Soulmates
29
Emergency
Rose and Angus
“MY GOD! What was that?” Rose exclaimed sitting up in Angus’s bed. She hadn’t intended to spend the night with him They’d started talking about what they could do to find the missing girl. That led to talking about old times. One thing led to another and they’d had a very nice New Year’s Eve.
“That was a psychic call for help,” Angus said. “Was it the missing girl?”
“Yes. I’m sure of it. She called for Keira and Jaime.”
“Which means those kids got the call loud and clear. Who knows how many other head talkers there are in Portland who heard her? We need to find her. Oh, goddess! The girls will hate me if I get them out of bed at this hour!” he muttered.
“It’s almost noon!”
“You’re right; they probably just got to bed.” Angus pulled Rose down to him and began kissing his way down her body.
“You’re incorrigible, old man.”
“Just because I’m too old to cut the mustard doesn’t mean I can’t lick the pot. It’s New Year’s Day. Let’s start it the way New Years should be started. Then we can start looking for the little lost darling.”
Rose thought they should probably call Jaime and Keira, but just at the moment, she was lost in the sensations Angus was delivering to an area that had been neglected for entirely too long.
Jaime and Keira
«She was here!» Jaime gasped.
«He’s raping her!» Keira yelled, jumping out of bed.
«He’s…»
«Raping her mind. Giving her drugs to expand her ability. Couldn’t you feel the fear?»
«Yes. That other voice. I know that voice. It’s the guy who’s been stalking me.»
«That must be why she shut down when we were supposed to meet. Was she trying to protect us?» Keira asked.
«Faraday cage,» Jaime said. «Like in the X-Men. That has to be it. Like the aluminum foil in my closet and the way it was suddenly so quiet in your aunt’s office and house. He must have rigged his vehicle so it functions like that.»
«Don’t tell me it’s the guy we stopped after the movie!» Keira cried.
«No. It’s the guy who was stalking me. Maybe Angus knows something. I’ll always recognize that guy’s head taste. He’s evil. I just know it,» Jaime said.
«We have to do something!»
Keira and Jaime wrapped each other in a hug, their naked bodies pressed against each other, but no new messages came.
«Where is she?»
«She didn’t seem to know. Trayce? Where are you, honey?»
«I don’t think she can hear us now. Not sure she could hear us when she broke through while we were making love. She just managed to be heard.»
«That’s a little crazy. Why is it she almost always contacts us during sex?» Keira asked.
«Probably because that’s when we are most open. It’s multiplied by our physical contact with each other. Remember what happened when we kissed Emerson Monday?» Jaime asked.
«Oh, God, yes! Do you think she knew what was happening?»
«I’ll bet she has a suspicion. But Trayce has always contacted us from miles away. All our barriers have to be down in order to receive her.»
«And that means we’re broadcasting loudly, too,» Keira said.
«How, though?»
«How do we find her?» Keira asked. «I don’t know.»
«We need to start by going to her house to make sure she isn’t there and just working on a new novel,» Jaime said.
«That would be embarrassing. We could, you know…»
Both snorted at the thought of just tumbling back into bed.
«I mean… we could try,» Keira whispered. «It’s how we always contact our lover. I’m nervous now. More than when we made love the first time last night.»
«It’s not going to work right now anyway. I’m eighteen, but I’m not superman. Sex with you is really intense. My body is depleted and our brains are drained. We were in a dream state when she contacted us. Let’s spend some time brainstorming and investigating other alternatives. We need to recharge. I’m too anxious to do anything intimate right now,» Jaime said.
They agreed. It was only noon, so they both started searching the internet for information on her.
«We should have shared our social pages,» Keira said in frustration.
«It never even occurred to me. You and I didn’t even do that. I mean, we were much more intimate without needing to connect online. You and I can talk to each other anytime, and we can see what other people are doing. If we want to talk, we talk. The socials are really for the head deaf,» Jaime said.
He supplied his friend info to Keira so she could connect their profiles. She proudly added, “In a relationship with Jaime Stackhouse.”
“Who do we know who is really active on the socials and could help us find her?» Keira said. «We need someone we can trust.»
