Mind Tamer, page 18
The instant she conjured the memory, she imagined a drawbridge gate of a castle sealing shut before the enemy cavalry could reach it.
I’m willing to bet Dan still remembers your underpants, Kyros taunted with a smirk.
Lyssa groaned. She was doomed to be an open book to her lover, enemy extra-sentients, and sundry.
“Not bad for a first attempt, but a bit weak and too slow. Try again.” Kyros bounced an eyebrow at her. “You consider me your lover?”
“All evidence points in that direction.” She was still heated with a flush of embarrassment.
“I’ll take it, for now.” He tossed her the ball and stepped behind the line so she could serve.
At first, Lyssa focused on keeping her head clear of any strategy at all, remembering she’d caught Kyros off guard when reacting on instinct. A few bruises later, Lyssa had finally scored two points to his seven, but she still got caught in his traps. She found herself left when she should’ve dived right, and at the back wall when she needed to rush the front, and vice versa. Kyros was herding her, and there was nothing she could do about it. Her temper flared, threatening to blow again.
She remembered being the brainy geek in high school, shielding her essays from prying eyes like a dog with its bone. Whether it was she who unwittingly cheated or classmates trying to steal her work, she hated it. It made her livid, and suddenly she felt the same way about Kyros stealing her strategies. Channeling her angst from every lousy high school calculus exam, she returned the next few shots with powerful hits and sharp angles that sent Kyros to the back of the court.
Mimicking the first time he pulled his super-show-off stunt on her, she rushed the front of the court and put her back into a punishing swing that hit the front wall with a deafening pop. Much to her delight, the ball bounced low on the wall and rolled, just as she’d hoped.
“Ha!” she shouted. “Ha! Point. So there, particle boy!” She made air-guitar motions with her racket and twirled in a victory dance, deliberately swaying her hips to taunt him.
Kyros sank into a crouch to rest his arms on his knees, heaving deep breaths and wiping sweat from his brow. “Nice shot, love.”
She was confused by the sympathetic throbbing she felt coming from his head; she sensed him struggle to neutralize it. “What’s wrong, Kyros? Hit your head with your racket again?” she teased but was truthfully a little concerned, since she couldn’t remember him struggling with anything before.
“I’ll be fine, just give me a moment.”
No, he wasn’t fine. She could feel the sharp throbbing at his temples, the splitting ache pounding at the back of his skull.
“Tell me the truth. What happened?”
He didn’t answer for what seemed like several minutes, and she observed, tense, as he wrestled the pain into remission. You are rather effective when you put your mind to it, Lyssa. That’s all. He probably didn’t answer out loud because his teeth were clenched in a grimace of pain.
She gasped and rushed over to him. “I did this to you? How?”
He draped an arm over her shoulders while he breathed deeply with his eyes closed, repairing his mind. His weight threatened to buckle her knees; she adjusted her balance and leaned into him. He dropped his head onto her shoulder and hissed a breath through his teeth. No, really, this is good. With some practice you ought to be Fort Knox, with fangs.
“I’m so sorry!” She nearly panicked, cradling his head in her hands, as though she could do anything to help.
He winced. Stop shouting, please.
She waited, holding him, keeping his balance when he swayed. The pain at the back of his head finally quit, but the nerves behind his eyes rang with a shrill ache she felt in her own head. Why wasn’t he okay yet? I was angry, but I didn’t mean to hurt you.
The pain blossomed for a moment then attenuated to a pinpoint. Good, he was overcoming it.
“You not only completely shut your mind, but you pushed back, and hard. Anyone who tries to pry into your head will get what they deserve,” he said, his voice muffled in her shoulder. “I know I will behave myself from now on.”
So, she had succeeded. Well…cool.
He sighed and rose from his crouch, shaking his limbs as though he could shake off the pain as easily. He lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe blood from his nose.
Her heart stalled. She stared, afraid he might—
“I’m all right, Lyssa. Incidentally, what was it that worked for you? Other than having your dreadful temper provoked?”
