Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,46

I would be there.

She narrowed her eyes. “I know it was probably traumatic for you. Are you blaming yourself?”

I didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want to talk about it at all, but I nodded. “I saw the other future. The one where I saved her.”

She put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. You did everything you could.”

I shook my head, shook her hand away. A You Will popped through immediately, wanting me to get home. Instead, I looked at my feet. “I knew Pedro was not fit to be on watch. But I did nothing. I should have said something. But I didn’t, because I wanted to stay on script. You see? It was my fault.”

Her hand found its way back to mine. The cycling stopped again. A wave of exhaustion swept over me, as if my mind was sick of starting and stopping again and again. She whispered, “It’s Pedro’s fault. Not yours.”

I nodded. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She just held my hand for a while. Then I said, “I’d better go.”

She nodded, and I dropped her hand and started to walk away. Immediately these things found their way into my head: beauty, harder to kidnap, Saint Christopher. That was when she called after me. “Have you ever been to one?”

I swallowed and, for some reason, tasted grass. I could feel the blades of grass and earth on my tongue. I brought my hand to my mouth and licked it, expecting my hand to be black, but it wasn’t. Instead, my eye began to pulsate with pain. I moved the muscle in my cheek up and down. Yeah. It felt like I’d been punched there. What the hell? When I turned back to her, she was staring at me with an expression I’d come to know so well: horrified confusion. I tried my best to cover it up. “I, um, had a hair in my mouth. Been to one of what?”

She let it slide. “A funeral.”

I started to say yes and then shrugged. I’d been to dozens, in the future. Lucky for me, none of them had worked its way into my past. The real thing was probably a lot more unpleasant than the memory. “No,” I finally said.

She laughed. “Which is it?”

“Long story,” I said, not able to say more. My head was aching so much, I felt it down to my jaw. Probably my mom was having the same feeling. Good. For the first time, I was glad. This time, I wanted her to hurt.

“Okay. You can tell me later. So want to go together?”

My heart thumped. She wanted to see me again. Yes! I hadn’t screwed everything up yet. And whatever history she had with Sphincter, it didn’t matter. But then I thought about Nan’s boat of a car, sitting in our dusty driveway. I thought of the way my hands shook on the steering wheel, of how I had trouble most times meeting the speed limit, even on residential streets. I started to sweat. “I, um, don’t … I mean, I guess I could pick you up.… Ten-thirty okay?”

“Oh, great!”

We spent another long moment standing there, outside her house. I counted four anthills in her driveway.

Here was the point when a normal guy would have gone in for the kill. Instead, I froze up. Sure, Taryn came off as innocent and angelic. But I found myself wondering what trouble she’d actually gotten into in Maine. Most likely she was a lot more experienced than me. Didn’t take much to be that way, but still. The opportunity to majorly screw up that future I’d seen of her, of us together, was right here. Right now.

And so I blew it. “See you,” I tossed over my shoulder, as if I’d been talking to just anyone. I cringed almost immediately after I pulled my bike away from the curb.

And then I went back to face the future memories that had been flapping around in my mind like wounded birds.

Nan had this 1976 Buick that was the color of calcified dog crap. It was built like a tank, all square edges, and had one of those bench seats that took a team of oxen to move into position. The Buick turned more heads than a car accident when it came down the road. It was so god-awful, people would crane their necks to see the unfortunate owner. Not like they could see little Nan behind the