Chapter 5
“How did you do that?” My voice was slow and even.
Derrick shied his eyes away from mine.
“There is no way that was a magic trick! The wine was all over the table.” I ran my hands around the crisp white table cloth and the now full wine glass feeling for strings, knowing there couldn’t be any. “You didn’t plan on me spilling my wine, so how the hell did you do that?”
He opened his mouth to speak and shut it again.
“Tell me,” I demanded through gritted teeth.
He lowered his voice, stealing glances at the other people in the restaurant. “I’ll tell you, but not here, all right?”
That was it. I tossed my napkin on my barely touched plate and stood up. “Then, take me home. You can tell me on the way. Or don’t. I really don’t care anymore. I just want to leave.”
Derrick made a quick apology to the waiter and followed me outside. The winter evening air stung cold through my wet clothes. I thought of my giant clawfoot bathtub at home. That’s what I needed. A nice hot bath, a lavender bath bomb and a book. It was how I should have spent my Valentine’s evening to begin with.
Once in the car, Derrick turned the heater on high and headed toward my house. I lived ten minutes away, so if he planned to give me an explanation, he better be quick with it. I vowed to myself that if I wasn’t fully satisfied with his story by the time we got there, I’d never speak to the big lug again. I crossed my arms and stared out the window, waiting.
Eight minutes passed in silence.
Finally, Derrick cleared his throat and said, “Uh, so back there… it was my fault.”
I rolled my eyes and glared at the houses going by.
“Not spilling the wine, obviously. You did that. But everything else — the pitching machine malfunction, the golf balls, the water — that was all me.”
I gave a dramatic sigh. “Don’t be ridiculous. You are not responsible for every malfunction in the universe.”
“No, I’m not, just the ones that happen when I’m with you.”
“You soaked us with water on purpose?”
“No. Yes. I mean, not on purpose. They were all accidents, but I did it. With my magic.”
He pulled into my driveway and let the car idle in park. I turned in my seat to face him. He really did look guilty, but it made no sense.
“So, you’re telling me that you set this whole date up as some elaborate joke? A way to pull one over on me?”
“No! Shit. I wanted tonight to go perfect, but when I’m with you… I really like you, okay? When I’m nervous, my control over the magic slips, and weird things happen.”
I eyed him curiously, wondering if he was taking this magic thing a little too seriously. Maybe he had been doing tricks so long that they were going to his head. If that was the case, the guy needed a therapist more than a boyfriend.
“I’m not explaining this right.” And with that, Derrick held out his hand and a coin that had been sitting in the center cup holder lifted up and into his hand. He held it out to me. “Here, take this. Examine it. It’s just a regular quarter, right?”
I took the quarter and felt it in my fingers. “Yes, it appears to be a quarter. Do you have some sort of magnet embedded in it to get it to come to you like that?” I grabbed his hand and yanked back his sleeve, certain I would find something there.
Nothing.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Oliver. There is no trick. No mirrors, no smoke, no strings. I’m telekinetic. I can move objects with my mind. I can manipulate matter, down to the individual molecules.”
“That’s enough! You know, I don’t know whether to be offended that you think I’m so gullible or concerned for your mental welfare. Either way, I’m done with this.” I opened the car door and stomped to the house, cursing under my breath at the frigid air.
“Oliver, I’m serious!” Derrick followed close on my heels. “I can prove it to you.”
My hands shook with anger so badly that I dropped my keys, as I bent to pick them up, Derrick said, “I got it.” And the dead bolt clicked open, seemingly on its own.
“Will you stop doing that?” I yelled, flinging my door open and rushing into the warmth of my living room.
Derrick followed. “Can we talk for a minute? I can explain.”
The damp of my suit stuck to my body, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I ripped the bow tie off and flung it with my jacket over to the sofa, which I missed by a mile and ended up on the floor. Suddenly, the jacket and the tie picked themselves up and hung themselves neatly on the back of a dining room chair. I didn’t even bother trying to figure out how he did that one. I bent to pull off my shoes and socks.
“Please stop ignoring me,” he said, leaning against the door. “Let’s talk.”
I unbuttoned my shirt, only hesitating for a minute before putting my chest on display and deciding I didn’t care. I rolled the shirt into a ball and tossed it toward the dining table. Would have made it, too, except it stopped in mid-air, folded itself, department store perfect, and set itself gently on the table.
I spun to face Derrick. “Will you stop picking up after me!”
“Will you stop being a brat and listen?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and glared. “Fine! I’ll listen if you start telling me the truth.”
Derrick lifted his hand and a pink plastic elephant figurine that my cousin’s child gave me rose off the bookcase and hovered in the air.
“Is there any metal in this object? Anything that might be magnetized?”
“No,” I answered.
“Feel around it. Are there any stings, fishing wires, anything holding it in place?”
I reached out and felt the air around the elephant. Nothing.
“Now, touch it. Is it a mirrored projection? A hologram?”
I touched the elephant, honestly expecting my hand to go through it. But it didn’t. The elephant felt just like it always did. Plastic. I grasped it to snatch it out of the air, but it wouldn’t budge. I pulled and yanked, but it stayed right there, suspended in place. Then, all of a sudden, Derrick sneezed, and the elephant and me went flying to the floor.
“Sorry about that,” he said, holding his hand out to help me up. “Lost my concentration for a sec.”
