Page 10

Joey

I sat in the swing next to Callum as we lazily drifted back and forth, toeing the ground covered in bark beneath us to keep us in motion. As predicted, there was no one around, and since we were in the middle of the park, we would be able to easily see if anyone approached.

There were a couple of bright lamps that lit the park, which helped because the moon had disappeared behind a thick band of clouds on our approach.

“You asked me how I knew about tonight,” Callum began nervously, shifting in his seat to get comfortable.

I nodded silently, my hands clasped on the chains that held the rubber seats to the frame and my eyes on the path that we had taken to get to the park.

“I didn’t.”

I gave him a sharp look, not believing him for a second.

He held up a hand to stop my unspoken argument. “I didn’t, but my boss did.”

My brow furrowed as I tilted my head to the side.

“You know how Mam works? Her powers?”

“Yeah. She can read minds, as long as she’s touching you.”

“And you know mine work the same way, except I have a bit of an add-on, right?”

I nodded again. “You can see the future.”

Callum grimaced a little before he shifted his focus away from me. “Kind of. There are limitations to what I can see.”

“Because you have to be touching the person?”

“Yes and no,” he said, still staring off into the distance. “George, my boss? He has powers, too.”

I frowned at the change in direction, but I didn’t say anything, figuring he’d get to the point eventually. I just needed to be patient.

He looked down and toed at the ground in front of him. “He’s not related to us, so his powers work differently. Where Mam and I can only use our powers via touch, he doesn’t have that limitation. He can see snippets of the future without needing to have physical contact with the item or person.”

I felt myself blink rapidly as I took in that information. “Like a seer?”

“Pretty much.” He tilted his head to the side, still staring at the bark he was shifting around. “The thing with future sight though… It can change based on the choices people make, environmental factors, stuff like that. I don’t know how George sees things, but for me? It’s like watching a TV tuned to static. The more something can change, the fuzzier the static is. The more concrete the future is, the clearer the image.”

“So,” I began, letting my mind process. “What you’re telling me is that George had a vision of Matthew having an allergic reaction? And… what? Sent you there to help?”

Callum nodded. “Something like that.” He lifted his eyes to the sky and let out a long breath. “George has limitations on his power too, just in a different way. He sees things, but often what he sees doesn’t match up to what happens in reality.” He pushed himself off the ground to swing a little more. “People like me get sent on missions to help when his sight is hamstrung.”

I dug my shoe in to stop my movement. “What gives him the right to do that? To act as God?”

He dropped his head to peer at me. “The US government.”

“Oh, come on. Seriously?” I shook my head at what he was saying, dismissing it immediately.

“You can either believe me now or later. It doesn’t matter. George tells me you’ll be getting a visit from a government official before you finish this year at college.” He shrugged. “You’ll be recruited to our team soon enough.”

I felt my teeth clench as I rubbed my palms against my cheeks, my stubble scratching my skin. First Callum tells me he and I are going to get married someday, next he’s telling me I’ll be recruited to the US government? I’m studying business management, not that I really want to anymore. What could the US government possibly want with someone like me? “Why? Why me? Why did your boss send you to save Matthew? Just… why?”

His head bobbled from side to side while he pondered how to answer my questions. “We saved Matthew tonight because he’s a doctor. If we’d let him die tonight, and he would have died if we hadn’t intervened, the cancer research he’s working on would have stalled. It would have taken decades for another doctor to replicate his findings and further the results.” He nodded at me. “Go on, look him up on your phone. His name is Matthew Andrew Carmichael.”

With a frown, I dug my phone out of my pocket and started a search on the name he’d given me, getting him to spell out Matthew’s last name for me.

“He works at the Eckersley’s Institute. You should be able to find a pic of him on their staff bio page.”

I ran the search again with the new information. Sure enough, there on the institute’s website, Matthew stared back at me, a wide smile on his face. I quickly cast my eyes over his short bio and, just like Callum had said, he was in uterine cancer research with a small team of five. There were a couple of lines about advances that they had made over the past decade, along with a plea for more funding so they could further their research.

