Mason didn't care about any of that.
Of course, he had his own problems.
She smiled as he browsed through a rack of shirts. Lean body, gorgeous smile, kind and caring.
She could definitely put up with watching over him during a storm.
She laughed as she headed for the front register.
They were a perfect match.
She waited near the exit as Mason paid for his clothes. The woman working the register flirted with him. Kelly couldn't blame her.
They walked to the Jeep and put their bags in the back.
“Check into a hotel?” he asked. “Separate rooms?”
She gave a shy smile. “I vote one room. If we're gonna order out and watch a movie, we're gonna be in one room most of the night anyway. Besides, there might be a storm tonight, remember? Who's gonna watch over you?”
He smirked. “You know, I can watch over myself.”
“You can. But not with me around.”
He met her gaze across the Jeep. If they stayed in the same room he wouldn't be able to keep his hands to himself.
“One room it is,” he said. “If I make any moves, slap me.”
Her eyes sparkled with playfulness. “Same goes for you.” She pointed across the street. “I'll be right back. I need something from Best Buy.”
She jogged across the street before he could offer to go with her.
He climbed behind the wheel and enjoyed the sun. He smiled at the thought of spending another night with Kelly.
He hoped it wouldn't storm.
Thoughts of Kelly in sleepwear faded as he pulled the flash drive out of the zip-lock bags. The thought of a murderer who could mind slide terrified him. He was glad Gabriel was locked away, but what could be on a flash drive that was worth breaking into Kelly's house?
He didn't even hear Kelly approach. He jumped when she put a box in the back of the Jeep.
“What's that?” he asked.
She climbed in next to him. “A laptop.”
“You bought a laptop?”
“Yeah.” She pointed at the flash drive in his hands. “You can't tell me you don't want to know what's on that thing.”
He smiled. “You know me too well.”
“I'm getting there. There's a hotel down the road. Let's go check in.”
Ten minutes later Mason was sliding an electronic key-card into a third floor hotel room door. He carried her laptop. Their clothes were still in the Jeep.
He glanced at his cell phone as they settled in. It was only four in the afternoon. Still plenty of day left.
He opened the curtain, revealing the parking lot and main road below. The swimming pool was just below the window. A few men and women swam back and forth and splashed water on each other.
Kelly stood next to him.
“Didn't even think about swimming,” she said. “We should have bought swimsuits.”
He imagined her in a bathing suit. Nice image.
Mason looked over the hotel room. Two separate beds. A television on a dresser. A table and chair in the corner. Tiny refrigerator. The bathroom was to the side near the door.
He had stayed at a hotel once a few years ago. He worked an affair case, and stayed at the same hotel as the suspects.
Sleeping at a hotel with a beautiful woman was completely new.
“I'll go get our clothes.”
“Wait a sec,” Kelly said. She put the laptop box on the bed. “Curiosity is killing me. Let's look at that flash drive first.”
Mason helped her unpack the laptop. He guessed they wouldn't understand anything on the flash drive. He was smart, but didn't speak the same language Doc did. Obviously, it was important to hide.
Kelly set the laptop on the table and turned it on. Mason sat on the edge of the bed behind her as she inserted the flash drive.
“First, my dad has millions of dollars. Now he's hiding things under lockers.”
She browsed through the flash drive. It was neatly organized, with folders for spreadsheets, documents, graphs, charts.
She saw a folder labeled Video.
“I really hope this isn't my father doing private things in a bedroom.”
He laughed.
She opened the folder to see hundreds of videos.
“Oh wow,” she said. “Get ready to cover your eyes.”
She was already double-clicking on a random video when Mason noticed how Doc labeled them.
Each video was labeled with a time and date, followed by a dash and number.
He recognized every date. The data on the flash drive became crystal clear.
“No, wait.”
Too late. The video started playing.
Mason stood behind Kelly. He wanted to lean over her and close the laptop, but his legs were frozen.
It was the same lab he spent so much of his life in, although from a different angle. Doc stood facing the camera in his lab coat. Doctor Fuller and the rest of the staff were working in the background.
Mason was laying on the metal table in the center of the lab, screaming at the top of his lungs. He remembered that day. He remembered every day. He was nine years old.
He never once knew the lab was recorded, from the glass office in the corner that Doc always stayed in.
“The subject has just completed successful projection number seven. Lasting a little over eight minutes.”
“It hurts,” Mason cried in the background. He thrashed on the table as technicians held him down. “Please make it stop.”
“The subject had a reaction to this latest batch of Cocktail that we'll have to correct. The most recent projection, while the longest so far, seemed to cause discomfort.”
Mason laughed shortly behind Kelly. Discomfort.
Doctor Fuller ran toward Doc and knocked on the glass.
“Albert,” he said. “Something's wrong. He's projecting again.”
“What?”
Doc left the glass office, but the camera kept recording.
“Where am I?” the nine-year-old screamed. “I don't know where I am! Doctor Rierson? Are you there? Anybody?”
