Super Born: Seduction of Being Page 15

  “Gee, Jennifer, your place is great,” Rebecca said to break the silence. She sat hunched over a small coffee table between the sofas, not sure what to do with her glass.

  “I’m sorry about the wine. I know you like that Miner’s Lite beer, but you just can’t get it anymore. I even tried the black market for you. No one’s got any,” I apologized, trying to be the gracious host and calm Rebecca, who seemed nervous.

  “It’s okay. For me, it’s Miner’s or nothing. I never liked any other beer.” Rebecca spun the wine glass in her hands and looked around the condo with its large windows and view of the city. Nothing in Scranton was really tall, but this was about as high as it gets. “Your place is amazing,” she said, getting up and walking to the windows. “How do you afford a place like this being a florist? Your family have money?”

  That made me laugh out loud. Was she kidding? “Me? My family had nothing. You wouldn’t want to know where I came from.”

  “So, how’d you get all this?” Rebecca asked, sitting back down and drinking some of her wine.

  “Rebecca, I’m about as much ‘just’ a florist as you are ‘just’ a graphic designer.”

  Rebecca blinked, and she put down her wine.

  “Oh dear, you are just a graphic designer…”

  Rebecca’s face had become upset. “Yes, I am, and a damn good one!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, sliding off my sofa. I sat down beside Rebecca and put my hand on her shoulder. “I know you are. I saw what you did on that B.I.B. website. It’s terrific.”

  “It is! Everyone likes it! I started from nothing and now look at it. That was the first time in my career someone just let me take the ball and run with it. He’s really given me the freedom to be creative and not look over my shoulder all the time. He gives me a cut of all the money the site takes in, and I’m doing very well, thank you very much…I just wish I didn’t have to hide things and lie to him. When you told me that taking over his site and using him as a front would help us find her, I had no idea he would be such a good guy.”

  “Good guy? Please. Don’t make me ill. The little loser can’t even get it up.”

  “You know why. She’s marked him. That’s how we know they’ve been together…right?”

  “The man has no taste,”. I sipped some wine, and memories of the coffee shop brought a flurry of heat energy to the ends of my fingers. I calmed my anger, and it flowed back into me.

  “I just hate lying to him.”

  “You know how important this is. That twerp knows where she is! Eventually he’ll go to her, or she’ll come to him.”

  Rebecca clearly began to run through a full circle of emotions and insecurity. “I told you I wasn’t a wine drinker,” she said, and put down her glass, tears appearing in the corners of her eyes.

  I began to feel sorry for her. She was upset and I decided to reroute the energy I was feeling myself. “Rebecca,” I began, “Let’s forget about finding the B.I.B. and websites and everything for a while. Would that be okay?”

  Rebecca nodded. “Sure.”

  “This may sound a little out of nowhere, but do you find it hard to have sex now that you’re discovering your powers?”

  “Oh yeah, do I. The men I’ve met lately are like toys—five or six quick ones and they can barely move afterward, and there I am, without even getting my motor running…I can’t even tell you how many batteries I buy a month.”

  I picked up Rebecca’s wine glass, put it to her lips, and tilted it. “Here, you’re gonna need this.”

  “What?” said Rebecca before drinking down the entire glass.

  Despite beint with man after man, none had been able to quiet the erotic fires in me. With all the frustration I had experienced lately, I felt open to experimentation. It was a new concept to me, but I reasoned that, if even a bunch of men could not satisfy a superwoman, then maybe a superwoman could. I began to move slowly toward Rebecca until we were nose to nose.

  “What are you doing?” Rebecca asked. Then Rebecca began to feel the power in my hands as they roamed her shoulders, neck, and hair. I pulled off Rebecca’s glasses and removed my own. I slowly ran my hands down Rebecca’s chest, took hold of her sweater at the waist and lifted it over her head. She sat motionless, stunned, while I tossed the sweater and her bra to the ground. I began a show of slowly unbuttoning my own silk shirt, all the while smiling and staring into Rebecca’s eyes. When I released the last button with flair, Rebecca looked down to see me bare to the navel. She trembled, waiting in anticipation and uncertainty. In a second, the slow dance was over and we were a combined mass of lips, arms, thighs, and hands.