I stared, first at his outstretched hand and then at him. The expression in his soft blue eyes was sincere. Really freaking sincere. He believed what he was telling me. Could he be telling the truth? Could he be telekenny or whatever that word was? I wasn’t the type to jump to paranormal conclusions when there may be a perfectly sound scientific explanation, but I knew Derrick was telling me the truth. And if he wasn’t lying… well, maybe there was a perfectly logical scientific reason for how he could pull off these tricks, and we haven’t discovered it yet. After all, didn’t the people in old-timey days think the moon was made of cheese?
Grasping Derrick’s outstretched hand, I let him pull me to my feet.
“Okay,” I said, somewhat breathless in my realization. “Tell me more.”
He led me to sit beside him on the sofa. “Remember when we went to the movies?”
“The date when you up and left in the middle, saying you had an emergency.”
He nodded. “Remember what happened right before that?”
“The film malfunctioned, or maybe it was the projector, I don’t know. The screen went black. They turned up the lights, and one of the staff came out to tell us they were working on the problem.”
“Yeah, and what happened immediately before that?”
I thought back to the movie, some erotic thriller thing with a recycled plot and plenty of explosions and skin. Not my kind of thing at all. I was bored. I’d thought Derrick had been bored, too, so I reached over and traced my finger up the inseam of his thigh, making him jump.
“I tried to put the moves on you.”
Derrick smiled. “It took me by surprise. Until that moment, I didn’t think you were that interested in me. I knew right away the movie choice was a mistake by those sounds you made in your throat every time the hero spoke some stupid dialog. When I felt you touch me, it surprised me — in a good way, I promise! But I lost control over my telekinetic senses for a split second, and they sort of bounced around the room, taking out the projector. I was embarrassed, and afraid I’d do more damage, so I made my phone ring, and pretended I had to go.”
“You broke the projector and bailed on me, because you were turned on?”
He blushed and changed the subject. “Now, think about your concert.”
“The one you blew off.”
“I didn’t blow it off. Think back to before the show when everyone gathered on the stage for the sound check. What happened?”
At first, I didn’t know what he was referring to. It was normal. Musicians tuning their instruments and microphones set in key places. But then I remembered my E string had snapped, and I needed to replace it. Strings broke all the time, so that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual is all of the E strings in the entire violin section broke at once.
“You snapped our strings?”
“I didn’t mean to! I got there early and slipped into the back of the theater to watch you set up. I knew it was a big night for you, and I wanted everything go well. I guess I was a little too anxious and my control slipped. You deserved a perfect performance. I didn’t think it would happen if I was there. No telling what might have happened during your big solo if I got excited.” His lips curved into a deep frown and his shoulders slumped. “So, I left.”
I reached over and grasped his hand. He gave me a squeeze back. The sincerity in his expression made my heart thump. He truly was a good man. How did I lose sight of that before?
“And since I’m confessing everything to you now, you should know about my job. But you seriously have to keep it a secret. I’m probably violating my contract by telling you this.”
“Your consultant job?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, you have my word that anything you tell me will not leave this room. As long as it’s not illegal. It’s not illegal is it?”
“No. I wouldn’t do anything like that. But the ethics might be in a gray area. Have you seen that TV show Ghost Fighters?”
I grinned. “You mean the one where the ridiculously hot people go into supposedly haunted buildings, turn off the lights, film each other with night vision cameras and work themselves up to getting scared?”
“That’s the one. The producer, Mark Leonard, used to work with me at the club where I performed. He was going to film school at the time, and we became friends. It’s pretty hard for me to be around someone regularly without them discovering my unique abilities, so when Mark got the idea for a reality show about haunted places, he asked me to join him. Officially, I’m an executive producer who doesn’t do much but hang around getting in the way while everyone else is filming. But I’m actually there to add an element of reality to the show.”
“You make things go bump in the night?”
“It’s ridiculous, I know, but audiences love it. At least once a show, I do something they can see at home, but the investigation crew doesn’t notice. Here, let me show you.”
He drew out his phone and opened the video app. Once he found the video he was looking for, he handed it to me to watch.
On the screen, two young women walked around what looked like an abandoned hospital. It was the part of the show where they switch to filming with infrared cameras, so everything was in black and white. It must have been freezing, because the women wore heavy hooded sweat shirts and their breath fogged the air.
Clunk.
“Did you hear that?” the brunette asked, her eyes wide with fright.
“Watch the hood on her sweatshirt when she turns around,” Derrick directed.
I did, and when the woman turned her back to the camera, her hood lifted up and shifted as if someone were gently tugging on it. Not hard enough that the woman noticed, but to viewers at home it was plainly visible.
“Wow.”
“I know,” he said, putting his phone away. “The audience loves stuff like that. You should take a peek at the Ghost Fighters sub-reddit sometime. My tricks have their own cult following. The people on the investigation crew aren’t acting afraid. They really are. The scenes at the end of the show when they examine the film, that’s not acting. They’re seriously freaked.”
“That’s devious. I like it.”
Derrick took a deep breath, “So you believe me? That this magic, for lack of a better word, is real? Do you understand why I left you those other times?”
“I believe you.” With that, his face lit up, but I placed a steadying hand on his arm. “But what do we do about it? I can’t keep coming home from dates soaked to the bone.”
“You won’t! I just need to get over being nervous around you. Every time you touch me, my control goes haywire.”
“Well, I know just the thing to help with that.”
“What?”
“My mother always said the easiest way to get through the hurt is to rip the Band-Aid off quickly.”
“Huh?”
I jumped in his lap and planted a hot, wet kiss.