Reaching into her pocket, Paxton pulled out a key ring. "Here's my car," she said, walking over to a rather beat-up Honda Civic with rust patches above the rear wheel wells. "Thanks for the food and not making me use my pepper spray on you in this parking structure, Sir Asshole."
"You're really sticking with that nickname, are you," I sighed. "Great."
She unlocked the driver's side door – by putting the key in the door, even! Not even with a key fob! – and gave me a smirk of her own. "What's the matter? It leave you feeling a little impotent? Pestered and unable to perform?"
Wow. As if only just realizing what she'd said to me, Paxton suddenly flushed, redness rushing into her cheeks so strongly that it was visible even in the dim light of the parking garage. "Anyway, it wasn't totally awful, meeting you," she finished, and ducked down into the car before I could form a reply.
I watched her leave, feeling strangely like I did when I escorted some of the supermodels out of my apartment the next morning. Ridiculous, of course. This wasn't a date, and I had no romantic interest in Paxton.
But I still wasn't sure how she was able to resist my powers. Could it be some metal object she wore, neutralizing me? Did she have latent powers that hadn't awoken yet? Was she my Kryptonite?
Finally, I turned around, looking back at the three flights of stairs I'd need to descend if I wanted to catch a cab back to my apartment.
"Screw that," I muttered to myself. I walked over to the door leading back into the stairwell, put my hand on the handle as I did a little writing inside my head to restructure the universe, just a little bit.
I opened the door and stepped through – right into my apartment, as if the door in the parking structure was connected by a wormhole of some sort, right to my own front door. Which, in effect, is what I'd done.
Closing the door behind me, I undid that little bit of broken physics and headed to the kitchen to grab a beer out of my fridge.
It seemed, at least, like this Paxton wasn't going to make much trouble for me. I could put her out of my mind, out of my life.
Chapter Seven
ALEX
*
"You're still talking about this girl?" Tommy frowned at me across his large desk, interlacing his fingers on the leather blotter in front of him. "I thought you said that you wanted to put her out of your mind?"
"I did say that – I am putting her out of my mind," I said, narrowing my eyes back at him. "I'm done talking about her."
"Uh huh."
"Stop looking so doubtful." I picked up my sandwich, one of a pair that I'd carried into Tommy's office, took a big bite. I savored the rush of salty, meaty goodness as my teeth sank through two dozen layers of paper-thin pastrami, tasting the smoked Gouda, the crunch of fresh tomato. Zia's Delicatessen made the best sandwiches in the world. I gestured at the similar sandwich sitting in front of Tommy. "Eat the lunch I brought you," I managed to force out through my full mouth.
He sighed, but picked it up. "I didn't ask for you to bring me lunch, you know. I've got a dozen cases that need my attention, and I should be spending this time working on them, instead of chatting with you about this mysterious girl that you can't land."
"That's not the issue," I protested. "I don't want to land her. She's ordinary central. Come on, you know what I like – supermodels, busty goddesses who look like they stepped out of the pages of Playboy! And some of them actually did! She's not what I'm after."
"But you can't seem to let her go," Tommy observed. "Why is that?"
"Because, like I told you, my powers don't work on her!" I narrowed my eyes. "Are you trying to use your lawyer powers on me?"
"You can't prove that," he replied, smirking in a manner that told me yes, that was exactly what he was doing. "But I'm not sure if I can even be of any real use to you on this."
"Why's that?"
He set his sandwich back down on its waxed paper wrappings. "Because, Alex, no one understands how your powers work. Not even you or I really know."
I sighed. He was right – and I could follow his logic. If I didn't know how my powers worked, then I didn't know how they could be disrupted, such as by something that Paxton... had? Thought? Wore? Carried as a special charm, passed down from her poor dead grandmother? No way to know.
