Soulmates
10
Thought Police
Jaime and Keira
«WHAT HAPPENED back there anyway?» Keira asked as they walked to her door. They had reached for each other’s hand, but withdrew before they touched.
«I don’t know… Can we leave this conversation for later? I’m really drained… and a little overwhelmed,» Jaime responded.
«Yeah. I get it. Maybe we could get together tomorrow and just go for a walk?»
«I think Dad will agree to letting me bike over in the afternoon,» Jaime grinned. «We should exchange videos. You know we’ll have to explain.» They sent each other the videos from the night.
«Okay… Until we figure out what happened, maybe we’d better not touch or… kiss goodnight.»
«Right. Okay. Nite.» Jaime hadn’t considered the possibility of a goodnight kiss. That would be awesome. But delayed.
«Nite… boyfriend.»
Keira and Her Parents
Of course, neither Jaime’s nor Keira’s night was over. Both knew they needed to talk to their parents about what happened. Otherwise, when a policeman showed up to have them testify, it would be completely unexpected.
“How was your date?” June asked Keira as soon as she walked in the door. Both parents were uncharacteristically up late on this Saturday night, pretending to watch TV and doing a good job of eating popcorn while they waited for their daughter.
“Um… Mostly good,” Keira ventured. “We had… or I should say we encountered some problems after the movie.”
“What did he try?” John growled. “I just knew he’d pull something.”
“Please, Dad. It wasn’t about Jaime. Let me describe the whole thing. When the movie ended and we headed toward the exit…” Keira had to go through the entire story, just as Jaime was doing with his father.
Jaime and David
“So, we want to get together tomorrow afternoon to talk about it and to kind of end our date properly, without the police or anything,” Jaime signed to his father.
“I can imagine,” David said. “I’ll call John and June to verify it’s okay. You are okay, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Dad. We were scared and shaken, but neither of us got hurt.” Jaime shared the videos that he and Keira had exchanged. The parents were all terrified for them.
“Okay. You might text Keira and make sure it’s all right for me to call her parents at this hour.”
Jaime sent a text to Keira and received a quick response that her parents were waiting for the call. Jaime nodded at his father and headed to his bedroom.
Jaime and Keira
After a flurry of late-night text messages between Jaime and Keira, mostly detailing how much fun they had and hoped to repeat the best parts of the evening again soon, they finally said their goodnights and went to bed.
He could feel Keira still thinking of him. It wasn’t as strong a connection as when they were close and communicating, and it was nowhere near the connection they’d shared for a minute while holding hands. That had been unreal!
Jaime cut his thoughts off with a picture of a polar bear holding a big floppy fish in its mouth. He’d promised not to try to connect with Keira when they were alone and feeling… horny. He just couldn’t call another girl to mind at the moment. He wondered if polar bears actually fished through the ice like cartoons showed. He was pretty sure grizzly bears feasted on the fish they caught from rivers and streams. Probably black bears, too, but he couldn’t think of having ever seen an image of a black bear with a fish.
He puzzled over the conundrum until he faded off to sleep.
«Did you sleep okay last night?» Keira asked when he bicycled up to her house.
He didn’t go in, but Keira came out and they began a silent walk to the park. Both were wearing winter jackets and risked holding gloved hands. There was a frisson of excitement there, but nothing like what had overwhelmed them the night before.
«Thanks to the polar bear,» Jaime chuckled. «All night, though, I had images from the theater flashing through my dreams. Some were just the movie or people going ‘Oh, shit!’ when we all got surprised. Others were a little disturbing.»
«Like the kidnapper?»
«Yeah, of course. But there were at least fifty people thinking about things other than the movie. I remember flashes from all of them. Why did we zero in on the kidnapper?»
«Maybe we should back up a little and figure out what happened.»
«We were startled and reached for each other’s hand, I guess,» Jaime said.
They both looked down at their joined hands.
«I don’t feel the same thing now,» she said.
«Maybe it has to be skin to skin.»
«Let’s wait to try that. Why did we reach for each other’s hand? And why did we start holding hands as soon as we left the house this afternoon?»
«It seemed… sort of natural.»
«Yeah. Natural. Like it was perfectly normal for a boyfriend and girlfriend to hold hands, right?»
«I guess that’s… Red? Are you my girlfriend?»
«If I wasn’t before, I sure am now. Zip, I’ve never felt anything like that ever before. It was like…»
«Yeah. Like I was in you.»
«More. Like I was you.»
«That’s it. Like there wasn’t any part of me that wasn’t open to you nor any part of you I couldn’t feel. It was too much to comprehend all at once.» Jaime was excited and then stopped suddenly in embarrassment. He grabbed for the polar bear.
