Heavenly Husband. Carolyn Greene
her mouth slightly when the spoon approached his face. Copying her action, he parted his lips. Warm liquid and lumps of vegetables touched his tongue, and he found the sensation quite pleasing. Adidas withdrew the spoon, and the liquid dribbled out of his mouth and down his chin.
He sat open-mouthed as most of the soup made a drool path down to his neck.
“It’s okay. I’ll get it.” The auburn-haired woman dabbed at his chin and neck until it was once again dry. “Maybe this time we should use a bib.”
As she tucked a paper napkin under his chin, a terrifying thought occurred to Jared. It appeared Nahum had changed his mind and decided to make him serve his full apprenticeship, starting as a baby.
Judging from the equipment in the room and the sterile smell of it, he decided he must be in a hospital. Could it be that he was a newborn and this gorgeous woman was his mother? Mothers feed their babies, and she was certainly doing that. He couldn’t remember the birthing experience, but then he’d heard that all humans forgot the events accompanying their emergence into the world.
The worst part would be going through life desiring his own mother. There was no way he could stop the strange urge that compelled him to stare at the beauty of her face, listen to the soft melody of her voice, or notice the gentle curves of her earthly form. How could Nahum do this to him!
But wait. Didn’t babies drink from bottles? Or elsewhere? Jared tried to rein in his errant thoughts as he pictured himself suckling from Adidas’s ample breast. No, if he were a baby, he wouldn’t be having such thoughts.
In fact, if he were a baby, he wouldn’t have been able to converse with her.
She pushed another spoonful of soup into his mouth, and this time he closed his lips around it, keeping the savory nourishment inside as she withdrew the spoon. It sat on his tongue as he wondered what to do with it.
This was quite different from on high. Up there, when they’d sipped wine or sampled grapes, it had been a symbolic procedure. The wine and grapes, having no dimension, had presented no problem, but this soup...
Reflex took over, and he swallowed. The chunks of vegetables lodged in his throat, bringing on a fit of coughing.
Adidas leaned forward and patted him on the back. Through a tear-filled haze, Jared was rewarded with a glimpse of the soft white flesh that filled out the front of her upper garments. Thoroughly distracted now, he ceased coughing. Strange, but this unexpected sight created even more pleasure than his first taste of vegetable soup.
“For goodness’ sake, Gerald, you’ve got to chew your food before you swallow it.”
“Chew?”
“Yes. You know, mash it between your teeth.” She stared at him with a mixture of curiosity and exasperation.
For some unexplained reason, Jared didn’t want her to be displeased with him. He wanted to see her smile, wanted her to lean close again so he could smell her sweet floral scent. And he wanted something else. It was a need that was so deep-rooted he couldn’t put a finger on what it was. What he did know was that this need somehow involved Adidas.
“Who is Gerald?” he asked.
She frowned at him a long moment before answering. “You were involved in a car accident...at the Pike Creek Overpass.” She waited a second as if she expected him to be familiar with this information. When he didn’t reply, she continued, her tone slow and careful, as if she was afraid of upsetting him. “You came very close to leaving us.” Her gaze dropped to her lap, and when she looked up again, her eyes glistened with moisture. “Your name is Gerald Kirkland. The doctors said you might suffer a temporary memory loss. But don’t worry, it’ll come back soon, I’m sure.”
Then Jared recalled Nahum’s words. There is a soul whose hourglass is almost empty. You will inhabit his vessel when he leaves it. So he had been placed in Gerald Kirkland’s body. At first he felt a twinge of guilt for invading the man’s physical casing. Then he remembered that the body would have died if he had not come into it.
He wondered if Adidas was the woman he was supposed to protect. And if so, how was he supposed to look out for her while confined to a hospital bed?
Jared lifted his right hand and was surprised to note how large it was. Dark hair covered the thick forearm. He reached for her, and she held his hand in her lap. Her skin was soft, even softer than a fenuki feather, and he relished the sensation of her fingers touching his.
“Tell me about your relationship with—” although he was inhabiting the man’s body, he couldn’t claim to be the former occupant “—Gerald.”
If she thought his question was odd, she didn’t show it. Instead, she seemed to be focusing on how best to word her reply. “We were...”
Hesitation. Wariness. There was something she obviously didn’t want to tell him. And she didn’t.
“We are friends. Just friends.”
“That’s it?”
“Your memory will come back gradually. Don’t push it too fast, Gerald.”
Jared squeezed her fingers. “Call me Jerry.”
She sat up straight in her chair and seemed to be trying to ignore the pressure of his fingers against hers. “You hate it when people call you that.”
“Not anymore.” With conviction, he added, “I’m not the man you used to know.”
CHAPTER TWO
KIM didn’t know what to do. Jerry—as he now insisted on being called—was driving her nuts. He was turning her home from a sanctuary into a zoo.
She realized she should try to have more patience with him. But it had taken repeated corrections and finally a look at her driver’s license to convince him her name was Kim, and not Adidas. He had seemed surprised to learn that she was only twenty-eight...in human years, as he’d put it. And patience ran thin after dealing with his endless questions about the mundane events and artifacts of everyday life. It was as if he were an alien from outer space and this was his first close-up look at life on Earth.
Kim stirred sliced bananas into the pancake batter, then poured out four round globs onto the hot griddle. And look at her now. Here she was, second vice president of Barnett’s Bakery—a woman accustomed to delegating work and giving instructions to high-level employees—taking breakfast orders from her temporary tenant.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that she was taking a couple weeks off from work to care for him when she most needed to be at the office, Jerry seemed to take delight in finding new ways to make her crazy.
First he’d gotten hooked on television. Daytime soaps, talk shows, cartoons, game shows and educational TV— he loved it all. Especially commercials. And he wanted her to buy him everything from the sugary cereal with a prize in the box to almost every sports car he saw advertised.
Then there was the telephone. He’d started out by listening to the dial tone until the electronic voice advised him to hang up and try again. After he got the hang of dialing numbers, he placed a flurry of calls to various 900 numbers. If he’d been confused by the horoscope predictions, he was absolutely bewildered by the sex-talk line.
“Why would a woman I’ve never met want to tell me what she’s wearing under her dress?” he’d asked.
Turning off the stove, Kim stacked the pancakes on plates, then poured two cups of coffee...black for him and cream and sugar for herself. A large tray accommodated the load, and she carried it to the den where she’d last seen Jerry sitting with his leg in that gaudy orange cast propped on the sofa.
He was nowhere to be found.
Kim set the tray on the coffee table and went to look for him. As she headed down the short hallway, she saw that the bathroom was empty, and the library, where she often caught him looking things up in the encyclopedia or dictionary, stood vacant.