Spark

by Angelina J. Steffort

  “How do you stand it?” Her tone didn’t match her emotions. It sounded almost as if she was annoyed. With me?

  “What?” I narrowed my eyes.

  “The feelings.” Claire’s cheeks turned a rosy color I had never seen there before. Her eyes were flickering back and forth between her hands and me. Was this what she looked like when she actually spoke her thoughts, no matter how awkward it felt for her? She leaned a bit across the table and continued in a much quieter tone. “The things you perceive.”

  Footsteps scattered my attention and I couldn’t help but check to see if anyone had heard Claire’s words. It was the old man who was running Noel’s—probably Noel himself—who was shuffling toward us.

  Claire shrank into her armchair resembling a startled deer and waited until the man stood at our table.

  “What can I bring you?”

  “A hot chocolate, please, and a glass of water.”

  I had to suppress another smile. As she waited for Noel to scribble down her order, her eyes kept glancing up at me, studying me for fractions of a second at a time. It made me nervous again.

  “A cappuccino for me, please,” I chose the first thing that came to mind.

  Before he returned to the counter, a wide smile stretched over Noel’s face. I watched him shuffle back to the coffee machine and wondered how old he was. Given his silver hair and wrinkly skin, he could be my grandfather.

  Claire was still peeking up at me, curiosity becoming more pronounced in her features by the minute.

  “So—where did we stop?” I couldn’t help leaning toward her. Now that she was sitting there, right in front of me, the table seemed an unnecessary barrier. Patience, I reminded myself. “—ah yes, you asked me something.”

  “That’s right. Do I get an answer?” Was she actually mocking me? For one moment I wasn’t sure if it was a facade or if it was authentic. I didn’t want to take chances and so I took her seriously.

  “You asked me how I stand it.” I took a moment to ponder so I could give her a truthful answer—satisfying but not scary. “It’s not exactly easy. Well, easier than it was in the beginning, but still…it’s easier than trying to keep it away.”

  Claire held my gaze as I stared into her eyes, searching for a reaction. Her emotions hadn’t changed, there was still the curiosity, the embarrassment, and that other feeling I had to block out so I wouldn’t reach across the table and take her hand. I didn’t want to startle her.

  “Why are you here?” She kept her eyes on me but her mind seemed to drift to a different place for a moment. It bought me some time to get straight what I had been meaning to tell her all these past days.

  “I came here because—because I missed you.” There. It was out. “More than I thought possible.” The smile I had been holding back earlier, now broke free. Claire’s emotional climate had changed. There was a wave of joy rolling through the air between us. She was happy. Happy about three simple words: I missed her.

  “Thank you,” I answered her emotions. “Thank you, for feeling that way.”

  Claire turned her head, denying me the chance to see into the depth of her eyes. She was taken by surprise as I answered her unspoken words so naturally, as if she had told me she missed me, too. It was clear she did. It was there in every particle in the air around us.

  “Here you go, kids.” Noel surprised me. I’d been so focused on studying Claire’s emotions and reading every twitch of her features, that I had almost forgotten we weren’t alone.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” I apologized to her, knowing it was a lot to comprehend. I had just given away how precisely my talent let me read her, whether she wanted it or not. She must feel transparent.

  “You didn’t.”

  Another smile escaped my control at the irony of how she seemed to want to make me feel better about intruding on her privacy like that. It wasn’t my choice I could read emotions, it was an integral part of me. And it as now or never to find out if she could live with that.

  “If you are willing to take me back…” It was so hard to say the actual words it almost tore me apart. What if she said no? “…I know it’s not easy for you, considering all the weird things…but I swear, you’ll never regret it.”

  Claire’s face went blank. It worried me for a second, then my lips twitched involuntarily at her emotions. She was right there, in that place of bliss of our first kisses, and I wanted to go there with her, but now was not the time. Now was the time for her to sort her thoughts and share, verbally, how she felt about my suggestion—and my promise.

  “You know what, Adam? I’ve been thinking about the…weird things…and I found I can handle it…that you are kind of supernatural, I mean.” All confusion was gone, drained from her system. She had decided she didn’t feel threatened by my sixth sense. It was like an absolution. I couldn’t have asked for more.

  The urge to reach over the table reappeared, and this time I didn’t fight it for I knew she wouldn’t flinch away from me. With a laugh of relief and joy, I took her hand into mine and cradled it there, feeling the softness of her skin, the fragile structure of her slender fingers. I had to tell her how I felt for her. Now or never.

  “I love you, Claire,” I jumped off the cliff putting myself into her grace. “If you say you don’t want me with my odd gifts, I can live with that. I just couldn’t live with not letting you make the choice. I had to come here today to tell you what I feel for you, so you can decide what to make of it—to send me away, or to love me back.”

  As I waited for Claire to respond, my own nervousness peaked, her silence driving me crazy within those few seconds she didn’t speak. Was that the sign she couldn’t return my feelings? Her emotions were going back to confused, her shoulders hunching a bit as if she was withdrawing.

