by Anise Eden
“I can only imagine,” Kai agreed, then glanced at his computer screen. “Okay, honey, our time is up. I better get you back to Ben.”
I forced myself to turn off my therapist brain and change the subject. As we headed up the stairs, I asked, “Do you know what Pete and Ben did in the Marines?”
“Hah!” Kai shook his head. “Good luck finding out anything about that. Pete said it’s so top secret he can’t even tell me where they went, let alone what they did.” I could see from Kai’s expression that the subject had been a point of contention between them. “Believe me, if I can’t get it out of Pete, you’re not going to get anything out of Ben!”
I had no reason to disbelieve him on that point. Kai seemed like someone who could be pretty persuasive when he wanted to be.
The scent of spices wafted through the air. “Indian food is a favorite here,” Kai explained. “We get it at least twice a week.”
Since I was a big fan, that worked for me. I just hoped it would work for Ben, and for our luncheon.
Chapter Thirteen
Ben was waiting when we returned to the lounge. We filled our plates with food and retired to his office. I could feel all eyes on us as we did so. Apparently, Ben’s reluctance to eat in front of others was well known.
We took our usual places on either side of his desk. Ben looked up at me with an uneasy smile. “So what do we do now, Doc?”
I appreciated his show of willingness. “Well, we could approach this several ways. But rather than starting off with my ideas, I’d first like to hear what you think would be most helpful to you.”
“Hmm.” He stared at his plate, contemplating. “Well, I like watching other people eat and enjoy themselves, so it might help if you started eating first.”
“Sure, no problem.” I put a little bit of rice on a fork and speared a small piece of potato, then held it up to my mouth. “Here we go.” I slid the food into my mouth, closed my lips, and pulled out the fork. “Mmm, that is delicious.”
Ben laughed, a little nervously. “You don’t have to oversell it.”
“No,” I exclaimed, “that really is delicious! Thanks, by the way, for lunch every day. I wasn’t expecting that, and certainly not food of this quality.” I picked up a samosa and nibbled on the corner. “So.” I gave him an encouraging smile. “Your turn.”
Ben closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I could see that he was fighting to control his anxiety.
“Okay,” I said, “forget eating for the moment. Your job is just to pick out something that looks good and put it on your fork.”
Eyes still closed, he said, “Cate, I have to tell you, I feel ridiculous.”
“If I flick this piece of cauliflower at you and get korma sauce all over your face, then you’ll really feel ridiculous,” I teased.
“Oh, I see. So this is therapy by threat?”
“You got it,” I said, trying to provoke him further. “Come on, you big tough Marine, stick something with your fork. That’s all I’m asking.”
That broke him out of his paralysis. His eyes flipped open, and he gave me a dangerous look. “You’re throwing down the gauntlet then.”
“I guess I am, yes.”
“Okay, fine.” He picked up the fork. He flinched as though he were getting a shot as he speared a piece of broccoli. Then he dropped the fork onto the plate.
“You have to hold the fork,” I said.
“You didn’t say anything about holding the fork.” He was smiling, but I could sense the tension flowing underneath.
While I was relieved that he was having fun with the experiment, I also wanted to make sure he made some measurable progress with minimal struggle. “Okay,” I said, working on a brainstorm, “fair enough. I have another idea.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Obviously, you’re not comfortable holding the fork. How would you feel about it if I…fed you?”
He cleared his throat. “You know, I’ve never tried that particular approach.”
“Would you be willing to give it a go?”
“I’d probably feel even more ridiculous.”
“I’m less worried about you feeling ridiculous than I am about helping you move forward with this.”
Ben looked back down at his plate. “You really think it will work?”
“As a first step, maybe,” I said. “After all, if I’m feeding you, then you’re not technically responsible for what’s happening. It might be enough to trick your subconscious into letting go of the fear that by eating in front of me, you might cause me harm.”
He seemed to release some of his tension as the logic of the approach settled in. Finally he said, “Okay, let’s do it.”
Eager not to squander the moment, I pulled my chair over behind the desk so that our knees were almost touching. “First of all, tell me: did you pick this broccoli because you actually wanted to eat it, or because it was the first thing you saw?”
He gave the broccoli a hostile look. “Definitely the latter.”
“What do you want to eat?”
He contemplated. “How about that piece of potato? That looks pretty good.”
I smiled. “Okay.” I speared the potato, which was steaming. I put it in front of my lips and blew gently on it a couple of times. I didn’t want him to burn his mouth on his first attempt. Then I looked up at Ben.
Our eyes met, and as though I had just jumped into a river, I entered a torrent of emotion flowing between us. My attraction to him, which I’d been trying to ignore; my growing affection for him; and something even more powerful coming from his direction—a chaotic jumble of emotions that I couldn’t quite identify, save one. He was attracted to me, too. The force of the flow held me paralyzed. I froze, fork in midair, unable to speak.
But Ben wasn’t paralyzed. Holding my gaze, he slowly leaned forward and put his lips around the end of the fork. Then he pulled away, taking the piece of potato with him. We continued staring at one another as he chewed slowly and swallowed. “It worked,” he murmured.
