“He is so cool and funny!”

Angie raised one eyebrow as she listened to Lucinda rave about John Grant. Lucinda’s face had that infatuated glow to it, the one that she seemed to emanate every time she had been about to fall in love with her leading man.

“What about Captain Vanduran, when is he coming?”

“What?” Lucinda stopped her continuing glowing report of John Grant, stopped dead in her tracks by Angie’s point blank question.

“Angie! Come on! Get real! I’m just admiring the man and his gift, nothing more. Marvin is still my man, my love…” Lucinda replied, with an extra emphasis and several more syllables in the word love than normal.

“Hmmm, I’ve seen this look before, Luce…”

Lucinda rolled her eyes; “Get real! And what about you? Another little creepy guy coming all the way from California, this one. How’s Rollie taking this guy?”

Angie set her mouth hard and Lucinda knew she had crossed the line. She knew that the creep that had stalked and planned to kill Angie after her pregnancy had been an emotional roller coaster for both Rollie and Angie. She had just gotten spiteful when Angie reminded her of Marvin. But, then again, she did have that gangbuster of butterflies in her stomach around John Grant…

“Sorry, really- I didn’t mean that!” Lucinda quickly added, lowering her eyes.

“Luce, look- I think it’s great that the two of you are getting along, much better than Judd Tolsen, huh? Sorry I got matronly on your case about Vanduran…” Angie replied as Luce smiled slightly and then hugged her.

“Never mind, Marvin is coming down here on the seventeenth, two weeks…and no, we haven’t set a date yet, so quit asking!” Lucinda reminded her, grabbing her long hair, twisting it up and putting a clip in the back to get it off her shoulders.

“Okay! It will be good to see him,” Angie replied, smiling.

“Miss the gang up there?” Luce asked, raising her eyebrows slightly.

“No, if you mean the crime stuff and well, the family disasters. This past six months has been great! Rollie and I have been back into the biz full time and Aidan has become such a chatty boy! But you know, more and more, everyday- he’s reminding me so much of Rollie…” Angie answered, shaking her head.

“The gift of the silver tongued rogue,” Lucinda commented, and grinned; “is Rollie still charming the pants off you?”

Angie chuckled and stood up in Lucinda’s trailer; “One day, Luce, you will think of something else besides sex!”

“God, I hope not! Don’t burst my bubble, Angie! You’ve only been married, what? Almost four years?”

“Noooo, I’m leaving…no more!” Angie told her starting to leave.

Lucinda giggled and got up, grabbing Angie by the shoulder and then spun her around to face her, grabbing her by the forearms;

“You don’t mean the fire has gone out in that Aussie studmuffin, do you?”

“Lucinda!”

“Angie!”

“Hey there ladies! Someone is calling for his mum, here…” Rollie’s voice interrupted them as he entered the trailer and both Angie and Lucinda twisted their mouths, suppressing their laughter.

Angie took Aidan from Rollie’s arms as her young son gave her a root beer drizzled smack on her cheek.

“I see you boys have been drinking again…” Angie said sternly, making a judgmental face in fun at Aidan.

“Daddy’s hot!” Aidan replied, jumping up in down in her arms as Rollie grinned.

“Well, that answers my questions,” Lucinda said from behind Angie before she snickered and pushed Rollie back to the door; “you guys get outta here, go home for the night and make a sister for Aidan, okay?”

“Luce!”

“Go!” and she fanned them out the door as Angie looked at Rollie with slightly colored cheeks.

“You girls talking smut again?” Rollie asked, with a twinkle in his eye.

“NO!”

“Smut! Smut! Smut!” Aidan repeated, rocking in Angie’s arms as Angie looked up at Rollie.

“He’s a little human tape recorder, be careful!” Angie warned him.

“Oops, forgot!” Rollie replied, ceremoniously zipping his lip.

“Come on! I’m tired!” Angie told him, as they walked over to their rental car.

“Great…no little sister making tonight…” Rollie muttered, under his breath.

Lucinda cleaned up her trailer slightly, putting on a simple but elegant, black little dress and shaking out her hair. She finished applying her make-up and looked at herself in the mirror.

There was a rap at the door and she smiled, placing a dollop of perfume at the pulse point of her throat.

“Come in!”

“Why, Miss Scott, aren’t we the charmer tonight!”

“John! I am famished! Take me away from this god-forsaken movie set!”

Rollie had told Angie about the second sighting of the orb, the one that Aidan and he had seen. He also told her about how Aidan had identified the orb as a man. The hair on the back of Angie’s neck began to rise as she clenched her fists tightly.

“Let’s not have him at the set anymore, okay?” she asked, as they entered their hotel room.

“Fine with me, but it was so strange, Ange…wonder if he saw something that we can’t?”

“You mean like a poltergeist thing, where only kids and dogs can see these things?”

“Yeah…”

“It gives me the creeps, Rol. Look at me, I’ve got goosebumps! No, this is intriguing, yes- but I don’t want Aidan anywhere near this stuff!”

“Okay…just telling you about it, don’t get so bent out of shape!”

“I’m not bent out of shape! I’m just tired!”

“You’re always tired lately…”

Angie looked at him strangely and then, lowered her eyes, not wanting to meet his eyes. She knew that he had been wondering what was going on with her and the truth was, she didn’t know. After the blighted ovum scare in Spain, she was worried that she was defective in some way. She worried that after all they had been through, the stress and the depression about her family- that she had lost her closeness, her intimacy with Rollie.

“I’m going to take a shower, okay?” She didn’t look at Rollie, but passed him, giving him Aidan who was starting to fall asleep.

“Yeah…okay…” Rollie replied, dejectedly.