She showed him her high school memories of guarding against cheaters, how it had pretty much developed into a paranoid complex. It was so ingrained in her, it had functioned automatically as a defense.
He chuckled and rubbed his temples. “You are truly one of a kind.” He pecked a kiss at the corner of her mouth. “And you call me a nerd.” There was such affection behind his words, it would’ve seemed natural for him to tack on some sort of endearment. She was waiting for it, wanting it…
He ducked his head and put his lips to her ear. “I already know I love you, Lyssa. Do you want to hear me say it?” She held her breath, then sank against him as a big hint she wanted to be held. He got it—banded his arms across her back and squeezed. Almost too hard, a pleasant excess that satisfied the part of her feeling overwhelmed.
“Yeah. Say it,” she mumbled back.
I love you.
Without thinking it through, she confessed, I don’t know what to do about it, but I think I love you too.
Chapter Fifteen
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.
— Albert Einstein, 1879–1955
Two days, twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds…thirty-nine…forty…
No. She was not going to watch the second hand on the clock.
Fifty-eight, fifty-nine…there. Another twenty-four hours, three full days since—
Absurd, pining over a boy like a starstruck teenager. Like an addict in withdrawal, more like, but that didn’t bear scrutiny.
After she’d pushed Kyros against the wall and kissed him senseless, they’d played two more matches until they were both exhausted. Kyros had been full of racquetball-inspired innuendo, and she laughed like a drunk, then kissed him again, until the next shift on night patrol walked in on them.
It was easy to walk in rhythm with Kyros, their breaths and heartbeats instinctively synchronized. He kept her hand in his, and they were comfortable in silence while their tired minds remained half-open to each other, exchanging miscellaneous thoughts.
He spared her from having to ask him to stay; he came inside her room without a word. She didn’t want to whine, but her head still felt weird and fragile, like a hangover. If she was going to relapse, she wanted Kyros there.
The sight of him stalking out of the bathroom to answer his phone, dripping wet with a towel around his waist, was so distracting she nearly missed the gist of his conversation. He did a lot of cursing in Greek and spoke in low, serious tones about taking action and requesting reports from people she didn’t know. Holding the phone to his ear with a shoulder, he moved his fingers lightning-fast over a strange space-age-looking gadget that beeped a lot. He was back in the shower before she had a chance to ask about it, and when he came out again wearing only a pair of gym pants hung low on his hips, she didn’t have room in her brain for anything else.
“It’s late, and we have work to do tomorrow,” he’d said, rubbing the back of her shoulder in deep circles, precisely the way she liked it. His hand warm and strong, the lazy patterns he traced on her skin lulled her into a pleasant stupor.
He’d stretched out beside her on the bed and stayed silent a long while, combing his fingers through her hair so slowly it tickled. Then he slid his fist down the strands and tugged gently on the ends, soothing her nerves and making her eyelids heavy. Days later, recalling it still made her back tingle. She would give anything—except an Amati, perhaps—to have him here, doing that with her hair again.
Cat lay dozing in her lap, apparently having decided Lyssa wasn’t all bad. The faint gurgling-chainsaw noise was the animal’s pitiful breathing. Lyssa scratched behind its ears. “So, it’s just you and me, Cat. What do you say, chess or spin-the-bottle?”
It winked open its eye then went back to sleep. Lyssa contemplated practicing violin again, but her hands were already sore from her morning scale regimen.
Mitch had at least called to say good-bye before leaving for his Orff conference earlier that day, and their short conversation was awkward. Honestly…Lyssa couldn’t wait for Kyros to call. Her stomach lining had a guilt-sized hole in it that wouldn’t go away until she had The Talk with Mitch. That didn’t stop her from checking her phone every five minutes.
Cat startled awake with a hiss. An explosion of fur, and it dashed off Lyssa’s lap to leap onto the kitchen windowsill. It sat still as a statue, staring out the window.
