Page 31 of Lion's Share
Ben and I had already planned to meet up that afternoon, so once I was safely home and knew I wouldn’t have to be back at the pet store until Monday morning, I sent him a quick text.
You can come over whenever you’re ready. Got a lot to talk about.
New developments?
Yes.
I really didn’t want to go into it in any more detail, not when we were talking on an unsecured channel. And sure, maybe it was crazy to even be thinking in those terms, but with FBI agents asking pointed questions and my brain suddenly deciding it was time to start reading people’s minds, I thought it best to be as circumspect as possible.
Ben seemed to understand, though, because he responded with a simple,
Be there in five.
There wasn’t much I needed to do to get ready for him to come over — the house was already clean, and we’d both decided to go out tonight — so I found myself pacing around restlessly and telling myself this was all fine, that everyone caught a glimpse into someone else’s thoughts from time to time.
Yeah, right.
But Ben was punctual as always, and as soon as I shut the door behind him, he took one look at my face and immediately folded me into his arms.
That was much better.
I held on to him for a long moment. However, since I knew I couldn’t remain in the shelter of his embrace forever, I reluctantly let go and took a step back.
“What happened?” he asked. His voice was quiet, but the warmth of its timbre still comforted me.
Just having him there made all this so much better.
“Special Agent Morse visited the pet shop,” I responded.
Because we’d both already known that federal agents were roaming around Silver Hollow, asking questions, he didn’t seem too shocked. “How’d it go?”
“Fine,” I said. “She knew about my mother and grandmother’s disappearance, of course, but she didn’t ask any questions that sounded like she knew more than she was letting on. It’s just….”
I let the words trail off, mostly because I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to continue. It wasn’t every day that you confessed to the guy you’d just started seeing that out of nowhere, you’d begun to read people’s minds.
If, of course, that was even what had happened. I supposed I could have imagined the whole thing, sort of like my friend Danae back in high school who wanted to be a writer and always said she could hear her characters arguing in her head.
This hadn’t been at all like that, though. For one thing, I’d never had any desire to be a writer, and second of all, while I had an internal monologue going in my brain most days, it always sounded just like myself.
Whichever voice that had been inside my head, it sure as hell hadn’t been me.
“Something weird happened when Agent Morse was in my shop,” I said, then paused again.
“Weird how?” Ben asked, still in that quiet, gentle tone. He glanced past me to the sofa. “Do you want to sit down?”
Sitting sounded like a great idea, if for no other reason than walking over to the couch and taking a seat would use up a few seconds before I had to confess this new weirdness to the man I was seeing. I went over and sank onto the worn leather cushions, and Ben followed suit immediately afterward.
“I was talking to Agent Morse,” I said. “Nothing important — in fact, I was trying to be as boring as possible so she’d decide she wasn’t going to get anything interesting out of me and would leave me alone. And then….”
Gulping in a breath sounded like a good idea, so that’s what I did.
Ben reached over and took my hand. His fingers were warm and felt wonderful against my icy skin. “And then…?”
It’s okay, I told myself. He already knows about the portal and the unicorn and all the rest of the craziness. What’s a little mind-reading on top of all that?
“And then it was like I could hear Agent Morse thinking, like it was her voice inside my head. She was thinking that she was wasting time talking to me and that everyone in Silver Hollow was clueless about the anomalies. And she also thought of someone called Rosenthal, who thinks the forest is the source of all the glitches that have been going on around here.”
For the longest moment, Ben didn’t say anything. His fingers remained curled around mine, though, and I tried to reassure myself that if he thought I’d suddenly gone crazy, then he would have tried to pull his hand away.
