Page 43 of Defended By Love

“A little while later.” It’s a prompt, a question, and a declaration of disbelief all rolled into one.

Grant winces. “This next part is a bit weird.”

“We aren’t in weird territory yet?”

“Is it too late to go back to lying?” Grant asks with a nervous chuckle. “On second thought, who needs trust? How about I just show you how I can fly again instead?” He gives me his suave superhero look with a raised eyebrow. “Let me give you a ride, baby,” he says in what I recognize as his Garnet Defender voice.

I shoot him a scathing look, even though I’m holding back a smile. What a dork.

“Worth a shot,” he mutters. Then he clears his throat. “One day at work, you were in my head. I was going about my cleaning—my hands were busy with one thing, but my mind was consumed with that radiant ray of sunshine on the pier. Even with those ridiculously oversized sunglasses, I could tell you were something special.

“I guess I was thinking so much about you that I wasn’t paying attention to where I was. Without even realizing it, I found myself in the off-limits area of back wing—the place that they say is getting renovated, but everyone knows is where they do some secret testing.”

“And what? You were just able to waltz in there? As the janitor? You have that kind of access?”

“That’s the thing!” Grant exclaims, looking more pumped on this than he should. “I shouldn’t have access to that wing. I never have in the past. I’ve tried my keycard in there before, just to see what would happen. Nothing. That day, though, I just sort of walked in while I was in the middle of a daydream about you.”

He still looks amazed at the luck of it all. Simply serendipity abound. They say you don’t know you’re in a trap until you’re in one. I guess occasionally, you don’t even realize afterwards. You just walk around with a lump of poisoned cheese in your mouth, blessing your lucky stars.”

“What was in there?”

Grant’s face breaks open into a grin. “It was the coolest thing to ever happen to me. The whole room was silver with puffy clear bumps all over the walls. There were probably some gadgets and stuff around. I’m not sure. All I could focus on was the very center of the room. Floor to ceiling, there was a laser cage. Actual purple lasers that hummed and everything. And right in the middle of them was this sphere that just glowed. No, I shouldn’t say glowed. It burned so bright I couldn’t even look directly at it.”

He’s still smiling, even though this sounds like a personal nightmare. Random, glowing objects that are caged in lasers are rarely beneficial for the environment. Granted, I didn’t think they existed outside of cartoons, but I’ll stand by my evaluation. Matte-coloured objects are much more eco-friendly.

“What did you do?”

Personally, I would have left immediately, taken exhaustive notes and filed some paperwork. Grant, I’m learning, is a very different person than I.

“I poked it with my broom.”

Of course he did.

“And?”

Grant closes his eyes and considers my question for a second.

“You ever blown a circuit in your house?” he asks. I nod. “Sort of like that. Full ‘Danger, danger Will Robinson!’”

I don’t bother asking who Will Robinson is. Most likely a coworker. I’ll check the employee roster later.

“After it felt like everything inside my head and body exploded, I blacked out for a bit. When I opened my eyes, I was floating. Just in the middle of the air. I was sort of glowing, like the sphere. For a second it was really scary because I couldn’t figure out how to get down and the energy from the orb felt like it was short-circuiting my brain.”

He’s smiling as he tells me this. Smiling. There is no way I’d be smiling. Between the pain and the paperwork, I don’t think I’d care for the experience at all.

“Anyway, eventually I feel this tug in my chest, so I tug a bit right back at the feeling. Next thing I know, the orb and the lasers and every single piece of furniture in the room goes crashing to one side, along with my body. It took a second, but then I realized that I did that. I gave the feeling another tug and everything zoomed up to the ceiling. So, I just ran out of the room as fast as I could so I wouldn’t have to be the one to clean it up.”

He laughs.

I don’t.

I mull over his story. It’s far-fetched. Beyond far-fetched. It’s so far-fetched, I doubt there’s any cell reception where it is, and that’s taking Hart Link’s new satellite communications systems into account.

Then again, the man can fly.

While I normally wear my skepticism like a security blanket—I’m one of those annoying people who sit through movies going ‘that could never happen’ (I actually had a date leave because I wouldn’t stop saying it)—perhaps I need to extend my radius of believability.

For now, I put glowing sphere in a laser cage under the ‘maybe’ column.

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