Double Cross [2] (14 page)

“And I touched you.” He runs a finger along his side of the cart. “Your skin was electric—I half thought there should be sparks.” He lowers his voice. “I know you felt it. You looked so beautiful. And then you came closer.”

He starts to roll the cart sideways. I clamp down hard on my side, stopping it, shocked that he’d talk so dirty in an office superstore. Then I realize that he hasn’t said anything dirty at all.

He leans in and talks low. “Your skin was so warm, and you smelled like girl soap, and you were trembling. I could feel you tremble with my lips.”

The trembling wasn’t about fear; it was about the aliveness of being with him. And how the brush of his lips felt kinetic. I curl my fingers into the cool metal crisscross of the shopping cart. “I’m thinking about the stairwell.”

“I’m not. I’m thinking about how you sighed this little sigh when you sank into the feeling of us together. We both sank into that feeling together—I’ll never forget that. And then you pushed your hands under my shirt and slid them across my back, and your palms made that skin-on-skin sound.”

I swallow. The lights are too bright.

“The slide of skin on skin. A kind of whisper.” He rolls the cart aside now, and there’s just blank space between us. We’re too close. “The heat of your touch, the whisper of it. And I remember how it felt to hold you, and how holding you made my prison walls seem to vanish for once.”

I take a half step back, unable to breathe, overwhelmed by this raw confession.

“There you are!” Shelby’s voice cuts the energy between us.

She’s a clashing heap of mittens, scarves, and a big floppy knit hat; Simon trails behind her in his shaggy coat. She steps right up to Packard and launches into complaints about us having to pose as auditors. “With our large target load, and now this? Is too much!” Her accent thickens with emotion as she recounts her oppressive duties as a disillusionist.

Packard wears his listening face, brows drawn slightly together, but he’s not listening; he looks a bit dazed. Rosy cheeks. Simon gives me this look; he senses that they’ve interrupted something.

They did. Packard let me into his secret life for a moment. The secret life inside him.

I try to focus on Shelby’s complaints. Packard’s nodding, and then he lifts his gaze over her head, and our eyes meet, and this sensation plunges through me. He’d felt happy. Less confined—even in his prison! I’d never thought it meant all that much to him because, minutes later, he’d refused to apologize for making me his minion. But it did mean something to him.

But then, if he’d felt any kind of connection or warmth toward me, why would he refuse to apologize?

The answer hits me like a thump on the chest—he was simply trying to charge up the memory.
This was about Ez, not Packard and me!
I turn and storm off.

God, I am so gullible! I fired at him and he was simply
firing back, trying to charge up the memory. Exploiting my emotions—and doing a damn fine job of it. I round a corner and head for the copy area.

I stop in front of a shelf stacked with reams of paper in all different colors—pink, yellow, magenta, electric blue.

“Justine.”

I turn and there’s Shelby, pink lipstick vivid against her dark curls and crazy knits, expression in a question.

I say, “Why, after all this time, do I continue to be surprised that he’ll do anything to get what he wants? Do I look gullible? Because apparently, I really am.”

“You are
not
,” she hisses as the store closing announcements come over the loudspeaker. I look away and she grabs my arm. She has a chipped front tooth that sometimes gives her a sexy, dangerous edge; other times it lends her vitriolic oomph. This is one of the vitriolic oomph moments. “Of all people, no. You are not.”

“I am. I know what he is, and he can still dupe me. There is no limit to that guy.” She fingers one of my coat buttons as I tell her what he said. “Like it meant something to him,” I add. “It was a vulnerable time for me, that kiss. A raw time, you know? And he could sense that. So he gets hold of that one little genuine thread and works it, just to get his way. You know what it’s like with me and Packard? It’s like in the Peanuts cartoons where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown, and tells him to run up and kick it, and then at the last minute she pulls it away and he falls. And then she begs him to try again, she promises she won’t fool him again, so he tries again, but she pulls it away and he falls again. He gets duped over and over, just like I fall for Packard’s manipulations over and over. I won’t let it happen again.”

