by Anise Eden
“Why don’t you try asking it?” Vani suggested. “It’s an aspect of you. You should be able to communicate with it.”
“Okay.” I focused on the rubbery, pillow-like object and asked, “What are you?”
But it didn’t answer. It seemed wounded, reluctant.
“I can make it talk,” Camo Ben muttered.
“Good grief, wait a minute!” I sighed in exasperation. Then I spoke to the pillow again. “I’m sorry about him. He didn’t mean to hurt you. All I want to know is, what are you?”
An awareness crept into me like a morning fog: I am Despair.
Despair? I held the question in my heart. Despair about what?
A realization rang through me like a bell: Despair that no matter how much you care about others or how strongly you’re bonded, eventually you always lose the people closest to you.
“Oh.” I whispered.
“What is it?” Camo Ben asked.
“It’s Despair—the knowledge that eventually we always lose the people we love.” A cold wind howled through me. “I lost Mom. Braz lost Pedra. We all lost Braz… and one day….” I barely choked out the words. “I’ll lose you.”
“Is that what this is about?” Camo Ben laid his hands on the rubbery pillow-like object. “You listen to me, Despair. Cate’s with me, now, and I’m going to see to it that she’s happy. The only reason I’d ever leave would be if she asked me to—and then I’d immediately do whatever it took to fix the problem and change her mind.” Then he looked at me. “You saw that Braz and Pedra are still together, even after death?”
“Yes….”
“That’s because bonds like theirs—like ours—never end. They transcend every obstacle, even death.” He addressed Despair. “Do you hear me?”
The rubbery object softened slightly. The ritual appeared to be working; Ben was making it work through the sheer power of his caring and determination. I held my breath.
But then Despair whispered to me again. I gasped as its words shot a pillar of pain through my core: It’s true. Some bonds never end. But yours do, Cate. You’re just someone who people leave.
“Cate, you just went pale,” Camo Ben said. “What’s going on?”
“Despair says it’s not about whether bonds can transcend death,” I whispered. “It’s about me. I’m just not the kind of person people stay with—and you won’t stay, either.”
Camo Ben’s expression hardened with determination. “Sorry, Cate, but Despair doesn’t get to make my decisions for me.”
“I know you think that whether you stay is under your control,” I cried out, “but history is against you. My parents—the people who are supposed to love you unconditionally—both left of their own accord. I have only two friends left, and as needy as I’ve been, they might leave anytime. When it comes to me, no one stays, nothing lasts. Patterns don’t occur without a reason, Ben. I’ve tried to figure out what the reason is, and the only explanation that makes sense is that something is fundamentally wrong with me. One day you’ll figure that out, and you’ll end up leaving, too.” I swallowed hard as the pillar of pain transformed into a dull, throbbing ache.
Camo Ben leaned down and picked up Despair. “What you just said makes no sense. Your mother’s spirit told you herself that her suicide was about ending her suffering, not about leaving you. You’ve said you don’t know anything about your father, so it’s hardly fair to jump to conclusions about the reasons for his actions. And when you say you only have two friends—who appear to be very loyal, by the way—I assume that you’re not counting all of your new friends at the MacGregor group.”
“But—”
Camo Ben held his hand up. “Hang on, I’m not done yet. Even if you did lose touch with some friends because of your dedication to your work, that doesn’t mean you didn’t have positive relationships. All of your clients, for example. Dr. Nelson. Your colleagues.” He tossed Despair from one hand to the other. I saw that it was growing lighter—more and more like a real pillow—and the red color was fading to white. Camo Ben continued, “I don’t know why you believe what Despair has told you about yourself; we’ll have to look at that later. But right now, I can tell you this for certain: Despair is wrong about you, Cate. Dead wrong. And I’ll make it my mission to prove that to you, day after day after day.” As he spoke, Despair completed its transformation into an actual pillow—small, white, and filled with feathers.
A nascent hope stirred inside of me, but a lifetime of experience to the contrary was not so easily dealt with. “You say that now, but you barely know me.”
