Martin was about to reply when the waitress brought their platters. He pulled back to give her room, then leaned forward again. "Listen, I'm not asking you to believe in it, but don't tell me you didn't feel it because I read it in your eyes, too."
"Read what?" Drake asked, suddenly feeling very cold.
"The flicker of recognition. When our eyes met, you knew who I was just as surely as I knew who you were."
"That's impossible, Devil," he argued, biting his cheeseburger. "We've never met before in our lives."
"You wouldn't believe how many unexplainable things defy rationality, Pirate. When I lived in India, I saw more than my share of them."
"They're all visionaries over there."
"I beg to differ, Pirate. They have an age-old tradition, a mix between magic, religion, logic and belief in the unknown. To them, the soul is something alive even when the body dies, with a million journeys behind it and a thousand more ahead, which shape it and mark its path in each successive passage." He paused to eat a french fry. "And it's not just an individual affair. I believe there are souls that start out together, soul mates some call them, which inevitably call for each other because alone they're incomplete. So they go through life seeking their missing half, the essential piece that will restore them to the unity they had started out with."
"And you think I am--"
"I don't think, Pirate, I know." Spoken without any emphasis, the words rang even more forceful despite Drake's thundering heartbeat clogging his ears. "I've been waiting a lifetime to read what I did in your eyes and your reaction was exactly as I'd imagined it a million times in my head. That's why I behaved like I did that first night."
"So now it's my fault?" Drake grabbed his beer glass to gulp down a generous sip. "Do you think I gave you the go ahead?"
"In a way, you did," Martin said calmly, finishing his cheeseburger.
"I don't believe this, Devil."
"That's your choice, Pirate. I can't and certainly won't force you to believe in this. When you ran away that night at your parent's house, it became quite obvious that you weren't ready to accept the truth anyway."
"What truth?"
The Irish devil stretched across the table. "Just answer me honestly, Pirate. Before you met me, have you ever felt you recognized a complete stranger before in your life? Or felt an electrical current run through your body merely by standing next to someone? Or felt your heart beat so fast you feared it might fall out of your chest?"
With a heavy heart, the pirate realized there was no point in lying so he had to shake his head in denial, long hair flying around.
"But you did the moment you saw me, right?"
)
