we settled into a comfortable pattern. We were not quite friends, but we were not enemies either. We would flirt, but there was no meaning behind it. At least, for me, there was no meaning behind it. The attraction I felt for Rafe notwithstanding, there was a lingering sense of repulsion that I could not drive away.

* * * * *

A few days later, I found myself bored behind the counter of Scary Boo Bees.

"Scary Boo Bees. That's an odd name for a Halloween store." I was making small talk as I sorted mylars at the balloon counter. Row upon row of mylar balloons were on a display wall behind me, filled with nitrogen to keep them full but not airborne. My job was to organize the boxes of mylars that matched the display balloon. From the disarray I found, they had not been sorted for some time. It was work that required fun discourse to break up the tedium.

"Lemme ask you this," Rafe began, "what do you call a pair of Halloween bees?"

I was stumped and not the least bit intrigued. "What?"

"Boo-bees." Expectantly, Rafe waited for me to laugh. "Get it? Boo-bees. Boobies."

"Huh. I bet that's a popular one with the parents."

"Hey, my five-year old niece told me that joke. At the time I heard it, it was the perfect fit for my store. You know I can't resist a good pun."

"That I do...."

Mystery solved, I worked for thirty minutes uninterrupted by a customer of any kind. It seemed like the appropriate time to solve another mystery.

"Why did you even hire me? I haven't had a single customer all afternoon."

Rafe looked up from the paperwork he had been engrossed in. "I told you, Halloween's coming up."

"Halloween's not for another three months."

He put down his paperwork. "Truth is, the shop doesn't even need me. Business has never been very competitive against the larger chain stores."

"So why hire an employee that you can't afford?"

"Why do you think?"

For a split second, words escaped me. I knew exactly what to think, but I was too put off to mull too hard on it. That...thing wanted me. Weeks ago I had come to the conclusion he could not be human, not with the kind of future I had envisioned for him. All the same, I had accepted his offer of employment out of necessity. Given that, I was not about to let things progress by accepting advances from "it."

"You know what? I think I need a break." My hands would not untie my apron as quickly as I would have liked. Once my fingers had it figured out, I was on my way out of the door.

Its hand on my arm momentarily ceased my departure. "Wait. What's wrong? We were talking and then you...."

I did not hear the rest of his plea because I became lost in another vision. When he touched me, another piece of his future was triggered. This vision was considerably better than the last one I'd had about him.

In it, he was filling a basket with food for a picnic. Suddenly, he froze up, put down the mustard bottle, and proceeded to his bedroom. The linen closet held two blankets he had forgotten to pack. On his way back to the kitchen, a picture on his bed stand caught his eye. Sunlight cast a glare on it initially, but the photo was visible a moment later. Rafe had his arm about the waist of a smiling brunette woman. Her smile lit up her russet eyes, accenting the curly hair that spilled over her shoulders. Even though the smiling brunette woman in the picture was me, I could not bring myself to accept it. A loophole had allowed me to see myself in a vision, and I would not have guessed that Rafe and I would share a future together.

The thread snapped, and I lost the vision. Rafe saw the glazed look in my eyes, and I could tell he was more confused than ever. For me, things could not have been clearer. Rafe was not an "it," but he could have been it for me.

His hand was still resting on my arm, silently asking me to stay. I let myself notice the warmth of his hand, and the smell of soap and pine that I had always loved.

Another vision of his future gave me a jolt. It featured a hint of me again, and it was what I needed to convince me that the black void I had seen was either a fluke or my powers adjusting because I was a part of his future. All I could be sure of then was that I wanted something. If the death of my sisters had taught me anything, it was that if I was not hurting anyone in the process, I should take what I want now.

A sound relationship had never been attainable for me, but after seeing myself in Rafe's future, I felt I could finally give myself to someone without the constant knowledge the relationship had a palpable expiration date on it. When I turned back to Rafe, my demeanor reflected my newfound interest in him.

"Let me try something." That was the only thing sort of warning I gave before tilting my face up to meet his.

Soft, sweet images of us came into my head as our lips touched: blue waves splashing our legs on the beach, Rafe laughing at something clever I had said, Rafe holding me as we watched TV....

Our first kiss was a brief meeting of lips, but I had seen the essentials. My power was uncontrollable around him. The images of his future had come to me without discrimination, when usually I had more control over whom and when I saw my visions. Meeting eyes with a person was enough to spark a vision, but after that, I could access visions of them anytime I pleased. At will, I could pick a strand, take hold, and witness future events of a stranger's life.

I found the lack of control with Rafe somewhat distressing. That did not matter though, because love, real love, was all about lack of control. Or so I had read.

Hope sprang into my heart. Not only did I have a future, but it was a fairly happy one, filled with a man that cared for me.

The next few weeks I came to care deeply for him as well, to my eventual detriment.

****

A/N: Be a pal and visit tamoja pronto! She's a freakin' amazing writer, and has numerous writing awards to prove it :D