I had been with Callum the entire time we were with Matthew and his wife. Christine had been the one that had talked, while Matthew had not said a single word.

Of course, Callum could have gleaned all that information from when he’d touched Matthew, but that couldn’t explain how he’d known to be there in the restaurant in the first place or why he’d known something would happen to Matthew.

I let my hands drop into my lap, my phone forgotten. “You knew.”

“No,” Callum said adamantly, shaking his head. “ George knew. I was just the one George sent.”

“Why me?” A sudden sadness filled me at the thought that I’d been a pawn in their game. Callum could have gone there alone. He hadn’t needed me. Unless… “You needed me for my EpiPen.” I turned to face him, beyond hurt at the thought that I’d been used. And by someone I had begun to really like. Frustratingly, I was getting flashbacks to my time with Amelia. “That’s all I was there for, wasn’t it?”

Callum’s eyes widened and he shook his head violently from side to side. “No! I asked you on a date, because I wanted to. I want you, not your medication. You .” He reached over the space that divided us and took my hand in his, pulling both of our swings closer together. “I didn’t know that we’d need an EpiPen tonight. George could only see that Matthew was clawing at his throat. His instructions were quite clear—stop Matthew from choking. That’s all I had been prepared to do.”

“But he wasn’t choking…”

“No. You heard him—the noises he made didn’t sound right for someone who was choking on food. I didn’t know until I had my hands on him that he was having an allergic reaction. That’s when I called for your EpiPen. If I’d known before then, I would have asked you for it when we were rushing to them.”

My twisted-up insides slowly started to unwind and settle. “You said that you needed me.”

He let out a frustrated sigh. “I thought you could help calm Christine while I worked on Matthew. If you hadn’t been there, I was going to get one of the staff to help me.”

Running my fingers through my hair, I thought about what he said. It made a lot of sense, but I still felt uneasy. “Why was I there? If you could have done all of that on your own, why did you ask me on a date tonight? Why risk Matthew’s safety like that? I could have panicked and caused you to lose focus on what you should have been doing. Matthew could have died, because I was there.”

Callum smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t panic. You’re stronger than you know, mo lus na gréine . I ran the idea of asking you along tonight by George, and he fully supported it.”

Shaking my head, I gave Callum some serious side-eye but softened the look with a grin. “One of these days, I’m going to find out what you keep calling me.”

He laughed, throwing his head back in amusement. “One of these days, I just might tell you.”

I smirked, already knowing the answer to the question I was going to ask. “But not today?”

Still facing the sky and laughing, he shook his head. “Nope. Not today.”

Letting out an obnoxiously loud sigh so he would know I wasn’t truly upset with him, I refocused. “Why did George support me being there?”

Callum’s laughter drifted away on the breeze that had started to pick up. He shifted in his seat to cautiously look at me. “The answer to that question lies with things that you said you didn’t want to know about. Have you changed your mind?”

I took a deep breath and looked away from him as I let it out slowly. “I’m beginning to think that it would be in my best interest to know more. Especially if you’re going to keep taking me on dates that end up with someone’s life in the balance.”

His face lit up. “You want to go on more dates with me?” he asked, his voice so full of hope it almost hurt.

“Well, I’d prefer it if people’s lives weren’t in danger, but yes, I would like to go on more dates with you.”

If his face had lit up before, it positively glowed now. His smile could have been seen from space, it was so wide.

“That doesn’t mean that we’re getting married, Callum.” At this point, I felt almost like it was a given, but he’d said we still had free will even with the futures he’d seen. “I’m nineteen. I’m not getting married now. Good God.”

He laughed again, pure joy radiating from his being. “Of course we’re not getting married now . We need to go on lots of dates before we get that far. Lots and lots and lots of dates.”

