“I’m sorry.”
“He used to say they were weirdos, so I’m guessing it came from her. What about your family?”
She took a swallow of soda. “Mom’s side, too. She had five sisters, and they’re a little bit psychic, all in different ways. Why is it so hard to say ‘different’ about your family? Anyway, it’s mostly just a little more of one thing or another. Nothing to interest the tabloids. Except one of my cousins who has this theory about how the Star People seeded the earth by—do you really want to hear this? I’d rather hear about you than talk about my crazy cousin.”
Brady leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his pop can between both hands. “I thought of myself as pretty normal until I hit puberty, but even as a little kid I never understood why people didn’t just know whose socks, or matchbox cars or soccer ball they were holding. Maybe I had a better than average b.s. detector, but nothing special. When I hit twelve or thirteen, I noticed sometimes people’s faces seemed to change—the b.s. detector got stronger. I didn’t really listen to it, though. It was more remembering afterward and dork-slapping myself for not paying attention. So I understand that part of your talent very well.”
They shared a look, but she broke it off before it gathered heat. “But that changed for you.”
“Yeah.” He swirled the liquid in the can and stared into it for a second or two. “Yeah,” he said again. “SEAL training made it a lot stronger. Pushed it to the forefront, more or less. I think it’s because that experience just peels your onion all the way down.”
Gemma blinked, then the image came clear to her. “Interesting way to put it. I think you’re saying it stripped you to the core—took off all the protective layers.”
Brady smiled slightly and tipped his head back against the log with a sigh. “Exactly.” He scoped out the area again before continuing. “One day just after Hell Week, there was a fight. A ‘he said/he said’ kind of stupid thing. We were all beyond tired. These two guys started swinging. I got between them—”
“Tsk.”
Brady grinned at her and went on. “I put one hand on each chest to hold them apart, and as soon as I touched them, I could see exactly what had happened. I could hear them, even when they weren’t talking. So I called the one guy on his shit. He looked like he’d been shot.”
Brady stopped talking as two teenaged boys cruised by on mountain bikes, whooping over the dips in the dirt road. “It changed after that, too.” He shook his nearly empty pop can and the last sip sloshed loudly inside its miniature aluminum echo chamber. He looked at Gemma. “What I really want to tell you, though, is—”
He looked over at her, and her breath came short. His eyes in the dappled light were the color of bittersweet chocolate, compelling, and dark, so dark she could barely make out the pupils. The banked-down heat in them was a red glow somewhere in the depths. The pull in her solar plexus felt so good she didn’t want to look away.
His long mouth smiled, and she shook her head.
Gemma waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. The silence grew. “I guess...” Her voice came out a surprising contralto that startled them both into laughter. Gemma cleared her throat and started over. “I guess it’s my turn. Mom died when I was fourteen. It was one of those stupid accidents you think can’t happen to you, to your family. Some wood came off a truck on the freeway and smashed into the windshield, and she was gone. Just like that. Dad was on a case in Korea, and it took him a day and a half to get home.” She jabbed the twig into the dirt. “For a long time after that, I filed things left and right. It gradually settled down to just happening when I was stressed or unhappy.”
“Like when you lost your temper the other day.”
“Yeah.”
“Shocked my socks off.” Brady grinned and slid his eyes toward her.
Gemma gave a long-suffering sigh. “When I was a kid, I could control it.”
“Puberty got in the way? You said Mike lost his abilities.”
She looked away. “No. His just left—mostly, anyway—except he still knows when I’m in trouble. Mine was more like a punishment. It was hard moving all the time. Sometimes we’d COS—change of station—”
He nodded.
“—two or three times in a single year, depending on how Dad’s cases went. I hated being the new kid all the time. Mike didn’t seem to mind as much. He was a jock, big, tall, tough. He fit right in, maybe after a fight or two. I was shyer, and nervous because I knew I was different.”
She took a sip of cola. “I was twelve, we were stationed in Norfolk. There was a girl in my class who just hated me on sight. I don’t know—maybe I stole her boyfriend in a past life, or something. She was kind of a bully, and very sexually knowing—always telling the rest of us girls stuff and using words we had to ask her to explain. I know enough now to guess she’d been abused, but back then it was so edgy, being around her, and she had this clique that followed her lead. She started picking on me, and finally I got pissed off and filed this little purse she always carried around with her. It was beaded, really pretty. I filed it right off her belt, and was feeling pretty smug. She made a huge fuss, accused me of stealing it, but even her friends told Sister I hadn’t been anywhere close to her. Later that day in Phys Ed she had an asthma attack. I was in Music class, so I didn’t know about it until I heard she’d been taken away in an ambulance. She nearly died.”
“Her inhaler was in the bag.”
Gemma nodded. “I didn’t know. When I found out, it was like being hit with a car, or something. Since then, I haven’t been able to control it.”
