“Oh no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to react like that. I just wanted to try surprising you into letting your guard down. I guess it worked. The feelings were just a bit much for me. But I’m sorry, anyway. I shouldn’t have done that.”
Dean had closed off completely. He didn’t look sad, or upset. He didn’t even look angry. But now I knew inside he kept hidden an ocean of grief. Pressed down, out of sight. I could tell his life wasn’t easy. Everything around us screamed poverty line. His dad didn’t seem to work, and was probably an alcoholic, but Dean seemed smart, and able, and so… kind. My own chest ached wondering what had caused such despair here.
I tried to smooth things over with Dean. He didn’t talk much for the rest of the day, but remained cooperative, nodding and trying a few more suggestions. We tried some visualizing techniques but honestly they just felt wanky. It was still early when Dean started looking gray and tired, and I could tell his arm troubled him. We ended the day frustrated and without any headway on locking down my powers.
I insisted Dean kept his own bed and I curled up on the beanbag. He fell asleep before me, and for a while, before I found my own rest, I stared at him, remembering the sensation of the deep, black despair he kept inside.
***
Thursday morning I woke up to Dean trying to tiptoe around me.
“What time is it?” I asked, squinting at the window. The blinds were still drawn but barely any light came in.
“Six thirty. I need to get to work.” Dean put on a dark blue hoody with holes at the elbows. “I’ll be back about three.”
I sat up quickly in the beanbag. It shifted under me and I almost fell on my side.
“No, you can’t. If you’re out working all day Jake might find you.”
“I have to work, Livvy. I didn’t even get to cash Dad’s welfare check this week and I’m out of money.”
Not only had I been taking up all his time, eating his food, and getting him in trouble in the first place, it was my fault he couldn’t get to work or a bank. He couldn’t work now anyway, not manual labor.
“No, I won’t take any arguments. You can’t go, not with your arm like that. I bet it’s hurting.”
Dean sat down again with a slight wince.
“Yeah, I thought as much. Can I have a look at your arm? We should put a clean dressing on it. Or at least that’s what people seem to do in movies. Then you can walk me into town and I’ll see about some cash.”
“And that will be safer than me going to work?”
“I’m not going to rob anywhere if that’s what you’re thinking. And at least if I’m with you, I could knock you out or something and use my powers to get us out of there if things go wrong. If you show up at your job with a bullet hole through your arm, people are going to talk and Jake will find out who you are and where to find you.”
“Well, you have worked out one way to shock me out of my blocking ability,” Dean mumbled.
I blushed and went to get more makeshift first aid supplies. Once I got some cash in town I’d get some real bandages and dressings.
I unwrapped and cleaned Dean’s arm. It hadn’t gotten any better, and the skin around it was red and inflamed. I bandaged the wound with the last clean washcloth available in the trailer and Dean walked me into town.
It proved hard trying to walk casually while still keeping an eye out in all directions for Jake or the team. We made it to the main street without any sign of them. The bank was closed up, police tape webbed across the front flapping in the slight breeze. I went into the pawn shop I saw last time I was here and sold my heart pendant necklace. I got less than half what I had paid for it new last week, but it was something, enough to get by a couple more days.
I asked Dean about somewhere to get lunch, and he took me around the corner to a tucked away diner with a drug store conveniently next door. I bought a cheap first aid kit which had alcohol swabs, bandages and dressings then went into the diner, insisting on buying lunch for us both.
The diner had a mix of cracking plastic table sets and a line of tall booths along the wall. It was still early for lunch so the place was practically empty and we took a booth in the far back corner.
I bullied Dean into ordering something substantial, and after I’d paid I slid the remainder of the cash across the table.
“What’s that?” He was already shaking his head.
“It’s for you.”
“I can’t take that.”
“Sure you can. It’s your pay. I’m paying you to work for me, to keep trying to do this blocking thing. If you can’t get to your job because of me, then I’m your job.”
We locked gazes, both unwilling to budge with the money sitting on the table.
The waitress brought our food over and raised an eyebrow at our strange stand-off. She put a massive hamburger down in front of Dean, and milkshakes that came in tall retro glasses. My fish and fries came in an actual basket, already spotted with grease from previous meals.
I smiled at the waitress then pouted. “I’m trying to pay him back and he won’t take it.”
She wiped her hands on her apron and flicked her curly hair. “Just take the cash, kid, before I consider it a tip.”
Dean pocketed the money begrudgingly and the waitress left us to our food.
“You didn’t have to sell your pendant. Didn’t it mean something to you?”
“Other things mean more.”
I picked through the fries and battered fish bits. They were good but I didn’t have a big appetite. Dean seemed to barely be putting up with my presence.
I wasn’t surprised considering the trouble I’d brought him, not to mention crashing his house and sleeping in his room. Each day he seemed more and more irritated sharing close quarters with me. Or maybe it was my crazy plan and nagging to get this to work. But it had to work.
Back in his trailer after lunch we sat in his lounge room and tried again to practice his blocking abilities. We attempted turning them off and on, making them stronger or weaker, but nothing worked.