  * * *

  One minute and twenty-nine seconds later, we emerged from my bedroom and walked back toward the living room, searching for our clothes and straightening hair. As we reached the living room, Rebecca said “Well that really sucked! No offense.”

  I followed and shook my head. “Yeah, how do men do that? What the hell was I thinking? I’m really sorry about that, Rebecca. I hope you’re not mad.”

  “I understand. It was your frustration coming out. Believe me, I know what that’s like. “

  “Now we know that’s not the answer either.”

  “But what is? Do you think ‘she’s’ found the answer? Like, maybe that’s why you couldn’t break the mark she left on Logan. ”

  I shrugged. “You wanna talk shop?”

  “Definitely,” Rebecca answered, bending for her sweater and glasses.

  “Good. I’ll get the ice cream.”

  I went to the freezer and then joined Rebecca at the granite island in my kitchen. We leaned on it and dug into a quart of premium peach ice cream with a couple spoons. There was a long silence, which I finally broke. “I’m really sorry, Rebecca. Not just for the sex, I mean everything. That website you made is amazing.”

  That made her smile. “You think so?”

  I nodded. “And you don’t know about me because I didn’t tell you. I should have. You deserve to know.”

  She turned toward me. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah…I’m a florist because my aunt was a florist. My aunt raised me. When cancer got her a few years ago, she gave the shop to me. It ended up probably saving my life. It was all I had left. But you’re right, that’s not where the money comes from for this whole B.I.B. search. All that has come since I got the powers.”

  “What happened to your mom and dad?”

  “They were murdered when I was fourteen.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “It messed me up for a long while. If it weren’t for my aunt…I don’t know…Then my aunt died, and it was like my parents all over again…I turned to drugs and drinking. All I had was a friggin’ floral shop.”

  “That had to have been so hard for you.”

  “It was, especially because I don’t know a carnation from a geranium. Lucky for me, my aunt had someone who ran the shop, Anna. She became the only friend I had. I would get so angry. We’d spend weekends up on her family’s farm. It settled me down.”

  “When did you get our powers?”

  I dug out a couple of spoonfuls of ice cream and instantly, they melted in my mouth. “I was at my apartment sitting in a Jacuzzi, believe it or not. I was thinking too much, I guess, about my parents, about my aunt; just feeling sorry for myself. Anyway, I got angry. It was just so unfair, you know?”

  Rebecca nodded . clearly sympathizing with me.

  “I closed my eyes and started to cry and let all the emotions out. When I opened my eyes I couldn’t see a thing. The room was filled with superheated steam streaming out the window and through the doorway. The water in the tub was gone, flash evaporated—like a drop of water on a red-hot coal. My arms and legs glowed with an energy that pulsed through them. I thought I was some kind of freak.

  “I had to get away, so I put my clothes back on and just left the apartment. I was walking down the middle of the empty street, my eyes full of tears, when a car came speeding over a hill weavin
g, with its tires squealing. It came right at me like a missile. I threw my arms up in defense Then a cone of, lava-red energy formed around me like a shield, and the car hit it.

  “The energy cone pulsed, then slowly faded, leaving the car squashed, like it had hit a wall.”

  “My god,” Rebecca said, “that’s amazing.”

  “And scary, and weird…I just fell to my knees and then passed out.”

  “You command energy with your thoughts?”

  “Hot, powerful, instant energy, with my emotions more than anything else. It scared the crap out of me at first, until I figured out the connection between the energy and my emotions. When I calm down, the energy goes away.”

  “Yeah, when you first stumble onto your power it’s scary. It was for me too, but nothing like what you went through. Go on.”

  I went to the fridge and pulled out another quart of ice cream to replace the one we had finished. “It took a while after that to understand what was going on, I mean, accept what was going on. I couldn’t talk about it to anyone…Who’d believe it, right?”

