Kiss by Ted Dekker

anywhere?” He took her hand.
    The muscles in Shauna’s legs were quivering under the surface, the way they did sometimes after an intense workout. She put a hand over her taxed heart and made herself take conscious, slow breaths.
    “I can’t explain it.” A vision of war? Like the football dream, she didn’t know enough about Iraq to have concocted such a bizarre scenario. Unlike the football dream, this one made her feel afraid. What was happening to her?
    And who was Marshall?
    She camouflaged her fear with feigned embarrassment and a giggle. “I’ve never passed out from a kiss.”
    Wayne didn’t find any humor in that. “It might have been a seizure of some kind. I’ll take you to the hospital.”
    “No—don’t. I have an appointment with Dr. Harding already.”
    “She’s not the kind of doctor I had in mind.”
    “Let’s not blow this out of proportion yet.” Shauna forced herself to sit up. No spinning head, no tilting earth. She was fine. Really. “I’ll tell her what happened.” Maybe the therapist could answer Shauna’s deeper questions too.
    “Dr. Siders needs to know. Dr. Carver too—if this is some side effect—”
    “I’ll make a note of it, all right?”
    Wayne eventually conceded, but he did not seem convinced.
    They rose to leave, and as Wayne shook out the blanket and turned to gather up their things, a glint caught Shauna’s eye. The stranger with the knife was standing, angling the blade to bounce sunlight in her direction. When he had her attention, he folded the knife and returned it to its case, tipped his fingers to the bill of his ball cap in a gentlemanly salute, and walked away into the trees.

10
    Dr. Millie Harding’s office for private therapy sessions was a cluttered suite in a corporate complex. The furniture in this space could generously be described as yard-sale: a small wooden desk painted lime green faced two metal folding chairs, and a squat vinyl footstool hunkered down between them.
    This office, bright and haphazard, seemed a far closer match to Dr. Harding’s inexplicable sense of style. Plum and gold southwestern-patterned rugs over-lapped each other under the crazy furniture. The walls were painted Mexico pink and—today anyway—matched the psychiatrist’s blusher. Potted succulents were crammed into the mismatched bookshelves, and books displaced by the plants were stacked on the floor.
    Shauna and the psychiatrist sat opposite each other in the folding chairs. She wondered if any of the doctor’s patients actually felt calm in this environment.
    For her own peace of mind, she focused her attention on the one item in the room that stood apart: a platinum-colored file cabinet, sleek and modern and as out of its element as Shauna at Landon’s estate. She homed in on the digital combination pad embedded in the face of the top drawer while she tried to formulate her thoughts about these— visions. For lack of a better word.
    War? Football? She didn’t think she knew enough about either of those topics to give her imagination enough material to fabricate such elaborate stories. Were those Wayne’s experiences? It seemed to make a weird kind of sense—he had told her about playing football and being in the military in Iraq. The visions had seemed so real, as if she’d experienced them with Wayne.
    How in the world was her mind making these leaps?
    She had decided not to say anything to Wayne until she had a clearer idea in her mind what was going on. She was less certain how much she should divulge to Dr. Harding.
    So when the therapist growled, in that coarse voice of hers that somehow sounded maternal, “Tell me how you’ve been sleeping,” Shauna was a little surprised not to have any trouble talking about the disconcerting nature of her dreams about Wayne.
    “Tell me about what happened before each of the occurrences,” Dr. Harding said.
    “Um . . . the day of the first one was terrible. The worst twenty-four hours of my life,” she