by Samael Wolf
It was that ‘for now’ that led me to hurry back to the car as quickly as I could. I could no longer ‘see’ the ground in front of me as clearly, but I knew where the door to the coffeehouse was, and I could extrapolate from there. I was relieved to find the woman standing beside the car unharmed, although it was no great surprise to find her sobbing quietly. She made an effort to wipe her face and put on a false smile as I approached, and I’m embarrassed at how readily I had accepted the mask she was using to keep up appearances in public as authentic. Scooping up the slightly battered to-go box, I shoved it into her hands as a pretense to get close enough to talk to her.
Gritting my teeth around a fake smile of my own just in case the man came walking back sooner than I expected, I grated out, “I’m sorry for all the trouble. Why don’t you step inside just a second and I’ll give you a full refund for the inconvenience.” She tried to protest, but I pulled her into the coffeehouse by the hand and she seemed powerless to resist. As we crossed the threshold of the doorway, I was relieved to find that most of the patrons seemed too engrossed in whatever they were doing to pay any attention to what had transpired outside. I checked behind the counter with my senses as we approached and spotted what I needed. Under the counter in a shelf accessible to employees, there was a little card holder stocked with innocuous items which looked like business cards. Sae had shown them to me and explained their nature on my first day, but this was the first, and I hoped, last time I would need them.
I darted around the counter and fetched one of the cards, putting it in the woman’s hand and wrapping her fingers around it firmly with my hands. “Keep this card on you,” I told her in an urgent undertone. “It looks like a list of pediatricians, but it’s actually a list of women’s shelters in Seattle. Call one of them. They’ll send someone to help get you out. They can pick up your son from school. Just please, please, call before this happens again.”
“I can’t leave,” she whispered brokenly. She tried to push the card back at me. “He knows about those places. He said if I try to leave, he’ll kill me and then himself. I can’t call the police, they’re all his friends and they think I’m crazy. I’m sorry. It’ll be okay. I’ll be fine.”
I didn’t believe that for a minute. I swallowed around a lump in my throat and forced her hand to tighten around the card. “Just keep it,” I pleaded. “Even if you don’t call, you’ll know you aren’t alone in this. They’ll help you if you ask, I promise. Do it for Jeffrey.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even look at it. But she put the card in her pocket, nodding at nothing in particular. I had to hope that would be enough. I fished the $20 she’d given me out of the register and put it in her hands so that she’d have something that might buy her husband’s good will a little longer, though what I really wanted to do was grab the nearest heavy object and crack it over his head. I walked her back outside, anticipating from her tension that he was waiting with the car. Sure enough, when he came back into my ‘sight’ he was waiting outside the car, with Jeffrey safely in the back seat again. I hoped it was safe there, at least.
The woman wordlessly ducked her head as she walked past him, circling around to the passenger side of the car and getting in. He didn’t say anything, but he held up something I recognized: my cane. The elastic holding the sections together had been snapped and the pieces clattered softly in his grip. Somehow I didn’t think it had happened when I’d thrown it at his car, but seeing as it had apparently done the trick and short-circuited his murderous impulse, it was a small price to pay. Still, the sight of the broken cord dangling from the middle of one of the sections made me flinch. He held it up long enough to be sure I’d seen it, apparently having concluded—not wrongly, I guess—that I wasn’t as blind as the cane implied, then threw it contemptuously behind the car and got in. The engine fired and he very deliberately backed over it, the tires catching briefly and sending the pieces rolling away with a clatter.
I swallowed hard. The message was loud and clear; to him, I was an unwelcome interloper in his business and if I knew what was best for me, he wouldn’t see me ever again or I could count on something unpleasant happening. Well, I had news for him; the same was true for him too. It hadn’t been easy to ‘see’ from that distance, but I’d memorized the name on his uniform. I had no idea what it was I could do if it was true that his coworkers would side with him, but one way or another, I vowed I’d find a way to make sure ‘Officer Orkin’ didn’t hurt anyone else.
Somehow.
The rest of the day was absolutely miserable. It took forever to stop shaking once the adrenaline wore off, and my concentration was completely shot after that. My synesthesia doesn’t switch off just because I can’t focus on it, so at least I wasn’t completely debilitated, but it felt like the signals from my brain were as unreliable as the connection on my phone if I tried to call someone in a tunnel. I’m sure people picked up on it, but I did my best to smile and turn up the charm. I don’t know how well I succeeded when I couldn’t remember half of what I said a minute after I said it. I’d received a few threats in the past from people who’d thought the documentary was a hoax, but they were always threats to expose me in some way, not threats on my life, and they couldn’t even get any traction since my condition is a documented medical fact. This was my first time running up face to face with someone I knew would hurt me without a moment’s hesitation.
At least my cane turned out to be mostly unharmed despite being run over. I found some minor scuffs in the reflective surface from where the tires had ground it into the pavement, but the segments still fit together and didn’t seem to be bent. I could replace the elastic cord with a spare once I got home, although I was sorely going to miss it on the walk back. Just thinking about trudging down the streets by myself made the trembling come back. What if he came looking for me? What if he, through his connections with the police, saw the shelter card and knew what it was? What if he guessed that I wasn’t about to forget what he’d nearly done and wanted to do anything I could to stop him from getting a chance to finish what he started?
