by Aja James
What things? He wanted to ask. What feelings?
“I don’t want to become attached to you,” she continued, her face blank of expression. “I don’t like the way you kiss.”
She didn’t seem to mind while they were in the middle of it, he wanted to retort, but he knew that she was speaking of something deeper.
He was starting to understand her. And he thought she was starting to understand him.
Maybe that was why she no longer wanted him.
Christ.
He shoved his hair back from his forehead and got to his feet. There was a sharp pain burning like acid inside of him, behind his chest bone. He didn’t want to examine it too closely.
It was all for the best.
“Very well,” he said with remarkable calm, as if being so summarily dismissed by a lover was an everyday occurrence. But he was careful to avoid her eyes.
He had to get out of here. He had to leave right now. He wanted to howl and destroy things and lick his wounds in private.
“But before you go, I want to give you something.”
What? Another dagger in the gut?
She got up from the bed and went to the gigantic table that held all of her tech equipment and came back with a small glass disc the size of a dime.
“Here, take this,” she took his hand, palm up, and placed the disc on it.
“It has all of the data I could download from Zenn’s global database and archives. I’ve removed the encryption for all files. It took me a few hours because I have the so-called ‘skeleton key’ since I designed most of their IT infrastructure. Otherwise it would have taken weeks, if not months.”
Devlin looked at the 5D digital data disc in his palm.
There were only a few like it in the world that could store 360 terabytes of data for some 13.8 billion years. The first one was invented only a year ago. It was not yet mass produced. Somehow, he was not surprised that Grace had one of the prototypes in her possession.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for, so I made a copy of everything,” she continued. “I organized it for easier search in data cubes. And I covered my tracks so that Zenn shouldn’t be able to find out.”
When she was silent for a long while, Devlin finally looked into her eyes.
She gazed back at him just as she had the first night they’d met: expressionless, emotionless.
“This is as far as I can help you,” she told him tonelessly, like a pre-programed smart device, “I hope you have everything you need.”
Not by a long shot, Devlin thought.
But what he said was, “Thank you for this. You didn’t have to—”
“Yes I did,” she interjected, “I did have to. Help you that is. I trust you. What you’re looking for must be very important. I trust you to do the right thing.”
God. She slayed him.
Why did she say these things? He needed to leave before his compulsion to stay got any stronger.
He gave her a small salute with the disc in hand. And then he left her without another word.
Chapter Nine
“She’s in the arts and crafts room,” Jaimie Lin, the receptionist, told Grace as she stopped by the front desk of the Little Flower Orphanage.
“You can’t miss her. She’s the quiet one at the drawing table in the back corner. The one who’s always by herself.”
Grace had promised Aunt Maria to come by today and try to talk to the new girl who’d been taken in a while back when her parents died in a car accident.
The last couple of times she’d been by, the girl had been in one of her frequent intractable moods, in which she preferred to isolate herself in a small room—a broom closet or pantry—and stay in the dark for hours.
She still hadn’t said a word. But they were able to discover that her name was Annie, Annabelle Parker. If Grace was the one to carry a conversation between them, this was going to be a short visit.
As Grace made her way down the hall to the specified room, she tried not to think about one particular topic.
It even had a name, which started with a D and ended with an N.
It had been exactly two weeks since the last time she saw him.
The back of him, rather, as he was leaving her apartment. Two weeks of alternately simmering and broiling in unspent lust, as her hormones remained rampant, but with no focused outlet to diffuse the tension.
She’d coldly and logically thought about replacing him with someone new. It should not have been difficult. And yet, just as logically, she found that she couldn’t do it. After all, if one had ridden a champion thoroughbred, would one ever want to go back to a lame donkey?
Grace mentally shook her head, stopping just outside the room in question.
Really, her thoughts were taking flights of fancy. Where did such bewildering analogies come from? She had never ridden a horse in her life. What did she know about thoroughbreds and donkeys?
Enough of this nonsense. She just didn’t have the desire to snare someone new. And before she knew it, her sexual crisis had passed.
But her lust for one particular male only increased with each passing day until it reached volcanic proportions. Perhaps she ought to reinvest in some sex toys.
Pushing such depressing thoughts away, she knocked lightly before entering.
There was one caretaker in the room watching over the children. Clara Scott. A quirky, ever-joyful lady who worked part-time here and part-time teaching art classes in her home studio.
Grace practiced diligently to be good at remembering names. It wasn’t a skill that came naturally, probably because she had little interest in people in general.
And then there was the fact that she thought mostly in numbers and codes, not letters or sounds. Some names were particularly difficult, especially ones with too many vowels, too many consonants. The ones with silent letters were real beasts. But Grace made every effort to remember names, because Dr. Weisman advised that calling someone by their name was the first step to building rapport.
Grace waved hello to Clara and searched the occupants of the large, well-used playroom for one in particular.
There. Just as Jamie had described. The new girl, Annie, was sitting in the back corner, head down, body hunched in a posture that said “I don’t want to be disturbed, don’t come near me.”
