I opened the front door and almost hit Holly, who was sitting outside the front hall’s bathroom—clue number one that something was wrong.
Clue number two was that Holly’s entire right side was covered in flecks of blood, like something—or someone?!—had exploded nearby and showered her with droplets.
“Oh my God, Holly! What happened?” I sat next to her and attempted to wipe away the blood, but as soon as I touched her face, she yelped, and I felt a sharp stinging pain in my hand. When I pulled it away to look at it, I realized why.
I bit my lip—to help me concentrate—as I pulled out the large splinter of glass.
“What was that for?” She sounded calm, and that would be clue number three. Holly wasn’t the most fiery personality—I guess that would be me, now—but she was very rarely calm under pressure.
If something had happened—and unless Holly had decided to pepper her skin with tiny shards of glass for kicks, something had happened—she was more likely to be either screaming at everything and extremely animated or sitting in the middle of the commotion, panicking and struggling not to cry. Or, at least, those were her usual reactions to stress and pressure.
I grabbed her shoulders—carefully avoiding the large cut on her arm—and shook her gently, trying to bring her back to the surface. “Holly, come on, lemme know what happened.”
“Jesse?”
I looked back over my shoulder at Brent, still standing in the doorway.
Wow. There were very few things that could distract me from spending alone time with my boyfriend. Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted to bring you home to.
“Um. Gimme a minute. I want to make sure she’s okay.”
“Your first-aid kit is on your fridge, right?”
“Okay, I’m an idiot. Yeah, our kit’s on the fridge. There’s some more stuff in the upstairs bathroom if that’s missing anything.”
He nodded, let his backpack slip from his shoulder so it landed next to mine—hastily discarded by the front door—and walked calmly, purposefully, towards the kitchen.
I watched him walk through the commotion. I’d heard people described as the “rock” in a relationship, and he was definitely mine.
I looked back to Holly, who was staring into space, completely fixated on the bathroom door across the hall.
“Jesse?” Brent called from the living room doorway. “You need to come see this.”
I stood carefully, trying not to startle Holly, but she didn’t react at all to my movement.
Brent met me partway, at the base of the stairs. “I’ll deal with Holly. You’re gonna need either a broom and dustbin or a vacuum, I think.” His face was grim.
“What happened?”
“It’s pretty obvious once you get in there, I think. I opened a window as well.”
Opened a window?
He leaned over, kissed me once on the cheek, and ran a hand through his hair, which flopped back onto his forehead haphazardly. “I’ll go make sure that cut of hers isn’t as bad as it looks—if it is, she might need to go get stitches.”
I nodded and met his gaze. What the hell happened? This sucked, but neither of us was the type to leave the situation that was interrupting our alone time.
This would be one of those times when I cursed my conscience.
I walked into the living room and whistled. “Okay, so that’s what the hell happened.”
The TV was still smoking a bit, which explained the open windows, and what used to be the screen was now a sheer coating of fine glass dust on the floor, except for a few larger pieces, a couple of which had blood on their points. Sighing, I walked into the kitchen to get the broom out of the pantry.
I’d only managed to cover about half of the room before I heard the bathroom door open, followed by Holly nearly screaming Alex’s name joyfully, and Brent calling mine, though he sounded worried, not joyful.
I jogged the twenty feet or so to join the people in the front hall and was met by Holly hugging Alex, who seemed unsure as to how to respond, arms wide out at his sides. Holly was crying, and Brent looked extremely uncomfortable.
I closed my eyes, gathering my thoughts before I said, in as final a tone as I could muster at that moment, “Okay.”
All three of them looked at me.
“Holly, you and Alex are going to work out whatever the hell’s going on with you two, and then you’re going to sweep up the living room. Vacuum will probably help. Alex, you can help or not or whatever. I feel kind of weird ordering you around, and I don’t know what just happened. Brent—” I grabbed his wrist, pulling him behind Holly to stand beside me. “We’re going up to my room to have the alone time we planned.”
Without waiting for a response, I turned on my heel and started walking, all but dragging Brent along for the first couple steps. Once we hit the inside of my room, I wheeled around on my foot and pushed the door closed.