Dean’s wound bled through again so I rewrapped it with real dressings and the result looked a lot better. I hoped that meant it would also heal better. I didn’t like the way it was looking one bit.
Dean was just putting his shirt back on when his dad stumbled in the front door.
“Just finishing up with your little whore?” His words were slurred.
I winced. Great, an angry drunk. I liked him better when he was passed out and snoring.
“Dad, don’t.” Dean stood up and made a buffer between the two of us.
His dad’s gray hair was greasy and while his eyes were the same shade as Dean’s, they bulged, bloodshot, and gave him the look of a crazy-man. They fixed on me over Dean’s shoulder.
“I know you been sniffing around the last few days. I see it’s going on. Don’t think you can go shacking up here. No money to be sniffing for anyway, and you can’t having more of my booze.”
I opened my mouth but just shook my head. I looked to Dean for a cue on what I should do, worried how embarrassed he might be. I got nothing. I might as well have been a figment of his dad’s drunken imagination.
Dean put a hand on his dad’s shoulder, leading him to the room at the opposite end to Dean’s. “Why don’t you go lie down for a while?”
His dad swatted the gesture away. “You two stole my vodka! Don’t make excuses. I know what’s what and what’s gone. You get rid of that whore, Dean. Get her out before she goes leaves you anyway! Just like your mom.”
He turned the other way and left out the front door again, cursing and stumbling.
I sat speechless on the lounge.
“Sorry.” Dean stared at the closed front door and didn’t look like he would turn around any time soon.
“Is that it? Is that why your dad’s like that, because your mom left?” I blurted. I clenched my shaking fists. Dean hadn’t stood up for me, just let his dad call me a whore, rant like that to my face.
De
an remained still. “She didn’t leave. She died.”
“Oh, crap. No, I mean, I’m-” Sorry didn’t cut it. I was such an idiot.
“He wasn’t always like that. He just couldn’t handle the way she left.” Dean leant on the back of the door and still didn’t face me. I wanted to poke, to pry, to encourage him to keep talking, but decided keeping my mouth shut was the best option right now, in case another foot could fit in.
The silence extended and I thought he might not have anything else to say. He stayed leaning on the door. I stayed watching anxiously from the couch. Finally he spoke.
“My mom got sick. Like, never-getting-better sick. We weren’t badly off and Dad gave everything, every saving, every dollar he’d earned on any kind of treatment he could. Dad refused to let her go, refused to give in or stop doing whatever he could. The medical costs bankrupted us. We lost our house just to keep Mom in hospital in palliative care. She didn’t want to be there. She was fading, slowly, painfully, and steadily. She was ready to go and knew what the illness was doing to us.”
Dean didn’t move. His words were slow and held just the smallest edge of pain. I, on the other hand, mopped tears up with the neckline of Dean’s t-shirt I was wearing. I kept quiet, didn’t sob, but the tears just ran. The sadness I’d felt in Dean when I kissed him all came back to me. How long had his mother’s illness gone on for? What had their family been like before? What had Dean been like before? I’d never seen him really smile. I bet he could be gorgeous if he really smiled. It would reach those gray eyes and they would sparkle in a way they never did now. The neck of the shirt was sodden.
Dean’s next words came a moment after the others. His voice broke so slightly I wondered if it was my own imagination.
“Mom took her own life.”
I’m sorry. They were such useless words, so flimsy. What anyone says when they don’t know what to say.
I thought back to my parents and how I’d judged them. The quality of their love. Under the right circumstances, or the wrong ones, would it be enough to break them? If I lost one of them, and then lost the other in a different way, I doubted I’d manage better than Dean. I’d up and left them behind, but only because they were so permanent. Like no matter what I did, I could always go back to home, to comfort, and there they would be. Even when distant they were a safe place in my heart. The idea of losing that seared my insides.
I would have locked all my emotions away too.
Dean shifted and I wiped frantically at my face to dry it before he turned around.
“Thank you, for sharing that with me,” I stuttered, hoping my words weren’t completely useless. “I understand now what it means to be a hero.”
He faced me and I shivered.
I grew colder inside than his presence had ever made me. Anything Dean had opened up, he’d now closed again tighter than ever before.
He sat back next to me on the lounge and asked about what we were going to try next.
I casually caught another tear with the flick of a finger and suggested we take a break and spend the rest of the day watching TV.
We sat close, our shoulders just touching enough to share warmth between us, but inside the sensation of cold only grew.
That night, I wriggled myself into a semi-comfortable position on the beanbag again before Dean could say anything about sleeping arrangements. He came back in from his shower and stood still in the middle of the room for a moment before getting into his bed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For being angry that night we first met. For not saying thank you for what you did.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had obsessed over that so much at the time, but forgotten about it again until he brought it up. It just didn’t seem to mean so much anymore. “That was you angry? I was the one yelling like a crazy person.”
“I was angry, and I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, really.”
Dean paused, his jaw clenching briefly. “It’s just, I saw this mousy girl-”
“Hey!”
“-willing to take on two big guys, willing to risk herself to save a stranger. To do something like that, you have to be something really special. It made me so angry, the thought that something so special could have been hurt, for someone like me.”