They strapped Mason down and pumped more drugs into his body. He continued to scream and fight.
“Could you stop that, please,” he said from behind Kelly.
She said nothing, not hearing Mason. She was appalled by what she was watching. She couldn't believe it was her father.
He leaned over and closed the laptop. The only sound in the room was the air conditioner.
His hands shook as he leaned on the dresser. He remembered all too well the early days of mind sliding. Falling asleep in a pure white room with no family or friends. Trying to formulate stable mixtures of Cocktail. Having no control at all over his ability to mind slide. Waking up in the middle of night in strange places. He thought they were dreams, at first.
Every experiment, every trip to the table, recorded.
Kelly turned in her chair and looked up at her friend. Her mouth hung open as she searched for words.
“Mason, was that you?”
He was angry. If things took off with Kelly, like he thought was already happening, he could see telling her his secrets one day. Now, that was all gone, taken away from him.
“Yeah.” He lowered his head and shut his eyes. He would never be able to fully put the lab behind him. But the thought of most of his life being on a flash drive was overwhelming. “I, uh, didn't know Doc was in to home movies.”
“What did they do to you? What did my father do to you?”
He clenched the dresser to stop his hands from shaking.
Everything was different now.
They were supposed to watch a movie, order food. Spend the night together in separate beds. Laugh and have fun. He even entertained thoughts of trying for a kiss.
None of that would happen. Their friendship was in serious trouble.
It took Brian and Lisa a while to accept Mason for who he was, and what he could do. He still remembered the look on Lisa'
s face when Brian and he sat across from her at their dining room table and came completely clean about how they met.
“I'm gonna go for a walk,” he said, unable to look her in the eye. “I'll be back in a little while.”
She wanted to go to him. She wanted to hold him in her arms and comfort him.
She couldn't move. He grabbed the second key-card from the dresser and left the room, quietly closing the door behind him.
A tear fell from her eye as she opened the laptop.
She knew she wouldn't like what she was about to see.
But she had to know.
Chapter 23
Kelly sat at the laptop for over an hour. She watched videos in sequence, skipping over some completely and fast forwarding through others.
It almost didn't seem real.
She had to take a break every few minutes to keep from crying.
She didn't understand everything she saw. She didn't know what her father meant by projections and Cocktail, nor did she understand the strange trances Mason seemed to go into.
All she knew was they tormented him.
She watched him grow up before her eyes, from a young child to a teenager. In the early videos he was terrified and uncooperative. As he grew older he seemed to accept what was happening to him, and simply complained and used sarcasm as a shield.
She watched her father change over time. The subject became Mason, and he actually talked to him, even laughed and traded sarcastic comments.
That didn't make the terrible things they did to him any better.
She covered her eyes and gasped as she loaded another video.
Next to the metal table, a fixture in every video, was a large tub of ice. Mason was submerged up to his neck. Even as far away as the camera was, Kelly could see him shivering.
There were fewer technicians than normal.
Her father addressed the camera. He straightened his lab coat three times, obviously uncomfortable.
“Time is 11:52 pm. Mason has been holding a lucid projection for nearly fifteen minutes. His body temperature is dropping, but it doesn't seem to be affecting the projection at all. He's done real well with this batch of Cocktail, very little side effects.”
“Uh, guys,” Mason said from the tub. Kelly could hear the panic and fear in his voice. “I'm not feeling so good.”
Her father opened a window in the glass office. “Get him out of there, Ronald.”
No one in the lab moved. They continued to record notes and work at their computers.
“I said get him out of there!”
He left the office and stormed toward the tub of ice. Ronald cut him off and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Albert, we talked about this. We agreed. Twenty minutes.”
“He's turning blue, Ronald!”
“We need to see how far we can push it. If he'll break down before the projection does.” Ronald looked at the teenager. “Be aware, Mason. What are you feeling right now?”
“Not much of anything.”
Her father shoved Ronald aside and opened a door on the side of the tub. Ice poured out to the lab floor. He scooped Mason into his arms and set him on the center table. Two technicians wrapped him in blankets.
“Bring his temp up slowly,” a bored-looking woman said from a nearby desk.
Mason could barely speak. “Doc, my penis is still there, right?”
“Don't talk. But yeah, it's still there.”
“Good. Don't want to disappoint the ladies.”
Despite the tears running down her face, Kelly laughed.
It was at that moment, watching Mason wrapped in a blanket, shivering in a lab, that she realized she was falling in love with him.
The door opened behind her. She shut the laptop and dabbed at her eyes with her shirt. Mason carried two fountain drinks and a pretzel in a wrapper.
“Soda for you,” he said. He lifted it to show her, then put it on the dresser. “Do you want half of my soft pretzel?”
She looked into his eyes. “What happened?”
“You didn't watch the videos?”
“I didn't understand half of it. I want to hear it from you.”
He took a breath and sat on the bed. He'd spent the past hour steeling himself for this moment, going over lines in his head.