She looked like she was absorbed in a drawing as she painstakingly scribbled on a piece of construction paper with colored crayons.
Grace slowly made her way to the little girl and as inconspicuously as possible pulled up a child-sized wooden chair to her table.
She didn’t speak as she sat down and watched the girl draw. Annie didn’t speak either, not surprisingly. But she also didn’t acknowledge Grace’s presence at all, not even to look at who’d sat down at her table.
For a long while, perhaps ten minutes or more, Grace was content just to watch Annie in silence.
It always made Grace wonder why people liked to fill in silences with words. She herself often found silences soothing, calming, enlightening.
For example, the silence let her focus on Annie’s features, her curly red hair, lighter brows and lashes and the generous sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose and on both cheeks.
It was a pretty little face, solemn but not sad. Perhaps she’d spent her quota of sadness already. Children had the innate ability not to dwell on painful things. Only as one aged did the ability to let go become more and more difficult to practice, never mind master.
“Is that you in the picture?” Grace couldn’t help but ask, pointing to the central figure in the drawing, breaking the quiet finally.
The little girl nodded, though she kept working without interruption. She’d put finishing flourishes on the figure’s curly hair, adding a small bow, and was now working on a house and the grass around it.
Quite good with her shapes and lines and color coordination for a four-or-so-year-old, Grace thought. Not that she was an expert on these things.
&nb
sp; Still, she’d been helping out at the Orphanage for years now. She’d been acquainted with many children, a few of whom, unfortunately, were still waiting for their family. This little girl was a lot more mature than she looked.
Grace refocused on the drawing as Annie added windows and a door to the house. Within the window frames, she drew two faces looking out at the figure with the bow out in the yard.
“Are those your parents?” Grace asked again.
Another nod. The girl was now coloring in the house, the grass and adding a yellow car to the side.
“I used to live in a house like that with my parents,” Grace murmured, more to herself than to her silent companion. “Their names were Judith and Jacob. Isn’t that cool? The alliteration of their names?”
Grace peered at the girl, but she gave no indication that she’d heard.
Grace didn’t mind.
“They both worked for the same company. I can’t recall its name now. I never really paid attention. Their job was in technology though, the same as me now. I still recall the old Nokia phones they carried, their matching Blackberries and their heavy laptop briefs. They went to work early every morning and came home by 6pm sharp so that they could cook dinner together and we would sit down as a family to eat dinner promptly at 7pm.”
Grace’s eyes unfocused as she tried to remember the details. “I never called them Mom and Dad. I always called them Judith and Jacob for as long as I could recall. All the schools they tried to enroll me in said I was impossible to teach. Said I wouldn’t engage on the lessons, I wouldn’t listen to instruction. So I stayed home and taught myself from the age of eight.”
She looked back at the girl, now adding flowers and trees to the yard in her drawing.
“I was a lot like you are now,” Grace continued her one-sided conversation. “I didn’t talk a lot. Probably not more than a few words a day. But I listened to everything my parents said when they chatted at dinner. Jacob was like us, you and me, he didn’t talk much either. But Judith liked to chatter on. Kind of like the way I’m talking now. For almost the whole thirty minutes it took us to eat our dinner, she chattered on about anything and everything. It was kind of soothing.”
“And then one day…” Grace paused, taking a deep breath, unconsciously bracing herself to confront the memory.
“And then one day they were gone.”
Grace’s voice dropped to a whisper as she stared unblinkingly at nothing in particular.
“That morning they left home early as usual. Jacob had prepared my favorite breakfast, a happy face with sliced bananas and Oreo cookies for eyes. Judith made my favorite morning drink, mildly brewed coffee with a lot of French Vanilla Coffeemate. I stayed all day and most of the night in the basement working on my latest computer game creation. And then… and then they were gone. Died in a bridge collapse during the hurricane.”
A small hand touched Grace’s arm, snapping her out of her trance, bringing her back to the present.
Annie was gazing at her with wide, intent eyes. She patted her own chest with her other hand and nodded.
“You too?” Grace interpreted. “You lost your parents too.”
The girl nodded more vigorously.
“Yes,” Grace recalled, “they died in a car accident.”
Vehement head shaking. So violent was the motion, the girl’s curls went from well-ordered ringlets to a messy cloud of frizz.
Grace put her hands on the girl’s shoulders to calm her, still her, before her head spun right off her neck.
“They didn’t die in a car accident? The reports are wrong?”
The girl nodded vigorously again. And then she pointed to her drawing.
There, framed in each of the two windows were her parents’ faces. Both had mouths rounded in an O. Both had Xs for eyes. What looked like black shadows were colored in around them, extending to the exterior wall of the house in an inky blob.
A blob that ended in the shape of a man beside the yellow car.
*** *** *** ***
“Have a seat, Grace, you’re right on time, as always.”
