by Holley Trent
She rolled the bottle between her palms and stared at the cluttered coffee table. It was covered with discarded packing materials—paper, bubble wrap, and bits of ripped tape.
Will bumped her knee with his own. “Did you miss Chris’s question?”
“Shit. Sorry. You probably think I’m a dunce, which isn’t so far from the truth. I kind of zoned out for a minute. What did you ask?”
“I asked if you live in the building. I haven’t seen you, but Paul and I keep weird hours so we might have just missed each other.”
“No, I live north of the park.”
“Ah. My parents live over there.”
“So do mine,” Will said with a chuckle. “Our families are neighbors.”
“Nice. Ugh.” Chris slumped low in his seat and rolled his gaze up to the ceiling. “My mother’s trying to hook me up with the girl next door, saying how we’re probably halfway to mates anyway because we spent so much time together as kids.”
“You don’t agree?” Erin actually thought it sounded a little romantic. She flicked a speculative look over to Will, but he was busy studying his beer bottle’s label. If he had an opinion on the matter, it obviously wasn’t a strong one.
“I definitely don’t agree,” Chris said. “I’m pretty sure I would know.”
“Does she think she knows? I mean, is it possible for one person to know when the other doesn’t?”
Will stopped picking at his label.
She thought maybe she’d asked a stupid question. He would certainly know the answer to it already, but she was realizing more and more that she knew diddly about the Afótama, or even herself.
“I’ve never heard of that happening, have you, Will?” Chris asked.
Will pushed some junk back on the table and made room for his beer. “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. It’s not common. The most prominent case that I know of happened with our queen, but obviously, that was a special case.”
“I hadn’t heard that about her. Which chieftain?”
“Harvey. They knew each other as kids when they were in Texas foster care. He always felt drawn to her, but she didn’t feel the pull. She was psychically null at the time, so her brain wasn’t working the way a typical Afótama clansperson’s would have been.”
“She certainly feels drawn to him now,” Erin said on a sigh. “There’s no doubt about that.” Tess could hardly function when her chieftains were away for too long. At first, Erin had found that concerning. Tess was supposed to be the strongest amongst them all, but her magic was all tied up with that of her lovers. That was the way it had once been amongst the Afótama, but they’d forgotten until the once-missing queen was found and brought home.
Erin envied Tess, not for her chieftains, but for her ability to give herself so completely to someone. Also that she could be brave enough to take what she needed from them, and know when she was missing it. Erin couldn’t even guess what that felt like. She’d never trusted any man that much. Hell, she wasn’t even certain she trusted her father that much. He wasn’t the most open individual, and was so inflexible. Ollie had once called him a kitchen autocrat, but that seemed to be true in other parts of his life, too. He liked running his house a certain way, and Erin tried her best not to run afoul of him.
Chris clucked his tongue and crossed his legs at the knees. “Well, Tess is a special case, any way you slice it. I haven’t bumped into her yet. Paul has, though. He said she’s hard for him to stand too close to. Her power seems to have a bit of an electric nature.”
“I haven’t noticed,” Erin said. “I’m starting to wonder if I’m a bit null myself.”
Will twiddled his thumbs and kept his gaze pinned on his beer bottle. “You could be. It’s worth looking into, whenever I have a chance to interview your family.”
“What are you conducting interviews for?” Chris asked.
“I’m the guy the folks in the mansion hired to methodically sort out and record the various psychic and magical abilities currently present in the clan. There’s a very old book in which a scribe recorded all of the traits of the people on the ship during Ótama’s voyage, but sometime after they hit land, the book disappeared. If we had it, we could sort out what’s new and what’s old much faster, but we can’t pin our hopes on finding it. The book could have been destroyed hundreds of years ago, or could be in the possession of someone who doesn’t know how valuable it is.”
“Or someone who knows exactly how valuable it is and are simply holding onto it for the right time,” Erin said.
Chris grunted. “This would certainly be the right time. Magic is flowing back, and there are probably people who’d want to capitalize on the confusion. The right enemies would pay a lot of money for information like that. Almost no one on the outside that I encountered in fifteen years really know what the Afótama are or what they’re capable of. The few people who had heard of us were folks who’d done business with the clan before or had some second-hand stories from folks who had. People who know about us fear us without actually understanding why.”
“And these people…were they afraid of you?”
He dragged his tongue across his lips and crossed his legs in the other direction. “I hate to admit it because I really don’t want people thinking I get off on intimidating other weirdoes, but yeah.”
“Do you have a psychic ability beyond telepathy?”
“I didn’t until recently.” Chris took a long sip of his beer and sighed. “Same as Paul. Kind of crept up on us all of a sudden. I was at work when it happened to me. I was in the process of ordering a strep test for a kid, and this guy walked past me. Not one of my patients. Just a random guy waiting to be seen in the emergency room. It was very obvious to me that he had a clot forming. The thing was, that wasn’t why he was there. He was there to get a broken bone set, but…I saw it.” He tapped his temple. “It was the weirdest shit. You know, I went into medicine because as a kid, I thought it was a noble profession. My dad’s a doctor here, and my grandfather was, too, when he was alive. But, maybe that wasn’t the only reason I was pulled into the job.”