“The bolt of lightning that hit me, you know it gave me a weird memory. But that's not all. I can go to other places, with just my mind. I call it mind sliding, cause that's definitely what it feels like.”
“Is that the projection stuff they kept talking about?”
“Yeah. I focus on a person or place, and I go right to them. I can move around, see, hear, smell. It's like I'm a ghost, just watching everything, but no one can see me.”
“I watched them freeze you. Burn your feet.”
He winced at the memories. “Don't remind me. They were studying me, trying to figure out how my brain worked. They wanted me to mind slide all over the world. Sometimes, they wanted me to mind slide through pain.”
She stood up and paced. Mason rose from the bed and watched her.
“So you didn't even need to be there? You never had any mental problems?”
He smiled. “Well, I am scared of storms. But besides that, nope.”
“My father was a part of all that,” she said. “The first time I heard about you, I had just won a spelling bee. Dad didn't want to talk about that. He only wanted to talk about you. How bright you are, how nice.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “I hated you. I was jealous. And the whole time, my father was strapping you down to a table.” She stopped pacing and met his eyes. “I am so sorry.”
“No reason to be sorry. Believe it or not, Doc tried to go easy on me. He never said it. But I know he tried to slow things down, cut out an experiment or two.”
She laughed nervously. “You know, the night I was kidnapped, my father said he was working late in therapy sessions with you.”
She spoke without hesitation. She never spoke of her kidnapping. But with Mason she held nothing back.
“Wow. No wonder you hated me. He never told me that.”
The way he said it made Kelly study him closely.
“Oh really? What did he tell you?”
Mason's face turned red. He opened his mouth to speak, but had no words.
“You knew, didn't you? He told you? He told you about what happened to me?”
“I, uh, I'm the one who found you.”
Her eyes went wide. Mason couldn't read her expression. Angry? Surprised?
“It's how I met Brian,” he said. He was in between both beds. He pressed himself as close to the nightstand as he could get. “Doc came in, with the police. I mind slid to where you were, and Brian went and got you.”
“You...saved me?”
He lowered his eyes. “No. I couldn't do anything. I was there with you, in that basement. I saw you chained up to the wall. The only thing I could do was cry. But you, you kicked the guy, and threw that boiling water right in his face. It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. No one saved you, Kell. You saved yourself.”
She was quiet as everything sunk in. Mason knew this was a lot to take, and there was still more to tell. He had a feeling they probably wouldn't be spending the night together.
“You were my first case,” he said with a slight smile.
Kelly pushed a strand of hair away from her face, then marched forward to close the distance between them. Mason thought she was going to slap him, maybe punch him. He could certainly understand her wanting to, and braced himself for it.
Instead, she put her hands on his shoulders and leaned in for a kiss. He was totally unprepared, trying to figure out what to do with his hands when she pulled away. Four seconds, maybe five. Nowhere near long enough. She grabbed his hands and held them.
“Thank you for saving me.”
He shook his head. “I told you-”
“Mason,” she said with a smile. “Just say 'You're welcome.'”
“Uh,
you're welcome?”
She laughed. “Now we're getting somewhere. Sorry about that kiss. I'm a little out of practice.”
“They say practice makes perfect.”
Was he joking?
Time to take a chance.
She stepped forward and kissed him again. It was gentle at first, tender. He ran a hand through her hair and caressed her neck. She gripped his back. Her hands slipped under his shirt, and Mason stiffened. Goosebumps rippled across his skin.
There was a quiet sighing, and Kelly realized it was her.
She smiled as their lips parted more. She hadn't kissed a man in over a year, and thought she'd be much more nervous, more uncomfortable.
Everything about her was at ease with Mason.
Grabbing the front of his shorts, she fell backwards onto the bed, dragging him down with her. Mason let out a surprised laugh and cushioned his fall with his hands. She grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him in close, brushing her lips across his cheek.
“Oops. I fell,” she whispered, trying to sound seductive.
She gasped as he put a hand on her hip. Her finger pulled at a hoop on his shorts to keep him close. Her shirt rose up a few inches, and he traced around her navel with his thumb.
“Clumsy you.”
He leaned in for another kiss, but veered off at the last second and kissed the side of her neck. She sighed and kicked her sandals off. Curling her leg up to his side, she shifted her hips. He grabbed her foot and slowly moved his hand up her calf, then the back of her thigh. She trembled.
Their clothes needed to come off, very soon.
Kelly hated parts of herself. Her complexion, paranoia, fear of anyone that knocked at her door, the dread that followed her when she was alone.
With Mason, she felt alive, beautiful.
“I swear, I didn't plan this,” she said, slipping a hand under his shirt. “I just wanted to spend time with you.”
Mason smiled. He would tell her everything about himself, over time. A part of him had fallen for her a long time ago, when he saw her strength in that basement.
He tried to slow his breathing. Her reactions weren't helping, only fueling his own desire. He leaned in to whisper in her ear.
Mind Slide Page 17