“Because you are afraid.” She tilts her head, chipped-tooth smile. “You love your grudge against Packard too much. You are afraid to lose control, I think.”

I give her an outraged expression, just a bit of a bullying edge. “No, it’s because I don’t like falling.”

“Pfft.”

“He just doesn’t want us to dream his secrets tonight.”

“What secrets?”

I haven’t told her about the schoolhouse dream; it doesn’t feel like mine to tell. “I’m not entirely sure,” I say. “But I can’t believe I fell for that talk when it was all smoke and mirrors. But I guess it’s fitting. Packard as smoke and mirrors. He was a momentary diversion for me, on my way to Otto, who is my ultimate perfect mate.”

“In other words, not real. Otto is fairy tale.” Shelby smirks at her own cleverness.

“Helpful hint—most girlfriends pretend to like their friend’s boyfriends, and act happy for them, or else they zip it.”

“Such a friend is useless. You and Otto, you comfort each other. That is all.”

“We fit.”

“Your fears fit.”

“I’m happy with him. Some people prefer that to grimness, believe it or not.” A sterner store announcement sounds. “Come on,” I say, leading toward the front. “You are going to meet your perfect mate someday and cringe when you think back on this whole conversation.”

“Pfft,” Shelby says.

We get into a checkout line behind Packard and Simon. I immediately engross myself in the magazine covers.

Shelby pulls three briefcases from Packard’s cart: one black, one brown, one tan. “Boring,” Shelby says. “All.”

“This isn’t a fashion show,” Packard replies. “Pick one and scuff it up. Read those books, too—you need to know the terms. Tech services’ll be couriering your laptops to you later, so don’t go to bed until you can work the software.” He lowers his voice. “Assume this guy has
surveillance wherever he puts you. The screens’ll be nonpeekable, but you need to act right.”

“This’ll be fun,” Simon says.

“Have mine sent to Otto’s,” I say, flipping through
Midcity Business Journal.

When we get up to the front, Packard chooses four chocolate nut clusters from the impulse item rack, one for each of us.

“Goody,” Simon says.

Shelby unwraps hers and pops it into her mouth. “Thanks.”

He holds mine out to me. It would be too weird not to take it, so I do. “Thanks.” I put it in my pocket for later and I go back to my magazine. I like finding chocolates in my pockets when I least expect it.

Packard untwists the bright foil ends on his chocolate as the cashier rings us up. He extracts the dark Orb and smells it and I secretly watch him, wishing he wasn’t such a manipulator.

He brings the chocolate to his mouth and bites. The planes of his cheeks move as he chews, jaw moving, teeth crushing. His Adam’s apple shifts with his swallow. Eating seems so shockingly carnal and animalistic all of a sudden.

He takes another bite, and I watch, a hungry beggar outside a candy-store window.

O
TTO LIVES
in a classic stone building nestled between an old-century hotel and a yesteryear department store that caters to Midcity dowagers who no longer care about money or hipness. I love just walking into his building—it’s like a grand fortress full of heft and history.

It’s not our night, but I want desperately to forget the stirred-up memory of that kiss with Packard. I need to get things back to how they’re supposed to be: me with Otto.

Sammy the doorman tells me that Otto’s home. Good. I walk through the marble atrium and head up in the paleo-space-age elevator.
Otto and I are together; get used to it
, I think, in silent response to Shelby’s naysaying.

The doors slide open and I step into his foyer, surprised the lights are all off. “Hello?” I make my way around the tall table and head toward the fire glow, dancing on the hall wall. “Otto?” I pause at the threshold to the grand living room; firelight casts a pulsating glow over the ornate woodwork and furnishings. It’s weird, because Otto would never leave a fire unattended.

A voice from the shadowy corner: “Justine.” Only then do I make out his dark form, hunkered in the armchair by the velvet-curtained window.