I chuckled at his unbridled enthusiasm. “Oh my God, Callum, stop! Going on dates does not mean we’re going to get married!”

His smug smile made me laugh even more as he grabbed my hand and kissed the back of it. “Yes, we are, mo lus na gréine . I’ve seen it. No static, full color, high-definition, IMAX quality. I don’t know how we get there, but I know that’s where we end up.”

“Enough, you idiot!” Still laughing, I shook my head at him. “Tell me more about why George supported me being there tonight.”

Callum let his smug smile fade just a tad, but his eyes kept sparkling with amusement. “He’s known about my vision of us for a while now and has focused on you once or twice to see if he can get more clarity on what I’ll be doing in the future. George saw you get approached by a US agent, but there were different outcomes based on our relationship.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

He chewed on his lip nervously, thinking about how to respond. “Let’s just say that your meeting goes better the more you know about what I do for a job.”

I felt my eyebrows rise so far that they nearly met my hairline. “Is that why you’re being so candid with me now?”

He nodded. “Normally, I wouldn’t be telling you much of what I do because of the secrecy of it all. Even if we were married. That’s why your dad doesn’t know everything about what Mam did before she met him.”

“Dad doesn’t know?” I thought back to all the interactions I’d seen him have with Erin. “He knows about her powers.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know what she used those powers for.” He paused and caught my eyes, boring into them to make sure that I fully understood what he was saying. “What I do, Joey? It can be very dangerous. Not just for me, but for my loved ones. You can’t tell anyone what I do for a living. Including your dad.”

“Is that why you don’t want to tell Erin?”

He nodded again. “She’d freak. I’m sure she’ll find out at some point, but I’m not going out of my way to tell her.”

“And you think I’m going to get recruited for this as well?” I was astonished he’d think I’d accept to be a part of it all, that I could be as secretive as he was pointing out. “I’m nobody. Nothing. I don’t understand.”

Callum stood from his swing and moved to crouch in front of me, his palms holding my thighs to stop me from drifting, focusing hard on me with those gorgeous, enormous hazel eyes. “You’re not nothing , Joey. You’re everything . And not just to me. What you did tonight? You helped save a man’s life. You stopped his wife from collapsing into hysterics. That wasn’t me. That was all you .”

His intensity shook me enough to break some tears loose in my eyes. No one had ever been that adamant about anything I’d done, that sure about who I was as a person. I sniffed, trying to stop myself from getting even more emotional than I already was.

He gripped my thighs, his fingers digging through my dark jeans and into my flesh. “George was okay with me asking you on a date tonight, because he wanted to use it as your job interview. And you passed with flying colors, mo lus na gréine . You’ve got a job working with us when you’re ready. You could even start tomorrow if you wanted to.”

His words shocked me and raised even more questions. I opened my mouth to ask them when Callum fell onto his knees between mine and lifted his hands to hold my cheeks.

“I wanted to ask you out on a date tonight, because I want you . Even before the vision I had of us years ago, I was attracted to you. Don’t you understand? I left home when I did…” His face crumpled, eyes crinkling as he fought back his feelings.

Without conscious thought, my hands lifted to mirror his pose, cupping his face and gently wiping my thumbs across the tops of his cheeks in a caring gesture, urging him silently to continue, imploring him to tell me more.

“I stayed away from home as long as I did because I didn’t trust myself around you back then. I felt the beginnings of attraction to you before the vision, but after...” He shook his head, tears finally slipping free. “I tried to fight it during dinner, but it was too hard. I knew I was going to fail, so I left. I wanted so badly to stay and get to know you, but I had to leave, mo lus na gréine . There was no choice. Not until now. Not until you were old enough to choose me like I chose you. Like I will always choose you.”

Feeling my own tears track down my cheeks, I surged forward, my lips meeting his for the first time.

And then I immediately reared back when a deafening crack of lightning boomed above us, flaring the playground with light for half a second before heavy sheets of rain began falling.