  “You’re confused,” I commented on exactly what I was perceiving from her. It was a bit painful to feel her reverting into that state from before I told her I’d missed her. Had I misread her joy for something it hadn’t been? I tightened my fingers around her hand, anxious she could slip away.

  Claire’s eyes closed and her forehead creased as she concentrated hard on something I couldn’t guess until I felt it. As her confusion slowly retreated again, it became clear—she was happy. Her chest rose and fell with a deep breath and I let her hand slide out of mine, gently placing it back on the table before I leaned back in my chair and watched her. Her hair had fallen over her shoulders, hiding her purple shirt down to the waist on one side, and throwing subtle shadows on her face. I blocked out my radar for a moment and instead used the second she granted me as she was sorting out her feelings to memorize every freckle on her fair skin and the exact tone of pink of her lips in the dark light of the rainy day. When her eyelids eventually fluttered open, her grayish eyes were a window into her soul.

  “What do you receive from me—right now?”

  No declaration of her feelings in words. Was that a reason to be concerned? I switched my radar back on and felt her right away.

  “Right now—caution …and…” Did she really want me to say this out loud?

  Claire lifted her cup and took a sip, but she couldn’t possibly hide from me what not only her eyes were telling me, but her entire being.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” I encouraged her. She had no reason at all, not even the slightest, to be embarrassed about the way her physique was reacting to my declaration. But was it just that? Or was it a response of her heart, the way she was feeling now? It was similar to that heat of our first kiss but more intense, deeper, fundamental. The growing intensity made me edgy.

  Claire ignored my stare and focused on her chocolate, putting on a great show of not caring—for a second. As I chuckled to myself, positively surprised about the way things seemed to be turning out, her face turned into an open book again, giving me reading material from more than one source.

  “…and longing.” Not just hers, but my own was growing, too.

  Claire averted her gaz
e at my words, using the window’s transparency to cover her own. She wondered at the dark clouds and the waterfall which was spilling from the sky, instead of exposing her blush to me. And while she observed the flood on the sidewalk, something like contentment grew inside of her.

  “If you feel all these things at the same time, how can you distinguish between your own feelings and others? I mean, there are three people in the room, how do you know which feelings belong to whom? And how do you know when you’re in a big crowd. Don’t get me wrong, but …how can you be sure which feelings are your own, and which of them belong to somebody else? And how do you know that it’s my longing, and not Noel’s?”

  She didn’t turn back immediately but left her gaze glued to the puddles in the parking lot, giving me a moment to find the right words before she bore her eyes into mine, stirring my calm, and the smile was back on my face. Despite her longing—her desire to be with me—she had her priorities straight. That impressed me. Within all her volatile emotions, she had a rational side which kept her on track, the same rational side I kept fighting to reconnect with since my emotional vision of Claire.

  “That is a lot of questions.”

  She cocked her head, disgruntled by my delaying an answer. “What? Don’t you think I have a right to know what I’m getting myself into?” Her eyes challenged me to speak the truth, anything less wasn’t an option. “I mean, if I consider being with you. Don’t you think it would help me with my decision?” she added before I could even open my mouth, as if she was worried her tone might have offended me.

  It hadn’t. She could never offend me, not with any outburst of thoughts or emotions. She was already part of me. And her words fueled my hope. She might come around…

  “You do have the right. And I want to answer your questions.” Honesty. Patience. “First, I have to say that it doesn’t work all the time. It’s been getting more and more regular over the last few months, though.” As I thought about the flashes of emotions and how they were becoming part of me and my life, I was grateful I had that extra weapon against Claire’s doubts. Would I ever be able to win her heart if I couldn’t understand her on such a fundamental level? As my mind was drifting off, her curious gaze pulled me back to answer her next question. “How do I distinguish between my own feelings and somebody else’s? I can’t tell how I do it exactly, but I know because my own feelings come from inside me and the others’ seem to come from somewhere outside.”

  Claire looked through me for a moment, focusing really hard on something. “I don’t understand.”

  I suppressed a chuckle. How could she understand if even I didn’t? The best I could do was share what I knew and help her realize my gift wasn’t a bad thing. “I can feel what others feel while I look at them. If they are out of sight, I cannot perceive more than anyone else.”

  Relief washed over the table in a spring tide and swallowed me. How I wished I could read her mind, so I could tell what had brought on that reaction. My guess was that she felt she still had secrets.

  “So you don’t feel Noel’s emotional state right now?”

  “Since I’m not looking at him directly at the moment—no.”

  “Which would mean that if you look away from me, you don’t perceive me either?”

  I shook my head, pleased to have guessed right.

  “Is it enough for you to just fix on a point a foot away, or does it have to be another direction? Do I have to vanish from your peripheral vision before you don’t feel me anymore?”

  She really wanted to know the limits of my radar, as if she was hoping to find ways of escaping transparency.

  “Peripheral vision will do,” I gave her a reason to breathe. “If the person is outside my peripheral vision, I can’t sense anything.”

  “So it isn’t as bad as I thought…” She was talking more to herself and this time I couldn’t hold back a chuckle.

  “No, it isn’t. Not that bad.”

  She laughed with me, face lighting up and eyes shining with the purity of her soul.

