Safe Harbor?
Heather Wardell
Copyright
Safe Harbor? Copyright 2015 Heather Wardell
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Table of Contents
Book Description
Author’s Note
Safe Harbor?
Acknowledgements
Thank You For Reading
Also by Heather Wardell
Book Description
Celia’s always thought she was just emotional. But when she witnesses a near-murder and finds herself feeling everything the victim feels, she wonders if she’s losing her mind. There’s only one place she feels peaceful: near her new coworker. He’s just been left at the altar and he should be devastated but instead he’s quiet. Calm.
Too calm? Or could he be the safe harbor she desperately needs?
Author’s Note
We met half-brothers Owen, Nicholas, and Austin in “All at Sea”. We spent some quality time with Austin in “Plan Overboard”. Now, it’s time for the third and final book in this mini-series: “Safe Harbor?”!
You’ll still understand the story here if you haven’t read the previous books but you will definitely get spoilers because the story in “Safe Harbor?” starts days after the end of “All At Sea” and covers several months after the end of “Plan Overboard”. If you plan to read the other two books I recommend you do that first. :)
Whether you’ve read all of my books (starting with my free novel “Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo”) or are just finding me now, thank you so much! If you’d like a free short story every month, please check out my newsletter at http://heatherwardell.com/newsletter.shtml.
Heather
SAFE HARBOR?
Chapter One
I peered up and down the crowded Toronto sidewalk then checked my newly acquired iPhone 4S again, heaving a sigh. I’d forced myself to be five minutes late for my monthly dinner with my friends and even so I’d been waiting ten minutes. Always being the on-time responsible one got tiring, but when I wasn’t I felt bad and guilty, and sick deep down inside, so I preferred waiting for people to making them wait for me.
After reluctantly putting my phone away to preserve its low battery instead of playing with it to pass the time, I shifted from foot to foot then rubbed my temples. As soon as I’d left my apartment and entered the rush-hour insanity of the subway I’d developed a headache, like I nearly always did on transit, but this time it wasn’t going away now that I’d left the train. In fact, it seemed to be getting stronger, intensifying like someone was turning up the volume on a--
I was flooded in an almost painful rush, not with sound but with emotions. Terror and pain and a desperate desire to escape. Fury and disgust and an equally desperate desire to possess and control. Somehow I knew the first feelings came from a woman and the others from a man, and the combination felt so real and so overwhelming that I had to grab a nearby mailbox to keep myself upright.
I’d never felt anything like it. Sure, I’d always had emotions swirling through me like a thick confusing mist, even more so in the crowds I hated. I’d always been the girl who cried at commercials and found herself obsessed with other people’s problems. But I’d gotten used to all that, and it was nothing like this. Why was I imagining these emotions in such sickening detail? How was I? Was I hallucinating? Losing my mind?
Before I could do anything but wonder what was wrong with me, I heard the first scream.
I looked up, with everyone else on the busy street, and saw a woman trying to climb onto a third-floor apartment balcony while a man fought to push her back over the edge.
Everyone gasped in horror, and a flurry of 911 calls began, but I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe. My emotions were even louder and scarier now that I could see the two of them fighting. I couldn’t have been more terrified if I’d been the woman, and at the same time the man’s rage made me want to scream my fury to the skies.
But even through all that, I knew. Seeing them removed all doubt. Though I knew it was impossible, knew it was insane... somehow I was feeling everything both of them felt.
This had been bad enough when I’d thought I was hallucinating. Real? A million times worse. How could I be so connected with two total strangers, especially one who could do what that man was doing?
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” a teenage girl near me whimpered to her companion, clutching his arm as he spoke to a 911 dispatcher on his cell.
Neither had I. Was that why their emotions were so horribly clear to me, because this was bigger and more dramatic than anything I’d encountered before?
But did that mean... my usual over-emotional state... was it also coming from other people? Was I picking up emotions all the time?
That couldn’t be.
Could it?
People began to yell at the man from the street to leave the woman alone, and he backed up quickly and disappeared through the sliding glass door.
The woman’s relief and hope surged into me.
Then so did her utter despair when he stormed back onto the balcony a moment later.
Wielding a baseball bat.
A rush of control and power set me alight with a deep blazing pleasure, and I almost laughed aloud with it until I realized.
It was his.
My stomach lurched and I clapped my free hand over my mouth as if I could somehow block his delight at what he was doing from getting into me. It didn’t work, though; I felt that awful evil pleasure even as I felt her paralyzing fear as she watched him approach with the bat.
The bat rose, then smashed down onto her desperately clinging fingers, and as his joy invaded me again and her pain did too the worst emotion of all threw itself into me like a dagger.
Hope that she’d die when she fell so he’d never be able to hurt her again.