“What? Oh!” He had done it! I grinned. “Do it again!”
He broke our gaze, looked down, and took the fork from me. He chose another potato, this time lifting it to his own lips. Looking back into my eyes, he ate.
As he swallowed, I bounced up and down. “You did it! You ate in front of me. And I didn’t die!”
“No, you didn’t. I appreciate that,” he said as a smile slowly spread across his face. He reached down, speared a piece of cauliflower, and munched gamely on it.
I couldn’t believe it had actually worked. “Wow.” I fell back against my chair.
He set eagerly to work on a samosa. “You were right. Their food is particularly good today.”
With some relief, I realized that I must have been the only one who had been hit by the emotional flow between us. Ben was focused on the food, which was what I wanted. “Look at you. You’re eating like you haven’t had a bite in days.”
“I don’t know. All of a sudden, I feel fine eating in front of you.”
“How about the others?”
Fear flashed across his face. “One step at a time, Doc.”
“Sorry. Of course.” I nodded. “I’m just so impressed with what you’ve done today. That’s more than enough for now.”
He dug in with gusto. I slid my chair back around to the other side of the desk and watched him. Ben seemed oblivious as my eyes wandered hungrily from his hands to his face, finally settling on his mouth. That’s when it occurred to me: Ben might not even be aware of his attraction toward me. It was possible that his conscious mind considered it unacceptable, and had therefore buried it somewhere far beyond his awareness. I knew that it would be best for all concerned if I just forgot I’d ever known about it in the first place and let it go.
A deep sense of disappointment began to sink in. I cleared my throat and forced myself back into a clinical mindset. “So, what was it about that exercise that worked, do you think?”
He p
ut down his fork and looked at me intently. I felt the flow between us again, although more gently this time. “It was you. You worked.”
“Oh.” Fighting a sudden attack of shyness, I asked, “You’re sure it wasn’t that ‘big, tough Marine’ comment that did it?”
“Oh yeah. You’ll pay for that one.”
I grinned. “Oh really?”
“Mm-hmm. You’ll see. Someday, somewhere, I’ll throw down the gauntlet. Hey, you should eat something. Your food is getting cold.”
Pleased to see how well he was doing, I joined him. For a while, we ate in silence.
Eventually, Ben asked, “So, was your conversation with Kai educational?”
“Very. It sounds like you have a pretty incredible group here. I’m still not sure how much of the woo-woo stuff I believe, but that doesn’t mean I’m not impressed with the people.”
“Well, we’re pretty impressed with you, too.” He punctuated his remark with another bite of food.
What I’d learned about the MacGregor family that morning had left me with more questions than answers, though. “I was wondering how your mother became interested in studying special abilities.”
Ben paused and pushed himself back from the desk. “When she was in her psychiatry residency, she helped one of the attending doctors with a difficult case—a patient who thought he could see the future. He was diagnosed with a psychotic disorder because everyone thought he was delusional. The patient wasn’t even certain of his own sanity since most of his visions weren’t verifiable. Either they were visions of people he didn’t know or of events years into the future. Anyway, they put this guy on a lot of medications—and this was over thirty years ago, when the side effects were brutal. None of them stopped his visions. The patient ended up taking his life.”
“Oh!” My stomach dropped. “How tragic.”
Ben nodded slowly. “In his suicide note, he said that he just couldn’t keep going anymore. He was so tired of being sick and of not knowing whether his visions were real. Then, at the end of his note, he wrote, ‘Congratulations, Dr. MacGregor.’ He put down that she was going to have a baby boy and the date and time of the birth. She wasn’t pregnant at the time, but for some reason, she kept a copy of the note. About a year later, I was born at the exact time the patient had predicted.”
“My God!” The hair on my arms stood on end.
“She named me ‘Benjamin’ after her patient,” he said softly. “I think she felt guilty that she hadn’t done more for him, and that she hadn’t believed in his abilities until it was too late. She wanted to honor him somehow.”
“I can certainly understand that,” I said with a new respect for Dr. MacGregor’s work.
We finished our food in silence. Then, as we cleaned up, Ben took me gently by the elbow. “Hey, thank you for your help with this,” he said. “I never thought I’d eat in front of anyone again. You’re amazing.”
His smile warmed me like the summer sun. “You’re more than welcome. Anytime.”
“I’m going to take you up on that.” He opened the office door. “Now it’s time for your first training exercise.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ben led me down to the large room in the basement where the staff cubicles were. It was quiet, and the only person there was Vani. She was barefoot and wore black velvet leggings and an emerald-green tunic with gold embroidery. She sat cross-legged on one end of a large blue mat in the middle of the floor. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, which told me she must be in serious work mode. Ben directed me to sit across from her, and then rolled a desk chair over next to the mat for himself.
“Welcome, Cate,” Vani said warmly.
“Thanks.” I was glad that the initial chill between us seemed to have thawed.
“Vani, can you give Cate a little tutorial before we start?”
“Sure.” She turned to me. “Everyone has an energy field surrounding their body,” she explained. “In physics, this is referred to as a subtle energy body. We haven’t figured out how to measure it with scientific instruments yet, so for now, you have me.”