“Get off, Cat.” Lyssa pulled herself up out of the sofa. “That’s just not sanitary.” She lifted the scrawny animal and set it on the ground. It darted into the bedroom, where it climbed the bed and watched out the other south-facing window in the apartment. Its intense kitty stare was disconcerting, and the utter silence made the nerves on her arms prickle.
She went to the front door to look out, wondering what might be going on below in the street. Something bumped the edge of the door as she tried to pull it open, and it took two tries before she looked down to see that the resistance came from Cat, stubbornly positioned between the door and Lyssa’s foot. It looked up with baleful yellow eyes and let out the ugliest rowr imaginable. When Lyssa stood nonplussed, Cat meowed again, drawing out a grouchy sounding r.
Lyssa tried to nudge Cat out of the way, and it dug its claws into her leg. She jumped back and yelped. “Ow! You mean thing.”
Cat rose on its hind legs, actually pushing on the door with its front paws. Another rusty meow, and Lyssa gave in. She closed the door back into the jamb. Cat stared intently, looking up at the door. Lyssa turned the deadbolt. Apparently satisfied, Cat sauntered away with a crooked gait.
Unaccountably subdued, Lyssa decided not to practice and read a travel magazine instead, trying to shake the creeped-out feeling. And plus, she’d just taken orders from an ugly cat.
The next day, Lyssa still hadn’t heard from Kyros. She went to her Wednesday Form and Analysis class alone and surprised everyone by remaining relatively silent; most chalked it up to her not having Mitch there to spring off of. She wondered what had kept Kyros away the past few days. Even though it was nearly ten o’clock at night when she got out of class, she decided to stop by his office to see if he was in.
She’d curled her hair in loose retro pinup-style waves and wore her fake glasses. Combined with her hip-hugging, bias-cut skirt and sling-back heeled mules, she was rocking her sexy librarian look, as well as she could for being a “7.” She knew she had the right idea when she passed the university basketball team’s point guard, who did a double take and thought, Jessica Rabbit!
When she knocked on Kyros’s office door, she heard his delicious late-night-radio bass voice, followed by other less magical voices, coming from the conference room a few doors down. Lyssa tried his office doorknob and met resistance, then after a faint click that buzzed under her palm, the doorknob turned. Either Kyros knew she was there and had just let her in, or she’d not turned the knob all the way the first time. Figuring it as good as permission to make herself at home, she flipped a switch that lit a lamp by the desk and shut the door behind her. Since Kyros didn’t have the romantic thoughtfulness to at least brush her mind with a greeting, Lyssa took some small revenge and snooped through his desk while she waited for him to finish his meeting.
He was a slob. She couldn’t help organizing his supplies into compartments, arranging them first by graduated size then front to back in rank of usefulness. She finally slammed the drawer shut, exasperated with her OCD self, determined to let well enough alone.
In the next drawer she found a collection of notebooks. She browsed through the topmost one and found a bizarre series of sketches, formulae, and page after page of Greek writing. Which I can understand! She made a silly, delighted squeaking sound as she translated a passage and recognized his notes on the soundwaves lecture he’d delivered on campus not long ago.
She turned the book sideways to study an elaborate multi-planed diagram, which he’d helpfully labeled as a model for integrating dimensions and uniting the factions of M-theory. Whatever that is… She assumed by the three accompanying exclamation points it would be a huge concept among science geeks.
Below he’d attempted several complicated equations, which had been crossed out angrily, judging by the deep gouges his pencil left in the paper. He’d scrawled next to those in English, Expand constraints of relativity? Or could quantum equations justify? Bose-Einstein condensate superconducting, in reverse acceleration agrees with electromagnetism, but contradicts the space/time continuum??? Might as well have been Greek.
He made energetic arrows from the text to the diagram, then underlined in tall block letters, Applications in nanotech? Cold fusion? In the margin was a recent date, seemingly random doodles, perhaps made while he talked on the phone, and then underlined: Cambridge. Present @ Cavendish, Littlewood says May? Collaborate with Bell? Lyssa assumed he meant the famous forward-thinking Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, which proved that the people on his speed dial were far more impressive than hers.