Jaime tried to block a name from his thoughts, but Keira picked up on it immediately.
«Do you think she’d help us?» she asked.
«Probably. She wants to spend more time with us. I mean, she’s tapped into a huge network online. Not just on the usual high school socials, but professionally, as well. I think she’d help, but we would need to be clear that it isn’t about anything else. Just needing her help.»
«We might have to tell her. We could do it just by touching her, I think,» Keira said.
«I’ve never told a head deaf person about my ability.»
«Right. There’s a first time for everything.»
Keira found her cell phone amidst her discarded clothing and dialed Emerson’s number.
“Hello?”
“Emerson, it’s Keira. Happy New Year.”
“Hey! Happy New Year to you. I’d love to get together again before school starts Monday.”
“We would, too.”
“I don’t know what happened Monday, but I’ve had you guys on my mind a lot,” Emerson said.
“I don’t want you to have the wrong impression. We like you a lot, but this is more of a professional call, if you could call it that.”
“Did Jaime make some more improvements on his app?”
“This doesn’t really have to do with that… Would you be available to help us do some searches on social media? We… uh… God! Emerson, this would be a lot easier to talk about in person.”
“Hey, I’m getting the impression you guys are having trouble. Was this like the… big celebration?” Emerson asked.
“Please come over so we can talk. And bring your laptop for searches.”
“You’re serious? I mean, don’t you have all the social accounts and all?”
“Neither of us really use them. We’ve always had other ways of communicating.”
Emerson paused to consider that statement.
“I’ve been getting that impression. I can help. I mean, give me the address. The snow is all slush on the streets right now. Probably freeze tonight,” Emerson said. “You really just want help on the internet?” She sounded so hopeful, Keira squeezed her eyes shut.
“Oh, God! Emerson, if it was something else, we’d tell you right up front. You were really frank with us and we’d owe it to you to be just as clear. We really like you, but this is just about finding our friend. Please?”
“Yeah. Okay. Give me the address. I can get there in about half an hour.”
Jaime and Keira and Emerson
“This is not how we intended to spend the day,” Keira said when Emerson arrived with a shoulder bag of equipment. “As I’m sure you can imagine.”
“This was it, wasn’t it? Congratulations, you two. I hope it was great.”
“Oh yeah. It was. But then we got a message that made us believe Trayce was in trouble.”
“Your girlfriend? Where’s the message?”
Emerson unpacked her computer on the kitchen table where Jaime and Keira were already set up.
“That’s a little hard to explain,” Jaime typed on his computer, activating the text to speech engine.
“You know, I actually believe that’s what your voice would sound like,” Emerson sighed. “So, anyway, what’s the story?”
“Remember the system I wanted to design that allowed people to communicate head-to-head?” Jaime asked.
“You did it! You tested it on me Monday! I felt… thoughts that weren’t my own!”
“It’s not quite like that,” Keira said. “We didn’t know that you would feel anything other than a really nice kiss. We discovered certain people have the natural ability to do that. In fact, Jaime and I have it.”
“Oh, come on. I thought you guys were serious about this.” I can’t believe they’re trying to put this one over on me. What do they think I am? If they want to get naked and all of us screw, I’d believe that. I’m in.
“If they wanted to get naked and all of us screw, I’d believe that. I’m in,” Jaime typed into his computer. This time, the voice was the one Emerson had recorded and tested.
“That’s… it’s the voice I recorded. But I didn’t say that!” Emerson said, pushing back from the table as if to run.
“You thought it,” Jaime typed in his own voice. “It was really near the surface, so it was easy to read. We aren’t trying to put one over on you.”
“Oh, shit! You guys are serious. Give me a minute. I need to get my thoughts in order.”
“Good idea,” Keira said. “We’ll give you tips on how to keep your thoughts from being read.”
“You’re reading them, too?”
Keira nodded. Emerson was near to hyperventilating. They know everything!
“It would have been easier to believe if it was only Jaime. You’re, like, normal. I mean, not that you’re not normal, Jaime, but you’re different. Is the school full of people who talk in their heads?”