  “Amen to that. That’s why it’s great that we have each other, our own little support group.”

  “I’m glad we found each other too.”

  “Well, it was you who found me, actually.”

  “Long story short, I was up one weekend at Anna’s family farm. Her dad’s pretty old, can’t work much. Even though he can’t work he dresses everyday like a farmer in overalls; carries a cane to help him with his limp. He’s worn out by the years, but he’s good at storytelling and complaining.”

  “Know the type. My grandpa’s just like that.”

  “One weekend, he drove Anna and me around the farm, telling us about the good old days when all the oil and gas wells on the farm made him big money, but now they just sat rusting in the fields. He stopped at one of the well heads, got us out of the truck, and started telling us his story.

  “‘See, Jenny’—he always called me Jenny—‘this well’s like me. Plenty of life inside, down deep, but can’t get it out. See,’—he tapped a gauge that read near zero with his cane—‘No pressure. Plenty of oil down there, but there’s no pressure to bring it up. I’ll bet we only got out a tenth of what’s down there. It’s all trapped in the rock and such. These wells used to be productive, just like the old fart who owns ’em. Now they’re just sitting here doing nothing’, rusting away, just like me.

  “The story made me feel bad for him, but it also made me think. If it was true and there was all this oil just sitting there, it seemed like a waste of a lot of money. I said to him, ‘You mean, all you need to do is force the gas out of the rock and these wells would flow again?’

  “‘Flow like a goddamn river!’ he told me. ‘Some guys up in Tunkhannock are workin’ with something they call ‘fracking’ that’s supposed to work. They force high-pressure water into the well to free the gas from the rocks. Supposed to be like Viagra for your well, I hear.

  “

  But late that night I returned alone to the field and walked around the rusting green metal of the wellhead we had visited. I began walking in a big circle around it with my arms out. I thought about the old man feeling full of life, but trapped in an aging body, just like the oil trapped in the rock below. Finally, red energy began to spark between my hands and then grow into a red and orange ball that hummed and flashed between my arms. Then I threw the energy ball at the well and it crashed, shaking the ground beneath me, as it spread out and was absorbed by the land. I repeated this over and over, each time lighting up the night sky with red flashes and feeling the earth quake beneath my feet.

  “The next morning I returned to the well before breakfast. The pressure gauge was pegged at the highest reading on its scale. That’s how I knew I had found a way to make money with my power.”

  “You got his wells going again? That’s amazing.” Rebecca had gone to the fridge for another quart of ice cream.

  “No, bring the chocolate in the half-gallon,” I suggested as she dug in the freezer. “As far as his wells go—

  sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I offered to buy Anna’s dad’s mineral rights and distribution contract, and he was glad to sell. So were his neighbors and their neighbors. When we ran out of existing wells, we began drilling new ones.”

  “So you became an oil baroness?” said Rebecca, bringing back the ice cream.

  “One problem. I didn’t have any money to buy the first leases with. Later on, the money from the producing wells paid to buy more leases, but I had nothing for the first few, nada.”

  “So how’d you do it?”

  I grabbed the half-gallon and took a few bites, debating whether I should confess to Rebecca. “I stole it.”

  “Stole it! Oh my god.”

  “When you have powers like this, you have to wonder if the laws set up for the average person apply to you. I don’t know how you feel about that, but I think I have these powers for a reason. Anyhow, there was a bank next to the floral shop. Every Friday, like clockwork, they had money picked up by an armored car. I knew the drivers. They’ d come into the shop for birthdays and anniversaries. In fact, Anna would remind them when their anniversary was. Saved their marriages.” I laughed, as did Rebecca. “They’d park in an alley next to my shop when they did the bank pickup. I checked it out, no security cameras.”

  “You didn’t!”

  I nodded. “What can I say? I tried doing it the right way, with a bank loan, and got laughed at. I almost melted that guy’s face off…literally. I really had to control my emotions when that little prick laughed at me. My flower shop wasn’t worth anywhere near enough for collateral. What choice did I have?