Grace sat where Dr. Weisman indicated, in a bone-meltingly comfortable chaise lounge by the floor-to-ceiling window that dominated an entire wall of his spacious uptown office.
It was angled toward his own simple yet ergonomic chair, where he sat down after opening the door and greeting her, elegantly crossing one leg over the other and regarding her with a benign gaze.
Grace was careful not to look at him directly; she had a tendency to stare into people’s eyes too long and lost her train of thought when she did.
Instead, she glanced at the tall, well-watered potted plants placed strategically around the room to make it seem less of an office and more of a study. An intellectual sanctuary of sorts. The views of the city from this top-most floor were spectacular, all lush greenery, blue skies and white clouds of summer in New York.
Dr. Weisman’s practice obviously did very well, if his luxurious office in the most prime location of real estates was any indication. The strange thing was that Grace never saw a line of patients waiting in the fancy reception area outside. The office always looked empty, except for Dr. Weisman and his assistant. Perhaps he saw all his other appointments elsewhere or on separate days?
“How are your pet fish and chinchilla?” Dr. Weisman broke the prolonged silence to inquire. He always gave her some time to settle in before continuing their on-going conversation.
“They are alive,” Grace answered simply. She was actually quite proud of the fact that she’d managed to nurture her creatures this long.
Earlier this morning when she was out with Miu-Miu, the chinchilla had licked her wrist with affection.
Well, Grace assumed it was with affection. For all she knew the animal smelled something sweet on her skin and wanted to have a taste. But Grace did know that she stroked Miu-Miu’s baby-soft fur with something like affection. She might have even cooed to the pet.
“That is very good to hear,” Dr. Weisman said. “How has your day been going thus far? Did you visit the Orphanage today or take a walk through the Park?”
“Both,” Grace answered. She’d cut across Central Park to arrive at the office, though she could have ridden the subway from Brooklyn to a closer stop.
She liked to consolidate the errands and appointments that required her to leave her apartment in one or at most two days a week whenever possible. That way, she got through the perilous human interactions outside of her normal routines all at once, kind of like ripping a Band-Aid off.
Visits with Dr. Weisman were always productive. He was a brilliant and effective psychiatrist.
But he was also extremely disconcerting with his intense, dark stares and portentous silences. Even after seventeen years of twice-a-month visits, he still had the ability to unnerve Grace.
Not because of the way he looked. Though she could imagine his stunning male beauty would make other women squirm or pant or at least pause, he did not attract her. He’d never attracted her. (And strangely, he never seemed to age in all those seventeen years. No wrinkles, not even a few gray hairs.)
Unfortunately for Grace, she suspected she’d only ever been truly attracted to one man, and she’d already severed that acquaintance.
No, Dr. Weisman unnerved her because of the way he looked—at others. As if he could see into their thoughts, emotions and dreams. As if he knew them better than they knew themselves.
He often seemed to know exactly what she was thinking even before she thought it. He sometimes answered unspoken questions before she asked them.
It was downright eerie what this man could discern.
Grace had wondered more than once how a man who looked to be in his late twenties or at most early thirties could reflect lifetimes of knowledge and experience in his bottomless dark eyes.
“Have you been writing in your journal?” he asked after a couple minutes of silence. He seemed to be just as comfortable with silences as Grace was.
He was not a man who put others at ease. There was something almost predatory about him, though he’d been nothing but kind to her since she first came to him at the age of twelve as part of the deal with the government to excuse her of her computer crimes.
It was Dr. Weisman who helped her get her first tech job, and then recommended her to Zenn.
“Grace?” he prompted when she didn’t reply, even after a lengthy pause.
“Yes. Every day,” she finally answered.
“Good.” He gave a brief nod and smiled at her. His smiles were never real, Grace always thought. They were mere stretches of his lips that didn’t reach his eyes.
“And does it get easier each time you write? Have you graduated from nouns and verbs to adjectives and adverbs?”
Grace thought of her recent entries about Devlin Sinclair and the feelings he evoked in her.
“Yes. Lots of adjectives and adverbs.”
“Very good,” Dr. Weisman murmured approvingly.
Grace looked out the gigantic wall of glass. She would be able to concentrate on the conversation better if she didn’t look at her discourse partner.
“Tell me about your dreams lately. Have you had the recurring one again?”
She shook her head. No, she’d been dreaming instead about a particular golden male body wrapped around hers, undulating with hers, thrusting into hers…and she wasn’t about to share that with Dr. Weisman.
“But there’s something that’s disturbing you, I can tell,” he said softly, almost hypnotically.
Yes, she was disturbed by the fact that her libido had not calmed down after her hormonal crisis was over.
Every night, she ached for her lover. She felt strangely bereft without him, and she’d never felt this way before. She’d always preferred her own company over that of others, even Aunt Maria.
But now she was restless, and she wanted and wanted and wanted. Endlessly, frustratingly wanted.
“What are you thinking right now, Grace?” Dr. Weisman asked.