“I know you well enough.” With triumph in his eyes, Camo Ben looked all around my inner landscape. “And empathically submerging into you has been highly educational.” Then he threw the Despair pillow at me, hitting me square in the chest.
“Oh, you’ve been snooping?” I had to suppress a smile; I should have known that Ben would use submerging as an opportunity to investigate me from the inside. I grabbed the pillow and threw it back at him. As he caught it, feathers floated into the air.
“You say snooping; I say gathering information,” he corrected as he caught the pillow and placed it gently on the ground. “It’s only fair. After all, you’ve submerged into me before. But as much as I’d like to stay in here and continue my reconnaissance, it would appear that the ritual was successful. The painful emotion has been disarmed.”
“You’re done?” Vani asked.
“I think so,” Ben said. “What do you think, Cate?”
I shot Camo Ben a disapproving glare to let him know exactly what I thought of his “reconnaissance.” Then I took a careful look around to be sure we hadn’t missed anything. “Well, Despair certainly seems to have been rendered harmless. I can’t see anything else right now.”
“If despair presented itself, then that must have been what was causing the paralysis,” Vani said. “Okay, Ben and Cate, time to reverse the flow and get Ben out of there.”
Finally I knew what Braz meant about how uncomfortable it felt having someone else inside of your consciousness. I ran up to Camo Ben and shoved him. “Okay, you, enough spying. Get out!”
He grinned. “I’m going, I’m going. Where’s the door?”
Judging from my own past experiences of submergence, I pointed upwards. He jumped up and flew into the air with one arm extended, Superman-style. I tried not to laugh, instead closing my eyes and focusing on reversing the flow of the portal. Before I knew it, Ben had left my consciousness. I quickly opened my eyes again to make sure he was still there in real life—and he was, lying on the bed next to me, beaming, his eyes locked onto mine.
Ben began to carefully disentangle our limbs.
“Do I hear movement? Oh good,” Kai said. “We don’t have to kill Little Braz now.”
Ben’s chuckle made the bed vibrate. “I’m glad to hear that our health was your main concern.”
Still with her back to us, Vani gave us a thumbs-up sign. “Everything feels good aura-wise, Cate. Whatever the energetic source of your paralysis was, it’s been rendered benign.”
Ben propped himself up on his elbow. “Okay, then, you heard Vani. Move something.”
I marshaled all of my effort and channeled it into my body. “Move!”
I blinked.
Ben blinked back. “Okay, good, but now move something other than your eyelids.”
I tried again, gathering my energy and strength like a weather god calling up a storm. I ordered my body to move.
But nothing happened.
“It’s not working,” I said, and I became aware that my voice was still coming from Asa’s mouth. Tension grabbed at my sternum like fists clenching a rope. “Ben, it’s not working! I can’t move! What’s wrong?”
“It’s all right,” he soothed, leaning over and stroking my hair. “Calm down.”
“Calm down?” Tears sprang into my eyes. “Vani, what happened? Why can’t I move?”
“I don’t know.” A catch in her voice told me that
she, too, was close to tears. “I’m sorry, I was so sure it would work.”
“I was inside of her, Vani. It worked.” Ben swung his legs over the side of the bed, keeping me covered with the blanket as he pulled on his boxers. Discreetly averting his eyes as much as possible, he slid my arms back into my hospital gown and arranged it around me, tying it closed in the back. Then he abruptly shifted back into manager mode. “Cate and I need a little bit of time alone to wrap things up.”
“What are you going to do?” Vani asked, dismayed. “We can help.”
“Trust me,” he said—and it sounded like an order.
Meanwhile, I lay on my side, helpless to wipe away the river of tears soaking the pillowcase.
“Asa too?” Kai asked.
“Yes, everyone,” Ben said. His tone that implied that he expected immediate compliance.
“No, not Asa,” I pleaded. “How will I talk?”
“Don’t worry,” Ben said, “we’ll be able to communicate. Blink once for yes, twice for no. Okay?”