Vani flashed us her glamorous smile and adjusted the glass bangles on her wrists with a gentle clinking noise. “To me, your aura is like a manual. It can find out anything I need to know about you at a given moment in time. But in addition to reading auras, I also heal them.”
Since she had blown away any doubts I had about her abilities the day before, I knew better than to answer her claim with skepticism. “What needs healing in an aura?”
Ben jumped in. “Many things, potentially. But for the purposes of this afternoon, let’s focus on your aura. We’ve discussed how, when you submerge into a client, information about that person flows into you—like you showed me last night—and after a couple of sessions, a filament forms that connects you to the client when you’re no longer with them. We call that ‘opening a psychic portal.’”
“A psychic portal?” He couldn’t be serious. “So, what—it’s like Ghost Trappers meets Star Trek?”
Ben’s eyebrow arched slightly. “Look, it’s just our term for ‘filament.’ If it helps, think of it as a metaphor.”
“Oh for goodness’ sake. Okay, fine.” Metaphors were safe enough. “But then why do I have filaments—I mean, portals—open to family and friends? I’ve never submerged into them.”
“It happens automatically when you spend time with someone you care about,” he said. “Without making any conscious effort, you are constantly connecting with them. Eventually, a portal forms.”
I nodded. That didn’t sound completely crazy.
“These open portals are like holes in your aura through which energy is always flowing,” Ben explained. “Having so many holes in your aura is depleting you by constantly exposing you to other people’s emotions. Even when you’re alone, energetically, it’s as though you’re always in a crowd of people—a crowd of at least fifty, if I remember correctly how many clients Dr. Nelson told us you have. So much external energy is entering you right now that you’re drowning in it. That’s the cause of your depression and anxiety. What Vani can do is temporarily close the portals between you and your clients.”
I jerked my head back as though I had been slapped. “What?”
Both Ben and Vani jumped a little. “Only until you finish the program, Cate,” Ben said.
It felt as though my filaments were strings connecting me to a bunch of helium balloons, and Ben was yanking down on them violently. “Ben, can I talk to you for a minute? In private?”
“Sure. Over here.” He led me to the space beneath the stairs. “What is it?”
I swallowed hard, fighting to keep my breathing slow and steady. “You never said anything about disconnecting me from my clients.”
“I understand your concern, but it’s only temporary. When training is over, Vani will reopen all of the portals if you want her to.”
“But I can’t cut them off, not even temporarily!”
Ben leaned down to meet my gaze, but I turned to the side. The corners of his mouth dropped. “Why not, exactly?”
I was starting to believe that I could trust him. Still, my whole body tensed. “If I tell you, you have to promise it won’t go any further. You won’t tell your mother or Dr. Nelson.”
Ben rubbed his forehead for a moment, then quickly raked his hand through his hair. “All right, just between you and me, what is it?”
Why was I hesitating? It wasn’t like I had anything to be ashamed of. I cleared my throat. “It’s like I said in my intake interview. I use the filaments—portals—to check in on my clients.”
His eyes narrowed. “When you were working at the clinic and had a specific reason to be concerned about someone.”
“Yes, that’s what I told you,” I said carefully, “but the truth is, I still check in on my clients every day. If I sense that someone’s in crisis, I call Simone, and she looks into it.”
Ben did a double-take. “You what?”
“That’
s why you can’t tell anyone,” I whispered urgently. “I don’t want Simone to get in trouble.”
His eyebrows forged a straight rod. “How long has this been going on?”
“Ever since I got back from my mother’s funeral.”
Ben covered his eyes with his hand for a moment. Eventually he spoke, stabbing the air with his finger. “This is why you haven’t been getting any better. You can’t start healing if you’re tearing the scab off the wound every day!”
“My clients are not scabs,” I hissed, “or wounds, or whatever is it that you’re implying!”
“That’s not what I meant.” Ben blew out a hard breath. “I know how much you care about your clients, but actively connecting with them is harmful to you right now.” He added in an almost hostile tone, “Frankly, I’m surprised that Simone has allowed you to stay so involved in your cases when you so urgently need to focus on your own healing.”
“It’s not her fault! She’s been telling me from the beginning to stop worrying about everyone else. But I care too much about my clients. I can’t let them go completely. Eventually she gave up fighting me on it.”
“I can see why,” he said, his voice hardening, “but I think it’s about time you let your colleagues do their jobs.”
“But—”
“But what?” He arched his most drill instructor-like eyebrow at me. “Don’t you deserve a few weeks off—completely off—to take care of yourself? What would you advise a client to do in your position? As you’ve noticed, this program requires all of your energy. You can’t spare any of it, not for your clients and not for anyone else. This time has to be all about you. Let Simone and your colleagues take care of your clients, and let Vani close the portals. Otherwise you can’t even begin to heal.”
So Ben was convinced that I had to do this in order to get better. What if he was right? If I never got better, I’d lose my job; then I’d be no help at all to my clients. It appeared that I didn’t have a choice in the matter.