I stare at her blankly. “If you could only have one super power, you would choose the one that couldn’t possibly benefit you?”
“It would benefit me,” she argues. “It’s not pleasant to watch loved ones in pain. Plus I would request the top-shelf package that includes the ability to ease emotional pain. Not make it go away completely, people need good and bad experiences to grow and all that, but I could just touch their heart or something and absorb some of the pain and ease their burden.”
It’s not lost on me that her hand is, at present, resting over my heart. She seems to notice too, her gaze dropping to her hand. Looking back up at me with feigned solemnity, she asks, “Is it working? Do I have secret super powers?”
Smiling faintly, I tell her, “Maybe.”
A smug little smile plays around her mouth. “Ha, I knew it.”
All I can think about in this moment is kissing those smiling lips. I shouldn’t, so I rain on her parade instead. “Of course, emotional pain doesn’t actually come from the heart. That’s just a bunch of cutesy bullshit. If you want to ease emotional pain by touching the source, you wanna go with the brain.”
“Stop trying to ruin it,” she tells me.
“I can’t help myself.”
“Whatever. I have superpowers. Maybe you do, too. Here, touch my head and see if you can read my thoughts.”
“I do not need to. You’re not even an open book, you’re a billboard.”
She wrinkles her nose up with displeasure. “I am not a billboard.”
“You are. There may be a few unsolved mysteries tucked away in there, but you can’t hide your feelings to save your life. Literally.”
Mia shrugs. “I don’t need to be mysterious. If you want to know something, just ask. You should consider adopting this policy, at least for me. I have a lot of questions.”
“Well, I enjoy the quiet, so I’m ecstatic that I invited a chatterbox into my bed,” I state.
Snorting indelicately, she says, “Invited. Right.”
Nonetheless, she falls quiet. I release her hand but she leaves it over my heart. She could move away, but she remains curled up in my embrace.
It’s nice.
[SATURDAY]
Much the same as every morning now, I wake up to Mia curled up against me, her arm thrown around my waist. Last night she fell asleep in my arms, but even when she doesn’t she seems to wind up here.
It’s still dark out so I ease over to grab my phone, checking to see what time it is. I still have a half hour before my alarm goes off. I replace my phone on the bedside table, my gaze catching on my untouched gun. I left it out when I came to bed last night—it’s not loaded, obviously, but Mia wouldn’t know that.
As much as I doubt she would even possess the capability of shooting me, you never know what a person will do when they feel cornered. Sometimes people fool you. I wanted to know if she’s a better actress than I give her credit for, if she loathes me but tries to soothe me to save her own hide. Wouldn’t be able to blame her for hating me, of course, but as I told her before, it doesn’t matter how she feels about me. She can fall in line, or else. If she had crept out of bed, keeping an eye on me as she tiptoed around to my bedside table, and grabbed my gun, that would’ve been strike one. If she managed to shakily lift it and point it at me, strike two. And if she could’ve run through the memories of what I’ve done to her—to the world, really, she has no lack of inspiration if she needs to lighten her conscience—and convinced her finger to squeeze the trigger, well, that would have been strike three.
I made sure the gun was empty and the ammunition tucked away so she couldn’t find any, just in case, but even in my imagination she could never manage to shoot me. Maybe she would think to use it as protection to get out of my house, but then where would she go? There’s nowhere this penniless girl can go that I can’t reach her. No, to escape me she would’ve had to shoot me, and I don’t see her pulling the trigger. Holding the gun on me, perhaps, her whole body trembling with terror. Me, I’m not one to fuck around when a woman gets false ideas about what a badass she is. I wouldn’t raise my hands and try to talk her down; I would just step forward and take the gun away from her.
Nothing I haven’t done before, to be honest.
Beth thought she was a badass once. Beth failed every damn test, and I wasn’t even obsessed with testing people back then. I trusted her.