"We tried to figure it out once, remember?" I asked, taking another bite of my lunch. It had been strange, waking up without a hangover. Admittedly, my hangovers usually only lasted for the few seconds it took to write them out of existence, but still. I'd pulled back my sheets and found myself feeling curiously refreshed. Not knowing what to do with myself, I'd headed into the room that, when I first purchased the huge penthouse, I'd turned into a personal gym – and then promptly had closed up and never used since.
Forty minutes on the stair-climber left me sweating and panting – and still unable to get Paxton out of my head. I still couldn't let go of the mystery. I'd decided to seek out advice from my lawyer, so I stopped to pick up the sandwiches before joining Tommy at his office.
"I remember," Tommy nodded. "We wanted to be all scientific about it, even. I had a notebook for tracking everything, and we tried every experiment that we could think up."
"And in the end, they really didn't tell us much at all," I sighed, leaning back in my chair.
That was an understatement. Some of the experiments we thought up failed, but most succeeded. I wasn't able to give my own powers to another, but I could transfer just about anything else. Changes that I made to the universe never seemed to wear off, even when they seemed to break the rules of causality and physics. For example, I still had a door coming off my bathroom that led right out onto a beautiful, totally remote beach in the Caribbean. It was, of course, impossible for an interior door to connect magically to a pristine wilderness several thousand miles away, but that didn't seem to stop the magic from working. It was great to sit in the bathroom on the toilet and listen to the sound of the waves, smell the salty freshness of the frothing sea.
"So maybe it's time to do a bit more research," Tommy finished. "Could you use your power to look itself up, if that makes sense? Summon a tome that tells you the history of your power?"
Doubtfully, I tried writing the words inside my head. We both looked down expectantly at Tommy's desk, where a large, leather-bound hardcover book completely failed to materialize.
"So much for that idea," I lamented. "Maybe it doesn't work on itself, or maybe I don't know the right things to ask for. Any other ideas?"
Tommy leaned back, trying to hold his sandwich off to one side so that it wouldn't drip on his suit. "Afraid that I'm out," he said calmly. "You'll have to probably end up talking to this girl herself, Poxy, or whatever her name was."
"Paxton." I winced at the idea. "I'm not sure that she'll be happy to see me again."
"What, just because you were a total ass to her?"
"Only at first!" I protested. "After that, I was a perfect gentleman! I talked to her, took her out of the club, even bought her food – where she totally took advantage of me, by the way! You should have seen the huge mountain of food she ordered as soon as she heard I was paying for it all."
"Yeah? And then what happened?" Tommy jerked forward, just a second too late to avoid getting a big glob of thousand island dressing right on the middle of his tie. "Dammit. And I'm supposed to go to meet a judge this afternoon."
"Hand it over," I said, holding out my hand.
"What are you going to do?" He started loosening the tie so he could slide it up, over his head.
I took the stained accessory from him, waved my hand over it. "Ta-da. Stain is gone. I'm not just incredibly powerful, I can get dressing stains out of expensive fabrics without even breaking a sweat. Find me in the supermarket, aisle twelve."
"Expensive? It's from an outlet store," Tommy muttered, but he accepted the clean tie back from me.
I waggled a finger at him. "Show some gratitude. And this isn't the biggest thing that I've fixed for you, as you know."
<
br /> "I thought we agreed not to bring that up?" Tommy looked a bit uncomfortable at even just the veiled allusion to his unhappy chubby childhood, the struggle he'd faced daily before I came into my powers and helped him.
"Right, right," I agreed. "Sorry, man. Didn't mean to remind you of it. But you're cured, now, and I'm telling you in excruciating detail about how I swooped this girl Paxton back to my apartment and fucked her brains out on every single piece of furniture I own."
He looked flatly back at me. "Objection. You did no such thing."
"Objection? This isn't court, man!"
"Doesn't change the fact that you're lying to me right now," he insisted. "I can tell, after almost a dozen years of being your best friend. You always start exaggerating and using slang that has no place in your vocabulary."
"What slang?"
He raised his eyebrows across the big, imposing lawyer desk at me. "Swooped? On every single piece of furniture? Give me a break, Alex."