I knew it was her emotion and I knew she meant it and the horror of picking up such a feeling from another human being made my knees give way so I’d have collapsed if I hadn’t been clinging to the mailbox.
Fresh anger and revulsion swirled through me along with a sick satisfaction, and I looked up in time to see him hit her other hand with all his strength.
She dropped, like a silent broken rag doll.
The people around me screamed, their shock and fear feeling to me like background noise against hers. I shut my eyes but it didn’t help: I still felt every moment of her plummeting to the sidewalk as he watched with equal parts loathing and pleasure.
When she hit the ground, the girl near me cried out, “Is she dead?” but I didn’t have to join the group racing to her to know she wasn’t. The sharp awful pain in my own arm told me she’d probably broken hers when she landed, but she was alive.
Alive, but beaten. By him, by the pavement, and by life itself. She did want to die, and she didn’t even get that wish. She had nothing, and the depth of her despair made me want to die too.
I stood, eyes squeezed shut against everything that could not be but clearly was, until a voice in my ear made me jump.
“Celia, did you see that?”
I turned, finding it difficult with my body full of echoes, and managed to nod at Dawn and Erin, hardly noticing as my friends’ emotions were added to everything else I was feeling.
She jerked her hand back. “Sorry, did I hurt you?”
“I... bumped into a door yesterday,” I lied, not knowing how to tell her what was going on with me. “It’s okay, just a bruise.”
She patted me lightly, and Erin said, “Then you’re better off than her.”
I swallowed hard to push back the sick feeling in my throat, which I knew was also in the woman’s throat, and nodded, fighting the urge to run away screaming into the cool March night. I still hurt everywhere, still felt horrified and devastated by being alive and now also by the crowds gawking at me.
At her. Not me, her.
I had to remember I wasn’t her.
Because right now I only thought I was going crazy.
If I gave in to what was happening and let myself be her, then I’d know it for sure.
*****
Police converged on the scene, some officers taking statements while others hunted down the attacker or kept the crowd back from where the arriving paramedics would work on his victim.
Once I’d given my statement, careful not to mention anything I hadn’t seen or heard instead of felt with whatever weird extra sense I’d developed, and Erin and Dawn had added what little they’d seen, the police officer moved on and my friends and I looked at each other.
“What do we do now?”
I shrugged, still feeling so much fear and sadness and rage that I could hardly breathe, and Erin said, “It feels insensitive to just go have our dinner, but it’s not like we can do anything for her.”
Dawn nodded, then turned to me. “Are you okay, Celia? You’re so pale.”
“Of course she is,” Erin said. “She had to see that.”
I managed a weak smile, wishing I’d only seen it.
“She needs a martini,” Dawn said, “and so do I.”
Not wanting to go home alone and try to figure out what was happening to me, and knowing that alcohol sometimes calmed my transit headaches so it might help, I said, “That sounds good, actually,” and joined them in walking to our favorite dinner spot.
“A little later than I like to eat,” Erin said once the restaurant managed to find us a table since our long-standing ‘first Thursday of the month’ reservation had been for half an hour ago, “but at least we’re healthy and able to sit up. Unlike that poor lady.”
“I can’t believe he hit her hands with a bat.” Though Dawn sounded nothing but concerned, I could sense a ‘gawking at a car accident’ kind of sick delight in her with my new and creepy intuition, and I swallowed half my martini in one go to try to drown the feeling.
Erin, who’d been closer to the action, assured her that he had, and they chattered on about it while I sat feeling so glad that when the woman had been whisked away in an ambulance and the still-furious man in the back of a cop car I had lost touch with their emotions. I could feel everyone else’s, though, the usual swirling mass around me replaced with sharply recognizable sensations now that somehow my perception was so much stronger.
Anger mixed with embarrassment. Love tainted with desperate hope that it would be returned. Sadness and loss entwined with the fiercest loyalty I’d ever felt.
The odd combination in that one made me look around, as subtly as I could, to see if I was really feeling it from someone in the restaurant. A woman of about my age sat next to a man who had to be at least a hundred years old, carefully spooning rice into his slack mouth. She was talking, though I couldn’t hear her, and on her face I could see exactly what I felt. The man was a relative, or someone who’d taken good care of her, and now she was returning the favor despite how difficult it was because she knew she owed him.
I could see it on her face and I could feel it in my own heart.
And with a quick glance further I spotted a woman struggling to deal with her toddler’s temper tantrum while people watched disapprovingly and a young teen gazing at her date with adoration while he played with his phone.
The anger and embarrassment came from the mother, I could tell when I concentrated, and the love and hope were the teen’s.
I couldn’t deny it any more.
I was feeling people’s emotions.
I’d always been doing it.