“Hey.” I move across the Oriental rug, pattern barely
visible in the licks of light, toward the chair in the corner, like a dark throne. I kneel before him. “Hey,” I say again softly.

He closes his eyes and shakes his head minutely. That alone tells me all I need to know. The headaches. The pressure. It’s bad tonight.

“I thought it was getting better,” I say.

“It is,” he whispers.

But not enough.

“The ones we’ve released so far, they’ve made a difference, haven’t they?”

“Of course.”

I straighten and kiss the top of his head, on his hat. “I wish I could take it away.”

“My head?” he jokes wanly. “Please do.”

“The pain.”

“It’s okay.”

“Yeah, right.”

He sits still as a mountain, half his face in darkness, the other half glowing pale in the flames.

I settle onto the chair arm and kiss the light half of his face, brushing his hair back from his jaw with one finger. I whisper, “Helmut and Simon are at the end of their targets. That’s two less, maybe three—Vesuvius is finishing one. We’re making progress.…” Only like forty more to go, I think.

A long silence leaves me feeling helpless, wishing so badly that I really could take away the pain and fear.

“I can feel them, sometimes,” he says, fingers on his forehead, “trying to breach their prison walls. I can feel their will to break free of my force fields.”

“It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“I’m not. If they all surged to get out at the same time, the sheer pressure of it would explode the veins inside my skull. I’m sure of it.”

“Otto, don’t,” I plead, imagining him holding his head in agony, bleeding out his ears, his eyes. “Don’t even visualize that.”

“What if somebody figures it out and unites them? An orchestrated surge would kill me.”

“You have no proof of that except your imagination,” I say, though it’s not the wildest idea. Gently I rub his neck, but not too hard, ever since we read about the woman who got a vein star episode from her neck being pinched in a beauty salon hair-washing sink. “You’re spiraling. You need to get control of your thoughts.”

He says nothing.

I rub in circles. “How long have you sat here?”

“I don’t know.”

“An hour?”

“Maybe.”

Two or three, then. Christ, if there was ever a perfect reminder of why we’re crashing violent highcaps, it’s this. Otto, destroying himself to keep them imprisoned. At the very least, the stress of maintaining those force fields with his mind is spiking his blood pressure, a factor that has been linked to vein star episodes. My heart beats in my throat; I pray he doesn’t sense my unease.

“What’s the nature of the pain?” I ask.

“Pressure,” he says. “Sometimes hot pressure, and sometimes dull—a dull spike that protrudes from my midbrain area to behind my left eye. And there’s a tingly numbness behind my right eye—”

He goes on in minute detail. We’re both connoisseurs of the varieties of cranial pain, and I listen, horrified, until I come to my senses. “Enough. Stop it.” I squeeze his shoulder. “Let me do something.”

“What?”

I move around the back of him and touch his hat. He sucks in a breath.

“Will you let me?”

A pause. Then, “Okay,” he whispers. “Okay.”

I pull it all the way off and kiss the top of his warm, darkly luscious curls, which smell faintly of his rosemary-mint shampoo.

“What are you going to do?” he asks.

“I’m going to relax the area.”

“How?”

“With my fingers. Lightly.”

A silence.

“Really lightly,” I add. He doesn’t like people touching his head, but sometimes he’ll make exceptions for me. Moving stealthily behind him, I rest my hands on his head and rub gently. “I got this from a healer.” A half truth. Shelby and I got massages together the other day, and even the lightest touch felt oddly calming. It gave me the idea to do this on Otto. Relaxation is good for any condition.

“Be careful,” he says.

“Of course.”

With vein star syndrome, one of the veins in your head deteriorates in a way that causes it to bulge out in a star shape, hence the name, but it can shrink back to normalcy just as quickly. Because of this, you never really know if you have it. A normal scan might just mean you’re between star flare-outs. Then, without warning, you could get a bulge so fierce that it leaks or bursts. A burst is typically fatal. A leak can be too, but sometimes leaks subside, or they can be repaired if you get yourself to an ER stat.