Lust by Francine Pascal Page B

unexpectedly—it sort of threw him. He wondered if she was supposed to get more upset. Or maybe she was just normal, and he was too screwed up to know the difference? That was what he was really worried about. What if his sense of normal had been warped by his history of nutty girlfriends?
    He looked up and saw the lights of a plane shooting slowly across the sky. Gaia leapt into his consciousness again, for about the fortieth time that night. Maybe because that plane was a mile away, like she always was. Maybe it was the blinking of its lights, switching onand off like her feelings for him. Or maybe she’d been on his mind already, and anything he looked at was going to make him think of her.
    Oh, man. When was he going to get Gaia Moore out of his system?

ED
    So Gaia’s in my system, like a virus. She moves around inside me, popping up when I least expect her. And she’s not showing any signs of leaving on her own.
    I wonder how you get rid of something like this? I wonder how I’m supposed to track down all the little Gaia-modules among my platelets and obliterate them? Maybe I should just envision the process as a video game. Every time she pops up, I’ll blast her out of me. It’ll be like Whack-a-Mole.
    No, that’s too New Agey. I think I need some medical intervention. I need a doctor to find some Gaia antibodies. Some kind of serum that’ll flush her out of my system.
    Or maybe I should just go sit in a hot sauna and sweat her out of me. Maybe a high fever would burn her out. Maybe, with enough coffee, I could pee her out.
    I don’t know, though. If it were that easy, I guess hotels and spas would offer Love-Cleansing Weekends, where they’d give you ahigh colonic and you’d leave with no lingering love whatsoever. If it were that easy, people wouldn’t write songs and poems and novels about their lost loves. If it were that easy . . . I’d be making out with Kai right now.
    I think I’ll have the Gaia virus for a long time. I’m just going to have to learn to live with it and all the accompanying symptoms: memories popping into my head at inopportune moments, lack of interest in other girls, the burning curiosity about what she’s doing and who she’s doing it with. I have to treat Gaia like a long-lasting but manageable disease. Like a heart murmur. Like arthritis. Like diabetes.
    That’s it. I’ve got Gaiabetes. Hah.
    The thing is, there’s only one person who would think that was funny. Only one person on the planet I could share that joke with. And you know who that is.
    Gaia.
    Oh, man. Someone get me some insulin.

not in kansas anymore
    It was difficult for Gaia to reconcile this kind man with her image of the serial killer formerly known as Loki.
    Reminiscence
    GAIA TURNED AROUND IN HER AIRPLANE seat and peered over the top at Jake. He had pushed his seat all the way back and was snoring with his mouth open. She sat back down and turned to Oliver.
    â€œIf sleeping were an Olympic sport, I think he’d be heading for the gold right about now,” she said.
    â€œIt’s very impressive. I wish I could sleep like that. Years of being an agent really trained it out of me,” Oliver told her. “That coma was the first uninterrupted sleep I’ve had since I was in my twenties.”
    â€œSo it was good for something.”
    â€œIt was good for a lot of things.” Oliver gave her a look. “It brought me back to you.”
    â€œI like how they show the movies on the backs of the seats now,” Gaia said. She wasn’t ignoring Oliver’s overture purposely. She just didn’t know how to respond to people when they said sweet things to her.
    â€œYes, but with all that new technology, they couldn’t come up with better entertainment?”
    Gaia laughed. “You didn’t like the feature presentation?”
    Oliver shook his head. “Those kids might be easy on the eyes,