Page 48 of By the Pint

“I brought provisions this time!” I said, shouted almost. For once taking Dima by surprise. I shrugged out of my satchel, removed a can of blood, and handed it to the vampire next to me.

“AB positive?” He sounded both impressed and cautious.

“You liked it the other night.” I shot him a wink and removed my own drinks. Two cans of AlaeMart premixed Mai Tai from the mini-bar.

There it was again. The slight pink tinge to Dima’s cheeks. Damn, that blush did funny things to my insides.

“What if you need to attend to your other human needs?” Dima’s gaze brushed over my crotch.

“Huh? Jeez.” Was this man capable of thinking about anything besides masturbation?

“Ha! No, Moonflower, I meant what if you need the bathroom?”

“Oh, right,” I said, composing myself again. “Well, bushes are over there.” But he immediately saw that it was a joke and broke into his own laughter. I wasn’t a bush pee-er. Thesplashback! Hard pass. “If I need a piss, I’ll just nip back inside the hotel. You’ll be okay without me for a couple of minutes, Mosquito.”

His smile had returned. It felt like making your bed in the morning, or that first sip of espresso. Everything as it should be. Calmness and order restored.

“I hope you don’t mind me bringing this.” He floated the quilting hoop a little higher and drifted it back down. “My flatmates would be suspicious if I came home from a quilting retreat, having not done any quilting.”

“There’s no actual quilting retreat, is there?”

He feigned looking guilty. “Uh … No. There is not.” I definitely didn’t let myself think he was cute.

“So, what’s the plan for tonight? More horrific deep dives into Casey’s mortifying past? Because we’re going to run out of awful thoughts soon.”

“We won’t. There are plenty more in there,” the arrogant bastard said. He laughed at that last thought. “But I have an idea. We need to try subterfuge. It’s all well and good putting all your deepest secrets inside a locker, but if it’s the only hiding place in the “room” of your mind”—he did air quotes—“then it’s going to be obvious that’s where they are.”

“Okay,” I replied, not sure I was following.

“When you go into someone’s mind, what do you usually see?”

I thought about it. Pulled back memories of Claus the centaur’s mind, or Gabby’s, or the guys from the gym, or the receptionist at the hotel, or the valet that parked my car. “It’s like a jumble sale, or a hoarder’s house. If they happened to live inside a cathedral.”

“Right? It’s a mess. You often don’t know where to start looking for information. So, you start at the front, where the loudest thoughts are stored. And once you sift through them,you can move onto the stuff buried deeper. But you have to watch out for memory triggers and involuntary reactions because it can shuffle everything else up again.”

I nodded, well used to ‘dodging’ flying thoughts that might derail my true mission — the thing I went in there to uncover — and holding my place while other thoughts swirled and undulated around me.

“But when you go inside my mind, or Killian’s mind, or indeed anyone who’s learnt some degree of thought control, what do you see?”

“Huh!” I said, feeling foolish for not noticing it before. “It’s much more ordered.” The neat freak in me hadassumed they were like me. But on reflection, that didn’t make sense. I’d lived with Killian for thirteen years and on the outside, he was the opposite of neat freak. Killian was a biohazard waiting to happen. He was lucky he was already dead, or his own hygiene standards would have killed him off centuries ago.

And I’d known Dima for only a few weeks, but he was also no neat freak. I’d watched him clean cum off an ancient wall with only a tissue — no anti-bac sanitiser — and act like that had been a job well done. He didn’t have to get up in the middle of the day and scrub it down properly because his brain wouldn’t let him leave it that way. It wasn’t a level of order I’d find acceptable, and yet his brain was calm and tidy.

Dima shuffled the quilt in his lap. “Go inside my mind now. What do you see?”

I stared into his eyes and slipped into his thoughts. “Uh … it’s like a sort of room, a bedroom?” There was no bed, only a coffin, a leather couch, an old-fashioned armoire, a huge chest of drawers, and a row of bookcases. Seemingly no walls or ceiling. And in the middle of the space, Dima. No other people. Usually, minds were crammed with people. Folk they loved, folk they hated, folk they’d only just met, famous folk, fictional folk. Oftenhundreds of varieties of the same person. Often shouting the exact same thing.

“That’s my bedroom at my flat. Well, my furniture at least,” Dima said.

“It’s so neat and empty.”

“Now look around. Can you see where I’ve hidden all my real thoughts?”

In Dima’s mind, I crossed the space over to his shelves and looked at the objects. The projected Dima watched me silently, like an NPC with an emotionless grin. Arbitrary items lined the shelves. Pill boxes, books, old glass bottles, rusty iron keys, but nothing that I ‘felt’ had a connection to Dima.

“Very good,” said the real Dima, as I began opening his drawers, the armoire doors, the lid of his coffin. Nothing seemed out of place.

“There’s nothing here that feels like it doesn’t belong … Wait!”

---