Psychic

by Chloe Garner

  He lowered his face to look her in the eye, and the tears came faster.

  “Do what you want to do. We’re not going to patronize you and make you sit with us or get in the way of you doing… whatever it is you’re doing. But none of us like seeing you unhappy. None of us.”

  She nodded and he stood.

  “I’m going to go sit. You’re welcome to join us. You can go back out to the Cruiser if you want. You certainly taught Sam his lesson. Do what makes you happiest.”

  She dropped her head against his chest and he hugged her.

  “It won’t suck forever,” he said. She nodded. He squeezed her and put his hand through her hair, then winked and went back into the restaurant. She watched after him for a long time, periodically brushing tears off her face, then turned and went upstairs.

  <><><>

  Jason and Kara were reaching the end of the part of the evening when they were appropriate in public. Jason had his hands up the back of her shirt and Sam hadn’t seen Kara’s face for several minutes. Caroline raised an eyebrow at him.

  “I give them fifteen minutes and they’re out of here,” Sam said. Kara and Jason gave no sign of having heard.

  “I’d heard rumors about them, but…” she glanced at them. “I didn’t realize they were true.”

  Sam shrugged.

  “I’m more used to it than I think is healthy.”

  “How long have they been like this?”

  “Since we were nineteen, maybe?”

  “Huh,” Caroline said, leaning against him. He wrapped his arm around her and shifted so that her head rested on his chest. “Is it creepy for us to be sitting here watching?”

  “I used to think so,” Sam said. “Then I realized it doesn’t bother them, and it’s really awkward to try to watch anything else.”

  She nodded.

  “You hungry?”

  “You could sit here and eat?”

  “Well, like I said, they’ll be gone by the time the food got here, but I wasn’t thinking about eating… here,” Sam said.

  “Aah,” she said. He could hear the smile in her voice. She shifted closer and he dropped his face to rest against her hair.

  Something about the air in the room changed, making both of them look up at the same time.

  “Huh,” Caroline said. Jason and Kara turned, then Kara unwrapped herself from around Jason to turn fully to face the door.

  “Who is that?” Kara asked.

  “Oh, that’s Sam,” Jason said.

  “Oh, I get that. But who is she?”

  Sam walked across the open floor of the restaurant, returning to her previous table. She was wearing a floor-length black leather skirt that was slit twice in the front and twice in the back, all the way up to her hips. Her black shirt was stretched taught over every feature of her torso, but at least it wasn’t mesh. Her hair was up in a tight bun at the top of her head and she wore thick black eyeliner and black lipstick, and complex earrings that wound around her ears and dropped to her shoulders on both sides. She sat down at her table and stretched her arms across the back of the booth, face placid, in control.

  “That’s Sam as a demon hunter,” Jason said. Caroline sat back up.

  “In those heels?” Kara asked. Sam shrugged.

  “Yeah,” he told her. He didn’t have to look to know that her fingers were covered in rings and her fingernails painted black. He had been ignoring her stormy mood since Jason had come back, but she had suddenly gone calm a few minutes ago. He should have seen it coming.

  Caroline settled in against him again.

  “She’s going to get you killed,” she said.

  “No, I get it,” Kara said. She was grinning.

  “You want to go?” Caroline asked. Sam looked across the room at Samantha. She wasn’t even pointedly ignoring him. She was watching the room like it was a stage set up for her to observe. Someone tried to sit down with her and she stared at him until he left.

  “Yeah. I think so,” Sam said, standing.

  “See you guys in the morning?” Jason asked. Caroline wrapped her fingers through Sam’s.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I’ve got to be on the road by lunchtime,” Kara said. “If I miss you, it was good seeing you.”

  “Yeah, you, too. We should get coffee sometime,” Caroline said. Kara grinned.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  All four of them knew that Kara was not the kind of girl who got coffee, but it was just how Caroline was friendly. Caroline squeezed his hand, and Sam jerked his head at Jason.

  “Night.”

  <><><>

  A while later, Jason and Kara nearly fell on the floor under the table.

  “Upstairs,” Jason said, swallowing hard. She laughed, jerking his shoulders away from the edge and kissing him again.

  “But the torture is the best part,” she said. Her hair fell in heavy curtains all around his face, and smelled her shampoo and her own particular scent, the one he would recognize anywhere. He grunted and grabbed her hips, pulling her against him and sitting up.

  “Upstairs,” he said again, holding the back of her neck as he pressed his mouth against hers. She pulled away and shook her hair back. He kissed her throat, open-mouthed, leaving faint red marks on her skin that faded as she pushed him away.

  “Take me to bed,” she said. He pushed her off the edge of the booth seat, grabbing her knees and standing. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and bit his ear, growling. His knee gave and he caught himself on the table. She laughed and he dropped her feet to the ground, swatting her. She sucked on his shoulder, then turned her mouth up to his ear.

  “Sam,” she said.

  “Not a chance in hell,” he said. She laughed.

  “No, her.”

  “Oh. I doubt she’s up for it,” he said. She laughed again, wrapping an arm under his shoulder and running her fingernails up the back of his neck. She pushed her chest against him and licked his throat under his chin, closing her mouth over the spot and nipping him again.