“We’re the only ones we’ve found. In fact, Trayce and an old retired detective are the only other people we’ve had any conversations with in our heads,” Jaime typed.
“But you think she’s real.” Emerson was beginning to get her senses back and control what she was thinking about.
“We’re more convinced she’s real than she’s convinced we are. A lot of the time she believes we’re characters in her head that she’s writing a story about,” Keira said.
“But you don’t really know her.”
“We were going to meet last Friday at the mall. But all of a sudden, she cut us off and never showed up. She’d been a little unpredictable about her beliefs and we thought she’d just closed her mind and decided not to meet us. Since then, we’ve decided someone else prevented her from getting there,” Jaime typed.
“Is it possible for a person—like me—to cut off their thoughts from the outside?” Emerson asked.
“Yes, though we try to be polite and not eavesdrop on other people too much. Everybody has random thoughts that they wouldn’t want anyone else to know. We try to respect that. Sometimes people just shout them so loudly, we can’t help but notice.”
“Like me. My thoughts weren’t so random. You guys must think I’m a real slut for all the things I’ve thought about you.” Tears were leaking down Emerson’s face as she hung her head.
Jaime glanced at Keira and reached out to take Emerson’s hand. Keira took the other hand.
«We are not ashamed of you,» Jaime thought to her. «We’re sorry we weren’t able to control our reading of you better. We didn’t know until Monday that we could talk to you like this.»
“It’s like I can hear you,” Emerson said in wonder.
«We promise that anything you think or have thought, we have locked in the back of our minds so we don’t think about it or think about you in that way.»
«You might as well think of me that way. I’ve sure thought of you like that,» Emerson thought.
«Privacy,» Jaime said. «Everyone’s entitled to it.»
«Thank you… Am I really doing this? Am I talking to you in my head and you are actually hearing me? I’m not just imagining a conversation?»
Jaime typed one-handed and the TTS system did the rest.
“It’s really happening. Apparently, we can talk to you when we are touching you. I’ve tried to send you messages in class before, but you didn’t hear them.”
“I’m going to have a million questions about all this, and I’m going to need more examples,” Emerson said, pulling her hands away from Jaime and Keira. “But first, let’s see if we can find your girlfriend,” she said finally. She launched half a dozen social media sites on her laptop at once.
Before she could say anything, Keira pushed a piece of paper over with the vital information about Trayce they had compiled while waiting for Emerson to arrive. Emerson shivered and then started entering the data in her social search engine.
“Okay. Trayce Lombard, age 18, attends Roosevelt High School and Rose Community College. Are you seriously telling me that’s all the info you have on your girlfriend??”
“Well, like concrete info about her, yeah,” Keira said. “She always seems to pop in when we’re… um… you know.”
“I think I’d blush if I could read your thoughts,” Emerson laughed. “You sure are blushing.”
“Keira and I have had to learn to accept each other’s thoughts no matter how embarrassing they might appear,” Jaime typed. “It’s just part of life.”
“I’ll bet,” Emerson mused. I wonder how many times they’ve seen me naked. God! I can’t accuse them of voyeurism—especially with the way I’ve imagined them.
The typing continued as Emerson concentrated on the screen; Keira and Jaime concentrated on not reading her extraneous thoughts by reciting lines from A Streetcar Named Desire.
“Okay,” Emerson announced. “Unlike you, it appears she has at least five social accounts and is pretty active on all of them. Is this her?” She pointed to a profile picture.
“Yeah. Without the cat ears and nose,” Keira said.
“Seriously cute! Wait! If you’ve never met, how do you know what she looks like,” Emerson pounced, thinking she’d caught them in a contradiction.
“She once faced a mirror and… um…” Keira began.
“And let us look at her all over. It was her seeing herself,” Jaime finished on the TTS.
“Oh, fuck! Have you read my thoughts while I was looking in a mirror?” Emerson exclaimed.
Jaime and Keira clamped their mouths and thoughts shut.
“You have! Oh, my God! When?”