On the next page, Kyros seemed frustrated. Lyssa recognized Einstein’s theory of relativity, E=mc2, then he doodled around the word, chaos. He berated himself after another round of equations he obviously decided were lousy, You are not a philosopher! The dimensions of the universe already exist in harmony, find the truth. Think Newton—it will be obvious. Lyssa smiled at his comical sketch of himself reclined against an apple tree in parody of Isaac Newton, but instead of an apple falling, a black hole opened above his head and sucked him in, Looney Tunes style.
Next Lyssa found notes intended for his classes, and she indulged the naughty impulse to play a prank on him. She erased a dozen or so characters from his formulae and substituted a peace sign, music notes, a Batman symbol, some racy text messaging acronyms, and she knew Kyros would appreciate the little Pac-Man eating the second half of an important-looking equation. It would teach him a lesson about writing anything special in pencil.
Satisfied and feeling smug, she flipped through the back of the notebook then gasped. A portrait. In soft pencil strokes he’d sketched her head and neck, turned three-fourths toward a light source. Her eyes looked to the side, narrowed and locked in a steely gaze, a mysterious expression. The shadowing and texture of her skin made her cheeks appear to be blushing, and her hair was captured mid-motion in a dramatic fan, as though she’d just turned her head. Kyros had drawn her more flatteringly than was accurate, and he had poured a wealth of emotion into it.
“Do you like it?”
Lyssa dropped the book and banged her knee on the desk as she jumped in surprise. Not only had Kyros entered the office without her noticing, but he’d already shut the door and was stalking her, wearing a predatory expression that made her gulp. He wasn’t angry—at least she didn’t think so. She felt relief, until he starting flashing lascivious images in her mind, heating her from head to toe and leaving her short of breath. Oh mercy. The inside of her thigh burned from his implanted impression of him rubbing his hand from her knee slowly upward—
Kyros! Stop it!
He settled for making slow, tingling trails down her spine until he was close enough to lean across the desk and kiss her chastely on the temple, but then he didn’t move his lips away. He nuzzled her face and hummed in his throat.
She mustered her remaining shred of dignity. “Well, if I would’ve known declaring my undying devotion would earn me three days of silence, I would’ve tried it weeks ago, when I was trying to get rid of you.”
Kyros chuckled, teasing her jaw with his breath. “On the contrary, I must confess it is less than inspiring that after I confessed fervent, eternal adoration for you, it takes precisely three days, three hours, and twenty-four minutes for you to come to me.”
“Come to you?”
“I’m being watched. I could no sooner broadcast a mental signal than call you on the phone. I was just about to fetch you.”
“Fetch me?”
“Lyssa, are you a parrot?” he teased, then leaned back and sat on the desk.
“Sometimes you talk like Rhett Butler,” she defended, then tried to make sense of what he’d said. “So, the situation is worse than you expected. What’s going on?” She remembered the mysterious phone conversation that agitated him. Oh, she remembered all right, because he’d been wet and wearing only a towel…
Focus, love.
If she didn’t know better, she’d think he colored a little.
He cleared his throat. “I need you to make a choice. You said you wanted to be a part of this, but it appears a confrontation will happen sooner rather than later. We won’t have time for the training you need.”
“And the choice?”
“If you still want in, I can’t let you live by yourself, and you must agree to let me protect you. Otherwise I will relocate you and notify you when the threat has passed. Sorry, but there’s no other way at this point. It’s too dangerous.”
She hoped he didn’t elaborate, because she didn’t want to know what Merodach had done this time to frighten Kyros. She’d already seen enough. “I said I’m in, so I’m in.”
“That’s my girl.”
She almost missed his slight sigh and the way he blinked slowly. Had he slumped a bit? “What was that for?”
He rolled his shoulders and pulled one corner of his mouth down. “Just relieved. Because I’m not confident I could’ve hidden you, had you chosen it. Not well enough to bet your life on it.”