"Fine." I crossed my arms, pouted. "I walked her back to her car and didn't get so much as a goodnight kiss. She called me 'Sir Asshole,' like I was some sort of reject Knight of the Round Table."
I didn't get an answer right away, and looked up – to see Tommy covering his mouth with one hand. "What's wrong with you?"
"Sorry!" he got out, his voice half-choked. "It's just really funny to see how you struggle so much when you finally meet a girl where your powers don't work! Kind of feels like comeuppance for all those times you walked by me, smirking, with a couple of supermodels under your arms."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Laugh it up, you jerk." I grimaced at the memory of last night. "So what do I do? Do I call her?"
"Do you have her number?"
I wiggled my fingers. "Abracadabra. I could find it, I'm sure."
"But she didn't give it to you?" Tommy pressed.
I shook my head. "Nope. Didn't think to ask."
"Then don't call her," he concluded. "If she didn't give you her number, it seems creepy to just find it on your own."
"So what, then?"
He sighed, swallowed the last bite of the sandwich half. "So you've decided to see her, and you aren't putting her out of your mind, like you declared at the start of this conversation. You know, you wouldn't make a very credible witness on the stand, if you keep changing your story like this."
I had said that I wanted to put her out of my head, I now recalled – but it hadn't been working so far, since I'd been trying to do just that for the whole morning. "Fine. Yes, I'm changing my story. I'm going to see her again."
Tommy made little kissing noises at me, and I considered throwing my own partly eaten sandwich across his desk at him, add some new stains to replace those that I'd magicked away for him. "Knock it off, would you? It's not like that. I want to see her again so that I can figure out why my powers don't work on her. There's nothing romantic about it."
I recalled briefly how I'd found my eye drawn to Paxton's ass when she climbed the stairs in the parking structure ahead of me, how her body had stretched the otherwise unflattering pants in interesting ways. I remembered seeing her laugh, and noticing how the body beneath that baggy sweater twitched just enough to keep my attention distracted.
No, I told myself. It was just idle curiosity; hell, I tried to imagine how most of the women I passed on the street would look when naked! I was only thinking about Paxton because, for the moment, I couldn't have her.
But I'd figure out why my powers didn't work on her, and how to get around it. Then, I could get past her, back to my normal diet of supermodels and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition covers.
I just needed to figure out the mystery, that's all.
"Okay," Tommy finally spoke up again, interrupting my thoughts. "First, let me make it clear that, as your lawyer and friend, I strongly advise that you let this girl go, and don't mess around with her. If she's immune to your power, maybe she can do other things – take them away, break them in some way."
I waved my hand at him. "Don't be so dramatic. I've acknowledged your worrying, and I'm choosing to ignore it. There, happy?"
"Not really," he sighed. "But what did you find out about her that would let you see her again? Last name, anything?"
I frowned, thinking back. "Davies. Paxton Davies. And she works for a bookstore with her uncle. Lives above it, too."
"Right, that's enough to start." Tommy grabbed his keyboard from the tray beneath the top of his desk, typed a few words into it and frowned. "Yeah, here it is. Davies Books, out to the southwest a ways. Looks like a local used bookstore, kind of place where people pick up old paperbacks for a nickel each."
I remembered Paxton mentioning that she had a whole stack of romance novels. Her uncle's store sounded like the place where she'd get them. "Great. Got an address for me?"
"Any idea what you're going to say when you show up?" Tommy asked as he scribbled down the address on a sticky note. He peeled it off the pad and passed it over to me. "Remember, you can't use your powers to just charm her into jumping your bones."
"Not why I'm going," I reminded him. "And I don't know. I'll just have to wing it, hope that my natural charm and good luck can carry me through."
Tommy sighed, held out his hand. "Sticky note, please."
"What are you adding?" I asked as I watched him add a phone number beneath the address.
"My pager number," he said.
"You still have a pager? Why? Is your semaphore not working at the moment? Don't have a blanket for sending up smoke signals?"
