Chapter 18

Kitty was driving her mom’s car when we pulled up to Dove’s work. I had a plan, and it was to get Kitty and Dove fixed by the end of the night. Kitty’s mind running two ways at once, and Dove’s ground state of absolute insensitivity to fun and attraction were some of the bigger problems I needed to tackle.

Vickie was the biggest. Even if Kitty’s busted mind was worse, and I couldn’t say one way or the other if that was true, Vickie’s doublethinking was my own fuck up. I had to clean up my own mess.

We walked hand in hand, I didn’t even do this with my high school girlfriend, but I could literally see how the act spun up both of Kitty’s minds. I squeezed her thumb. One of the waiters came out to meet us.

“For two?” he asked.

“Is there something in Dove’s section?” I asked.

“I’ll check,” he said, and seeing how Kitty and I were eighteen and nineteen respectively, I don’t think he minded handing us and our limited tipping income onto Dove. We were left near the front door as he rushed up the steps.

“Once we’re fed, I want to take you straight back to my room,” I said.

The restaurant had a half dozen female minds spinning about in addition to Kitty’s two. I judged that by the number of women in the dining room. I was well versed at how inaccurate it was to count via mindsight. Still I felt one fractal of minds spin up and another spin down at that.

“I can’t wait,” Kitty said, smiling her crooked smile. Her bright blue eyes were glowing.

We weren’t dressed for a date. She had managed to comb the blowjob handles I had left out of her hair. Blonde framed her unmade-up face all the way down to frame her breasts under her unzipped parka. Jeans, sneakers, t-shirts, nothing fancy. She rubbed my fingers brightly.

“Just the two of us though, right?” she said, after flicking her eyes up the stairs. “I had enough weirdness with a sibling in the room already.”

The last sentence was said at a whisper and lightning speed.

I looked up as Dove came down. She beamed to see us. Another mind joined the fog as her head came into our line of sight. Her brightly smiling false face looked sad when I could tell there was a joyless unspinning mind behind the facade.

I had done some emergency wiring, but I really needed to take my time and get things fixed.

Could I do it one at a time?

Did I want to?

But I understood Kitty’s hesitation.

“C’mon guys, I got you a romantic little table,” Dove said, waving the menus.

Kitty’s minds jumped and we walked up to the second floor. The smattering of minds from the first floor faded away and the new crop manifested.

Kitty - 2, Dove - 1, guests - 1. For women’s minds that was. There was one big table of six, at which the girl sat, and another table of three, all guys. I felt like I could keep track.

“I’ll grab you drinks,” Dove said, “We have diet coke not diet Pepsi, Kit.”

“Just water then,” Kitty said.

“I’ll have a beer,” I said.

“Oh, a beer?” she gestured to the signs over the bar, three dozen on tap. “Care to be more specific.”

“Something good?” I said, frowning. I flicked my eyes at Kitty. I was ordering a beer, I realized a second later, to show Kitty I was adult and capable. I felt I should bolster that dynamic before I went into her brain and soldered the collapsed Jenga tower back together.

I was not good at metaphors.

Dove was about to open her mouth and start listing. I just went with the Nova Scotia staple. “Keith’s.”

“Sure,” she said. “Twelve ounce? Sixteen? Pitcher?”

“Sixteen,” I said.

“I’ll be right back,” Dove said brightly and turned to go. I checked out her ass. I looked back at Kitty. Dammit, I wish I had clocked her minds, when Dove turned the corner, in behind the bar, she disappeared from my sight for a moment.

Though her zero was easy to spot.

Kitty was pouting at me. A four, a five, and a seven. I didn’t know which was which, just that the four and seven weren’t Kitty, they spun the same clockwise spin.

“What?” I asked.

“You shouldn’t check out my sister’s butt when we are on a date.”

“Yours is protected by the chair,” I said. “It’s harder to see.”

“But–”

“Right,” I said. “Baker girl butts are always worth the look.”

“Nuh uh,” Kitty countered.

I tilted my head waiting.

“Mom’s butt’s terrible,” she said.

“Yeah, but Stephen’s is amazing!” I said.

She snorted, laughing. “OK. I forgive you.”

A five, a five, and a seven. And the zero.

Both fives were hers?

I was looking dead through her glasses as her smile folded up brighter. It was the seven that jumped at that. Up to an eight. Dove placed our glasses in front of us.

“I’ll be back for your orders when you’ve actually opened the menu,” she said. She left again.

One five dropped to a four. I frowned.

“You were supposed to check out her ass!” Kitty said, turning back from her sister who was over at the other table.

“But you just said–”

“And you just convinced me,” she said.

“Gift of the magi,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s a story we had to read in grade six. It was about these two boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, somethings. They wanted to get each other Christmas gifts. Or something gifts. Maybe just gifts.”

“You’re telling a story as well as a sixth grader,” she said, grinning.

“Anyway, the girl has beautiful long hair and the boy has a nice pocketwatch. The girl sells her hair to buy a chain for the pocketwatch, the boy sells his pocketwatch to buy combs for the girl’s hair.”

“So, you listened to me about not checking out other girls and I listened to you about how hot me and my sister are, and neither of us ended up happy,” she said.

“Not unhappy,” I said, I raised my glass and we tapped a cheers. We took a sip.

I’d have to stay on the edge for a long time to fix her. The plan was two girls at a time so they could pay greater attention and stop me if I got too excited. Could I fix Kitty without her sister.

“Do you still like Asian chicks?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Kitty said. She frowned. “Um, what about the redhead?”

“Paula?”

“No, Paula’s roommate of the Indian girl, Eerya? No, Paula’s the redhead! You were right,” she said.

“Ira,” I corrected.

“What?”