Neither of us said anything else.
I hadn’t done it for him. I’d done it for myself, to feel like a hero, to be praised. I had no idea what it meant to be a hero, not then.
The next morning, I woke up and saw Dean sitting on the side of his bed, watching me. Something inside felt different, a turmoil of hot and cold, and then it came.
Ice grew in me, crystallizing and encasing every sensation of Empath power I knew. And then I felt nothing at all. Not the warmth of the power, not the cold of Dean’s blocking. Nothing.
I ran through the trailer park, trying to connect to any emotion at all but nothing came.
It was done. I was normal.
***
At night, the overgrown park across from the mall felt like a scene from Grimm’s Fairytales. The wooden play fortress loomed in shadows and the slight breeze made tree branches creak against each other. Only one street light at either end of the park provided lighting, and both flickered. It was cold out and I pulled the fleecy jacket Dean had given me close in around me. It smelled of him.
I hoped the cold would give us an advantage, so the team wouldn’t sense what was happening until too late.
I’d called Jake earlier that day. He wasn’t happy to hear from me, and I begged, I begged shamelessly to be given another chance to be part of their team again.
I wondered what time it was, whether the team was late. I felt like I’d been here hours. But Dean and I did get here much earlier than we needed to, to give Dean a chance to get hidden before the agreed meeting time.
The hiding place looked uncomfortable, particularly with his arm still hurting him so much. He suggested the park while I tried to think of somewhere with a place Dean could hide, public but without other people around, and that wouldn’t seem more suspicious to the team than I thought this already must.
Dean knew the park well, and its special hiding place that only local kids know.
A car pulled up beside the park. Not one of the team’s usual favorites, but it was them. My blond prince charming who had turned from beauty to beast strolled up to me followed by his pack. They seemed confident and I sighed inwardly. It meant we cleared the first part of the plan I’d worried about. Dean was able to hold in his blocking power. If he hadn’t been able to, the team would have sensed him as soon as they arrived. I’d only realized it could be an issue after he’d already locked me down, so we had no way to test he could do it. But Dean seemed confident. He said he’d worked something out. He had something inside now he could use to control his abilities. Now I just had to hope he could keep holding in his general block and still shut each of the team down for good individually.
Jake wore a dark leather jacket over a stark white designer shirt. He stared at me with disdain. I marveled at the face I once thought so dreamy that now spoke of nightmares.
“So, hi.” Lame. I had to get my brain working, keep them engaged, talking, so Dean had time to do his part. But seeing Jake and the team flicked the off switch in my head. I shivered and it had nothing to do with the cold.
“Living rough, Honey?” Emma smirked at my outfit. She, of course, looked ready to hit a catwalk, mini dress, stiletto heels and all.
“Yeah, things have sucked.” That was a direction I could take, playing to their egos. “But it was good to see what it’s like without you. And it was basically a whole lot of sucking.”
Jamie, looking like a mini version of Jake, chuckled. “That’s what she said.”
Jake held up a hand, silencing his brother, and glared at me some more. “So you think you can manage it now, doing what we do? You want it bad enough? Not going to flip out like a freak again and mess up our plans? You got us into all kinds of trouble wit
h that stunt.”
“I’m sorry.” The words tasted disgusting in my mouth, but I worked to keep my emotions stable. “I know I screwed things up.”
Donnie looked more and more uncomfortable as we spoke. He tried to get Jake’s attention a couple of times but Jake kept shushing him, too busy enjoying a good gloat at my expense. Come on, Dean.
“And why should we even want to bring you back in?” Jake strode around me in a circle. He must be able to tell how uncomfortable this whole situation made me. I hoped he thought it was just nerves in his oh-so-glorious presence, the bastard.
He came to a stop behind my back. He groaned softly. “What is that? I feel…”
Donnie looked drained. “I’ve been trying to tell you, something’s happening. I think the blocker is here.”
Jake grabbed me and turned me to face him, shaking me. “Is he here? Did you bring him here?”
Last ditch effort. “It’s probably just the cold you‘re feeling?”
Donnie looked around frantically. “I think he’s locked me down. I’ve lost it all.”
Jake shoved me and yelled at his team. “Find him! He’s got to be close by.”
Jamie moved in a flash. I guess Dean hadn’t gotten to him yet. He sprinted around the park, checking the perimeter, behind trees and fences, in high grass.
Donnie moved slower. He went to the play equipment and wooden fort. I tensed, and tried not to watch and make it obvious where Dean hid. Climbing through it, Donnie’s adult footsteps clunked heavily on the timber. I hoped for a plank to snap under his weight but didn’t get lucky. But they weren’t finding Dean.
Emma watched Donnie’s slow, normal movements for a moment with her mouth agape. “I can’t. I can’t lose my powers. I can’t go back.”
She fled, just a blur till she reached their car, and took off in it on her own. Quite a feat in the shoes she wore.
Jake pulled a gun from the hem of his jeans behind his back. He pointed it at me, and his hand shook. “I’m not losing this power, Livvy. You’re dying first.”
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