"Pagers are allowed in court," he answered, his tone suggesting that I wasn't as funny as I thought. Ridiculous – I was hilarious. "And this way, when this woman has you arrested, you can get in contact with me with your one phone call from jail."
I stuck out my tongue at him as I took the amended sticky note back. "Have a little faith."
Strangely, now that I had a plan, I felt a little better. Scooping up the rest of my sandwich with my other hand, I headed out to go chase down Paxton, check out this bookstore where she worked, try and figure out what was so special about her.
I was sure that she'd be thrilled to see me again.
Chapter Eight
PAXTON
*
Oh my god. Sir Asshole is here. At my work.
Crouching down slightly behind a set of nonfiction bookshelves, I peered through the cracks in the books at the tall man standing just inside the store's entrance. I'd started forward when I heard the bell tinkling from where it hung above the door, but I'd quickly ducked back behind cover when I caught a glimpse of the man who'd entered.
What in the world was he doing here? How did he know where I worked? Was he stalking me?
No, wait a minute, I countered that thought a second later. I'd told him, hadn't I? I'd mentioned that I worked for a bookstore, my uncle's store, and I'd given him my name. My uncle, Ryland Davies, named the store after himself, so it probably wouldn't be that hard for Alex to find with a simple internet search.
Still, that was a little creepy, wasn't it? Him looking me up, tracking me down? What in the world did he want?
I peered again through the crack in the books, trying to get some idea of what he wanted. Alex seemed to be just standing there, inside the door, looking around at the interior of the bookstore. Was he waiting for me to go out and greet him?
Admittedly, the inside of Davies Books tended to be a little overwhelming to most people when they stepped inside for the first time. The bookstore covered the first two floors of the narrow building, originally a row house that had been practically smooshed in between its neighbors on either side. My uncle widened the front entranceway to feature a counter on the left side, an old-fashioned cash register squatting on top like a massive metal toad. On the right side, a staircase, flanked by a heavy, custom-carved wooden banister, rose to the second level. The first level held nonfiction books and some of the older, rarer, more expensive volumes my uncle acquired through auctions, estate sales, an
d his far-reaching network of nebulous contacts and other dealers. The second level featured the different genres of fiction.
But that wasn't the intimidating part of stepping into Davies Books.
Every single wall, every vertical surface, was covered in bookshelves. My uncle knew his way around a saw and other power tools, and he had the kind of patience needed to plan complex, custom woodworking projects. He'd built rows of bookshelves that wrapped all the way around the interior of the store, and promptly filled them all with rows and rows of paperbacks.
The place looked like the library of a madman – but it made sense to Uncle Ryland, and I'd come to understand it nearly as well as he did. My uncle's sorting system worked, in its own strange way, and he seemed to know the location of every single book in his inventory. Sometimes, I thought he used some sort of black magic to keep track of them all inside his big, bald, egg-shaped head.
Usually, when visitors stepped inside for the first time, they just froze in the lobby, turning around in a slow circle and looking at the multiple levels of books. Either Uncle Ryland or myself would come out at some point to greet them, help them find whatever they were looking for in the store.
But right now, I definitely didn't want to try and greet Sir Asshole. I knew that he'd see right through my fake retail smile, and he probably wanted to say something else to get under my skin and rankle me. He'd bothered me enough last night; did he need to show up here and keep driving me crazy?
I glanced down at myself, winced at the outfit I'd chosen today. I wore a pair of old, rather tattered jeans, and a tee shirt that read "Grab some knowledge" was stretched tightly across my chest. Great. Sir Asshole would definitely make a comment about that, and I could already imagine his eyes lingering on how the shirt was stretched tight by the unfortunately large bosom that Mother Nature had handed out to me at puberty.
Maybe, if I could distract him, I could duck upstairs. The only way upstairs was using the main staircase next to Alex, but if I could sneak past him, I could go up to my apartment on the third floor, change into something-
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