  “But as long as you somehow see them, you feel what they’re feeling,” she asked for reassurance of her understanding,

  “Yes.”

  “And you can’t do anything about it.”

  My mind flashed back to the pain of feeling Claire fade from me, and the sleepless nights and strain of suppressing my gift, and I shuddered.

  “I could, but you saw what happened last time. It makes me lifeless and tires me. I don’t think I can survive too long without sleep and without energy.”

  Claire’s eyes widened and her entire body tensed as if she was preventing herself from running.

  “So, is that what you do? Take away their energy?”

  What was she thinking? That I was taking people’s energy? That I was bad? Dangerous? I inhaled slowly to steady my voice—patience--and gave her the honest answer I had promised myself I would be giving. “I could never do that—even if I knew how. It just diminishes my own energy when I keep myself from seeing, or feeling, more than others do. I feel like I lose a part of what I am and it makes me ill.” And I couldn’t go back to that. Not if I wanted to stay sane.

  It seemed I wasn’t the only one to remember the horror of those days. Claire bobbed her head, shaken by the memory of how drained I had looked. She knew I was serious when I said I didn’t want to go back to that, but she wasn’t done interrogating me.

  “And if you look at somebody, you know everything about them?”

  She was pleased about something as she watched me listen attentively and I almost chuckled again. She wanted to know every detail…

  “Not at all. I mainly feel what they feel. And most of the time I get the main idea behind that feeling …why they feel that way. When I spend a lot of time with a person, I start to notice patterns—like in behavior—and that makes it much easier to guess accurately at their reasons. The better I know someone, the easier it gets.” I thought of Jenna and my dad, how they felt about each other and everything they did was guided by that love. About Ben, who was so mature for his age and kept surprising me with his emotions which were always driven by the wish to help and do good. Even his jokes, bad as they sometimes were, were part of that urge to console people and guide them in their aspirations. Geoffrey with his kindness and patience… It had become easy for me to guess why they behaved the way they did. I saw them on a daily basis and their patterns were fairly consistent. But Claire…she was different. There was so much she didn’t let on. All her thoughts and motives were somewhere locked up behind those bluish eyes, waiting to be discovered. I knew more about her emotions than about her life, her interests, or her actual thoughts. If she would only share more… Frustration crept into my mouth and made the coffee taste bitter. “It’s not that easy with everybody, however. Some people are harder to read than others.”

  “Hm.” Claire seemed to be in one of those trains of thought she was hiding so well from me. “What about me? You said it was different with me… You told me you knew things about me before you first met me.”

  Ah yes, a reminder of the conversation which had sent my chances to be with her to hell… Ignoring the dark feeling it brought back, I pondered how to best explain without scaring her off again. It wasn’t just my ability to read emotions, but the fact I’d had a vision of her personality, her emotional patterns, and so it was as if I'd known her forever—without actually knowing her.

  “I guess that was because you’re different from the others—for me at least. It was only one single time that I had that …let’s call it an emotional vision of you, that I felt somebody whom I didn’t look at.”

  Her calm face gave me the impression I was on the safe side, so I continued, letting her get a glimpse of my enthusiasm. If she only knew how much I kept holding back…

  “That’s what makes you so special, Claire—you’ve been there in my life before you were really there—physically, I mean. But since the vision, I’ve never felt you when I didn’t look at you.” As
I spoke, I wondered if it was supposed to be this way, that after the vision she’d become like anyone else. I wasn’t hot-wired to her emotions over distance… “Don’t think it doesn’t scare me not knowing how you are, how you feel, when I don’t see you. It pains me to be away from you.”

  Claire was just sitting there, listening with the same calm face, and giving me the time I required to share everything I needed to. And I seized the opportunity to inform her just how special she was, and how her personality was engraved in my heart. She had a right to know and once it was all out there, she would truly know what she was getting herself into…if she did get herself into it…

  “When I had my vision of you, I felt a certain pattern without knowing where to put it. I hadn’t seen you yet and, still, I felt everything you were. It was like I was taken through your life in time lapse. I know so much about you, though I don’t know anything at all. I know there was so much pain in your past…”

  “How can you feel things that happened years ago? That’s not—normal, I guess?” Shock was written on her features. Had I been wrong to choose the path of honesty?

  “There is hardly anything normal about the way I perceive you, Claire,” I mocked myself. Now it was too late to go back. I would say it all. Every little thing I’d felt, knew, and loved. “After I had that emotional vision, I knew that you were everything I wanted. It drove me crazy that I couldn’t relate it to somebody I knew. You know, it’s fairly annoying, searching around for a face matching the pattern. All I knew was that I had to find you…though I had no idea what you would look like…except for your beauty, I was sure of that—” The memory of the time before that blessed day I’d chosen to drop by Gran’s grave made my head drop with heaviness. “It was frustrating, running around day after day. I knew so much about you, but I didn’t know where to find you…maybe you weren’t in Aurora at all.”

  Claire didn’t react. There was some sort of stress boiling under the surface, but she hid it well. If it hadn’t been for my sixth sense, I wouldn’t have been able to feel it at all.