“Right,” he sighed.
She rounded her desk and put her hand on his back, comforting him at the same time she guided him toward the door. “Get some rest. Be prepared for Holly to come back into town soon, and for her to want to have a long talk with you.” She opened the door for him and blinked in the bright light from the hallway. “Be prepared for her to be angry.”
11
Elijah woke up sweltering. Beside him in the hotel bed, Holly drowned in dark dreams of zombies with gray clothes and gray faces, bony and gaunt, chained to a ballet barre, crouching in endless pliés. The details of her dream were so quirky, he wanted to laugh. But he couldn’t laugh with such pervasive sorrow and depression driving her imagination. He tried to go back to sleep. His swirling thoughts, her dark dreams, and the heat of the room threatened to smother him.
Carefully he rolled off the bed, watching her to make sure her eyelids hadn’t fluttered open, then checked the thermostat on the wall. It was set at a comfortable temperature, and he didn’t want to freeze her. The discomfort was all his. He snagged his wallet and the ice bucket and quietly left the room.
The bright sunlight in the hallway surprised him. It was midday.
He didn’t mean to read the minds of other hotel guests as he passed their rooms. Their minds reached out to his. Here was a rodeo queen trying to rest up before the parade, but worrying about her excitable horse out in the town stables. Here was an overweight man struggling into a gorilla costume that had fit perfectly last year. Here was a happy family of three road-tripping through the mountains. They’d had a big brunch, then returned to the hotel for the small child’s nap. When he woke, they would find a good spot to watch the parade.
The child’s dreams were happy, of the child himself and angels and kittens leaping from cloud to cloud, chasing a birthday cupcake that zipped along just out of their reach, but then—the child caught it! And it magically divided into just enough cupcakes for everyone. The child had learned the story of five loaves and two fishes in church. The child and the kittens and angels giggled and ate. The cupcakes were delicious, vanilla with white icing. Elijah’s mouth watered, and the pure sugar rushed through his blood. The child considered dividing the cupcake again so that everyone could have two cupcakes instead of one. He thought he could get away with it since his mom was not in this dream. Elijah agreed it was worth a try. Finally Elijah trudged on down the hall to retrieve his ice. On his way back, he paused next to this door again to share a few more seconds of a child’s fantasy.
At his own door he slipped his wallet from his back pocket, then put both arms around the ice bucket while he fumbled to draw out the room key card—and nearly dropped the bucket as a wave of emotion and desire washed over him.
Holly was dreaming of him.
Holly was dreaming of making love with him, and—
Crunch. Elijah realized he was squeezing the ice bucket with both arms. He blinked, backing away from the door.
But no, he needed to go forward, toward the door, inside the room. To Holly.
He paused again with his key card in the slot. He couldn’t really read minds. He only thought he could read minds because he was crazy. He shouldn’t burst into the room and give Holly the rudest possible awakening by touching her when she didn’t want to be touched, just because he’d thought he sensed her dream about him while he stood outside the door. That was how crazy people got accused of sexual battery and ended up in the state pen rather than the mental institution.
But if he woke her gently, and she seemed receptive, fair was fair.
He opened the door, illuminating the dark room with a wedge of light from the hallway.
A hotel notepad, a pen, a bottle of lotion, a glass of water—every object that had sat on the bedside table—circled slowly in the air above her head.
Elijah backed into the hall and slammed the door. In the craziest depths of his crazy evening that caused him to be medicated when he was fourteen, he’d never suffered a hallucination like this: objects tumbling in midair, glinting realistically in the light as if his insanity were the most carefully crafted Pixar cartoon.
He took a deep breath and collected himself, returning to the normalcy of the bright hotel hallway. He would get his Mentafixol that afternoon. The visions would go away. In the meantime, he had to quit freaking out before somebody got wise and carted him off. He steeled himself and opened the door.
Holly sat up in bed, the pad and pen and bottle of lotion and empty glass in her lap, blinking water out of her eyes.
