he spun the combination lock on the outside, locking the gun within, he sighed. I felt him struggle with a heavier feeling that wanted to take over his light.
Shoving it aside, he shook his head, rising to his feet with the handle firmly grasped in his fingers.
No, baby, he sent softly, weaving an apology into the words. ... I’m not.
IT WAS FEBRUARY.
It was a cold, windy, sometimes-rainy and sometimes-blue skies February, and I sat in an Italian restaurant on California street, my mushroom gnocchi with cream sauce growing colder by the minute. I hadn’t even touched it. It just sat there on a plate between my elbows, and now even the smell made my stomach roil with nausea.
I bit my lip, fighting frustration as I stared at the man sitting across from me.
We’d had this conversation before, he and I.
Not these exact words.
More, it was the whole gist of the conversation, which felt a lot too similar to a conversation I’d had with him in Bangkok a few months earlier. He’d refused to take me seriously in that conversation, too. He’d also refused to believe that Black was in danger.
Just like that time in Bangkok, Kiko sat next to him, listening to us argue, her dark eyes probing as they scanned my face.
“––Dex, please,” I said, holding up a hand as I cut him off. “I don’t need to hear all this. I’m not arguing protocol with you. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about the company’s operational protocols. I’m telling you, something is wrong. Something that falls outside of your damned protocol...” Biting my lip to keep from raising my voice more, I deliberately subdued it instead. “Aren’t you intelligence trained? Do you really need to list out protocols to shut me up? Or do you want to listen to what I’m saying and think for yourself?”
Dex frowned, glancing at Kiko, who raised her eyebrows.
The only thing noticeably different––in my mind, at least––between the conversation we were having now and the one we had in Bangkok were the clothes the three of us wore.
Rather than a sundress and sandals, Kiko, a small-bodied but densely-muscled Japanese woman, wore form-fitting black pants and a black T-shirt, the basic uniform of Black’s team. She looked like what she was in that outfit––ex-military.
Dex, the handsome, thirties-ish African-American man sitting next to her on the leather booth, wore a tailored, charcoal-colored suit, presumably because he’d been to see a client earlier that day, or would be seeing one after lunch. He looked significantly less military now than he had when I first met him in Bangkok, but I knew him as another of Black’s vets, and definitely one with an intelligence background, despite my jab.
Like Bangkok, this meeting had been my idea.
Like Bangkok, they’d been stonewalling me at every goddamned turn.
Unlike Bangkok, I found I cared a lot less about my previous “rules” around when to use my psychic ability on other people.
Truthfully, I was struggling more every day with the emotional side of things, and that made this conversation a lot harder. I’d talked to my shrink about it––a sweet, ex-combat vet by the name of Roger who did trauma counseling for people who’d experienced violent ordeals. Nick insisted I go see someone when he finally heard the bare bones of the story around what happened to me in Bangkok.
I hadn’t told Nick details, definitely not about the seer side of things, but he knew what Black’s employees knew––namely the part about me being abducted and held by a mercenary who worked for human traffickers out of Russia.
Nick had been horrified, of course.
Predictably, he’d also blamed Black.
He immediately insisted I go see Roger as well, who did crisis counseling work for the police. And yes, Nick was right to pressure me to see someone professionally, although I fought him on it when he first brought it up.
Roger seemed to think my new hyper-emotionality was a normal side-effect of the trauma,
Tera Lynn Childs, Tracy Deebs