Alan realized halfway up the stairs that he’d made a mistake. Phoebe smelled sweet — like new-mown hay and sunshine. She felt soft and solid and warm in his arms. The surprising weight of her hair spilled like a curling waterfall over his right arm, and she moved her head and his lips brushed her ear, and it took all his control not to pursue that fleeting touch. Her small, tight muscles would feel so good beneath the palm of his hand. Her full lips were designed to be kissed. She had curves that fit against him in a way that just meant sex.

She was saying something about how she could make it by herself — that he didn’t have to do this — but he couldn’t hear the words too well over the sound of his blood rushing in his ears. His heart pounding in his throat made breathing so much of an effort that he didn’t dare speak. And his body was reacting to having her in his arms in ways he was pretty sure a psychic would notice — ways that, if he let her slide down another half inch while he was carrying her, she wouldn’t have to be psychic to notice.

And how the hell was he going to put her down without embarrassing himself?

Okay. He’d been neglecting his physical needs and desires — well, actually, until he ran over her on the sidewalk, he hadn’t been having any physical needs and desires, but five years plus change of being celibate were bound to take their toll. He could surely have done something to prevent what was going to become an awkward situation in just two more steps.

I should have gone for the sympathy fuck on the X-ray table and made Morrie a little bit richer, he thought. Because then Phoebe wouldn’t end up looking at me like I was a pervert or a molester, and that’s where we’re going to go with this the second I put her down.

He reached the landing, winced a little at the discomfort of jeans that were suddenly far too tight, and leaned over a bit while putting her down, contrary to all principles of good body mechanics. But he didn’t betray his arousal, and the sudden sharp pain in his lower back gave him a much-needed distraction. He lunged past her to the door, hurried into the office, and switched on the light.

“In here,” he called, and by the time she made it into the room, he was sitting at his desk. Not smooth, but it worked. He wasn’t sure why he cared so much that she didn’t think he was some lecher who’d dragged her up the stairs just so he could grope her on the way up. But he did care. A lot.

She came through the archway, the limp not too pronounced, and glanced at him. Then she turned her attention to the window.

She moved toward it slowly, eyes half closed, with a sort of out-of-focus expression on her face, and she looked like a Botticelli angel in the sunlight that angled through the glass; she wore sparkling dust motes for a halo. And he thought, Yes. Simply, yes. To whatever place she might have in his future, his life, this room — yes.

She stopped a few feet away, her eyes went all the way shut, and he saw her shiver.

Suddenly the room felt cold to him. Not air-conditioner cold. Sweating-ice cold, like someone had poured water on him and shoved him into a meat freezer. He stood up, his other issues erased by the shocking temperature change, and by the fact that he could hear whispering all around him, though he couldn’t make out a word. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck stood up, and his testicles felt so tight they seemed to be trying to climb into his abdomen.

That’s one way to get breathing room in the blue jeans, he thought.

Phoebe took another step toward the window, and Alan wondered if the window was going to change, and if he was going to see Chick again. No matter what Phoebe said, he would jump through that window if he ever got a second shot at it. What was a broken leg if he got to be with his kid again — no matter where she was?

But the verticals stayed the same. Everything stayed the same, except that the temperature kept getting colder and colder and colder. Phoebe shivered again, took another step forward, and cocked her head. She opened her eyes and looked at him, then walked the rest of the way to the window and put her hands on the sill.

“I can’t find anything here,” she said. “I mean, it’s obvious to me that something happened here. And from the sudden cold I felt when I moved towards the window, this seems to be a contact point. But your daughter didn’t leave any tracks that I can read — not where she was, not how she opened the doorway between there and here.”

“I still feel the cold,” Alan said. “I’ve never felt anything like it before. Is she here now?” he asked.

“The cold is related to her, but it isn’t... her. It’s just...” Phoebe sighed. “It’s like — the contrail of a jet.”

“She’s been here, but she’s gone?”

“She’s close, and this is blowback,” Phoebe said. “If I can sit at your desk for a few minutes, I can throw a few cards... maybe see if I can shake something loose. Maybe I can help her bridge the gap.”

Alan nodded and cleared a space on the desk where Phoebe could work. The computer was easy enough to pick up and move. Notes and other things he just gathered up and deposited on the floor.

Phoebe sat, closed her eyes for a moment, then pulled cards out of a dark blue drawstring bag and began shuffling them. These weren’t the round ones he’d seen her scoop up from her table and drop into a silk-and-wool card bag. These were big and rectangular and had tiny gold stars on a navy blue background. She shuffled them competently, her hands flashing. When she stopped, she cut the deck into three piles with her left hand, picked one of the piles, and started laying the cards out on the desk, placing them in an odd pattern that made no sense to him. She didn’t do any oohing or ahhing, nor did she suddenly look up at him, stab a card with one finger, and say, “This portends financial ruin unless you pay me to put a spell on your enemies.” Some still-wary part of him had been expecting both responses.

