Now You See It

by Cáit Donnelly

  She swallowed hard and kept talking, but her voice grew softer. “I don’t know about the baseball cap, or the twenty. Or those other things. I thought I’d lost that notebook last month. When Ned and I were fighting and I finally told him to leave.”

  She started to pick the things up. He beat her to the keys.

  “Keys that sit around someplace look grungy. These look like they’ve been used every day.” He paused, watching her. “Let’s try this again. These things weren’t here when we went into the kitchen. They’re here now. I don’t think you did this. Not alone. I think we did it together, when I kissed you.”

  “And I kissed you back. Oh, damn!”

  “What?”

  “Dammit, I thought that jolt I felt was passion, romance, attraction, not—”

  “Not what?”

  “I file things,” she blurted.

  “What?”

  “I file things. I make them disappear. Sometimes they come back. It’s not intentional. I can’t control it. It would be great if I could, though, wouldn’t it? Mike always says it would be like a Bag of Holding or a dimensional closet.” She tried a smile, but couldn’t manage one. “It’s worst when I’m upset or distracted. Or I guess when I’m really, um—”

  “Does that mean whenever we make love things are going to fall out of the sky on us?”

  She didn’t want to think about going to bed with him right now. She uncurled her toes and shied away from his last words. She half wanted to laugh, half wanted to cry.

  “I know what you can do, Gemma. I saw it happen. I saw a glass of juice just disappear the other day when you lost your temper. That wasn’t my imagination, was it.” It wasn’t a question. “And you and Mike are linked. I’ve seen both of you reach for the phone before it rings.”

  Gemma went absolutely still when Brady mentioned Mike. She held her eyes and breathing under rigid control. “It runs in the family. Lots of people do something like that.” She tried another grin, but it kept collapsing. “We’re Irish.”

  “So are thirty million or so other people in this country, at last count.” He looked as if he were about to say something more, but seemed to think better of it.

  “The last few months before I drove Ned out, it got pretty bad. Although—” she bit into her lower lip, “I got some control over it. Sometimes I could control it just a little.” Brady’s left eyebrow shot upward.

  “I scared him toward the end. One day—it was maybe six weeks ago. Seems like a lot longer.”

  “A lot’s happened in a short time.”

  “Uh huh. I was unpacking groceries, and he was there ragging on me. I put a can of tomato soup up onto the shelf. He yelled that he wanted it for lunch. Right then. Stop the world, confirm his rule and serve him some fucking lunch. I told him to fix his own fucking lunch, and he stomped to the cabinet and slammed the cupboard door open so hard the handle put a ding in the wall.”

  “Let me guess. No soup for him,” Brady said in a Soup Nazi accent.

  “Nope. That can was gone.” She smirked. “He started yelling, I don’t even remember what. And suddenly I knew I could get it back. So I did. Some flukey combination of contempt, pissed off and fed up, I guess. Anyway, I walked over and pulled the can off the shelf. I had to reach up, but he was tall enough to see inside the cupboard.”

  She bent down for the can of soup that lay half-buried under an old UW Huskies baseball cap. “So I said something devastating like, ‘Oh, puh-leeze,’ and put it back up on the shelf, and filed it. It blinked out as soon as I took my hand off it.” Gemma looked at Brady out of the corner of her eye. “That was the only time I ever remember winning an argument with him. He stopped talking to me. Two days later he moved out.”

  “Can you do it now?”

  “No. I’ve tried, but I can’t. That was the only time it happened that way since sixth grade. I used to think it was some kind of punishment.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Is that all? The, what did you call it, filing?”

  “Isn’t that enough? It’s really hard to talk about this, you know?

  “Yeah, I do know. Trust me. And there’s the thing with Mike.”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. There is something else, sort of. But I don’t think it counts. The first instant I see someone, it’s as if I see their true face, just a flicker. There’s a word the psychologists use, micro-emotion or something like that. Anyway, it’s gone very fast.”

  “Is it accurate?”

  “Almost always. I ignore it, try to prove it’s wrong, or go out of my way to give them the benefit of the doubt, but so far, I’ve always ended up getting hurt.”

  “What did you feel when you first met me?” he asked, his voice sharp.

  “I don’t know.”

  He gave her a keen, implacable look. “You don’t need to try and soothe me, Gemma. What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anything when I first looked at you. Nothing.”

  “Did you think that might be because you were seeing exactly who I really am?”

  “No. I thought I was submerging whatever was there in pure lust. Okay? Are you satisfied?”

  His only response was a wolf grin of pure male glee.

  “I’d just found out my husband had been murdered, and I meet this guy out of nowhere, and all I can think about is how he would taste.”

  “That’s exactly what I was wondering about you. Exactly.”

  She shook her head on a disgusted “tsk.”

  “That’s not my usual first reaction to an attractive woman.”

  “Really?” The word positively dripped. All three syllables of it.

