The gift, if Mara calls it that, works like this: sixty seconds. No more, no less. She sees exactly what will happen, in precise and useless detail, and then she lives through it anyway.
She is twenty-nine years old and has been doing this for eleven years.
The man who walks in at eleven-forty is tall, dark-coated, and she knows immediately that he is not the thing she has learned to recognize as human. She knows it the way she knows the glass is going to fall: the moment arriving sixty seconds early.
In sixty seconds: he will sit at the bar. She will pour two glasses of her best rye. He will ask her name. She will tell him, and he will say it back in the particular way that very old things say a name — like they're filing it somewhere permanent. His glass will be empty before she finishes hers. She will ask how long. He will say long enough that the question stopped meaning anything. She will ask what he wants. He will say what are you offering? — and she will say an hour and my company and he will say show me where and she will lock the bar door and lead him upstairs —
The sixty seconds ends.
He walks in. Tall, dark-coated.
Mara pours two glasses.
He sits at the bar and looks at her in a way that suggests she is not interchangeable with the thousand other bars he's sat in. "You knew I was coming."
"I know a lot of things a minute early. Doesn't usually help."
"Does it help tonight?"
She slides one glass toward him. What she saw in the sixty seconds was accurate in the way her gift is always accurate: correct about facts, silent about weight. It hadn't told her what it would feel like to have something that had been accumulating time for centuries turn its full attention on her with no reserve. The room is warmer than it was.
"Mara," he says. Her name in his voice, the way she saw him say it.
"That's what I said."
"I've been looking for someone who could see what's coming."
"Most people use it for avoiding things."
"I don't want to avoid things." His eyes are very dark and very old. "I want someone who sees what's coming and pours two glasses anyway."
She finishes her glass. Sets it down.
She locks the bar door. Leads him upstairs.
Upstairs is her apartment: small, honest, smelling like the bar and old wood. He is unhurried in the way of something that has had centuries to learn patience and has decided, tonight, not to use it. He takes her coat off her shoulders with a deliberateness that is nothing like rush. She gets his in return. The lamp makes the room amber and close.
He has his mouth at her neck, her collarbone, lower, and she tips her head back and grips the edge of the dresser and stops thinking about the gift entirely — no sixty-second preview, just the present, which is his hands on her skin and the specific education of being attended to by something that has no hurry in it whatsoever. He works at her clothes and she at his, and neither of them makes it neat.
She told him in the sixty-second preview what she was offering: an hour and her company. He's taking both seriously. When she pulls him toward the bed and says his name — he gave it to her over the second glass, and it landed in her chest like a key — he looks at her for one breath with all his centuries in his eyes and then joins her.
The sex is unhurried and thorough and conducted with the quality of a creature that has all the time it could want and is choosing to use some of it here, now, specifically on her. She finds this either alarming or excellent and decides on excellent. He keeps his eyes on her face as he moves — dark eyes with nothing managed in them — and she holds him and moves with him and says his name again, and when she comes it is with her hands in his hair and his name still on her lips, and he follows with a sound that is several hundred years older than the room.
After, the city noise comes back. The bar is quiet below. He gets dressed without ceremony and she watches from the bed with no particular hurry.
"The gift," he says, at the door. "Does it show you the same things twice?"
"Never." She props her chin on her hand. "It shows you what comes next."
He looks at her. In the lamp light his face is very clear. "What comes next?"
She saw it in the sixty seconds before he left. She's looking at it now.
"Come back tomorrow," she says. "I'll tell you then."
The door closes. She lies in the amber light and thinks about the gift — about sixty seconds of preview that she has spent eleven years routing around rather than walking into. She thinks that this is the first time she's understood what it was actually for.
It was never about avoidance.
It was always about deciding which futures were worth walking into.