“It was an accident,” Jaime typed. “It was a rainy afternoon a month or so ago. I happened to see you in the cafeteria looking out the window, kind of daydreaming. After school, I was lying in my bed for a nap, you know, and all of a sudden you were in my mind—or I was in yours. You were daydreaming about your lovers in France, Dom and Raquel. You stood in front of a mirror and took off your wet shirt. Then I pulled away quickly.”
“Except not right away,” Emerson said. “I remember that. Just as I was daydreaming about Dom, your face occupied my mind. I started to kiss you and then you were gone. The next day, I asked you if you ever had random thoughts about people crossing your mind. I was more embarrassed then than I am now, knowing you’d already seen me naked and just decided against me. Shit, shit, shit.”
They were quiet as Emerson stood up from the table and stretched. Then she turned quickly and kissed Jaime hard. Before he could respond, she pulled away and grabbed Keira to kiss her, too. It was all too fast for concrete images to form in their minds and the kisses were hard, but not intimate as the three-way had been on Monday.
Emerson sat down again and began typing in her search engine.
“You’re accepting this whole thing rather easily,” Keira ventured. “I mean that we can actually talk to each other mind to mind.”
“I’m in a state of suspended disbelief. You know science says you can’t just believe your eyes. You have to document proof. I’ve heard you talking in my head. I’ve felt the magic of your touch. You’ve answered questions I only thought. None of it is proof. Not according to science. It’s experience, not experiments. It has to have independently reproducible results.”
“That’s where science has failed regarding telepathy over the years. Even when some know for a fact it exists,” Keira said.
“Weird, isn’t it? Like, I had fantasies about you two. Maybe I even shared them with you. We were talking without our voices. That was after I saw your design for a thought broadcaster, Jaime. I wondered what it would be like to make love while we were linked together mind to mind.”
“It’s intense,” Keira said.
“Yeah. Well, I never expected to experience it. Like wondering what it would be like to have sex in the weightlessness of outer space. You never expect to actually do it.”
“We didn’t know we could connect like that with someone who wasn’t a head talker,” Jaime typed.
“I sensed something when we kissed. Not this time. But Monday. And I knew it was a glimpse of what someone could have. But I also knew it wasn’t me. I could sense even then that it was all for your girlfriend, Trayce.”
“Have you ever heard someone’s thoughts?” Jaime typed. “Other than when Keira and I touched you?”
“Mmm. Maybe. Once or twice. I just assumed I was hearing things. You know… inner dialogue or inner monologue. That kind of thing.”
“Probably. Possibly. There’s a slight chance you actually do catch snippets, but don’t recognize it and can’t control it,” Jaime typed.
“Well, here’s an address. Trayce was pretty active on all her social media sites—especially the one for writers. But it wasn’t only you she went dark on. She hasn’t posted anything since last Friday morning when she said she was off to meet a couple of characters in her head and not to bother her,” Emerson said.
“So, she disappeared,” Keira said. “But why hasn’t anything been reported? No police reports. No hospital reports. No missing persons report. How can she just disappear with no one looking for her?”
“Unless this is all a figment of your imagination,” Emerson said. “And that would mean you were writing an in-depth backstory that goes through years of social media. There are a few messages from people asking where she is. Some not so kind about what they think she’d do. Hmm. Here’s a dm from her to another person on the writer’s forum. They talk about hearing voices and she says she’s going to see a shrink named Schwartz. That’s a possible place to start.”
“Emerson, you’ve been really helpful. We’ll go to her house first and find out if there is anyone there. Then we’ll hunt down this Dr. Schwartz.”
“I’ll keep monitoring her social sites. Call me if you need a driver for your rescue. I can do that,” Emerson said.
“You’re really willing to do all that?” Jaime typed. Emerson looked hard at him.
You turned me down after seeing me naked. This girl must be something really special. We still have some experiments and testing to do on our comp lab projects. Maybe we can do some other testing, too.
Emerson didn’t say anything and just hoped that Jaime and Keira really could read her thoughts. She shouldered her bag and headed toward the door.
Keira and Jaime glanced at each other, not needing any direct communication. The kind of testing Emerson was interested in was clearly written across her mind. She wanted to know if they could communicate to her while having sex. She was ready to try anytime.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
