The Space Between (The Book of Phoenix) Read Online Free PDF Page A

. . I cleared my desert-like throat and took her hand.
    That feeling of the floor dropping from my under my feet hit me again, though not as strong as before. The word “ dyad ” returned in my mind and the feeling I knew this girl, much more than was possible, exploded again from somewhere deep within me.
    Leni licked those full lips of hers. “They’re calling your flight for the last time,” she mouthed since my hand still held hers. As though she might have forgotten, she slipped her hand from mine and signed the same thing. “Don’t want to miss your flight, do you?”
    Yes . I wanted to tell her.
    I gave her a smile and signed instead, “I can read lips.”
    She returned my grin with a sexy smile of her own.
    “Take care, Jeric,” she mouthed before turning and gliding down the corridor. My heart faltered a few beats at the thought of how my name sounded rolling off those lips . . . that tongue . . .. If I only knew what her voice sounded like.
    Once the plane was in the air, I reached for my backpack stuffed under the seat in front of me and pulled out my tablet and the used-and-abused, leather-bound notebook inside. I thought I’d look her up on Facebook, but realized I didn’t catch her last name, so I went straight to the notebook. I kept notes of my search in it, but also used it for communication when texting on my phone didn’t work and even had a few sketches in it. I was far from a great artist—my true talent was music. Or, at least, it had been before the accident. Now my talent lies in things much more sinister.
    I flipped to the picture I’d drawn a couple of weeks ago after waking from a dream, one I’d been having for years. As I had previously, I’d felt the need to sketch the girl who had me waking with a painful boner. Now that I’d met her in real life, I couldn’t deny the girl in my sketches depicted Leni—curly hair, exotic green eyes, full lips and breasts, dark-honey skin . . . As if the absolute best features of African and European heritage had been blended together to create my Beautiful Girl. The Leni I’d just met would probably never wear the leather bra, miniskirt, and knee-high boots I’d drawn her in, but damn if she wouldn’t look hot in them. The vision came to me clearly. Too clearly. I had to place the book over my lap to hide the full-blown stiffy pressing against my jeans.
    Damn. I needed a distraction. I needed to get her out of my head. Several airline bottles of rum dumped into my Coke weren’t enough to blur the image of Leni’s face in my mind. When the smoking hot flight attendant ran her finger over my arm then dropped a napkin with a message on my tray (“Meet me upstairs?”), I couldn’t resist. I snuck up the spiral staircase to the empty upper level and found her in the bathroom wearing nothing but heels and thigh-high stockings, tendrils of bottle-bleached hair barely hiding her fake tits. Flight attendants like this had made me a lifetime member of the mile-high club—they wanted nothing more than something to make the long flight more interesting. My perfect kind of girl.
    Unfortunately, my eyes only saw Leni’s body under my hands.
    The French babe who helped me through the Paris airport didn’t distract me either. I had a little easier time communicating—I could read her lips as she spoke French—because I’d spent enough time in France for work for a couple of years. I thought she might actually recognize me, the way she flirted in a more subtle way than most chicks. When she told me the flight to Miami had been cancelled due to weather and the next available flight to the U.S. left in three hours for Atlanta, I forgot what she even looked like. Atlanta. What were the odds?
    Not that I could really expect to see Leni again. Atlanta was a big city.
    I took the flight, making new plans as we crossed the Atlantic. My search for a piece of my past had become an epic fail. Except for a few clues I’d been given along the way, I’d