  “A few days before the lease payments were due, I watched the two guys from the back of the truck enter the bank, leaving the driver alone. I stepped around to the back of the truck and stayed out of the driver’s mirrors. I put my hands against the wall of the truck and thought about the money inside that I needed. The metal wall just melted and flowed to the ground like spilled water, steaming and hissing as it hit the pavement. It was great. I reached inside and grabbed some bags. I knew they had to be valuable, right? Or why else would they be in the truck? It happened so fast the driver never knew what happened. In a few seconds, I was back in the shop and the money was under the floorboards.”

  Rebecca’s mouth hung open with her ice cream spoon turned over against her tongue. Had I made a mistake in confiding in her? “Are you kidding me? I never would have guessed that you were a gangsta’. All this,” she said, gesturing to the apartment, “came from that money?”

  “No, but it was enough to to get started. After that, my wells began to pay for more wells and more wells. The ‘fracking’ Anna’s dad talked about worked too, but my wells are twice as productive as theirs, so it’s easy for me to compete.”

  “It must be worth millions!”

  “Billions is the new millions.”

  “Holy crap!”

  “I have real estate all over the world. With the prices down from the recession, there are bargains everywhere. But I like living here in Scranton. I don’t know, it seems like my powers came from here. Who knows what would happen if I left?”

  “I never thought of that. It might be true…you know, maybe I should figure out a way to make some money from what I can do.”

  I smiled, already knowing I had led her to the right question. “Once we find the B.I.B., you won’t have to worry about money or anything else. She’s the key. Once we connect my finances and your technical knowhow to her pure little image, there will be no stopping us.”

  Rebecca remained thoughtful for minute and I studied her face.

  Finally, she smiled, seeming totally content to continue trusting my vision of the big picture, unwavered by the story I had told. “Are you gonna hog all the ice cream or can I have some?”

  “Did you see the butter pecan?” I ran to the freezer, glad that our jacked-up metabolisms req
uired a lot of calories to satisfy—a lot of delicious calories.

  “Do you have any waffles?”

  “Always!”

  When the freezer was empty of ice cream and Rebecca had squeezed out the last drop of maple syrup onto her last bite of waffle, we began to discuss the reason of our meeting.

  “What about Victoria?” I asked.

  “I think she’s scared,” answered Rebecca. “But I think she’ll meet with you. I forwarded you her phone number in an email. She wants to meet somewhere safe, in public, Tuesday afternoon. She’s having a tough time. Her husband can’t take it anymore and left. She’s sick and alone. So I think we can get her.”

  “And did you ever hear back from Suzen?”

  “Not, a thing. It’s like she dropped off the earth. Last I heard she was off in Oregon somewhere trying to deny her powers and hide them from the world, teaching at some little college.”

  “God, we needed her!” I said pounding my fist on the counter with frustration. “She was the next closest born… I think she still might answer you. Do you think they found her too, or is she just afraid to join us?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “You know as well as I do, they’re easy to find, but it’s hard to convince them of the danger they’re in.”

  “Easy to find? What about the B.I.B.? She’s easy to find?”

  Rebecca hung her head. “Okay, okay, I will keep working on finding her. But she’s like…invisible.”

  “When’s the last time you heard from Suzen?”

  “When I call I just get that weird voice mail with the poetry on it. She ignores my emails. It’s been over a week now.”

  “Damn, just like Jessica!” I stared at the ground and wiped my palm over my face. “Text me the address of that college in Oregon. I think Suzen needs a visit and a talking to…maybe a little push.”

  “I doubt she’s still there. You know how she is…You did your best to warn Jessica. Let’s hope Suzen figures it out before she ends up the same way.”

  I ran my hand through my hair as I paced. “Let’s hope we don’t end up the same way ourselves… we have to make sure we get Victoria. We can’t afford to lose all of them.”

  “What if she just doesn’t want to join us?”

  I gave her a sober stare. “She’s joining us… one way or another, she’s joining, even if I have to whack her over the head…and find the fucking B.I.B. She’s the key…and her journalist boyfriend. Without them…”