She laughed nervously. “Was I snoring? Did you throw water on me?”
He backed against the door to close it, then gave her the sort of excuse he kept giving himself to explain away his own power. “No, you must have knocked your glass off the bedside table.” His voice sounded hollow, as if he didn’t quite believe it. In the bathroom he made them each a glass of ice water and grabbed a hand towel off the rack. He stopped at the edge of the bed and handed the towel to her. “Here.”
She wrinkled her brow at the towel and took it slowly, as if he’d offered her something apropos of nothing, like a combination wrench or a pneumatic nailer. Finally she wiped her face with it. He waited until she was dry(er), then handed her the fresh glass.
She sipped the cold water. He could feel it in his throat. He was cooler already. He eased onto the bed again and drank from his own glass, the whole thing, down to the ice. He could see himself through her eyes. She watched his throat move as he swallowed.
He slid the glass of ice across his brow. “When you first got mental adolescent dysfunction,” he said, “before you started taking Mentafixol, what were your symptoms? Did you think you had magical power?”
She nodded. Her curls bounced. “That’s one of the most common symptoms. In my case, I thought I could move stuff with my mind.”
Elijah shook the dregs of his glass into his mouth, swallowed. “Do you feel like you have this power now?”
“No. I haven’t been off Mentafixol long enough. Probably in the next few hours, though. I feel it coming on. I have this urge to nudge things, even though right now I’m still sane enough to know I can’t.”
Elijah wasn’t so sure she couldn’t. He remembered the gun in his jeans, and the way his foot had seemed to hit an invisible wall preventing him from connecting with the door of the candy store that morning.
She took a few swallows of her own ice water. “How about you? Do you feel like you can levitate things?”
“No, I feel like I can read minds.”
Her heart sped up as her suspicions bloomed. “Do you feel like that now?”
“Yes.”
“Can you read my mind?”
He laughed shortly. “Yes.”
“What am I thinking?” In her imagination she slid her arms around him and pressed her lips to his.
He said sharply, “Don’t think that unless you’re going to put your money where your . . .”
She gaped at him.
“. . . mouth is,” he finished weakly.
She was horrified that he could see into her mind. And not exactly turned off.
But of course this was all his imagination. He could feel himself blushing. “Holly, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. I haven’t gotten enough sleep.”
“Well.” Trying to gloss over it, she glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “The parade won’t start for another three hours. Lie back down, if you can dodge the wet spots.”
He was embarrassed at her unintentional double entendre, and he could feel she was embarrassed, but how could he really feel this? It was enough to know that they both looked down and avoided meeting each other’s eyes in the flickering light of the TV as he sank onto the bed beside her. Facing her would seem like he assumed too much after his comment about her mouth, so he flipped onto his other side.
She wasn’t touching him, but he felt her warmth.
And thought her thoughts.
That she wanted him.
That she was not thinking straight.
And then he felt her hands in his hair. At first she only ran her fingers along the ends of the outermost strands, testing. He probably couldn’t have felt this physically. He knew she was doing it only because in his mind he could see her seeing it in the sunlight filtering weakly around the edges of the curtains. He felt more pressure as she plunged her fingers deeper into his hair, letting the waves slide between her carefully polished long nails, marveling at the way some strands blended into the dark while others glinted in the dimmest light.
When he didn’t shy from her touch, soon she was massaging his scalp, running the nails of both hands through it and gently scratching. He let his head fall back into her hands in tacit approval of her touch.
Her thoughts of kissing him were gone. Now she thought of his hair, the way it glinted in the light, like tiny grains of sand in every color on the shores of Lake Mead, which she’d visited often with her parents when she was a child on languid Mondays, her parents’ one day off from the casino. She thought of water, and sunshine, and a comfortable sleep.
“What the hell!” Holly cried.