“Nevermind,” I said. “Yeah, her. You prefer her?”

“Not really,” Kitty said, “But I kinda like it when you make her do stuff ‘cause you can see it in her eyes that she’s really not sure how to do it. I don’t like feeling like I’m the dumbest girl in the room.”

“Paula’s a dean’s list engineer,” I said. Which wasn’t the right thing to say because both of Kitty’s minds dropped by twos over that. Kitty frowned and looked at me patiently.

“I meant about sex. That girl’s a total nerd.”

“That’s true.” But if it was about being paired with a girl with less than or equal to sexual experience than Kitty, Lynsey or Vickie would be the choice. I figured what Kitty was noticing was Paula’s lack of sexual attraction to women.

“And, April’s not,” Kitty said, rolling over my train of thought.

“Avril.”

“Her too!” Kitty grinned.

“Right, let’s get some food,” I said.

We ate quickly but took some time to do the standard date stuff. Weird stories mostly. I didn’t have a lot. Most of them were me running around with elementary school friends up until I ended up in a different high school and moped around until I had a girlfriend. Kitty’s were lively. She never stuck to anything for very long, quit soccer after she broke the opposing goalie’s nose with the kick that lost her team its match. She quit horseback riding after she had fallen off and elbowed her instructor in the eye socket. She had quit art class, because she sucked at drawing. No wounds there. Or we’d need time for more stories.

It was fun, relaxed, I felt better for doing something normal. A handful of new brains were marching into the restaurant, but I hadn’t felt overwhelmed with Kitty straight across from me, laughing at stupid stories. She took a trip to the washroom; I walked up to the bar to pay.

“I could’ve brought the machine over,” Dove said, handing me the pinpad. I tapped my unopened wallet to the receiver.

“Yeah, I just wanted to touch base,” I said. “You seemed down.”

“Not down, just not up,” she said.

No Kitty in mindshot, and I didn’t care how I affected the four over fifty women currently in the restaurant. I gave Dove a good push start. She had instantly started turning as I touched her mind, even before I pulled the ripcord.

She smiled at me.

“I still got six hours of shift left,” she said to me.

“Do you have your car?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Well, I’ll probably be done with Kitty around then, she’s got your mom’s car if you need a ride home.”

“I’ll text you,” she said. “There’s your date. Need the receipt?”

I shook my head and she tore the strip from the debit machine and crumpled it into the trash. She ripped off a second printing for the register. I squeezed her fingers and smiled. Kitty’s fingers tapped their way up my spine.

“Hey,” I said.

Kitty flashed around the room. Those four older women were checking me out as I left. Kitty frowned.

“You’re not competing with them are you?” I asked, lifting her jacket off the back of her chair for her to put her arms into it.

“I don’t want to have to,” she said.

“Let’s just say, I’ll take my tight, wet, teenage girlfriend over an army of dusty wind tunnels.”

“Girlfriend?” Kitty said, brightly, grabbing and squeezing my hand. The nail of her pinkie stabbed me in the meat just under my thumb and ripped open the skin. “Shit, whoops!”

I smiled, kissed her, “I’ll meet you outside.” I went to the washroom.

I noticed that my comment of dusty wind tunnels had significantly chilled and turned the spins of the minds in the room.

I had Kitty, and seven other girls under twenty-three. I stood by it.

I washed my hand and pressed some paper towel into the cut. I formed my fist around it. I considered pulling my glove on over the makeshift bandage, but I didn’t want to take them out next winter and find out what happens to nine months worth of dried and rotten blood in the padding.

I was still squeezing the paper towel when I held the door for Kitty and we stepped out into the winter. She reached for my hand again, I offered my elbow. She leaned on my shoulder and we headed back to the dorm room.

Paula? I already made headway on her. Maybe that was for the best. One big project and one mostly finished one. I had quite a bit of time, but still not enough, inside the focused state the other day. It couldn’t hurt to do things smarter, not bigger.

Dove, Kitty, and Vickie were gonna be the big ones. Or so I figured.

I made some connections with Paula. I could turn her into a real sex fiend, especially with the other girls. That would be awesome. Paula was the tallest of the girls. Maybe not the strongest. With tiny girls like Vickie and Lynsey, it’d be fun to have some of the taller, stronger girls like Paula and Kitty able to throw them around.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“What’s gonna happen when I really get your heart and mind where I want it,” I said.

“Think we’ll be together for a long time?” she asked.

“I can’t see me giving you up,” I said. “Ever.”

I pulled my hoods up to quiet the mind-noise on the street. I think I had a proper focus on Kitty’s two minds. A nine and a three. And that nine came from me claiming to keep her. That had to be her romantic side.

“And Fox is gonna be just like you,” Kitty said. And then she frowned. “Well, his girls are gonna be darker.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t like pale girls. Redheads and blondes? Yeah, no.”

“Well...” I mean Marie was black. That nurse was Filipina. She wasn’t dark dark. I looked at Kitty’s bright smile. There was a lot of distance between Kitty and Tala though. “I guess so.”

“What about you?”

“I like you, and I like Ira, and I like Marie, and I like Paula,” I said, shrugging. “I guess I don’t have a type.”

“Yes you do,” Kitty said, grinning. “I’ve been watching you for months, you know? Plus I had Fox as my awesome undercover spy.”

“OK, so what’s my type?”

“Into you,” she said.

I frowned.

“That’s what everyone wants,” I said.

“Yeah, but you get ramped up when your girls are amped up. Your key-thingy in this pocket?” Kitty stabbed her hand into my jeans under my wallet and phone and dug around until she punched my balls with middle and ring finger knuckles. I fell forward and grabbed the wall of the entryway to the doors of Gerard Hall.