«We both had… thoughts. Since we both had them, we shouldn’t need to be… embarrassed by them.»
«Aren’t you ever embarrassed by your own thoughts, even knowing no one else can hear them?» Jaime asked. «A lot of times I catch a stray thought from someone and they are immediately embarrassed by their own thought and try to shut it down.»
«Well, yeah. But… I don’t feel like I should be embarrassed because you heard my thoughts. It might take a little work to get to that point, though.»
«Yeah. Red, are all girls afraid all the time? I mean, that girl Heidi was just as scared of us and the policeman as she was of the kidnapper. And… I can see you are… cautious.»
«I’m probably not as fearful as most girls because I can hear the thoughts of people around me. But yeah. We… It’s kind of programmed into us, or taught to us repeatedly from the time we’re babies. All men are trying to touch us, look at us, see through a gap in our blouse, or up our skirt. All men notice a nipple pop if we don’t have enough layers of clothing between their eyes and us. I know… you do it, too.»
«I’ll never look at a girl like that again!»
«I think it’s as ingrained in boys as it is in girls. And that being said, I appreciate the sentiment. It tells me a lot about the kind of guy you are. For most girls, it wouldn’t make a difference if you looked or didn’t look. They can’t read your mind. Girls will assume you look—even when your eyes dart away as we look at you. You know the popular meme: Girls would rather meet a bear in the woods than a strange man.»
«Preferably one with a floppy fish in its mouth,» Jaime sighed. The breath was audible as well as internal.
«The thing is, even though I think most boys reflexively look at girls that way, the majority of them are decent enough to shift their thoughts away and would never act on those thoughts. Unfortunately, head deaf girls don’t know which ones are a danger and which are just… guys.»
«I still don’t understand, though,» Jaime said. «When we touched, I felt us… expand, I think is the word. I could hear a hundred times more than I usually hear when I’m completely unfiltered. And it wasn’t just crowd noise, like with everyone talking out-loud at once. I could hear each of them individually.»
«Wow! That was more than I got,» Keira said. «I mean, I heard more, but I could only filter out a few distinct thoughts. As soon as I heard the kidnapper, everything else just went away.»
«The girl, Heidi, has a very unhappy homelife. Her mother often sends her out to the movies while she entertains at home. She was afraid if the police called her mother, she’d be punished. She was thinking of running away. That was before the movie ended. After the attack, she was thinking maybe she’d have been better off if he took her.»
«Wow! You got that all in the minute we were holding hands?»
«More. There was a guy hoping his date would really appreciate him going to a chick flick with her. He figured it should at least be worth a blowjob. Another guy was worried he wouldn’t get out in time to meet his dealer. And a guy was thinking that if anyone saw him at the movie alone, he’d get outed as gay and he would kill himself.»
«I guess I’m glad you heard more guys than girls,» Keira said.
«I think most of the girls were in the ‘Oh, shit! No!’ crowd.»
«I was at first,» Keira said. «I don’t know if it was because of the movie or because of the crowd reaction, or because I was holding your hand.»
«You didn’t want to hold my hand?»
«I did want to hold your hand! I do want to. It just surprised me that it happened all at once and then everybody else flooded in.»
Jaime looked at their gloved hands, still clenching each other firmly.
«We could…» Jaime’s thoughts outpaced his conversation as he imagined the tingle of contact when they held hands.
«Yeah. We could try again. But we should prepare ourselves. I mean, we’re pretty isolated here in the park with just a few people around, not like all the people in the theater. Still, touching might send us into each other again and we might… It scares me a little, Zip.»
«Me, too,» Jaime said. He led her to a picnic table. «How about if I just lay my hand flat on the table and you put yours on top of it. Neither of us will grip. That way, either of us can pull away if it’s too much.»
«Jaime, you’re really kind. That’s one of the things I like about you. Thank you.»
«I just don’t want to be like all those guys girls are afraid of.»
«You’re succeeding.»
They sat on opposite sides of the picnic table and took their gloves off. Jaime extended his hand palm up across the table. Keira took a deep breath and softly laid her hand on his.
They were both prepared for a rush of sensations, but even that preparation was not enough to stem the feelings of pure joy that flooded them both. They smiled across the table as each opened more to the other. Awareness of other people in the park played around the edges of their senses, but they were completely focused on each other.
«Do you really think I’m that pretty?» Keira said in his mind. Only to Jaime, he was asking the question himself and his answer was «How could I think anything else?»
Both teens blushed and mirrored each other biting their lower lips. Something told them that if they stayed like this for long, they might never want to let go. They slowly withdrew their hands.