He tipped his head a little to the right, one eyebrow quirked downward toward the bridge of his nose as if he were considering something. “I’d be willing to bet you still can.”
He spoke with such assurance Gemma had to pause to think. “But I can’t. That’s just it.”
“No. You can. You did. With the soup thing. So you can. You just have to figure out how you did it.” He stood up in one smooth motion and dusted off the back of his shorts.
Gemma watched as he wandered over into the scrubby dry plants nearer the trees. He brushed at something with the toe of his boot, and bent to pry a rock out of the soil. He came back toward her, brushing it off and rubbing it clean between his thumb and forefinger.
“Have you ever meditated?” he asked.
Gemma shook her head. “It doesn’t work. I always fall asleep.”
Brady flicked her an amused look and set the rock in front of her. “You don’t have to use a rock. Anything will work. You just need something to focus on.”
“You want me to file it?”
“I want you to focus on it. Size, surface, textures, colors. See if you can make that rock your whole universe. And as you get there, you’ll feel your muscles unclenching. That’s what we’re really after. You’ll block out everything else—all the stressors—”
“But I need the stressors. That’s the only time it works.”
He shook his head. “You need to get all that out of the way, because I want you clear to remember everything you felt back in the kitchen in that instant when you knew you could get the soup can back. That’s where your control is, Gemma. Down in the wellspring of that set of feelings. So you need now to block out any other fear, worry, anger, and just put all the extra load into that rock. It will hold it all, and more, so don’t worry. Your job right now is to clarify yourself. Got it?”
She nodded and swallowed, suddenly uncomfortable.
“If you start calling me ‘Grasshopper,’ you’re dead meat.”
He chuckled. “Okay.”
“No ‘Padowan,’ either.”
“Okay.”
“And now you’re going to tell me you learned this from an old monk.”
“He wasn’t a monk. Just an old guy who recognized what I am. Concentrate. I’m right here, and I won’t let anything hurt you.”
“But—”
“The rock. Do it, Cavanagh. What else do you have to do?”
Gemma’s gaze dropped to his lips almost of their own accord. Brady’s eyes lit, but he shook his head. “You need to work. Just don’t disappear the bed,” he added with a half laugh.
She looked away and tried to control the raging flush she could feel reddening her face and tingling her nipples erect.
“Don’t control it, Gemma. Let it go. Just let go of it. All of it. Release it all. Open your mental fingers and let it fall.”
* * *
Brady strolled back over to the log and sat against it, opening a second can of pop as he settled in to enjoy the warm mountain sunshine. The outdoors always steadied him, made the world look a little clearer. He couldn’t remember anything of his early childhood in Chicago—not too surprising, since his parents got divorced when he was barely three. His earliest memories were of growing up in Nova Scotia, surrounded by a million acres of heaven and a million of his Métis relatives, of himself laughing, shouting, fishing, running free with his cousins or alone, walking the beaches or the grass meadows, playing King of the Mountain on the massive boulders or just climbing to the top of one to sit by himself and watch the sea, or the wind in the trees and long wild grass.
He remembered his mother. Her face was clearest in the dreams that sometimes plagued him, but even awake, he remembered her quicksilver laugh and the flash of dark, almond-shaped eyes. Michelle Sangrey had been the family beauty, his aunts had always said, speaking together in the patois of Micmac and Canadian French they saved for spicy gossip and family secrets.
He was seven when she died—he still wasn’t sure what had happened to her. He remembered the funeral, the ritual smoke, the sobbing drums and wailing women, the unbearable, ripping pain of loss. When his father came up from below the Border a few days later, Brady had refused to talk to him, even to look at him. Instead, he’d hidden in the back room, in the closet, refusing to speak English, or French, muttering in dialect—much to his aunts’ consternation as they realized how much he must have overheard and understood all those years.
Finally the tall man had opened the closet door and hunkered down to Brady’s eye level, forcing the boy to look up for a startled moment. It was enough. Brady had seen sorrow in his father’s clear blue eyes. Grief, affection, and something he understood after all these years was fear—hope, maybe, too, the boy would accept him.
Brady had reached his hand to meet his father’s, and the bond was sealed. Knowledge crashed in on him, flooded his mind with things a seven-year-old had no way to interpret. Things he only understood years later. In those first moments, it was enough his father shared Brady’s crushing sense of loss for the woman both of them had loved but couldn’t keep.
Chicago had been like another planet. He still remembered how hard it was to fit in, how strange even to have to think about fitting in. Up Home—he still to this day thought of Nova Scotia as “home,” probably always would—he had just been. Now suddenly he had to worry about manners and which clothes to wear and what people would think. His dad had seen him through it all, explaining with a wry smile that yes, it was silly, but it was what a man had to do. It had been their secret, that shared smile, and it had made everything a lot easier to deal with.
* * *
Brady had moved out of her range of vision, but even though Gemma couldn’t see or hear him, she could smell the sunshine-and-warm-male scent of his skin, the aroma of the softener sheet he’d put into the clothes locker.