“What did you do with the man with the clot?”
“Sent him upstairs for a CT scan. Everyone looked at me like I had two heads, but I was right.”
“And you did with another patient, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, and let out a strained laughed. “It happened again. Happens all the damned time with the big things. With the little diagnoses, I’m on my own. I guess that’s fair.”
“Does your father have a similar ability?”
“Hmm. You know…I’m not sure.”
Will slung his arm over the back of the sofa and let his fingertips dance along the left side of Erin’s neck.
Like a cat, she leaned into his hand, and let out a pathetic sigh. She didn’t know why his touch affected her so—made her let down her guard the way it did—but he felt so good. He felt right.
Chris raised an eyebrow. His gaze darted toward Will’s roving hand, and then he gave his head a slight shake.
Erin cleared her throat and scooted a bit away from Will. She didn’t know if she was being improper and certainly didn’t want to break any rules.
“Uh, I didn’t think to ask, to be honest, and my dad hasn’t said anything.” Chris looked up at the ceiling and bobbed his foot. “He’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t say anything unless he was specifically asked because he wouldn’t think things were as big a deal as they actually were.”
She gave Will’s knee a nudge as he’d done to her. That simple act couldn’t possibly be construed as improper. She hoped not, anyway. “You should ask him.”
“I’ll eventually make my way down the list. Might take a while.” He gave her ponytail a playful little flick against her cheek. “There’s only one of me.”
“That’s what my nurse says whenever I ask her to do her job,” Chris said with a chuckle. “Fortunately, she’s not Afótama, so she can’t hear the mental threats I make against her live
lihood. One of these days, I’m going to fire her. If she weren’t my boss’s daughter, I would have already.”
“And you say she’s not Afótama? That must mean Helena,” Erin said.
“You know her?”
“Yeah, she was in my high school graduating class. Her parents were one of the families who’d had a child stolen around the same time Tess was taken, and Helena was adopted. Her dad is up there in the years, isn’t he?”
“Yep. I think he’s been trying to make a love match between me and Helena. Not gonna happen.”
“You’re so fucking picky, man,” said the newcomer in the room. The dark-haired man polished the lenses of his glasses with the bottom of his T-shirt and squinted at Chris. “You’ve been here, what, three weeks?”
Chris grunted.
“Already, you’ve had folks throw two super-hot chicks at you. You keep saying I’m blind, but I’m think you’re the one who needs to get his eyes checked.”
“I never said they weren’t hot. I said they didn’t feel right. Maybe you haven’t experienced that gnawing feeling in your gut—that voice in your head that’s telling you not to waste your time—but I have, and I don’t like it.”
Erin furrowed her brow. She knew that feeling. She lived with that feeling. If that was a sign she was on the wrong track, then nearly everything in her life was wrong. The only thing that didn’t make her feel that way was Will. She cut a furtive gaze at him, and fortunately he wasn’t looking or else he would have caught her flushed cheeks and the probable look of ditzy confusion on her face.
“You’re a far stronger man than I’ll ever be, then. I wouldn’t kick either of them out of my bed.” Paul slipped the glasses onto his nose, and settled his gaze on Erin, and grimaced. “Shit. You are so fucking obviously not a dude.”
She gave him a little wave. “Not a dude.”
“I’m sorry. I caught the tail end of the conversation, and didn’t hear your voice. I’m usually a bit more genteel in mixed company. Sometimes, I can tell if someone nearby is male or female on the Afótama web, but you’re coming up a blank for me.”
Will reached for his beer. “Really? What do you mean by blank? And apologies for jumping right in with a bunch of questions for you right off the bat before we’ve been properly introduced. My interest is professional.”
Paul shrugged and flopped onto the sofa near Chris. “I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Like, I can tell there are three people other than myself in this apartment, and that there are a couple of folks downstairs. I can tell with pretty good certainty that the missus is in the back of the unit and the dude is in the living room. When you were upstairs, I could tell that one of you”—he indicated Will—“was male. I knew there was someone else up there, but couldn’t discern anything about them. I assumed the person would be male because it just wouldn’t have been fair if our new neighbor already had a guest of the feminine persuasion while we assholes have had no one to stare at but each other.”
Chris rolled his eyes.
“Interesting,” Will said.
“Great. Something else that’s wrong with me,” Erin muttered. “I’m starting to feel a little self-conscious here.”
“Aw, don’t be,” Paul gave her a dismissive wave and accepted the beer Chris handed him. “I’m not exactly trained at this. Both of my parents were pretty shitty telepaths, so everything I know was self-taught.”
“Are they better telepaths now than they were before the power started trickling back?”
“Nope.”
“Huh.”
Will gave the end of her ponytail another flick. “Curious, huh?”
“Yeah. How do you process all this information without getting a headache?”
“I don’t try to process data while I’m gathering it. I compartmentalize. I record the data, and then study what I’ve recorded later. Sometimes you need to put a bit of distance between the time you gather the information and your theory-making.”