  “Really.” Three syllables right back at her. “I usually wonder if they will, and what they look like without their clothes. Not always in that order, but that’s one and two. Always. But not with you. Now why, do you suppose, is that?”

  “I don’t know why. That’s what has me so scared. It’s like one day I turned my computer on and suddenly all these weird, terrifying things started happening, and half the time, I’m afraid you’re one of them.”

  He looked into her eyes. “No, I’m one of you.”

  Gemma froze, then she swallowed. “Where’s that wine?”

  “Right here.”

  “A little alcohol makes it go away,” she said. “Like a sort of damping field. Until I get really ripped. Then it can get downright scary.” She started to hand him the bottle, but decided to pull the cork herself, and felt less fragile for it. “So, if you’re one of ‘us,’ what do you do?” The cork came free with a pop! and she looked around for the plastic cups she’d brought from the market.

  “A little of this and a little of that. What do your wineglasses look like?”

  “They’re balloon glasses, about so high. They’re in here, somewhere,” she said, waving a hand at the boxes. “That’s okay. The cups will be fine for now.”

  He held up a finger. “Wait one.” He started running his hands down stacks of boxes. In the middle of the third stack he stopped and shifted cartons until he could extract the one he’d been after. Breaking it open, he unwrapped two balloon glasses and dusted them out lightly before handing them to her.

  Gemma shot a look from him to the dozens of stacks of anonymous boxes. She hadn’t even met him yet, when she packed the glasses the first time, and he hadn’t been there the day the movers came and repacked everything. “You really are. One of us, I mean. I can’t believe this. Peopl
e like us aren’t exactly thick on the ground. But you found me.” She felt her face heat up and she looked away. “Does Mike know?”

  “About me?” He lifted an eyebrow. “Yeah.”

  “He never said anything.”

  She felt more than saw a shift in Brady’s expression.

  “No. He couldn’t.”

  Well, that was clear enough. Damn spooks. “Oh,” she said. “Navy buddies. Right. Still, you managed to work together. Were you in Intel, too?”

  He gave a “What cookie?” smile. “Electronics love me.”

  “They hate me. I haven’t been able to wear a watch since I was twelve.”

  “I saw a watch on the floor by your dresser.”

  “It’s just for show. It doesn’t work, but how professional would a consultant look without a watch?”

  He nodded. “Okay. You read faces and kill watches. And you move things.”

  “No. I don’t. I make them disappear. I used to move them around, but not since I was twelve. When we were little, Mike and I used to knock each other’s toys over, or make the mobiles in our room change direction. But that was years ago.”

  “Stubborn, too.” He stared pointedly at the pile of items on the floor.

  “Whatever happens, it’s always stronger when I’m upset. And then the last few years, I began to wonder whether it was all in my head. Ned was so skeptical, you know? He kept hammering at me about delusional behavior, saying it was just a way to make myself—ourselves, Mike and me—seem important, special.”

  Brady watched her, saying nothing.

  “Then he started hiding things. I’d think I’d filed something, because I couldn’t find it, and he’d let me stew and search for a while, and then pull it out from wherever he’d stashed it and laugh. Sneer, is more like it.”

  “So you started doubting yourself.”

  She took a deep breath through her nose, let it out. “Dumb, huh?”

  “It happens.”

  * * *

  He swirled the wine in his glass. He needed to explain. “I have really good hunches.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “And I’m mildly psychometric,” he added, lifting his glass toward her.

  When she looked blank, he explained. “Sometimes I get impressions from things people have touched.”

  “Like the wineglasses.”

  “Yeah. Your traces are stronger than most people’s. I can even feel the shapes of some things you’ve touched right through the boxes.”

  “Wait a minute! Wait, wait.” She made pushing motions. “Is that why Mike sent you, that first day? So you could ESP whoever messed with the computer?”

  Brady nodded. “Mike’s one of maybe twenty people who know. It’s not something I talk about, as a rule. So we’re just really careful when people are around.”

  Brady looked away and set his wineglass down.

  “But you didn’t get any sense of who was fooling with the computer the other day,” she said.

  He shook his head. “No. Maybe the guy wore gloves—it has to be a direct contact. All I felt up there was you,” he said and looked straight at her.

  She set her glass down. “I don’t want to talk any more. I want to find out how you really do taste.”

  He smiled, “That works for me.”

  She cleared her throat. “I think it’s always a good idea to follow your first instincts.”

  He made a solemn face as he moved closer and clasped her arms lightly, swaying a bit from side to side. “I couldn’t agree more.” He stroked her cheek, trailed fingers down her jaw and across her shoulder, just threatening to brush her breast.

  Her breath got thick. “Think we can make it upstairs?”

  He gave the slightest smile and swallowed hard. “Next time, maybe.”

