The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [88]
She was saying too much and she wasn’t sure why. Yet she was truly speaking her mind and it felt so intensely good to do so. This was a rare opportunity indeed and she instinctively longed for it. She’d wrestled with the notion of spilling her guts earlier that afternoon, but she didn’t expect this.
Yet, alas, there it was. Out there smack dab in the naked open spaces.
Andrew’s reply, after an expressionless stare and then a contemplative pause: “Who is Max Polito?”
Bari's distorted image disappeared. Most likely, Andrew would not detect any sign of Bari for the remainder of the date. Whatever Bari had done, she had obviously gotten away with it. And that was all it would take.
Melony looked at him as though she’d just said something obscene, as though she’d caught herself after the fact.
Now, it was her turn to answer.
Who was Max Polito? Didn’t he know? Countless people Melony never even met knew the celebrity’s name, at least, even if they mistook it for a sports announcer’s.
Surely Andrew must know who Max was, must know it was Max who had been trailing him and his antics throughout the past decade and earlier, dispersing tidbits of his research concerning Andrew’s “kind” in his PBS series and nearly every Polito publication that made the Book-of-the-Month Club’s alternate selection. Of course, Max took care to never mention specific names or references, but rather made use of general theories and a few unspecific facts. He knew how to watch his ass.
Except with his own wife.
Apparently, now, she couldn’t watch hers, either, and she was still on the spot to give a reply.
She gave one the way Max would. “I know who you are.”
To Andrew, Melony again appeared as if she just let something obscene escape her lips and he recalled how she’d asked him what turns him on. The Max Polito name sounded somewhat familiar to him with Melony’s odd and perplexing reply, and he could easily detect her uncertainty and regret in mentioning his name.
She was hiding something and attempting to force it out; it seemed as if Bari hadn’t fed her any ideas after all...she seemed to have released Melony’s inhibited temptations, to make her cough out the thoughts that were choking her after she had chewed on them for awhile.
I know who you are.
He’d been told that before.
He’d been told that in his dreams, by his own self, or by someone who looked like him, by someone that maybe wasn’t him at all but someone else entirely, a mirror image of himself that dwelt independently and that returned his glare from a world parallel but opposite to his own. It was more than a reflective image before his bathroom mirror that told him I know who you are.
It was an image sullen and scarred, angry and full of pain, burdened with remorse.
I know who you are.
And whenever it spoke those words, it spoke with the voice of A.J. Erlandson, his father....
...confounding Andrew’s own certainty that he had never known the sound of that voice in his own lifetime.
Intently disturbed, he broke away from her eye contact and methodically impaled a diced bamboo shoot upon his plate with a single chop stick. He hoped she would continue on a lighter subject, with enough dialogue to earn a passing grade in Normalcy 101, with a Graduate Degree in What Were We Talking About Before.
Melony recognized the advantages of the soap box limelight Andrew had placed above her, with or without his intentions and it seemed so suddenly opportune that he would reveal more of himself the further she went into revealing more of hers.
How ironic that the same principle applied to average first dates.
“Max is my husband and my boss,” she told him outright and boldly. “Although I’m not expecting him to last much longer as either one. He’s what we have in common, besides how similar my relationship to him can be to yours and Ralston’s. He sent me to meet you. You, and/or a few others he’s interested in. Max is famous for dealing with unexplained supernatural