“How do you avoid jumping to conclusions?”
“I’ve had a lot of practice at this.”
“You’re good at it.”
He shrugged. “I like to think so. Everyone has a calling, and I believe I found mine.”
“You’re lucky. I’m not sure if I’m cut out for any specific thing.”
“I don’t believe that. I think you’re very good at disarming people. You’ve always had a non-threatening aura about you. I bet you could ask a person for their deepest, darkest secret and they’d tell you just because they’d think you didn’t mean them any harm.”
She sighed. “Non-threatening. Yeah, that’s what every girl wants to be.”
“You wear it so well, though,” Chris said. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to aspire to.”
“You can’t say our queen is non-threatening in the slightest bit. Afótama women have a reputation for being a particular way, and I think most are more like Tess than not. I definitely didn’t inherit what they’ve got.”
“Unique isn’t the worst thing you could be,” Paul said.
She couldn’t suppress the snort. “Oh, is that what I am? Nowadays, unique sounds like an insult.”
“Depends on how it’s being used.” Will let her ponytail fall to her shoulder and leaned a bit away from her to extract the vibrating phone from his pocket.
On that cue, she pulled her own phone out of her shirt and cringed at the display. Three text messages from her mother, two from her father—all querying if she was coming home because she’d apparently never stayed out that late before.
And why haven’t I?
She fired off a quick text: I’m fine. I have a key. I’ll be quiet when I let myself in.
“Are you actually getting reception here?” Paul asked.
Will grunted. “I am, but Lora told me weeks ago that I would have to change carriers if I wanted to get a consistent signal. The closest tower for my old carrier is probably a couple of hours away.”
Erin’s father responded, Where are you?
Biting the inside of her cheek, she pondered not answering. Her life was her business, and she needed to start living it without interference.
“There needs to be a relocation packet or something that has that kind of shit in it,” Chris said. “Naturally, my parents didn’t think to tell me about the phone issue. They still have a landline, for crying out loud.”
“Not gonna lie,” Paul said, “I was thinking about getting one installed. I was on hold with the satellite company last week, and I kept dropping the call. Every time I called back, I got put at the end of the queue. After about ninety minutes of that, I nearly lost my shit.”
Erin responded, I’m with a friend. Don’t wait up.
What friend?
Fuck that. A soft growl rattled her teeth as she turned off the phone. It would have been one thing if she were sixteen and still obligated to adhere to that draconian list of rules her parents had enforced during her teen years. But, she was a grown woman who contributed to the household finances and, for the most part, kept her nose clean.
Is there really any wonder I haven’t let a man touch me in so long? I haven’t had enough fucking privacy to even scratch my ass in peace.
Will put his hand on Erin’s knee and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You’re broadcasting.”
“Shit.” She looked up at Chris and Paul. Thankfully, they were caught up in their own conversation at the moment.
“What’s wrong?”
“My parents are expecting me at home.”
“I see. I’ll walk you home, if you’d like.” He lifted his hand as if to pull it away, but she grabbed his wrist.
“No. I don’t want to go home.”
He pushed up an eyebrow.
“I’m tired of being left out as the world moves on without me. I get to decide what I want.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want to fit in. I want to connect to people and learn all about what I’ve been missing. I want to…I guess I
…” She traced the veins on the back of his hand and toiled over the words. She didn’t know how to express what she wanted or even if it could be expressed.
“Think it over.” He pulled her hand into his lap and entwined his fingers with hers. “So, I have it on good authority that some of the folks in Fallon will be relocating here within the next couple of months,” he said to Paul and Chris.
“XX or XY kind of people?” Paul asked.
Erin massaged the back of Will’s hand with the pad of her thumb. Apparently, he wasn’t going to try to squeeze words out of her. He wouldn’t make her feel embarrassment over her ignorance. She appreciated his kindness, really, but wondered why he was paying so much attention to her.
She didn’t want to get her hopes up. It was very possible that his attention didn’t mean anything—maybe his behavior was absolutely typical for men out in the world at large, and she was finally getting a taste of something normal.
She liked normal.
That almost certainly meant it wouldn’t last.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Will was fairly certain Erin wouldn’t remember much about the evening. He guessed that sometime between her third and fourth beer, her brain had kicked into autopilot. She smiled and laughed at all the right times, but it would have been evident even to a child that she was no longer processing information in the way she should have.
He’d extended goodbyes from the both of them to Chris and Paul and led her upstairs. She’d burrowed beneath the covers of his air mattress and had passed out pretty much on impact.
All night long, he’d held her against him, waking occasionally when her dreams became too loud. He’d stayed up long enough to make sure she wasn’t afraid and drifted back off.
He was exhausted, but couldn’t think of a better reason to be.
Leaving Erin sprawled in the bed at eight, he showered, quietly dressed, and ran down to the coffee shop, hoping the pastry case hadn’t already been picked clean.
“I figured you’d sleep in,” came a tired voice ahead of him in line.
