Your Planet or Mine? by Susan Grant

visibility would go down soon. She wanted to get home before it did. Fog in the winter was part of living in Sacramento, but she wasn’t any good driving in it. She picked up her pace. Out in the open space bordering the parking lot, an owl hooted. Where suburbia met the wild. People paid good money to live here and hear owls and coyotes along with lawn mowers and leaf blowers. She paid good money to live in the city, too, but all she heard were police sirens and car alarms.
    Heavy footfalls crunched behind her. Body armor rustled. The action figure had followed her outside.
    Darn it. No— damn it.
    She threw a nervous glance around the parking lot. Be calm. Be aware of your surroundings. One checker helped a couple load groceries in their trunk, but they were several rows away across the lot. If she screamed, they’d hear her. Probably.
    She rummaged through her purse for her mini canister of pepper spray disguised as a key chain as she calculated how hard it would be to swing the bag of groceries and knock him out. Pretty hard, seeing that her bag was filled with bananas and a melting container of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food that she was dying to eat and couldn’t because of this crazed hunk in the Halo2 body armor who wouldn’t leave her alone.
    “Jana…wait.”
    She wanted to scream. To scream at the top of her lungs until all the frustration had emptied out of her and she was left a quivering but satisfyingly empty blob on the ground.
    However, lacking the freedom to scream herself into a coma, all the emotion of the day threatened to explode as she turned on him. Only with a monumental effort did she keep her temper under control. “Look, I’ve had a very, very bad day. You have no idea how bad. Please don’t follow me anymore. I’m not interested in flying saucers and spacemen and alien invasions…”
    She let her voice trail off as a couple walked past and gave them both a strange look. Jana wanted to sink into the pavement and disappear. Wasn’t she supposed to be keeping a low profile? It was really hard when a guy who was almost seven feet tall in his platform combat boots kept following you around ranting about alien invasions.
    She backed up. “I’m going now, and you’re going to stay here.” She opened her cell phone. “Or I’ll call 911.” Her thumb hovered threateningly over the 9.
    He lifted his arms to the sides, entreating her, palms up. “Please. Squee…it’s me.”
    Jana’s breath caught in her throat, and her eyes widened. What did he say?
    Squee . She hadn’t heard that word since…since she was nine years old. Only one person had said that word, ever. Only one.
    “Now you remember, Jana. Finally.” His voice sounded huskier, almost tender. “I can see it in your eyes.”
    He stood there, watching her reaction, an armor-clad hulk with a short military haircut, a square chin and vulnerable eyes—vulnerable green eyes.
    Peter. Her wild, exotic, magical boy. I wished for you to come back. I wished .
    No magic. “No!” She blinked out of the trance. “You’re not him.”
    There were a few heartbeats of silence. Then he said, “Yes, I am.”

CHAPTER THREE
    J ANA’S HEAD SPUN as if she’d been drinking. She might as well have been, with this grown man standing in front of her in the parking lot of Safeway insisting that he was her childhood imaginary friend, reincarnated. Or re-in- something. She narrowed her eyes and, using a mental version of the age progression used in the photos on the backs of milk cartons, tried to imagine Peter—and came up with a man who looked frighteningly close to this one.
    “You’re imaginary.” She backed up, shaking her head. “You’re not real.”
    His voice deepened another notch. “Is it not a good thing that I am in fact real?”
    Jana stuttered at the sexy glint in his eyes. For a brief, sharp instant of panic, she was brought back to the days when she couldn’t get out the words. “Are you really Peter?”
    “Peter?”
    No,