Chapter 28: Counsel

Jaime and Keira and Rose

“I WONDERED IF I was ever going to get a chance to meet you, Jaime. Welcome,” Dr. Rose said on Tuesday when the teens went to meet with her. “Tell me what the problem is.”

“We can’t talk about this without asking you to suspend disbelief and just go with Jaime and me being able to talk in our heads to each other. I recognize that it sounds insane, but I know you know it’s true,” Keira said.

“I’ll suspend disbelief for the time being,” Rose said.

“We also know that you talked to Trayce Lombard,” Keira said. “And then she left us.”

“She left you? Okay. Obviously, I can’t discuss what Trayce and I talked about, but tell me about what happened.”

“Dr. Rose,” Jaime signed with two taps of the inside of his wrist followed by his fingers crossed and circling beneath his nose. They were established signs for doctor and rose. “We talked to Trayce on Christmas night.” Keira interpreted, though she thought her aunt probably knew exactly what he was saying.

“So, you met with her?”

“No,” Jaime continued signing. “We talked in our heads. We’ve never met her face-to-face. She was excited for us to meet in the mall on Friday at noon. We were all there. Keira and I were crossing the mall and Trayce told us she was just getting out of her car in the farthest corner of the parking lot.”

“We were all crazy excited,” Keira said. “We’d only ever talked in our heads before. But as we were all heading to meet, she suddenly screamed at us. She said, ‘Stop! I won’t go. Go away. Go away.’ And then she went completely silent on us. Like she just vanished.”

“And you both heard this ... in your heads,” Rose said.

The teens nodded.

“You haven’t heard anything else from her since?”

“Not a word,” Keira confirmed.

“Hmm. You’ve posed an interesting problem. A person you know only as a voice in your head suddenly stopped being a voice in your head just when you thought you were going to meet her. Am I right?”

“Yes, but Aunt Rose, we know her! We’ve talked a lot. Yes, in our heads. We’ve been intimate. She’s really a wonderful person and it just doesn’t seem right that she’d cut us off like that,” Keira said. Tears were leaking from her eyes and Jaime took her hand. The teens combined, but could not hear a single thought from Rose.

“Okay. Now I want you to suspend your disbelief for a moment,” Rose said. “Perhaps Trayce was just a voice the two of you hallucinated together. Perhaps your own anxiety over the meeting caused you to cut her off before you could be disappointed in the outcome of the meeting.”

“If we suspended our disbelief that much,” Jaime signed, “we’d have to question whether Keira and I know each other and even if you are in this room with us. I understand it is hard for the head deaf to comprehend what it is like to hear other people’s thoughts. But I have always been this way—from birth. I’d only once heard another person deliberately answer me until I met Keira. That was seconds before my mother died. Then she went silent like Trayce did. Two girls and an old man are the only people I’ve ever met who could do this. I can’t stand the thought of losing one of them.”

“You have always been able to read the thoughts of others? What am I thinking?” Rose asked.

“Keira warned me you were well-shielded. So well, in fact, that we suspect you can hear others, too,” Jaime signed and Keira interpreted. Then he reached over to take Keira’s hand and she opened fully to him. Before she could respond, Jaime reached out and touched Rose’s hand as well.

«Please help us! You know we can communicate like this, » Jaime said.

Rose snatched her hand back, but it was obvious she’d heard Jamie’s demand.

“You don’t know the depth of what you are playing with,” Rose said severely. “You should go home, make love to each other, and close yourself off to the rest of the world. Don’t disclose your suspicions about your talents to anyone. Whether it is true or not, it is dangerous. I think we need to close this session. We can talk again next week.”

The dismissal was so firm and so final that Jaime and Keira stood and left the office.

Jaime and Keira

«I never thought Aunt Rose would tell me to go have sex with my boyfriend!» Keira laughed in her mind.

«I think she was just telling us to distract ourselves. She knows something!» Jaime said.

«Does that mean you don’t want to make love to me?»

«You think I’m crazy? Of course I want to make love to you.»

«Damn! I promised my parents I’d be home tonight and go to their friends’ house with them, » Keira moaned.

«I think tomorrow night would work as well, » Jaime thought. «Maybe better. I know Dad plans to spend New Year’s Eve with Olivia.»

«New Year’s Eve! What a perfect way to end the old year and start the new. I’ll come to your house and we can celebrate all night long!»

«Keira, I love you and the images you are sending me are making my pants uncomfortably tight.»

«I feel it. I might be ... slippery the whole time between now and then.»

«I love you! I don’t think there will be a moment I’m not in touch with you between now and then.»

«Just, no orgasms between now and then. Especially when I’m visiting my parents’ friends.»