Release it, he’d said. Let it go. Easier said than done, she thought in a burst of irritation she recognized as frustrated sexual need. The rock drew her attention. White. Small, maybe an inch-and-a-half long and an inch wide. A jagged peak rose near its center like a mountain in miniature. The light struck glints from dozens of tiny crystalline surfaces. Streaks of variegated gray-to-black wove through it, like veins beside a roadbed, like streams of water. Streams of fog. The beauty of it washed through her, captivating, absorbing.
The muscles in the small of her back released emphatically enough to catch her attention and pull her focus back from the small white world that had held her enchanted.
Her gaze went straight to Brady where he sat against a tree, looking deceptively relaxed. “Is everything still here?” she asked.
He grinned. “Oh, yes.” He held out a strong brown hand toward her as he rose. She stood and moved to take it into her own.
The contact this time was more than electric. A soft, glowing stream of power and need burst in her—desire so powerful and complete it needed no name, no definition. She gasped as it surged through the core of her, and she moved with him into the shelter of the tent.
This was new. This was amazing. Slow, deep and inexorable as a mighty river. Their mouths met, tasting, drinking each other without thought or intent, borne on that powerful surge of emotion. Blending, merging, without need for haste or hesitation. Moving together, mouths locked, hands seeking, finding, revering. She felt his hands/her hands unfastening, unbuttoning her blouse, and his lips and tongue moved down her throat toward the softness of her breast. She rose toward him, shrugged her blouse off her shoulders even as she buried her face in his hair, breathing deeply his scent, feeling his hair strong and soft against her lips.
No thought, no words, just formless longing and excitement that moved from her skin to her core and back to where his mouth and his warm breath raised goose bumps along the outer curve of her breast. His hand slipped beneath the knitted cotton and closed over her, brushing lightly over her nipple, then more firmly. She unhooked the front release of her bra and he brushed the fabric aside with his hands and lips, teasing her already aching nipple with his tongue and teeth. She lifted her hips hard against him as the pull grew into thirst. Need. She strained against him, her hands moving under his shirt, forcing it away, pressing skin to skin as they rocked together.
Without surprise she felt her own skin beneath her hands/his hands. His skin so smooth, golden, warm, her own skin softer, cooler—the rest of their clothes brushed away, his scent/her scent, mingled yet still separate, changing, deepening. Their tongues danced together, exploring, teasing until she could no longer tell her taste from his. He kissed her deeply and kept their mouths joined as he tore open a foil packet. The condom was a cool slither as he covered himself. He cupped her and she was aware of her own slippery wetness as his fingers moved inside her, and the gripping/gripped sensation as her muscles closed around him. She rose over him and took him in, sliding down until he was lodged deeply, deeply, lost in the mingled sensations that pulled so powerfully, centering, centering, bursting as she came. Immediately, the deep pulsing as Brady shattered inside her, the astonishing sense of sharing what he felt, set off another orgasm and she shuddered and broke under the amazing crest of pleasure.
Slowly, her awareness dropped away from his, separating into two souls again. She nuzzled his shoulder and he tightened his arms around her, cradling her head against him, his lips now in her hair, his heart against her breasts, slowing, slowing to nor
mal, his skin damp and cooling. She had no words for what had just happened—no experience for comparison or context.
“Well,” she said with a glance at the small white stone she had let fall after her ‘training’ session, “if nothing else, falling into a rock makes for great sex.”
Chapter Thirteen
Gemma wandered along the dusty road toward their campsite lugging a gallon thermos filled with sweet, cold water from a pump-handled faucet. A hundred feet from the turn-in she lifted her face, watching empty white cumulus clouds steam past against a sky made bluer by the green tops of pines and the cottonwoods that grew beside the rivers. The heat here on the eastern slope of the Cascades was different—dryer than in Seattle, redolent with pine and hot dust and the ancient, magical essence of the mountains.
She rounded a curve in the road and froze at the sight of a strange car pulled into their campsite’s access path. Cold adrenaline washed through her. Should she keep going? Turn back? Pretend to hear someone calling?
Before she could decide, Brady stepped out of a little stand of pine trees and looked toward her with a slight smile, and she knew it was safe. A few steps further on, she recognized Mike’s red hair as he pulled grocery bags and a file box out of the back seat. He must have rented a car before driving up.
Gemma set the water beside the picnic table and hugged her brother.
“How you doing, Brat?”
“Better. How’s Nikki?”
Mike laughed. “She’s happy as a clam. I found a really good kennel where they’ll walk her fractious, fluffy butt a couple times a day. I wouldn’t mind staying there myself.”
“Any more news?” Brady asked.
“You mean since three this morning? Just more police—arson this time. Tran called with your coordinates. He may have the beginnings of a thread to all this, in a bigger case he and his Task Force are working. Wanted to know whether you want back in, if they are related.”
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