I didn’t realize just how much these thoughts were hounding and distracting me until a customer reached across the counter and tapped me on the nose like a cat. Somehow I managed to keep from climbing up on the counter, but it was a near thing. Thank God I recognized who it was before I screamed.
“Whoa, don’t tell me I actually managed to sneak up on you.” The young woman leaned forward across the counter with a mischievous smile. “How? I want to know so I can do it again.”
“There’s a certain trick to it,” I mumbled with no idea at all what I was saying, only that it vaguely sounded like a proper answer. My heart couldn’t take another shock today. I took a deep breath, putting on a long-suffering smile. At least this was a friend.
I first met Esti Maite at a rave on one of the few occasions my friends convinced me to go to when I was 17. She was dressed in something like the skimpiest school uniform I’d ever seen. I still remember it far too well: a knife-pleated skirt, red and black; a sheer blouse covered by a black corset, with just enough protruding above and below to hint at the barely concealed flesh beneath; a shrug with a high collar which seemed designed to draw the eye to the other type of collar around her neck. All that and then there was the fact that she had the longest hair I’d ever seen, a thick curtain of blonde that easily reached the back of her knees, which is what actually caught my attention. She’d come as Jesse’s date—or something else, I think—but by the end of the night, Jesse had loosed her on me, stolen Cassie—the girl who was supposed to be keeping an eye on me—and that was it for coherent thoughts for awhile.
Esti had smiled in a way I’d never seen anyone smile before, like she was about to let me in on a great joke. “I like to dance close,” she said into my ear. I’d nodded, at a total loss for words. “Really close. Is that going to be okay?”
I distinctly remember thinking that I knew where this was going and, darn it
, I was going to follow it all the way down the rabbit’s hole and see what all the fuss was about. Well, it didn’t get as far as I’d hoped/feared, but by the end of the night, I’d learned a lot about her and myself, and all without a word passing between us. There are nights when I lay in bed and remember the taste of her lips, the candy gloss she used that made them seem so pink to my secret eyes, my delight when I found out they tasted just as sweet as they looked, and I laugh at myself and wonder if I can really call myself bisexual when I can’t remember ever fantasizing about a guy the same way.
Well, eventually I made it home with Jesse and Cassie to the apartment we were sharing. Later that month, the fourth person in our little household had to leave when her mother had a stroke and suddenly we needed another person to help cover the rent of our four bedroom apartment, and by sheer coincidence, Esti was enrolling with the university that semester. I expected it to be awkward when we met for the second time, but she didn’t seem to have any hang-ups at all about what happened and all the awkwardness was mine. After a few weeks of seeing each other almost every day without her saying a word about what happened, I finally worked up the courage to broach the subject, and you know what she said?
“Sweetheart, we can open that floodgate if you want, but it’s just going to get both of us wet.”
Somehow this broke the ice, as well as any hope I had of making it through the evening without wanting to die of embarrassment. We talked, or rather she did most of the talking and I nodded when she articulated things far better than I could. What she said was that she’d really liked dancing with me and she thought I was incredibly sweet, but the atmosphere of a rave was a much different beast than anything as intimate as living together and dating each other. We’d had fun together and she was open to doing it again in the future, but at the same time, if I was interested in a relationship, we needed to get to know each other first as friends first and see where it went from there. It was my first experience with the idea that people could act on their attraction for each other without it going hand in hand with a relationship or both people going separate ways after it was done.
I thought about it for awhile and realized there was a point to it. I had a nervous, giddy feeling in my stomach whenever I thought about kissing Esti, but I barely knew her otherwise. That was when I realized that I was attracted to her, no doubt about that, but I couldn’t rightly say that I had feelings for her otherwise. I did a little growing up that day, even if some of it stung a bit. I was just glad her relationship with Jesse seemed to be just as casual as it was with me, so I didn’t have much jealousy to work through.
Eventually the awkward feelings went away and I could start comfortably thinking of her as a friend, albeit one who delighted in making me blush at every opportunity. Esti turned out to be absolutely shameless and a tease like nothing I’d ever seen. She had no problems accepting my ability to ‘see’ things through synesthesia, but when she found out I could also do things like accurately visualize the objects inside boxes I wasn’t even touching, she insisted on having me try to guess what kind of panties she was wearing, proclaiming skepticism unless I was able to get it on the first try. I realized she was doing it intentionally when I reluctantly ‘looked’ and confirmed she wasn’t even wearing any. She made up for it with a Christmas present that came in a box wrapped in paper covered in pictures she smugly informed me were called ‘hentai,’ which if you don’t know, apparently means people get paid to draw things to make me turn colors.
I eventually got her to tell me that the panties inside were a joke, but she made me promise that if I ever wear them, she gets to play with the remote control.