«I don’t know what love is,» Jaime said deliberately. «I don’t have a frame of reference. But I know I’ve never felt so happy in my life.»
«Then let’s only use the words we understand,» Keira said. «I joy you.»
«And I joy you.»
They put their gloves back on and held hands all the way back to Keira’s house. They were still filling each other with happiness.
When Jaime saw Keira in school Monday morning, his heart leapt. He knew he was grinning from ear to ear and tried hard to clamp down on his exuberance. Keira was smiling broadly, too.
«It’s okay,» Keira shot to him. «I don’t mind people knowing we’re a couple. Do you?»
«No! We are a couple, aren’t we?»
«Definitely. I hereby declare you my boyfriend.»
She reached out her hand and Jaime prepared himself for the sensation. Keira took his arm, though, and while the thrill of contact was there through his shirt and sweater, the resulting multiplication of talents was muted.
«Nice,» he said.
«I don’t think it’s a good idea to actually touch in school. There’s too many people in range.»
«It could be pretty overwhelming. I like this, though. Sit next to me?»
They found seats next to each other in their first period English lit class and settled in for the lecture. Jaime opened his laptop so he could participate in the class discussion. Then a sharp stab of thought entered his mind.
For every freak, there’s an equal and opposite re-freak. What does she see in him?
For an instant, Jaime thought the boy two rows back and a seat over was actually talking to him, but it was soon obvious he was overhearing the boy’s internal monologue.
I’m so much better than him. But she wouldn’t go out with me. Now she holds his arm in the hallway and sits beside him in class. I could show her what she’s missing.
Jaime glanced at Keira, but she was focused on Ms. Henderson and the exposition of Ulysses. He tried to raise more filters, but not even a floppy fish could block the boy’s angry thoughts. They became more violent and Jaime could see the boy beating him up and raping Keira. The kid imagined himself with a cartoon-sized dick, so large that when he shoved it into his cartoon image of Keira, she bulged outward. Everything he was thinking looked like a badly drawn cartoon. He couldn’t even see a realistic face, but just an image of her pussy and his dick ripping into it.
Jaime was breathing heavily when Ms. Henderson handed out a discussion sheet and asked the class to start making notes on examples of foreshadowing, flashback, symbolism, irony, and characterization. It was like a switch was thrown in the kid’s head and all thoughts of Jaime and Keira vanished.
«See you at lunch?» Keira asked when class was dismissed.
«Too cold to go outside. In the cafeteria?»
«Okay.»
Jaime was still clamped down on his thoughts about the boy in class. They parted for their second period classes and Jaime forced his attention to not getting hit in the head in a game of dodgeball in PE.
“What’s the problem?” Keira asked aloud as she joined Jaime in the cafeteria.
They took a table together as far from others as they could get. They still needed to be careful about who could overhear them. Jaime had learned early on, though, that people often said things with their mouths that they weren’t thinking in their minds. He could do the same with his hands.
“Stupid Ulysses assignment. I don’t get it,” he signed. «Brad Johnson,» he said in his mind.
«They guy who always thinks in cartoons? I’ve put up a permanent filter not to hear anything he thinks. He asked me out once and showed me a sketchbook of manga-style drawings he carries around. I said no. It’s too hard to figure out if what he’s thinking at any given time is an actual thought or if it’s a story he’s thinking of drawing. Poorly.»
«He wanted to beat me up and rape you!» Jaime said, trying to calm down so he wasn’t shouting.
«Take it easy, hon,» Keira said. «We need to be careful about letting thoughts like that affect us. Remember? Not many people are disciplined in their thinking. If we let them in, every stray thought comes out of their heads into ours.»
«It was gross. I wanted to punch him. He couldn’t even call your face to mind. All he could see was a cartoonish image of your… privates… that he could rip up. Then he just quit thinking about anything except the worksheet Ms. Henderson handed out.»
«Well, he certainly couldn’t have any ability to see a realistic image!» Keira laughed. «Really, Jaime. That stuff goes on all the time. But it’s just like Brad in class. The thoughts occupy their minds until something else demands their attention. Then they evaporate. I don’t worry about it unless I hear the same guy repeating things incessantly and not dropping the thought when something else comes up. They’re the dangerous ones.»
«So, that’s been on my mind a lot. How do we tell the difference between someone truly malicious and someone having a vivid fantasy?» Jaime asked. «I mean, there was no doubt in my mind that the kidnapper Saturday was going to kill that girl if he got hold of her. But there was a guy preparing a drug buy a few seats over and that didn’t faze me at all. It’s still illegal.»