«Agreed.»

Rose

“Kenton! What have you done?” Rose barked into the voicemail of her one-time friend and lover. “I warned you to stay away from them. I warned you! Now I’m coming for you. I have a lot more credibility in the community than you do. I’ll destroy your reputation. The State Board will kill your license. I warned you, Kenton. I warned you!”

Rose disconnected and sifted through her old contacts. She had a tattered business card she didn’t know why she’d kept. He might not even have the same phone number after twenty years. She’d bet his address was the same, though.

And she knew the best way to get through to the dirty old man. She went home to change clothes and apply a little makeup. Even for a head talker, Angus had simple tastes. She looked at herself in a mirror and then took her bra off. Simple tastes.

Jaime and Keira

«I’m ready, » Keira said when she picked Jaime up Wednesday afternoon. «You are all I wanted in the first place and I want you more now than ever. Please say you’ll make love to me tonight.»

«You know I’m ready, » Jaime responded. «I told Dad I’d invited you to spend the night.»

«How’d he take that?»

«More chaos in his head than you can imagine. For a while I thought he was just going to stay home. The thought of spending the night with Olivia won. He just said to be safe and not to rush things, » Jaime said.

«About the way my parents took me telling them I was planning to spend New Year’s Eve with you. Mom asked if I thought I’d be home by one. I said, ‘Maybe by one Thursday afternoon.’ She almost swallowed her tongue biting back forbidding me to go. I think Dad saying to be careful and safe and to call if I needed anything was what settled her down.»

«My heart is going a million beats a minute!»

«I can feel it. This is it, Jaime. Make love to me tonight.»

«I will make love with you. I don’t think there is any other possibility, » he said. «We need to pick up a few things to eat, assuming we have an appetite for anything but each other.»

«I thought we could pick up something ready made at Whole Foods.»

«Good idea.»

They went to the grocery store and tried to select something simple. They ended up just grabbing a frozen pizza and some chips.

Rose and Angus

“I knew I’d find you here,” Rose said when she spotted Angus at the tip rail at Sassy’s. “Still just a dirty old man, aren’t you?”

“If it isn’t one of my favorite fantasies,” Angus said turning to Rose. She spun around to let him get a full look at her. “Ass good ass, I remember.”

Rose sat in the chair next to Angus and he tapped the tip rail

“Two dollars a song if you’re sitting here,” he said.

Rose reached in her bag and pulled out a five. She tossed it over the rail. The girl dancing was having a good time displaying herself to the half dozen men gathered to watch her.

“I need to talk to you, Angus.”

“After Thursday’s set is over. We’ll go to the patio.”

Thursday had one more number during which she lost her bottoms and danced around the floor completely naked, making sure Rose got as good a view as Angus did.

“She your main squeeze now?” Rose asked as they pushed their chairs away at the end of the song and Thursday collected her tips.

“My friend. Sometimes a partner when I’m investigating. We don’t fool around, so there’s still room for you and me to have fun if you haven’t joined the dark side.” They went outside to the patio where heat lamps warmed an area around the fire pit. “Did Schwartz send you after me?”

“What makes you suspicious of that?”

“Little run-in I had with him a couple of weeks ago. I warned him to stay away from a boy and his girlfriend.”

“I warned him of the same thing,” Rose said. “I don’t think he listened very well.”

“We’ve been keeping an eye on the kids. Haven’t seen him around since I warned him off. What’s happened?”

“I think he picked up their girlfriend.”

“They said there was a third. I staked out the community college and never saw a sign of her,” Angus said.

“She was supposed to meet them at the mall Friday and suddenly went dark on them.”

“Damn! I thought they were acting strange. Went into the mall and raced to the bookstore. They were searching all over, then took off.”

“They thought she blew them off. Her signal suddenly went blank. You know what that means,” Rose said as she accepted the joint Angus lit and passed to her.

“Some variety of Faraday cage. That damn bastard. I don’t think he ever caught on to me being able to hear him. Unless you told him,” Angus said, reaching over to put a hand on Rose’s bare leg. Fortunately, the heat lamps and gas fireplace on the patio kept a limited area warm, but Angus’s hand on her leg heated Rose even more. She’d always had a soft spot for Angus. If she admitted it, she’d call it a soft wet spot.

“I cut myself off from Kenton when you and I discovered what he was trying to do. Until I started threatening him a week ago, I hadn’t really thought of him at all. Then Trayce, the third wheel, came in for counseling and mentioned she’d already seen him. Red flags all over.”

“I’m glad you’re keeping the shields up. I let mine down a little and those other two jumped right in,” Angus said.