Out of Touch by Clara Ward Read Free Book Online

herself be led up the hill.
    At the back door, Sarah wiped her bare feet fastidiously on the mat. In her hurry, she’d run without shoes. Usually she loved the moist, prickly feel of grass on her feet, but this time she’d been too preoccupied to notice. Now she felt the dampness and smooth specks of soil trying to ride her feet into the immaculate house.
                  Striding in ahead of her, Howard didn’t rush for the freezer. Instead, he moved through the sitting area to one of the small mahogany end tables. He pulled out a neatly folded page of newspaper and handed it to Sarah. A glance showed her it was an old story about her car rescue.
                  She didn’t want to deal with this. It was too rapid of a change after her awkwardness with Lisa, her babbling on about Tabitha, rescuing Robert, the strange look from Mei Mei, silence on the hill. She needed time to regroup, not another round of questions. And why was a stranger bringing this up now?
                  Howard waited silently, head tilted a bit, and one eyebrow raised.
                  “What?” asked Sarah.
                  The newspaper floated out of her hands and into his. Sarah stopped mid-breath. She’d given up on finding someone like her. Now all the childish hopes resurfaced, along with all the fear of being discovered or exposed.
                  “I was there to break Rob’s fall if you didn’t,” Howard said. It had been a set up, but she froze instead of running, not knowing where to hide. Would it do any good to deny it?
                  She looked him over again. His warrior posture and concentration from beneath the ladder were gone. He looked vulnerable, but he met her eyes. She could see his shoulder muscles tense beneath his shirt.
                  “Are you really Mei Mei’s nephew?”
                  “Yeah, but they’re not teeks, only teeps.”
                  The words were from books and movies, books and movies she’d wanted to escape into. But she’d given up on saying them or hearing them with real people. Or had she? How could she be what she was and truly expect to never use such words? She took a deep breath. Her hand and thigh braced against the side of a couch. Her voice sounded surprisingly calm in her own ears.
                  “Telepaths? What else exists? Do you know?”
                  “You really can’t hear us? They’re all too paranoid to deal with you now, but I saw how that ladder fell.”
    Sarah gently flew the news clipping back to the end table. Howard smiled like they shared a joke.
    “We thought all teeks were teeps,” he said. “My aunt thought she heard something from your house once. You would have been too young, but was your mother –“
                  Sarah shook her head. The initial shock had left behind a hollow space against her lower ribs. Her mind tangled with every question she’d ever wanted to ask and every thought she’d kept completely secret.
                  “Sit down,” Howard said, touching her arm lightly. “Should I call the others in?”
                  “Are you talking to them now? Can they hear our conversation? Can you hear my thoughts?”
    “Shoot, I never thought I’d talk about this to someone who couldn’t do it.” After nudging her onto a sofa, he plopped down across from her, knees wide, back curved, hands in his hair, completely unlike Lisa who had sat there before. “No we can’t hear your thoughts at all. That’s part of why we thought you were a teep. Very few normal minds are completely silent, maybe one in a hundred. And Aunt Mei Mei thought she’d heard clear telepathy from your house that one time. Then she saw the newspaper article, just after you came by. She thought you were refusing to answer her telepathically –“