Even in the Future

Chapter 1 - Tea Leaves

Jeremy stepped out into the night. An ordinary night, not unlike any other that he had ever seen or felt or smelled before. A perfectly ordinary night by any sane person’s definition of the period of darkness between sunset and sunrise, and nothing was going on that would ever be written down in a history book or scripted into a movie. Yet because of this, it was as far from normal as he might have wishes.

The two-lane road in front of the entrance to the hotel where he worked was almost empty. This was commonly the case at night, despite the hotel being the classiest establishment in the small town and right in the center of the downtown area. Jeremy was just getting off from a double shift and was exhausted, excitedly looking forward to greeting his bed shortly. He pulled the two sides of his coat tightly against him as a frigid gust of wind sent shivers across his body. Only one light was on above the parking lot across the street, and the dimly lit area made the January weather feel even colder. Squinting, he saw a small blue sedan in the parking lot, most likely the beat-up travel vehicle of one of the hotel’s patrons.

“Probably won some kind of sweepstakes to get a free room” he thought to himself, “anyone who drives that thing is too poor for fancy things. Either that or it’s the most fashionably tone-deaf rich person that I’ve ever seen.”

The car, though, looked very familiar. He had seen the likes of it before…

-----------------------------------

“No way Jer!” Safia shouted, playfully hitting his arm, “If we didn’t have Mrs. Payston’s class together two years ago we definitely would have still met. There’s not that many people at our high school.”

Jeremy smiled a goofy looking grin. She had touched him. Sure, it wasn’t as if it was the first time or was anything remarkable in and of itself, but he relished it. There was something strangely intimate about breaking the touch barrier with someone, even if for the thousandth time.

“Don’t look so happy about it,” Safia snapped in that slightly obnoxious voice she used sometimes when she was being sarcastic and which was probably her only drawback, “If we hadn’t then we probably would have just replaced each other with cooler friends anyways.”

That stung a little, despite how she was quite clearly joking, but it was far outweighed by the joy of just being beside her. Their small talk, however small, always was the high point of his day. It was nighttime and they were walking back to his car from the House of Tea, their usual hangout place on the mall. Neither of them were 18 yet, but somehow they always managed to get into the back room and smoke hookah with some older friends anyways. It was one of those things that is not really special at all, but at the time it was such a large source of pride for him.

It was summertime but the night was cool, and as the shops and restaurants closed and turned off their lights the sky became ablaze with stars. As they walked back to the car and looked up at the stars Jeremy told her the story of Queen Cassiopeia, the vain queen of Ethiopia who Poseidon placed in the heavens tied to a chair as punishment for her boasting. “Poseidon decreed that because of her great vanity, Cassiopeia should sit on her throne in the sky, but half of the year her throne would be upside down as punishment.” Jeremy pointed his finger up to the sky and outlined the stars that made up the constellation. “You see there? Those stars are the throne that she sits on.” Safia leaned in closely to him in order to follow his pointing. Her head brushed against his arm as she looked and he felt a rush of heat flow along his body, beginning on his arm where her blonde hair fell across his shoulder and arm and flooded out across him and into all of his limbs. His legs would have grown weak if he did not focus all of his attention on keeping standing to provide for her a place to rest her head. She held such power over him with every touch, just as she always had since the first time they met.