Instead, she sat looking at the spread for a moment, counted the cards on the table, said, “Ick. Five majors,” and went back to looking at the spread again.

Finally she looked up at him. “This first reading tells me about you,” she said. “I always use the Universal Waite when I read men.” He tried to concentrate on what she was saying, but logically, he couldn’t see where the cards could have any real relevance to his life, and illogically, he kept imagining Phoebe naked and in interesting positions on the desk, and the chair, and the floor. She pointed to the card in the center of the spread and said, “The reversed Page of Swords represents you. You’re facing a challenge right now where your instinct is to approach with all your analytical skills front and center, but that’s truly not a good idea. You’re going to have to close your eyes and trust your gut to find your way through the current problems.”

This comment caught his attention, since it told him both what he’d been thinking and why he shouldn’t think that way. Damn.

Phoebe continued, “Your atmosphere — basically what’s going on right now — is Strength, a major. It represents courage, compassion, patience, and strength — all of which you have, all of which you’ll need. Your obstacle is that what you face may be too much for you — the Ten of Wands upright.” She turned to him. “I have some unpleasant feelings related to this card, too, but I’d like to do my second layout over the top of this one before I say anything specific.”

He shrugged. “Sure. Fine.” Like he had any opinions on this bizarre process.

“Beneath your feet,” she said, “is your Ground — the Hierophant — a major arcana card that indicates a tendency to conformity, strong personal beliefs, and occasionally an unwillingness to bend. It isn’t a bad Ground card when you’re in trouble, though. Over your head hangs the Nine of Swords. Nightmares. If you open your eyes and face them, you can deal with them, but so far the reversal of this card indicates that you have been letting the nightmares control you.”

He stopped her. “This is really strange. What you’re saying makes sense, but is it making sense because you know a little bit about me and the situation I face, or is it making sense because this thing you’re doing works — and if it works, how does it work, because, really, I only had the one nightmare?”

Phoebe looked bewildered for all of half a second as she parsed that tangle of a sentence. Then she laughed, and he discovered that he loved her laugh. It was warm and rich and throaty, and he found himself right back with the Phoebe-naked-on-a-desk images, and revisited, as well, by too-tight jeans.

“It works. As for why it works, I can tell you what I think, but you’re welcome to your own interpretation. I think we’re all linked. That we are beings of light that wear these mortal forms for some reason we can only guess at while we wear them. That beneath these shells of flesh, we’re part of a... a river of energy that fills the universe and moves through us and binds everything.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s either religion or quantum physics.”

“I’m not convinced that religion and quantum physics aren’t both aspects of the same thing.”

“Actually, I’m not, either,” he said. “I’m just at a place in my life where neither one of them seems to make sense.”

Phoebe laughed a little and nodded. “Both seem to defy logic at the best of times. But that doesn’t make them irrelevant. They both speak to how we affect each other. We touch each other, all of us, for good or bad. We never know what we do that matters, or whose life we change with a simple, unthinking action — but our touch spreads out infinitely far, altering and mutating and affecting even more people as it goes. I know you’ve heard this before, but all of existence is so closely bound that when a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it rains in Iowa.”

“I’ve heard that,” he agreed.

“I think that’s why tarot works. I think the energy that is us and that moves through us responds to our will — whether we call that prayer or magic or simple action. And that because we are all connected pieces of the animating force of the universe as a whole — holograms or fractals, maybe — the fall of a piece of painted cardboard on a table echoes the movement of intelligence through the galaxy.”

Alan laughed, then caught the expression of hurt on her face. “I’m not laughing at you. It’s simply — well — the last person I would have expected to blow me away with quantum physics was a woman who reads tarot cards for a living.”

“People are never just one thing,” she said, and her smile was almost devilish.

“No, we aren’t.” He shook his head again. “But why did you put so much thought into this?”

Phoebe shook her head. “It’s the science teacher in me. I’ve always preferred to understand the ‘why’ of things. Tarot gave me results that I couldn’t explain. So I tried to figure out why.”

“Not happy with the ‘it’s magic’ explanation?”

“I don’t believe in magic,” she said.

Neither did I, he thought. Until I touched you.

She returned her attention to the cards.

“In your recent past I see hiding away from opportunities, refusing to explore new horizons: the Three of Wands reversed.”