The emotions of the woman on the balcony and her attacker had been so powerful that I’d recognized them specifically, but on a lower level that mental noise had always been there. I’d just thought I had random mood swings, albeit so much worse than everyone else’s, but now I knew better. It wasn’t that I couldn’t control my own emotions. I couldn’t control how everyone else’s affected me.
But why? And how? And what was I going to do about it?
“Just need to check if my recruiter emailed,” I mumbled, though my friends weren’t paying any attention to me, and pulled out my phone. I typed “feeling other people’s emotions” into the search engine, then scrolled down through the first few results.
They were unanimous.
Empath. The word was empath.
There was a name for this. That must mean other people could do it too. So maybe I wasn’t crazy after all.
I skimmed several of the articles and realized that other people being able to do it was no guarantee I wasn’t crazy. Some of the things I read made their posters sound like they should be locked up, and yet if I told my friends what I’d experienced they’d think exactly the same thing about me.
Maybe I was nuts.
One thing was for sure. I wasn’t going to tell anyone about this.
I was going to keep quiet and hope it went away.
“Okay, ladies, can we talk about me now?”
Erin laughed, and I put away my phone and tried to pretend I wasn’t feeling Dawn’s sudden rush of excitement and delight. Her face was calm and she hadn’t said what she wanted to tell us so there was no reason for me to think she felt--
“I’m in love!”
I said all the right things with Erin but my heart sank, and I knew that hers did too.
Dawn fell in love with a new guy more often than I got my split ends trimmed, and her relationships always ended the same way as those haircuts: with shattered bits on the floor. None of my relationships had gone particularly well either, since my guys had all found me far too emotional and frustrating, but at least I didn’t go on and on about it, or about the fact I hadn’t had a boyfriend in over a year. My last relationship had ended with him saying I cried too much and he couldn’t take it. That I hadn’t cried over his departure had been the only source of amusement for me in being dumped yet again for something I couldn’t control.
“That’s great,” Erin said, managing much more enthusiasm than I’d have been able to pull up. “Who is he?”
Dawn babbled on about the man of this week’s dreams, telling us how she’d met him at the gym when he told her she was using the pull-up machine wrong, and Erin and I made supportive noises while I wondered how to fix whatever was wrong in my head. My martini had dulled everyone’s emotions along with my headache but it hadn’t taken them away entirely like I wished it would.
When Dawn ran down, Erin said, “And Celia, any news on the job front? You were checking for recruiter email, right?”
Surprised she’d heard me, I said, “Didn’t have any, but I do have news from earlier today. A big bank is looking for data analysts. The recruiter thinks my experience is exactly what they’re after so I’ll be interviewing Monday.”
Dawn nodded and Erin said, “I’ve got my fingers crossed for you.”
I believed her, but I could also feel that they both still disapproved of me quitting my last job without having a new one.
I’d known I shouldn’t quit like that, but I hadn’t been able to stand working there another minute. The company had been going through a hostile takeover, and though when I’d been hired I’d felt sure I could handle the challenge and make a good place for myself in the new organization I�
�d found the place so stressful that I hadn’t been able to think or do anything. I’d resorted to looking busy in the office and then doing all my work at home where I could be calm and quiet, but that had left me so exhausted I’d had to quit.
Now I knew why. I’d been feeling everyone else’s emotions, their fear for their jobs and jealousy of others whose positions seemed more secure. No wonder I couldn’t think with all of that bombarding me every second I was in the office.
I needed a refuge from those sorts of feelings. My potential new employer seemed like a small stable department of the big bank, so with any luck it would be that refuge.
But if not, where would I find it? How would I ever have peace when everyone’s lack of it infected me at every turn?
Chapter Two
About two weeks later, I rushed toward the bank’s door struggling to shake off the emotions still clinging to me. A man had killed himself by jumping in front of my subway train, and after feeling first his awful dark depression and its sudden absence as his life ended then the mingled anger and stress of everyone who’d been delayed as a result of his actions, I could hardly breathe. How could I possibly get through my first day of work?
“I’m Celia Abrams, I’m new, working for Nadine Reynolds, and I’m so sorry I’m late,” I gasped out when I reached the reception desk. “The subway... someone jumped...”
The receptionist nodded at me, and though she said, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll call Nadine down,” I caught a hint of surprise and pity as she looked at me and realized I probably looked as frazzled as I felt.
“Thanks,” I said, trying to calm down. “Is there a washroom around here so I can quickly tidy myself up before meeting Nadine?”
As she directed me to it, the relief on her face said I’d been right in what I felt from her. Since I was already late I couldn’t spend too long, but I took slow deep breaths as I touched up my lipstick and redid my braid, and when I went back out I’d done a good enough job soothing myself that I didn’t feel too nervous meeting my boss.
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