  “Talk to her,” Kara said.

  “I’m telling her it was your idea,” Jason said, feeling like he needed to clear his throat. She laughed and butted the side of her head against his chest. He wrapped his arm around her and half-carried her across the room. Samantha looked up at them, face blank. She blinked.

  “You okay?” Jason asked. Her shoulders moved a fraction and she blinked again.

  “I figured as long as I’m going to be by myself, I may as well enjoy it,” she said. Kara dug her fingernails into his scalp just above the hairline on the back of his neck and he fought off a shudder. He heard her laugh, deep in her chest, and she turned her face up to look at Samantha.

  “Give ‘em hell, girl,” she said. Samantha’s mouth turned up and she turned her face down in the slightest of chuckles.

  “Have fun, guys.”

  “Kara says you can come if you want,” Jason said. The fingernails dug in harder and he turned his head down to her, aware of the length of her body against his.

  “I don’t share well,” Samantha said. Kara tipped her head back and laughed.

  “Truer words,” she said. “Night, Sammycat.”

  “Goodnight, Kara,” Samantha said. Jason looked at her once more, and she met his eyes, her mask slipped just enough to show humor in her eyes. He grinned.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.

  “Someday you’re going to have to make a list of what that entails,” she said. “Because I’m at a loss.”

  Kara wrapped herself tighter around him and sucked on his neck under his ear, and he was gone. His eyes rolled up into his head and he reached down to grab Kara’s knees, tucking them behind his hip as he carried her toward the elevators.

  <><><>

  Sam padded back from the door, carrying a pair of food trays, strangely aware of the tufts of carpet between his toes. Caroline was pulling the bed sheets straight over her legs and he set the trays down, pulling the comfo
rter the rest of the way onto the floor. He was light-headed.

  He sat down on the bed next to her and reached down to grab the food. He lifted the first tray cover and handed her her dinner.

  Two in the morning was not an unusual time for room service for Rangers. The food was hot and fresh and the smell made Sam’s mouth water. He was starving. They had stopped for lunch just outside of Little Rock, but he hadn’t eaten anything since.

  All the same, every nerve ending in his body was screaming for him to throw the plate of food over his shoulder and take her. Put his hands on her, put his mouth on her, take her body against his. The way she was watching him, she knew it. She put the plate in her lap and picked up her sandwich, tossing her hair back over her shoulders. The silk slip of clothing she was wearing didn’t so much as define what he couldn’t see or touch so much as what he wanted to.

  “Something wrong?” she asked, smiling. He swallowed and looked at his plate. Food. He was going to eat food now.

  “So,” she said. “If you were going to take a year off. No guilt, no strings, no worrying about what you should be doing, money is no object. What would you do?”

  He frowned.

  “I don’t know. I never really thought about it,” he said. She grinned and wiped the corner of her mouth with her little finger.

  “So do it,” she said. “What would you do? Where would you go?”

  He sighed, leaning back against the pillows.

  “I don’t know. Maybe get a little cabin up in the mountains somewhere, fill it up with books. Sit in front of a fire and read every night.”

  She smiled.

  “What do you read?”

  “Histories. Action stuff.” He grinned. “Comic books.”

  “Seriously?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve never gotten comic books,” she said.

  “I think it’s a guy thing,” he said.

  “Short attention span,” she said. He shifted over so his shoulder leaned against hers.

  “Maybe. What would you do?”

  “Travel,” she said. “New Zealand, Cambodia, China, Japan, India… Greece, Italy, France… I would love to spend a month in Paris.”

  “You speak French?” he asked.

  “I don’t speak Mandarin, either,” she said.

  “Fair enough.”

  “I’ve got a list,” she said.

  “It sounds awesome,” Sam said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

  “It’s what I do when it gets to be too much, you know?” she asked.

  “I think it’s easier, having someone to work with,” he said.

  “You mean Sam?” she asked. He frowned.

  “I meant Jason, but yeah, Sam makes it easier, too.”

  She nodded, leaning her head against his shoulder as she chewed.

  “I don’t think I’d want to work with someone else,” she said. “This way, if I make a mistake and get myself killed, I’m the only one.” She paused. “You know?”

  “I get it,” he said. “It’s what everyone says. I just can’t imagine going back to an empty hotel room, covered in ash and blood, and sitting by myself.”

  She snorted.

  “I don’t sit in my hotel room any more than you do,” she said. He grinned.

  “You go out.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Drink?”

  “Scotch when I win, vodka when I lose.”

  “Only thing vodka is good for is getting drunk,” Sam said.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  He slid his legs under the sheets and she put her legs over his.

  “Would you go traveling with me?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if I just did it. Would you go with me?”

  “I couldn’t,” he said. She shook her head.

  “No, I know. I couldn’t either. But if I did. And if you could.” She paused. “Would you?”

  He thought of Jason. They hadn’t really been apart since before his parents died. And of Samantha. He was physically uncomfortable even being seven stories away from her. And he didn’t resent it. They were at an odd point, but having someone who knew him like that… He would fight to keep it, not consider giving it up.

