Page 8

Asher

Something wasn’t right here. I’d put Calisto’s initial lack of reaction to me down to there being too many things going on, or to him having an overabundance of fear-induced chemicals rampaging through his body. I’d expected everything to click into place once we’d gotten back here and he realized he was safe. When it hadn’t, I’d figured there was no harm in speeding things along a bit. Hence the handshake. But the moment of clarity I’d expected from the touch hadn’t materialized, Calisto as polite and friendly as ever, but without the dawning of realization I’d been counting on.

“Are you okay?” Calisto looked genuinely concerned for my wellbeing.

No, I wasn’t okay. I was extremely confused by things not going the way they were supposed to. Deciding it was time he saw something other than the kitchen, I led Calisto into the living room, both of us taking our mugs of tea with us.

Calisto did the same as he’d done in the kitchen, his expression giving nothing away as he scanned every inch of the room. I seized on the opportunity to study him while his attention was elsewhere. Dark hair cut short to tame the slight wave to it. Brown eyes so dark they were almost black. Neat mustache. Naturally tanned Mediterranean complexion. Thick eyebrows. Hard body.

I’d seen him frequently. In my visions. Photos. And yes, I might have snuck a peek at the PPB’s security cameras a time or two when temptation had gotten the better of me. But seeing him in the flesh was different. Whether it was pheromones or just being in the same space as him, I could feel the connection sparking between us. He, however, seemed immune. Just like in the kitchen, Calisto’s gaze lingered for too long in one spot, making me turn toward the empty corner. “Is he here?” I asked.

Calisto turned with a slight frown. “Is who here? There’s no one here except for you and me.”

I sat on the sofa and patted the seat next to me in invitation. When Calisto took me up on the offer, I twisted round to face him. “I’ve been having visions of you for as long as I can remember.”

“Okay…” The single word was careful, Calisto’s tension transmitted in his fingers tightening ever so slightly around the mug he held.

“Since you were a child. When I was still a child myself. You weren’t alone in most of those visions.”

“No?”

“There was a man there.” I studied his expression, but Calisto was doing an excellent job of not giving anything away.

“What man?”

“I don’t know his name. I can describe him, though.”

“Go on.”

“Dark curly hair. More brown than black. Blue eyes. Slimmer than you. Three earrings in both ears.” With each extra piece of information I gave, Calisto grew stiller until he barely breathed. “I’ve had visions of tonight before. Different snatches of it. In all of those visions, he was there. I don’t know who he is or what he is, but I know he’s been in your life for years and that you talk to him when no one else is around. I know no one else can see him. And twice tonight, you’ve focused on nothing and then quickly averted your gaze when you saw me looking. If he was at the PPB building, then it’s not much of a stretch to assume he accompanied us back here.”

Calisto’s gaze strayed to a specific part of the room. I took a chance, hoping it would be the key to getting him to open up. “What’s he saying?”

The moment stretched while he debated whether to lie or tell the truth. If everything I’d heard about Calisto was true, lying wouldn’t come easily to him. “He’s saying that it’s always nice to feature in a handsome man’s dreams.”

“Visions,” I corrected. “Not dreams.” I turned my head to where Calisto had focused, almost surprised when there was nothing to see. Like I’d expected Calisto’s acknowledgment of him being present to make him visible. “Who is he?”

“Baxter Stuart Canmore. He likes me to use all three of his names. I think it makes him feel important.” Calisto held up his hand. “Don’t! I’m talking about you, not to you.” To me, he said. “He’s pleased someone knows of his existence, even if they can’t see him. He’s getting rather giddy about it.” There was a slight pause. “Okay. Fine. Not giddy. I used the wrong word. Sue me.”

There was a sharper edge to Calisto’s voice when he spoke to Baxter, something akin to two siblings bickering. “He died almost twenty years ago,” he said. “Yes… murdered. I was trying to be delicate.”

“Who by?”

“He doesn’t know. Not when it happened or since. Which is all kinds of screwed up when you think about it.” When I frowned, Calisto elaborated. “When he was alive, he was psychic.” He laughed. “You don’t know how good it is to talk to somebody about him. It’s liberating after spending years keeping him a secret.”

“You could have told someone. John, maybe. Or Griffin.”

“Maybe.” A rosy flush crept into Calisto’s tanned cheeks. “I told people about him when I was a kid and they thought I was losing it. Faced with seeing a child psychologist, I claimed I’d made him up. It’s hard to let go of something like that.”

I nodded. “It must have been tough.”

Calisto tipped his head to one side and studied me. “You’re not what I expected from what John told me about you.”

“John’s not my biggest fan,” I admitted. “We’ve never really seen eye to eye. He struggles to understand people who don’t express every single thought going through their heads.”

Calisto laughed, the throaty sound sending a frisson of pleasure through me. “Oh yeah, that’s definitely John alright. I wish I could be more like him. You know, braver… not care as much what people think.”

“You don’t need to be anything except what you are.”

It wasn’t just that I’d said the words I should have held back. It was the way I’d said them: soft and imbued with far too much feeling for someone I’d just met. The furrow on Calisto’s brow said he agreed. As did the slight shift of his bodyweight that told me he was fighting the instinct to put more space between us.

“You don’t feel it, do you?” I blurted out. What was I doing? I would have been better off leaving things well alone tonight. Maybe after a good night’s sleep, Calisto would feel differently. He was tired and overwrought, and there were probably chemical signals misfiring that cloaked our connection. I should give him time and space. And there was also the fact that we weren’t alone, that we were being watched by a long dead psychic. I dreaded to think what running commentary he was giving.

“Feel what?” Calisto asked carefully.