“Seeing you do things like that always amazes me,” Brent said.
I straightened up, and shrugged, suddenly a little self-conscious, despite him having seen me in much more intimate situations and circumstances.
“No, really,” he said. “You can do some amazing things.”
Oh. Right, that was what I was going to tell him.
“What did you think of?” he asked.
I blinked a few times, looking at him. “How…how did you know?”
“Well, your eyes sort of…lit up. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the entire room got a couple degrees hotter.” He scratched the back of his head. “Um. Pretend I said that in a less clichéd way, okay?”
I laughed and grabbed his hand. He yelped and pulled away.
“You’re…” He touched my forehead, like he was checking for a fever, and yelped again, shaking his hand.
It’s not that hot… I smirked. This was definitely the most amusing way to tell him about my powers, and I figured—or, at least, I hoped—he’d appreciate the humour in it.
And, y’know, it’ll help him come to terms with it faster, since I still want him to sleep over tonight.
“You’re burning up, hon, we’ve gotta get you…” He trailed off. “You’re…you’re not sick, are you?”
“Nope!” It came out a great deal higher in pitch than I’d meant for it to, and I clapped a hand over my mouth. “Well, that made me sound like I was about twelve,” I mumbled through my palm.
“Okay, what’s…what’s going on?”
“I have a feeling you’re guessing, so…”
“No.”
I raised an eyebrow. He rarely sounded quite that final.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t want to guess, I mean. I want you to tell me what’s up, okay?” He reached for my hands again, presumably having forgotten how hot they were, so I focused on cooling them off and then grabbed his hands. He looked down at them, then back up at my face. “They’re normal again.”
“I know.”
“What’s…what’s going on? How can you…?”
I smirked. “You know how I told you that Holly…uh, slipped up and shocked me?”
His grip immediately tightened, tensing around my fingers.
I slipped free of his vice grip and shook the blood back into the constricted vessels. “Ow.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I can’t really fault you for being angry at…the situation.”
“At her.”
I sighed but let the comment slide. Hopefully, he’d work out something in his head that would make it easier for him to forgive Holly. “Well, that night, I noticed… Hold on, where’d I put it?” I looked on the floor around my laundry hamper—since that was where most of the laundry I threw at it ended up—for the long-sleeved shirt with the burn marks from the night before. I wanted to properly lead up to what had happened and avoid letting it slip out.
I didn’t want anyone to walk in on me playing with my powers the same way I’d found out about Holly, especially when Brent was already uneasy about powers in general.
I spotted the shirt on the ground and tossed it over my shoulder at him as I straightened up. It hit him in the face, the arms wrapping around the sides of his head.
He pulled it off him, giving me a mock glare, and looked at it. “It’s a shirt.”
“Oh, sorry, I meant—” I walked the couple steps towards him and showed him the blackened end of the sleeve.
He looked at it for a second, uncomprehendingly. I wasn’t sure if he’d made the connection and was ignoring it or if he had yet to make it.
“They’re burnt.”
“Yeah. But I wasn’t around fire at all last night.”
“Weird.”
“I thought so, too.”
He raised an eyebrow. “They hit the burner while you were cooking or something? I dunno.”
“Well, that was what I decided must have happened, too, even though that really makes no sense, and you know it.”
“It’s a bit tight, but—”
“Anyway, when I was on the phone with you, I started feeling a little weird.” I sat on the bed and leaned into him when he automatically turned to lean on me.
“And then my coffee started boiling while I was holding it.”
That got the reaction I’d been expecting. He went tense again and pulled back to see my face. “It…it what?”
“It started boiling in my hand.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I dropped it out of shock before it could boil over or anything.”
“Wait, why was it boiling?”
Okay, this was it—the moment when I found out if he would react the way I imagined.
I held up my hand, fingers splayed, and looked him in the eye. “This.”
I clenched my fist—okay, I’m a sucker for the overly dramatic—and my hand made a slight popping noise as it burst into flame.