Inside the shower, she bit her lip and began to cry. What was happening to her? She looked down at her hand, the injured fingers starting to pink up slightly. She muffled her crying in her washcloth. She didn’t want Rollie to ask her why she was crying. It was stupid, she didn’t know why. She lost track of time as the water seemed to turn cold suddenly and she turned the shower knob to hotter without any results. Had she been in the shower that long? Her teeth began to chatter and she turned off the water. The sound of the water dripping from the shower nozzle suddenly intensified, the drops each sounding like an explosion…she was dizzy.

Rollie had put Aidan to bed. He was exhausted from all the activity on the boat ride that day and being on the set. Rollie laid down beside him until he himself, dozed off. It was Angie, her hand on his shoulder that woke him later.

“Hey, come on…you fell asleep…” she told him as he stirred slightly and got up from the bed. They crept out of the adjoining room, leaving the door slightly ajar and entered their room.

“Stu Westburn is supposed to come by tonight. He’s developing some pictures of those orb thingy’s from today…” Rollie commented, looking down at his agenda book for tomorrow’s activities.

“Mind if I go on and hit the sack, then?” Angie asked, running a comb through her wet hair. She had begun to let it grow out past the short, layered cut again. She was wearing the hotel’s white robe, one side of it, falling off her shoulder.

“No, go ahead…” Rollie replied, sighing and closing his eyes for a second as he then looked down at his book again.

She turned around from the mirror, putting the comb down. She walked over to where he was sitting on the bed; his back propped up against the headboard.

“When is Stu coming?” she asked, looking down at him as he continued to read.

“Don’t know exactly, but not after eleven,” Rollie replied, still reading.

He felt her kneel on the bed, suddenly turning off the light by the bed, leaving only the light from the bathroom shining out and the light from outside, the moonlight through partially closed curtains. She straddled him, pulling the agenda book from his hands and pulled herself out of her robe at the top as it draped behind her, caught at the belt.

Rollie didn’t say anything. He breathed deeply and felt her lips on his chest and then felt her unbuckling his belt, unzipping his jeans. Her mouth found his with a softness at first, that he returned. He didn’t want to go beyond what she was willing to give even though he was going mad inside. His hands on her skin, hers on his and the wondrous feel of her hips, her breasts against him…

Angie made love to Rollie, slowly…until she fell back off of him, pulling his arms, and bringing him crashing down on top of her. Rollie responded to her sudden change in desire, no longer able to hold back. It was as if Angie had become someone else. She whispered words that he didn’t seem to remember but they urged him, caressed him, making him more forceful than he had ever been and he couldn’t stop. It was madness and it was incredibly intoxicating.

He remembered only afterwards, his hands holding her arms over her head, tightly, spent and wet with perspiration; that he looked down at her face, her eyes vacantly staring at the ceiling.

“Angie?”

Stu Westburn spent his evening at the local Fox Film developers, getting his roll of film done in what seemed like more than an hour. He paced around the store and watched the people in the lab through the glass. He prayed that they didn’t botch up the last five pictures.

Finally, after seeing four people huddle together in the back and what seemed to be something engrossing, he asked to speak to the manager.

“Look, it’s been almost two hours, I need those pictures of mine!” he told the rather, uninterested teenager that was senior management that night.

“Yeah, they’re coming, okay? You wasted most of the roll, you know. Must have opened and exposed the roll partly,” the kid told him, scratching his head and yawning, “but hey, don’t worry, the last five of them came out, if you can call it that,” the kid continued as one of the techs came from the back, with the packet in his hand.

“Hey man, sorry about the delay. We tried to do a second set off the negatives and still, weird,” the tech remarked, shaking his head.

“What?” Stu asked and grabbed the package from him.

Shaking out the pictures with anticipation, he saw only total blackness on the first 31 pictures…then, he stopped, his hand trembling as he grinned and let out a whoop; “Thank you, thank you!!!!”

Stu left the store, anxious to get back to Rollie and Angie Tyler. He couldn’t believe it. The digital camera had come through! What was an orb to their human eyes was nothing compared to what the digital optics pulled out of the evening sky at Seven Pines.

“Angie?”

“What? Hey, did I fall asleep on you?”

Rollie looked down at Angie, incredulously. He rolled off her, onto his back as she tried to sit up.

“Whoa! The room is spinning…” Angie remarked as she started to move toward the edge of the bed.

“You okay?” Rollie asked her, remembering how forceful he had been and then, finding himself pinning her down under him, exhausted at the end.

“Yeah, sorry I was soooo incredibly bad, Rol. I’ll make it up to you…okay?” she told him standing up, naked as he tried to stand, woozy as well.

He came over to her, seeing the impressions on her wrists as she stared down at them, frowning and then looked up at him, her mouth opened slightly;

“Hey, what happened to you?” she asked him, her hand coming up and touching his shoulder on the right side.

“What?” Rollie asked, and walked over to the mirror, turning the light on over the bureau.

“It looks like a bite mark, but it’s cold! Bloody hell! You bit me!” he remarked as she grabbed her robe and huddled beside him.

“Rollie, no! I don’t remember a thing after coming into the room and well, starting to make love to you…I couldn’t do that, I didn’t do that!” she began, shaking her head and then he reached up, touching the wound.

His hand jerked back as if he had been stung.

“That’s cold! Hell, it’s like ice!” he exclaimed.

“I’m getting a warm towel and putting it over that right now!” Angie replied, running to the bathroom.

Rollie began to shiver. He looked at Angie, his Angie…his wife, his lover and knew that the woman he had made love to that night was not Angie.

“I don’t understand!” Angie said, holding the soppy, hot towel against Rollie’s flesh.

“That makes two of us…” he replied, his teeth chattering.