Nothing. That’s all I needed to say. One word. Two syllables. Easy. It would smooth over the crack I’d just opened up. That’s what I did daily. Smoothed things over. Met things head on, but with the least amount of conflict possible. Scheduling issues with Cade’s timetable. Angry clients. Pissed off employees. John and his constant needling. It was what I was good at. So why was it so hard when faced with Calisto’s earnest stare? “Us.”

“Pardon?”

I took a deep breath before throwing caution to the wind. “I’m your other half… your fated mate, if you want to use that term. The Bellamy to your John. The Ben to your Griffin.” The more I said, the more Calisto’s dark brows drew together. “I feel it so I don’t understand why you can’t. I knew it would be like this. Why would I have visions about you for years if you weren’t of utmost importance to me? Why would I know I had to save you from O’Reilly’s clutches?” I reached out and curled my fingers around Calisto’s knee, the warmth leaching through his trousers to my palm making me break out in goosebumps. “Maybe it doesn’t always work the same way. I made assumptions about it being instantaneous, but I guess it’s not an exact science, that there might be deviations between certain pairs. What do you think?”

Calisto dropped his gaze to stare at the fingers curled around his knee. For all the emotion on his face, my hand may as well have been a dead spider. He gave a slight shake of his head. “I… um…”

I retracted my hand. “I’m coming on too strong. I apologize.”

“No!” Calisto caught himself. “I don’t know… maybe.” He raised his gaze to mine. “If you truly believe we were meant to be…” The wave of his hand said he was struggling for words.

“Together?” I suggested.

“Yeah, together. Then it makes it even more crazy that you’ve done everything in your power to avoid me. What am I meant to make of that?”

I nodded. I’d known this conversation would happen one day, which made having such a weak answer for it it even more disappointing. “The visions aren’t always clear. They show me different parts of an event. Sometimes with slight variations.” I waited for Calisto’s nod to show he was following. “But one thing that was always the same whenever I saw snatches of tonight was it being our first meeting, so I stuck to that, because changing the future can be dangerous. Have you heard of the butterfly effect?”

Calisto frowned. “The film with Ashton Kutcher? I think it’s been on TV a few times, but I’ve never watched it.”

I laughed. “Not the film, no. Although the film is based on the same premise, hence its name. The butterfly effect is associated with work on tornados carried out by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. Lorenz showed how something as inconsequential as a distant butterfly flapping its wings weeks earlier can influence a tornado’s path. He proved it changes things and can give a situation a completely different outcome. In the film, Ashton Kutcher’s character kept going back in time to make things better, but every slight change he made only ended up making things worse. The butterfly effect. Change one thing and you risk changing more without meaning to.”

“I’ll have to watch it,” Calisto said.

I shrugged. “Watching the film isn’t necessary. What I’m trying to say is that if all the visions showed me we hadn’t met before tonight, and I’d changed that, there’s no saying what might have happened. Bellamy might not have come back. Or Ben might be dead. Or Cade’s son might not have survived. I had to keep things running on the same trajectory, no matter how difficult or frustrating that proved, or how desperate I was to meet you.”

“‘Desperate,’” Calisto parroted with some measure of discomfort in his voice.

“Bad choice of word,” I said. It wasn’t. It was the only word that adequately conveyed the maelstrom of emotion that had raged within me for the past couple of years while I’d known Calisto was close, but hadn’t been able to see him. Sometimes it had taken every iota of willpower I had not to say to hell with it and go downstairs.

John thought I was made of ice. I wasn’t. I’d just been waiting. In suspended animation, if you like. I’d built tonight up into this perfect moment in time where our eyes would meet and the knowledge of what we were to each other would pass between us. Even knowing Calisto didn’t feel the same, it was all I could do not to shuffle closer, take his face between my hands, and convince him with a kiss. Except there was no love on his face. There wasn’t even lust. Just confusion he was doing his best to mask.

“This is…” Calisto ground to a halt, seemingly at a loss for words.

I eased myself off the sofa and stood. If what he was about to say was a rejection, I didn’t want to hear it. “It’s been a long and difficult night. You should get some sleep.”

Calisto frowned. “I was on call tonight. What if someone dies? You know necromancy only works within a certain timescale.”

“Then they die,” I said bluntly. “And it will be like old times before the inception of the PPB. People will just have to deal with it.”

The comment went down like a lead balloon with Calisto, his natural empathy toward others coming to the fore. The common consensus was that Griffin was too harsh with clients, and that Calisto was too soft. As much as it pained me to admit it, it was John who had the best balance out of the three. Although I was very much going on hearsay, my work not taking me out in the field. Before Calisto could comment, I gestured toward the door. “If you’d like to follow, I’ll show you where you can sleep.”

“Alone?” Calisto asked as he followed me.

“Yes… alone.” I tried not to take offense at his words, but it was a hard fought battle. “I have four spare bedrooms.” I led him up the stairs and to the room at the end of the corridor. “Whether or not you felt the connection between us, the plan was always for you to stay in this room tonight. You should find everything you need there. If I’ve missed anything, give me a shout and I’ll do my best to rectify whatever it is.”

Calisto stepped inside as I held the door open, scanning the room just like he’d done with the kitchen and the living room. After a few seconds, he turned to face me. “I’m grateful for your intervention tonight. I don’t want you thinking I’m not. The other stuff is a bit…”

“I understand. We can talk more tomorrow.”

“Yeah, tomorrow,” Calisto agreed.

Awkwardness hung, thick and cloying, between us. An awkwardness that I’d never expected to experience with Calisto. I was almost grateful when a loud ringtone pierced the silence. “Cade,” I offered, before bringing the phone to my ear. By the time Cade started speaking, Calisto had already closed the door to leave me standing on the opposite side of it. I rubbed at the phantom pain in my chest while I did my best to concentrate on what Cade was saying.