“Okay, I guess, but….”
“Try to quiet your mind again, Cate,” Kai said. “I want to take Asa out of his trance. Are you decent? Can we turn around?”
“Yes, I’m decent.” I dreaded being mute again, but it seemed the die had been cast. Ben was the only one left with an idea. My whole body flushed, and my throat tightened as a panic attack threatened to take hold. I tried to push it back by mentally repeating “om” as I listened to the movement all around me. I felt tiny tickling sensations as Eve removed her needles. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kai standing in front of Asa, chanting and moving his hands around. It sounded like Vani was gathering things and putting them into some kind of bag. Then—in no time at all, it seemed—everyone was leaving the room. “Good luck, Cate,” Eve said softly as the door clicked shut.
Chapter Nineteen
Mute again. My tears continued to fall. What did Ben have planned? As he so often pointed out, he wasn’t the energy-healing expert; the others were. Why had he sent them all away?
I looked down to see Ben at the foot of the bed, putting his shirt on. Then he walked around and began shifting me back into the middle of the mattress. “I think I know what’s going on here,” he said. “We’ve ruled out any physical problems and taken care of the paranormal ones. That leaves us one piece left to consider.”
I tried to absorb some of his confidence. Ben carefully kept me covered with the blanket as he rolled me onto my back and straightened out my limbs. He must have intuited—wisely—that exposing my naked body wouldn’t help calm me down.
“Look,” he said, sitting down next to me. “We know two things for sure. We know the mind-body connection exists, and we know that it’s particularly strong in you. In your first aura reading, Vani observed that you primarily experience your emotions in the physical realm. Do you remember?”
Once for “yes,” I reminded myself, and blinked once.
“Good. So what if there’s an emotional part of you that wants to keep you paralyzed? A strong, stubborn part of you that’s deep in your subconscious, outside of your awareness. I wonder what will happen if we bring that shadow part of you out into the light and take a look at it.”
What on earth? I widened my eyes, since that was the only thing I could do to communicate my incredulity.
“I know it sounds unlikely,” Ben said, “but think about it. Your grief over your mother’s loss paralyzed you before, in a sense; it left you homebound, unable to work. What if losing Braz triggered that again, and this paralysis the physical manifestation of that grief? What do you think?”
If that were the case, Ben was right—I wasn’t conscious of it. But subconsciously…. Maybe he was onto something. It was possible, anyway. Unfortunately, however, his insight didn’t help me move. Other than blinking twice, I remained as still as a stone.
Ben squinted at me, apparently watching for any new signs of movement. Seeing none, he continued, “All right, how about this? Maybe the past several days have been too much for you. If so, that’s my fault. I shouldn’t have expected so much. Maybe this subconscious part of you agrees, and this is its way of demanding a good long rest.”
There could be some truth in that, as well. I had been feeling overwhelmed. But there was no way my subconscious would choose paralysis over, say, a pint of ice cream as a coping mechanism. I blinked twice to deliver that message.
Ben nodded. “Okay, not that.” He began to massage my hand and fingers. At first, it was merely soothing, but the heat from his touch built steadily, traveling up my arm and spreading slowly throughout my body. “Here’s another thought. Changes have been coming at you very quickly lately. Maybe there’s a part of you that’s anxious about starting your new life—with the MacGregor Group, with me—and is reluctant to leave your old life behind. Paralysis would certainly be an effective way to put on the brakes.” He released my right hand and began to massage the left one.
As my internal temperature rose, a light sweat coated my skin. I forced myself to focus. That explanation sounded reasonable as well, but when I tried it on for size, still no dice. I couldn’t un-paralyze myself. Ben’s strategy wasn’t working. After all, both my breathing and my heart rate were speeding up in response to his touch. I wanted nothing more than to reach up, pull his head down to mine, and draw him into a deep, eternal kiss. But all I could do was blink the tears out of my eyes.