And he thought, That pretty much defines my last five years.

“In your near future, the Wheel of Fortune. Another of the major arcana cards. Chance, the roll of the dice, opportunities for a big win or an equally big loss.”

“Major arcana cards. What are those, and why do you keep mentioning them?”

Phoebe said, “The tarot deck is divided into major and minor arcana — ‘arcana’ means secrets. So think of them as big secrets and little secrets, more or less. We read minor arcana differently than major arcana. Minors are transient, changeable cards — you get them and you say ‘Okay, those are things I have to work on and then they won’t be an issue.’ Majors...” She shook her head. “Major arcana tell of — well — the movement of the finger of God, or a shift in the energy of the River of Life. However you want to think of it. The majors depict events and qualities that are fixed — that you cannot change. That you can only deal with.”

“And I got five of those.”

“Yes.”

“Five is... a lot?”

“Yes.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s neither good nor bad. It suggests, however, that you have stepped into a place in your life where events you cannot control will move you in ways you do not expect, cannot escape, and may not welcome, and that for a while your challenge will simply be to get through them.”

Alan didn’t care for the sound of that.

Phoebe rested her chin on one hand and said, “Death, also a major, sits in your House, which is someone or something that is not you but that is related to you closely — and though in most cases I would give the card the traditional interpretation and say that someone who matters to you faces change and letting go of the painful past to move into the new future, I think in this instance Death has to do with your daughter. I’m not sure. This one feels muddled to me, as if other things are also suggested, but I’ll find out more about the connection when I lay out your daughter’s cards in a minute.” Phoebe glanced up at him. “Some of these cards are trivial, simply noting the woman who is currently in your life and your wishes to have both financial stability and some sort of freedom very different than what your current work permits. You want to do something wild and irresponsible, which is interesting, considering your Ground.”

I don’t have a woman in my life, Alan thought, and looked at Phoebe and knew as the words were forming in his mind that they were a lie, and that at least from his perspective, he suddenly did.

Alan was getting tangled up in the cards, where everything seemed to make sense, but always in a vague way. That comment about doing something wild, though, cut straight to the bone.

He wanted to write. He’d always wanted to write. But he’d made a deal with God that he would give up writing and trying to be the next Jack Kerouac to become a doctor if his father would survive the heart attack Alan witnessed but couldn’t stop. God had seemed to listen. Alan’s father had lived, and in gratitude — mixed with a bit of resignation — Alan had become a doctor. And then God, the bastard, had let Alan’s kid die alongside his wife, and Alan was left with ashes, and a career he’d never wanted.

Phoebe was still reading. “...but the core of the reading, and the part that I find most interesting, comes in the outcome. It’s quite fascinating, really.”

She pointed to three cards descending from the left side of the circular layout at a forty-five-degree angle. Alan looked over her shoulder at the cards; they looked like all the rest of the cards to him. Colorful, weird, alien.

“Tell me the first thing you notice about these two,” she said, pointing to the two cards closest to the circle.

“They’re upside down,” Alan said. When she didn’t say anything in response to that, he looked closer and noticed an odd mirroring of the body positions of the lone figures on each of the first two cards. “They’re both sitting in the same position, with their knees and feet out and their arms crossed.”

Phoebe nodded. “The Two of Swords and the Nine of Cups. In a way they’re polar opposites, too. She’s cut off from everything, guarding herself with swords, blindfolded only to bring her other senses to sharper awareness. She sits small and alone in the center of a vast world, in the dark, outdoors, beneath a moon, before a sea. She is uncertain and afraid, wary and armed. But, because the card is reversed, no matter how hard she tries to prepare herself, she’s not ready for the challenge she faces. He, on the other hand, has his eyes wide open, but is also cut off from events happening before his eyes — both by comforts and wealth and by the fact that he sits in a sheltered location indoors, where everything seems bright and safe. His confidence that all will be well with him is his blindness. The reversal of the card lets us know that he, too, is unprepared for the challenge he faces.”

“Who are they?” Alan asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

“Good question. They could be two facets of you. They could be you and your girlfriend.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Alan finally said.

“Some woman you know or are attracted to, then,” Phoebe told him, and Alan felt his heart thud in his chest and did not let himself look at Phoebe or think of Phoebe, and said, “Oh. Her.”

“And the final card is big. It’s the World, a major, which, along with the presence of the other four majors in this reading, indicates that Fate is playing fast and loose with your life right now. What’s the first thing you think when you look at it?”

“That my World is upside down.”

”Since this is an outcome, it isn’t yet,” Phoebe said quietly, ”but it sure looks like it’s gonna be.“