  * * *

  His hand brushed across her budded nipple, tightened to caress her before moving up to cup her head. His fingers tangled in her hair as he drew her mouth to his, slowly, slowly. His breath blew across her skin, and she saw his lips part as their mouths met full on, tongues seeking, stroking, teasing, in a dance of arousal. He slipped his hands under her T-shirt, across lace and smooth satin, trailing his fingertips across her skin. He released the snap on her bra with a deft one-handed move she barely noticed as his tongue trailed lightly over the sensitive rim of her lips, turning their heat to tingling that she had to quench. When he pulled her shirt over her head, the bra came with it. His shirt followed, and then they pressed together, strained together, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat, astonished by the overwhelming sense of homecoming. Of belonging, of rightness Gemma had never hoped to find again outside of fantasies.

  The doorbell broke her concentration.

  “Let it go,” he said against the curve of her neck.

  “Ms. Cavanagh? Pierce County Sheriff. Open the door, please.”

  “Shit,” Gemma and Brady said simultaneously, and began huddling into their discarded clothing

  Brady smoothed down his shirt. “Straight?” he asked Gemma, who was still in her bra because she’d pulled her shirt on wrong-side-out the first try.

  She gave him a once-over, nodded, and ducked behind some boxes as he headed for the door.

  “Afternoon, McGrath,” Olsen said.

  “Detective Sergeant Olsen,” Brady answered. He opened the door and Olsen spotted Gemma. “Ms. Cavanagh?”

  “Come on in,” she said. “I’d ask you to sit down, but as you can see, there’s no place to sit.”

  “That’s okay,” Abernathy said, looking around.

  “We had some trouble finding you,” Olsen said. “One of your neighbors gave us your new address. We weren’t aware you were planning to move this quickly.”

  “I wasn’t, but my house was broken into twice in two days—the last time whoever it was seriously trashed it. I’m sure my neighbors told you that, too. I spent over an hour with the Kirkland P.D. that night answering questions. Don’t you people ever talk to each other?” She knew that wasn’t fair—there was no reason Kirkland Police would report a vandalized house to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, but her body was still raging, and she didn’t feel like being fair. “Maybe you should all compare notes, or something.”

  “McGrath. Checking the computer security in the new place?”

  “Matter of fact,” Brady answered.

  Gemma bit her tongue to hold back a giggle. She was definitely too tense, she thought, but Olsen’s next words sobered her like cold water.

  “The first break-in was computer tampering.”

  So, he had checked, Gemma realized, and suddenly felt fed up. And she was angry with herself that even that niggling filament of suspicion had made her stomach flip.

  “Which is why Mr. McGrath was at my house the first day you came,” she interposed. “I assume this is a social visit, detective sergeant, since you can see my attorney isn’t here.”

  “We just wanted to tie up a couple of loose ends before we head back to Pierce County.” Olsen’s benign smile didn’t convince her. “And to let you know we’ll be coordinating with Seattle P.D. on the Dawkins homicide, now that we’ve established a link with their case.”

  She didn’t respond. She needed all her resources to keep her face and body under control.

  The moment of silence stretched until Abernathy shifted on his feet, and Olsen said, “Well, thank you. I’m sure Seattle P.D. will be getting in touch with your attorney.”

 
Gemma stared at the door for a full minute after the detectives had gone. Abruptly she turned away. “I’m starving,” she said. “I haven’t eaten all day. Can I fix you something?”

  “Sure you don’t want to send out for pizza?”

  “When I’m stressed, I need to cook,” she said. “Think you can clear off some place for us to sit?”

  “I can probably manage that. I’ve just got a little more to do on the wiring first.”

  “Great. Dinner in forty-five minutes.” Damn, damn, damn!

  Following the pattern her mother had established in their countless changes-of-station, Gemma had opened the kitchen boxes she could recognize first thing this morning, putting away the salvaged staples and spices, and making sure the perishables—milk, eggs, butter and veggies she‘d picked up on the way from Mike‘s—made it into the fridge right away. The kitchen, at least, was ready for action. Or near enough.

  Cooking calmed her. She loved the balance of creativity and order, the scents and textures of baking, loved the way eggs changed color as she whipped them to a froth, then again as she added cornmeal, sugar, corn niblets, cheese and a can of green chili peppers. A quick spray of oil in the pan, and pop it all into the oven while she built a monster salad and put some eggs on to boil. By the time she was whisking the vinaigrette, she was feeling much better, and even ready to enjoy the meal.

  Gemma headed into the living room to see how Brady was faring, and to let him know dinner was nearly ready. As she stepped into the living area she saw him stretched out on the couch, legs crossed at the ankles, one arm tucked behind his head. He‘d cleaned out a corner of the room and moved the couch under a front window where it looked as if it belonged. The TV was playing softly on a digital music station, and Brady was sound asleep. A tender softening filled her chest, followed immediately by heavy dampness as her body swelled in readiness for him.

  She took a step closer, wanting only to look at him like this for a little while longer, and so swamped by warmth and affection that her knees felt wobbly and her breath came short.