“Please don’t.” Ben softly stroked my tears away. “Don’t give up. I have other ideas, but before we try anything else, Cate, there’s something I need to say to you.” He held both of my hands in his. “Thank you for allowing me to submerge into you. That was very brave of you, and I consider it an honor. I’ve seen all of you now, even the parts you try to hide—and I know you were afraid of that, of what I might think.”
He was right about that. I blinked once, hard.
Ben smiled gently and squeezed my hands. “Well, for me, submerging into you was like looking at the ocean for the first time, or visiting a place that feels more like home than any place you’ve ever been. And what I feel for you—it’s in a completely different dimension than anything I’ve ever felt before. There’s a power, a clarity…. I’m not even sure exactly how to describe it, except to say that it feels like for the first time, I know what really matters.”
Ben looked down at his hands and cleared his throat. My chest tightened in anticipation. When his eyes again met mine, his voice was rough with emotion. “What I want to say is that however you feel about me, and whatever happens from here, I want you to know that I’m in love with you, Cate.”
As he spoke those last words, a tide of emotion was unleashed through the portal. I felt his love swirling and crashing inside of me, filling me up until my whole being seemed to float on top of it. My heart began to tremble and swell.
“And because I’m in love with you, I paid sharp attention when Vani said that it’s dangerous for you to stay like this for too long. Since my psychological tactics aren’t working fast enough, we may have to try a more direct approach.” He lifted up my right hand and kissed me on the palm.
Between the emotional bombshell he’d just dropped and the sensation of his lips on my skin, I nearly fainted. Not being able to move was maddening, and not being able to respond to Ben’s touch was driving me to a breaking point.
He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek, then slowly kissed his way up to my temple and across my forehead, leaving a burning trail along my skin. He ended by placing a final kiss on my other cheek. Then he stopped and become perfectly still.
No! Don’t stop, please—! my mind begged. The chasm between what I was longing for and what was actually happening tore at me as Ben sat there, poised over my body, not moving.
Finally, after what seemed like centuries, Ben moved—but only to bring his mouth close to my ear. His breath on my neck sent a new wave of scorching heat rolling down my body. “Let’s try tempting your subconscious into releasing you,” he whis
pered. “Maybe if we give it a good enough incentive to let you move again….” He reached over and smoothed down my hair. “We could start with a kiss.”
Ben’s lips brushed across mine, the first in a slow, languorous procession of feathery-soft kisses that fueled the heat inside of me until I was certain I’d catch fire. Finally, the sheer force of my hunger for him grew so strong that my lips couldn’t help but answer his. The instant he felt my response, Ben’s mouth was on mine in earnest. His tongue teased my lips apart and plunged inside, claiming everything it could reach. I kissed him desperately, pulling myself back from the brink. Ben tangled his hands in my hair as he absorbed my moans and cries.
Inhaling his scent drove me over the edge. My ache for him became so acute that other parts of my body could no longer remain still. Pushing through their paralysis, my arms reached around his back and my nails bit into his shoulder blades. Oh my God, I thought. I’m moving! I’m cured! But then, with alarm, I realized that I still didn’t have control over my body. My need for Ben had taken me over.
Ben climbed onto the bed, straddled me, and tried to sit back. But my arms wouldn’t let go of him, and of its own accord, my back arched wildly in an attempt to press our bodies together. I was powerless to stop my legs as they wrapped themselves around Ben’s waist and dragged his body closer, trying to force his hips against mine.
Once assured that his intervention had really been a success, Ben made several half-hearted attempts to pull away from me. Then he whispered hoarsely, “I want the same thing you do—more than you know. But now is not the time.”
“You don’t understand,” I whimpered. “I can’t control—”
Then I mewled in frustration as Ben slowly unwrapped my arms from around him. He leaned back and searched my eyes. It only took a second for him to grasp the situation. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got you.” He tucked my hands beneath my hips to keep my arms in check. Then he gently pushed my legs down onto the mattress, keeping a grip on my ankles until my legs stopped kicking against his hold.