Brent managed not to scream—but only because he clapped his hands over his mouth immediately—and scooted backward further onto the bed.
“Holy fuck. Oh, my—fuck!”
“Well, I think I phrased it closer to ‘This is so fucking cool!’ but…”
He laughed. “Oh, my God, Jesse. You… It doesn’t hurt?”
“Nope.” I unclenched my fingers and turned my hand over. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”
“Jesus.” He reached for me but pulled back as soon as he got within a few inches of the flame. “Okay, but it’s pretty obvious it’ll hurt me.”
Oh. Right. The flame winked off as soon as I made the connection, and he tentatively touched my hand again, established it was normal temperature, and gripped it more firmly.
He was only shaking a little bit, and I had to give him his due credit for that. “You’re not afraid?” I asked.
“I…a bit, I’ll admit.” He ran his hand through his hair again; it was starting to stick up in tufts. “Of course. But…I trust you. And I’m…glad you trusted me—this only happened this morning?” He sounded like he was interrupting himself, trying to say too much at once.
“Yeah. I needed to figure out what I could do with it, and I needed to…well, I needed to figure out how to tell you.”
“I…I can’t believe this.” He chuckled, a little strangely. “First Holly, then you. Think it’s genetic or something in the air? Am I gonna wake up with ice powers tomorrow?”
I cocked my head. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
He raised his eyebrow. “Never thought of what? Ice powers?”
“No, the whole genetics thing. I mean, it’s weird that it’s only Holly and me, but…I’d never thought of it.”
“Oh. Well, I’m assuming you never heard anything about it from your parents before.”
“No.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. Not like it hadn’t been a while. I did wish I could ask them about this, though.
“It’d be cool.”
“Hm?” I looked up at him, lost in my thoughts of my parents.
“If it was a genetic thing, I mean. Actually, hell, it’s…” He leaned over, grabbing the sides of my face, and about an inch away from my lips, he stopped and murmured, “You can keep it under control, right?”
I was tempted—extremely tempted—to answer by kissing him, leaning those few inches forward, but I instead pulled back.
This was something he needed to hear, not just experience. Not just. I held back my smirk, worried he’d take it the wrong way with the situation. “I…I’m not completely sure, of course, but I’m not going to ever be sure until we try it.”
“Oh.”
“But…well, Holly was learning how to control it, and she was doing pretty well with a bit of basic meditation, learning it from the very beginning. I’ve been doing it for years.”
I held out a thumb, the very tip of it aflame. “You should be able to touch the base of my thumb and it should feel normal. I think.”
He looked at me skeptically for a second before poking the base of my thumb.
“Okay, I believe you,” he said, finger still touching mine. “How, though?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I know you said it’s meditation, but…how can you do it so much better than Holly? It’s not like you’ve ever specifically learned this before—‘Controlling Your Superpowers 101.’”
I rolled my eyes. I loved Brent, but sometimes he was dismissive of things he didn’t understand—or care to understand, for that matter.
“No, but I didn’t need…anything like that. It’s all the same energy.”
“Energy?”
“Seriously, Brent, come on.”
“I’m sorry, I…”
“You find the concept of inner energy hard to believe, faced with superpowers involving setting my skin on fire with no pain at all?” I looked him in the eyes as I said it, making sure to keep my voice as even as possible.
He stopped for a second and stared at me, processing what I said, his mouth hanging slightly open. “Uh. Okay, I guess…”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be such an ass about it. I—”
“No, you’re right, it’s okay.” He squeezed my hand, and everything was back to normal. We seemed to fight a lot more than Holly and Alex—or we argued a lot more than they seemed to—but it meant we got things like this whole conversation out of the way, to clear the air.
“So…you think it’ll be okay, then.”
I smiled at him, the meaning behind his words not even registering until he grabbed the front of my shirt in his fist, twisted it and pulled me into a deep kiss, his free hand running down my torso.
I pulled back for a second—just long enough to mumble, “Yeah, it should be fine,” and then I launched myself back into the kiss.
I didn’t think I would be able to properly sleep, but…hey, I could tire him out so that when I wanted to go out back and play, I could, right?