«I don’t think we responded to whether it was legal or illegal,» Keira said. «It was evil, pure and simple. That’s the way I interpreted it. But even then, if we hadn’t been connected to each other so… completely, I don’t know if I’d have done anything. I mean, I might have tried to delay her in the restroom or to walk home with her, but that would have just delayed him. It wouldn’t have stopped him like you did.»
«They caught him. Dad checked the news reports this morning and said it was on the police bulletin.»
«Thank God! Still, the point is we knew he was really going to kidnap and kill her. You acted because we absolutely had to stop him. He had actual memories of having done it before.»
«It’s too bad we can’t supply that information to the police,» Jaime sighed.
«I guess. We have to be careful, Jaime. We aren’t the police. We can’t just raid people’s minds and turn them in.»
«Wow! That would be pretty awful. What if we reported a fantasy as having actually happened?»
«You get it. There was a movie once that portrayed some kind of thought police who could get a person arrested for a crime they intended to commit in the future. Of course, it backfired and they accused someone who was innocent,» Keira said.
«Just accusing someone of something could cause them to do it, too,» Jaime said. «I read that somewhere.»
«The bell is about to ring for class,» Keira said. «…Would you like to hold hands for a minute?»
«You know the answer to that,» Jaime grinned.
They quickly glanced around to be sure they couldn’t be observed and to note who they were likely to hear when they touched. Then they reached their hands toward each other under the table. The contact was simultaneously more controlled and more intense than their previous contacts. The blending of their minds took their breath away. Before they could get carried away with the emotions or lose themselves in the thoughts of those near them, the class bell rang and they withdrew.
«Keira, you make me so happy!»
«I joy you, Jaime!»
They hadn’t made a plan, but Keira intended to meet Jaime outside school at the end of the day and possibly stop for ice cream on the way home. But when she exited, she saw Jaime in a close conversation with another girl. She thought she recognized the girl, but Jaime put an arm around her. The blow was almost physical to Keira. She jolted back away from the scene and ran back into the school building as if she forgot something. When she re-emerged ten minutes later, both Jaime and the girl were gone.
Jaime and Cheery
“Zip, you have to help me. I don’t know what to do,” Letitia ‘Cheery’ said when she caught up with Jaime outside of school. They’d been friends since kindergarten and she’d been in an actual couple relationship with Mex since the past spring.
“What’s up?” Jaime signed.
“It’s Juan. He…” Cheery stopped and looked around. Jaime heard what she was thinking before she leaned in and whispered. “He wants to go all the way. I can’t do that!”
“I know Mex will respect you. You just need to tell him you don’t want to,” Jaime signed.
“That’s just it. I do want to. I’m just so scared. I love Juan. The nuns say a girl will never be respected by her husband if she gives in. And I might get pregnant. And the priest says it’s a sin.”
Cheery’s thoughts were flowing in such a confused mass that Jaime put his arm around her shoulders to comfort and calm her down. He began to get a clearer picture of the problem. There were so many mangled bits and pieces it was hard to pin down. He was surprised Mex wasn’t right there beside them, but Mex had football practice before the last game of the season. Otherwise, he followed Cheery around like a lovesick puppy. He’d been thinking about marriage.
Cheery was genuinely afraid, and genuinely in love with Mex. She wanted desperately to make love. But between the restrictions of the church—very important in the Latina’s life—and her fear of getting pregnant and having to raise a child by herself—just as her mother had—Cheery was scared half to death of intimacy.
Jaime could see in her memories, though, that she and Mex had already progressed to stages that would lead to the next step. He really didn’t need the images of Mex’s erect penis just before Cheery put it in her mouth. Or her feelings while Mex sucked on her nipples while he played in her panties. No wonder both were ready to have sex!
“I can talk to Mex,” Jaime said. “But you need to really be up front about your worries and talk to him about them. Without making out at the same time. If you believe the church and think it is sinful and wrong, you have to tell him that and start thinking about marriage. If you are just afraid of pregnancy, there are ways to prevent that. The church doesn’t even frown that heavily on condoms anymore. But you both have to talk it out and respect each other’s feelings.”
“I know, Zip. I know it in my head, but when I see him, I just want to do whatever he wants to make him happy. He’s my forever man.”
In Cheery’s mind, she already had a wedding dress picked out. They were both seventeen, but Jaime knew their parents would agree to a marriage, even if they didn’t wait to graduate first. He had no opinion on that. Whatever made them happy.
“I’ll go around to the team entrance and talk to Mex after practice,” Jaime signed.
“Thanks, Zip. I owe you one.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek, then took off down the street toward her home.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
