Lost

This flash was my submission to the MCForum’s February 2006 Romantic Stories Event. As always, feedback is love, concrit is how I learn and flames are garbage.

Copyright in this work lies with the author, who can be contacted at the email address above. This story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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“Good God, she knows!” That’s all I remember thinking, silly and Victorian though it sounds. We were sitting cross-legged, facing one another on her bed and she’d said she was going to play me her favourite song. Back then I was too smitten to wish we could just hurry up and have sex already. No, seriously, she could have said “OK, Damien, now I’m going to read the whole phonebook to you,” and as long as she’d flashed me that smile of hers, I would just have grinned goofily and said “whuh” in a fairly agreeable sort of way.

So she leaned over and hit play on the CD. Now I think about it, I could probably have snuck a peek down her top if I’d had the right angle. As it was, her top rode up and I was mesmerised by the sudden appearance of her back. Her skin was flawless, I was convinced she was Galatea, the “one like my ivory maiden” of Pygmalion’s prayer. A Classical education, wine, and a really hot chick do not mix well at all. So the song started playing, Erica closed her eyes, and as an indulgent smile touched my lips at the way she was swaying her pretty head in time with the beat; I started listening to the words.

She couldn’t possibly know. That was what I was trying to believe at that point. My heart and stomach felt like they were trying to swap places. I was nearly in tears over the idea that she might have discovered my secret somehow, the fact about myself I’d been trying to deny ever since I’d first laid eyes on her. Sounds clich�, doesn’t it? I guess even clich�s have some truth in them, because since we met, I can’t remember letting more than about thirty seconds go by without formulating a plan to get into her pants. It was when I found myself reluctant to take a peek inside her head to see just how much control I’d have to exert that I realised why she was special. I didn’t want to make her into what I wanted, I wanted to make myself into what she wanted.

I’d put my slaves' minds back together as best I could, sent them back to their old lives, and now, near as I could figure, one of them had remembered what I was and was trying to ruin me. I’d bet the farm on winning Erica the old-fashioned way, and no, I don’t mean with money, and now she knew. The song wore on. I hoped it would never end. I didn’t want her to open her eyes, didn’t want to see all the accusations in them. I’d vowed to myself she’d never learn what I could do, and now it was out of my hands.

Later, I got the chance to look at the readout on her CD player, and found out that the song was, in fact, three minutes and fifty-six seconds long. To me it felt like a too-long stay on remand, awaiting a trial that was to be neither speedy, nor (thankfully) public. How much did she know? Was my betrayer waiting in the bathroom to testify? By this time I’d changed my mind. Waiting for the inevitable confrontation was worse than facing it. I wanted the song to end so that Erica could ditch me and I could go and get on with throwing myself off a bridge or something.

She opened her eyes, and moved closer to me. I dragged myself back into composure-land as she put her arms round my neck, brought her face close to mine until our noses were touching. I couldn’t breathe. She opened her mouth, joined in with the singer, and locked eyes with me for the last line of the song.

I’d like to be able to say that I couldn’t help myself, but it would be a lie. I was frustrated, angry at her for putting me through that, and angry at myself for being angry at her. It all came out through my talent. I felt the too-familiar sensation of my awareness shaping itself into a bullet of control, darting deep into her innermost self and ballooning out, putting out tendrils to grasp anything and everything that looked interesting. The first thing that struck me, like a cudgel in my gut, was that she hadn’t known at all. It was just her favourite song. Once I had enough control over myself to realise what I’d done, I tried to make the best of it, projected images of warmth, comfort and well-being. I made my image, my avatar in her mind into a cushion, envisioned her lying down on me, warm, safe, relaxed, happy. Warm, safe, relaxed, happy…

Guiltily, I let go. She may not have known before, I thought, but she does now. I looked into her eyes like a Protestant who’s turned up for Judgment Day and discovered the Catholics were right all along, and all she said was “Wow, headrush!”