Free Fearless by Francine Pascal

but not by much. Maybe twenty. He had to be an international master at least. She wasn’t on the chess circuit, but she knew an extraordinary player from a good one.
    And as he played he was becoming real to her. His
    little ticks were so peculiar. The skin around his fingernails was ragged from being picked at too much. Tiny blue veins zigzagged under the surface of the transparent skin beneath his eyes. Rain plastered thick dark cords of hair to his forehead. Now that it was no longer perfect, she could see it was beautiful.
    Suddenly she had this powerful urge to touch the pale skin above his wrist, where she could see his pulse thumping. She stared transfixed at that spot, feeling that her own heart was beating out the same rhythm.
    Oh, Gaia. She almost groaned out loud. Get a hold of yourself, girl.
    This was an inexplicable reaction she was having to him. Was she profoundly low on sleep, maybe? When had she last eaten?
    Another bolt of lightning blazed through the sky. Maybe it was the plunging barometer? The electricity in the air?
    When she looked back at the board, she felt dizzy and disoriented. A chess game like this one meant holding a million teetering moves and possibilities in your mind, and here all at once she’d dropped them. The crowd of pieces left on the board had gone from a thrillingly complex and significant battle in one second to a meaningless jumble the next.
    Blood rushed to her face. She tried to kick-start her
    memory, to patch together her lost strategy. But it was as though the whole thing had existed in someone else’s mind.
    Rain blanketed them. Steam rose from the surrounding pavement. Goose bumps pricked up and down her arms. Why had neither of them suggested giving up this ridiculous contest and going inside?
    He was looking at her. Not silently, impatiently demanding her next move, as she would expect. Just looking. Looking for something. Rain dotted his eyelashes with diamonds, formed rivers down his cheeks.
    His eyes had taken hers, and she couldn’t look away.
    Then she felt something grab hold of her chest. It wasn’t fear. It couldn’t be. But what was it? She had to get out of there.
    With a flick of her index finger she felled her precious king. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I have to go.” She got to her feet, reaching into her bag for her wallet. He stood, too. She fumbled the wet leather and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, then jammed it in his palm.
    “No. No,” he told her. The bill fluttered to the ground, but neither of them stooped to get it. She was already walking, and he was hurrying alongside her, confused, surprised, stammering for a word.
    “W-Wait. Please,” he whispered.
    She was almost running. In her sneakers the water squished around her toes. The rain was so loud, it filled up all of her senses.
    She hurried from him and from the strange perception that a million frozen feelings were about to thaw and the flood would certainly drown her.

Bottomless
    HE WATCHED HER GO, FEELING A terrible tightness in his throat. What had she done to him?
    It had all happened in that moment, when he’d met her eyes and, like a mystic, seemed to see her past and future. Her past was haunting, marked by bottomless wounds, and the future was terrifying because it included him.

no bad dogs
    For the last twenty-four hours his mind had behaved more like a badly trained dog on a too long leash.

The Right to Ask
    “I WISH MY NAME WERE FARGO.”
    Gaia was walking so fast, Ed Fargo was having a hard time keeping up with her. Her movements were strangely jerky, and her mouth was going a mile a minute.
    “Why is that?” he had to practically shout at her because she kept getting ahead.
    “It’s a cool name,” she said.
    “You could marry me if you asked really nicely,” he proposed.
    “Yeah, right.”
    “What’s the matter with Moore?” he asked as they rounded the corner of Charles Street and Hudson.
    “I don’t know.” Gaia’s eyes weren’t quite