After the holidays had ended, she caught me grousing about not wanting to ask Dad for any more money—he’d bought me a smartwatch with a lot of nice accessibility apps I could use to do things like check my class schedule, and while I appreciated it, I had to wince at the cost I imagined it’d had—and asked if I was interested in a job working at the No-Name Coffeehouse. She knew the person looking after the business while the owner was away on an extended vacation and said they were short-handed. About a month later, I celebrated an early birthday with money from my first paycheck.
I used it to try and get Esti back by buying her a phallic-shaped lollipop from the adult novelty store at the mall, hoping to embarrass her. I didn’t expect her to, well… enjoy it. Definitely not that much.
Yes, I’m kind of naïve.
Esti could be a devil when she wanted, but she was more perceptive than she often let on. Although I’d tried to banter with her, she frowned and leaned closer, as if she could smell the aftereffects of terror oozing off me like stale sweat. “Been a long day?” she asked, the innocuous question belying concern that even I could pick up on.
I debated how much I wanted to tell her. I’ve always been pretty independent, but there are some things I just can’t do on my own, even with the advantages I have, and other things I just don’t have the life experience to know how to do either. My life has been on fast forward ever since my first celebrity role model in life died on an operating table and I made the decision to go to medical school and become an emergency physician. I was eleven, and suddenly I was grasping at any means I could get my hands on to finish my schooling as quickly as possible. That became my drive and passion, with only a few concessions to normalcy at Dad’s insistence, none of which included relationships or adversity. Esti liked to tease me that I was both gifted and sheltered, and I suppose it’s true. I’ve grown in some ways, but lagged behind everyone else in others.
I decided, yes, I trusted her enough. Taking a deep breath, I nodded and leaned in closer. “Could you walk me home tonight?” I asked softly, fighting to keep my voice even. “Something happened today and I would really appreciate not being alone on the way back.”
Esti’s frown deepened and I had the sudden impression she wasn’t going to let me wait until the end of the night to tell her, but then she simply nodded. “Of course; no problem. I’ll wait around after the munch. In the meantime, can I get a cup of that lentil soup if there’s any left?”
There was, and I took the few dollars she gave me, made change which she tossed in the tip jar, and quickly settled into my work routine with one burden lifted off my shoulders. The evening saw a lot more customers than the afternoon and by 8:00 the dining room was filled with the din of a dozen conversations taking place at once, creating a comforting ambiance which helped to ease more of the tension I was feeling. I listened to tabletop gaming and a board game taking place alongside the Anime Appreciation Club’s weekly meeting as they discussed something called Dragon Ball Super which I was completely unfamiliar with, and did my best not to blush when I overheard the occasional snippet of conversation from the BDSM munch. At 9:00 Sae arrived to join the munch. I told her we’d had a problem with a customer and I’d have to give them a refund, but she waved it off.
“Is there a receipt for the transaction and the refund?” she asked, and I said there was, since I’d had the presence of mind to do that much when I’d finally had a chance to catch my breath. “Then it’s fine. I’ll catch it when I do the books this weekend.” She gave me a curious look, inclining her head slightly. “Are you good to close up tonight, or would you prefer I stay?”
I gave a start, wondering if I’d let something slip. “N-no, I should be fine. Esti’s staying to walk me back home,” I stammered, surprised by her concern. Sae continued studying me, and I studied her right back, trying to read that odd expression.
Sae doesn’t really look or act like someone you’d expect to have any business acumen. She always has bright pink hair which she usually wears in pigtails, and the frilly black and white dress she’d changed into since I saw her earlier managed to flaunt cleavage at one end and barely cover her rear at the other. And she was wearing cat ears. She looked like she’d just arrived from a convention, and who knows, maybe she had. I’d never seen her outside of work before, and we never had much of a chance to
talk while we were there. Even when she was in business mode, she still gave me the impression she didn’t really take the job seriously. Frankly I wasn’t entirely sure how the business kept afloat, but she did the accounting and she assured me that we were in no danger of having to shut the doors anytime soon.
“I’m fine,” I said again, growing uncomfortable with her stare. Sae made a noncommittal noise and abruptly smiled, an expression which did nothing to dissuade me from the feeling that I was being somehow dissected.
“Whatever you say,” she said, and looked expectant. When I could only shake my head in confusion, she stuck her tongue out at me and flounced off as if I’d just spoiled a joke, leaving me completely bewildered. I heard a chorus of greetings as she reached the table and tried to shut out their quick recap of the discussion thus far. It was something to do with ‘endurance.’ I did my best to bury myself in a chicken and pesto sandwich to avoid being educated any more than I had been already.
The last hour passed smoothly. I collected stacks of plates and mugs from the bin next to the table of napkins, lids, straws and condiments, and washed them in between the last to-go orders of the night. Most of the customers drifted out with farewells before I even had to call that we’d be closing soon, and before long it was just me and Esti while I finished cleaning up. She helped me carry the bags of garbage, recycling and compostable materials and dump them in the bins outside, and I quickly ran the vacuum around the tables to finish up. After that, I just had to transfer the cash drawer from the register to the safe in our lounge, which Sae would open and perform her accounting magic upon the next morning. I let Esti out of the building, closed and re-locked the doors, and after that we finally were on our way.