Elijah shook the nightmares out of his head and sat up on his elbows in bed, casting about in his mind for what had prompted Holly to sit bolt upright and curse. He didn’t need to read her mind to figure this out. Some horrible creature howled in the street outside the hotel, joined by another howl and another. After a minute they fell into roughly the same two-part chord. Bagpipes.
“The parade!” Holly scrambled from the sheets and made a long-legged leap off the bed, landing at the window and tearing back the curtains. She leaned over, forearms on the windowsill, and watched the commotion in the street. “You’re missing it,” she called.
He was not. He saw it all through her eyes. A line of bagpipers in kilts stretched across the street and led the parade. Next came a line of people in gorilla suits. Holly had never seen that many people in gorilla suits in one place, not even in Vegas. Then came big pickup trucks hauling flatbed trailers. People in shorts and T-shirts sat on the trailers and waved. Holly assumed the people would wear costumes and would get around to decorating the trailers before St. Patrick’s Day, and then the trailers would be called floats. The horses brought up the rear: rodeo horses dashing about, Tennessee walking horses stomping a strange gait, Native American horses decked out in beaded harnesses, all producing copious amounts of poo. Elijah didn’t need to look out the window to see this. Mind reading could make a guy lazy.
She looked over her shoulder at him, curls cascading down her bare arm. Her attention shifted from the parade to him. Because she’d been so tired before, she hadn’t even attempted to take advantage of the fact they were sharing a king bed. Only now was she realizing she’d just spent the last few hours in bed with Elijah Brown. He’d been a gentleman. She wished he’d been less of one. Tangled up in the covers, his hair a riot, dark circles under his eyes, he’d never looked sexier.
She asked, voice husky, “Are you coming?”
He rolled out of bed and crossed the room to her. She turned back to the window, but she held her breath, anticipating his touch.
Past her glossy brown hair, the parade marched on, a colorful blur. Elijah focused on her smooth bare back. He touched her sleep-warmed skin with his fingers.
An unseen hand grasped his hand. He flinched, but the pressure was unrelenting. The invisible force moved his hand up her back, toward her shoulders. Her mind told him she wanted to be kneaded there.
He did what she asked. Under the gentle but steady pressure, he had no choice. He reached forward, placed both hands just below her neck, and circled his thumbs.
She rolled her shoulders, welcoming his touch. And he was bathed in warm and tingling pleasure: the delicious sensation he always got when he used his power, and the additional heady feeling she got using hers. It was all he could do to keep massaging her shoulders and pretending he touched gorgeous girls this way in hotel rooms every day of the week.
“Of all the powers to imagine we have, why these?” she chirped, trying to act as casual as he was acting. “Dr. Gray said I was jealous of my dad—”
“You went to Dr. Gray?” Elijah asked, hands stopping on her back. Of course she did, if they had the same . . . disorder. He was beginning to wonder.
“—and that makes sense, I suppose,” she went on. “But if you have MAD, couldn’t you imagine a better superpower than that? Why can’t I imagine I have the power to eat all the cookies I want without getting fat?”
“You’re really into the sugar high,” Elijah commented. Kneading her back, losing himself in the tingling sensation she was giving him, he inhaled the oleander scent of her hair.
“Oh, no, it’s over,” she exclaimed.
His heart sank, thinking she wanted him to stop touching her. Then he leaned even farther forward to look around her shoulders, and he realized she meant the parade was over. It had reached the end of the street that ran up against the side of the orange mountain, near the candy store. Faintly he heard the participants cheering for themselves as they pumped their fists in the air. The lines of people and trucks and horses curled back on themselves and melted into a disorganized crowd.
She looked over her shoulder at him, sunlight glinting in her dark hair, her eyes dark, her lips curled into the smallest secret smile. “What superpower do you wish you imagined you had?”
“Reading minds,” he said.
“How lucky. You’re satisfied with your delusion.”
“Very.”
Deliberately she kept her eyes focused on his, but she thought about kissing him.
Automatically he raised one hand to his tingling lips.