  “Maybe,” he lied.

  “Maybe it would be better, not being alone,” she said. He moved to put his arm around her waist, the skin of her legs against his more than he could just ignore. He put his plate down next to him on the bed and turned his body, kissing the side of her face. She laughed and fought him off with straight arms.

  “Ew,” she said. “I’m going to go brush my teeth. I taste like mayonnaise.”

  She got out of bed and he watched her, the skin on the backs of her thighs teasing him like a game of red-light-green-light, until she was out of sight.

  They had already done the scars thing. Sitting in his bed in North Carolina in their underwear, telling the stories behind every one of their scars. Jason told him once it was a normal step in every Ranger relationship.

  “You have a lot of scars on your back,” she had said, tracing over them with a finger. “Where did you get these?”

  He honestly couldn’t remember.

  “We fought this legion of goblins once,” he said. He had gotten slashed up a bit in that. Maybe that was what she was talking about. “I was out in the middle of them with Sam.”

  “You let yourselves get surrounded?” she had asked, still tracing scars. “That would explain it.”

  She had a bullet scar in the back of her left thigh that his fingers looked for. He didn’t know why, really. She didn’t like it. Didn’t like the splash shape it had, or that he seemed to think it was sexy. He loved that she was that kind of tough. Shot, pants leg drenched in blood, she had managed to kill the witch she had been hunting and made it back to her car to patch up her own wound. She said the bullet was still in there. She had been so worried about bleeding out that she had just closed it.

  Something was bothering him. He heard the water in the bathroom run, and he frowned, trying to figure out what it was.

  He grabbed his phone.

  Jason answered an instant before it would have gone to voice mail.

  “This had better be good,” his brother said.

  “She’s weaving,” Sam said.

  “Sam, you just woke me up out of a sex coma. Do better.”

  “Sam. She’s weaving. I don’t even think she knows it.”

  “So?”

  “Will you check on her?”

  Jason grunted.

  “You do it.”

  Sam looked at the bathroom.

  “It would bother Caroline if I left to go find Sam.”

  “It would bother me to go find Sam,” Jason said.

  “Please,” Sam said. Jason groaned.

  “Fine. You owe me.”

  Sam hung up and tossed his phone back with his pants as Caroline came back out of the bathroom.

  <><><>

  “I told you once I’d kill you if you snuck out on me,” Kara said, her voice muffled by her pillow.

  “I’m not sneaking out,” Jason said from the doorway. “Sam called. He wants me to check on Sam.”

  She rolled over.

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  She got out of bed and dressed. He leaned against the door and watched.

  “Why does Sam want you to check on Sammycat?” she asked.

  “They’re co-dependent like that,” he said.

  “Could have fooled me.”

  Jason shrugged.

  She pulled on her boots and shook her hair out. He ran his fingers along her hair line, hooking the thick locks he captured behind her ear, kissing her. She eyed him.

  “That was almost affectionate,” she said.

  “Sorry. Forgot myself,” he said, opening the door. He leaned against a wall in the elevator and she wrapped her arms around his waist
and leaned against him, resting her head against his collar bone like she might go back to sleep. He ran her hair between his fingertips.

  “We smell like sex,” he said. She nodded.

  “Hard-earned.”

  He snorted and pushed her toward the doors as they opened again.

  “How do you know she’s down here?” Kara asked.

  “Guessing,” Jason said. They followed the sound of music to the restaurant and pushed the doors open to find the room only barely lit. Tables had been pushed against walls and bodies crushed into the open space. They let the doors fall closed and stood for a moment, letting their eyes adjust to the dark.

  “There,” Kara said. She grabbed Jason’s wrist and pulled him through the crowd to where Samantha had cleared a large open space around her. Stepping into it, Jason knew Sam had been right. It was like he hit a force field. Kara paused, but he pushed forward. Samantha moved with the music, eyes closed, none of the signs of bliss she usually had evident. Her brow was wrinkled in focus.

  “What are you doing?” Jason asked. Her eyes flew open.

  “What?”

  He looked over his shoulder, where Kara still appeared to be confused.

  “Sam says you’re doing something dumb,” he said. She looked confused, turning her head to look at the wide circle around her. She frowned.

  “Huh.”

  He raised his eyebrows and shook his head, waiting. She chewed her lip, then put her arm out in front of her, looking at her sleeve. When she looked up at him again, her face was still.

  “I didn’t know I could do that,” she said.

  “What… exactly?”

  “I was being alone.” The corners of her mouth turned up. “Emphatically.”

  Kara finally made it through the spell - Jason felt the power of it siphoning away - and grabbed Samantha’s shoulder.

  “Sammycat, I have got to try on that skirt.”

  Samantha looked down at it.

  “It was made specifically for me, but you’re welcome to it,” she said. Kara grabbed one of the sections of heavy leather and lifted it. Jason grunted, trying to step in the way.

  “How do you keep it from flashing everyone?” Kara asked.

  “The webbing,” Samantha said, sticking her leg through the slit so that the leather fell away and revealed a section of criss-crossed elastics.