Being Jamie Baker (19 page)

For a split second his fingers slid across the bit of my skin that was exposed between the bottom of my T-shirt and the top of my low-rise jeans. I wasn’t sure if he’d noticed the contact, but I sure did, and the brief touch sent a shock wave through me.

Ryan did notice. His fingers quickly found their way back to my skin, and then he slid his free hand firmly across my stomach, making sure to catch as much of my bare skin as he could before lacing his fingers together, locking me in his arms. The action raised goose bumps on my skin. “Ryan.” I sighed reluctantly. It was meant as a warning.

He cut me off with gentle authority. “Shh. We’re just going to sit here for a minute.” He didn’t say anything more because he knew he’d won the argument. Not that I’d put up much of a fight this time.

Ryan was beginning to learn where my weaknesses were and was artfully figuring out how far he could push me before I hit the panic button on him. He waited a few minutes until I was completely relaxed again, and then he unlocked his hands and began grazing my skin with his fingertips. His touch caused a burning sensation that left a trail everywhere his fingers roamed. My whole body shuddered.

As I gasped, trying to find enough breath to tell him to stop, he cut me off with a whisper. “Jamie?” I could barely think straight anymore. “Hmm?” I breathed in a voice so small I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me.

“Kiss me.”

I shuddered again at his request. “No.”

I answered his question but didn’t have the strength to tell him to stop the torture his fingers were inflicting. I shuddered again, forcefully enough that Ryan stopped what he was doing and locked his hands back together. “You’re ready,” he insisted. “If you can handle this, then you can handle just one kiss.”

Suddenly I felt his nose brush against my jaw. His lips fluttered across my ear as he whispered a faint, “Please?”

My pulse was racing and I felt almost faint, but I concentrated on my breathing, willing myself to stay calm. I wasn’t strong enough to resist him, so I had to try my hardest not to hurt him. And then his hand was under my chin tilting my head up to his. Our lips met before I even realized what was happening, and that was the end of it. Every logical thought I had slipped right from my mind.

Just like the first time we kissed, my body pulled me to him like a magnet to iron, and my arms wrapped themselves around his neck. I felt the flow of energy pass through us, and Ryan responded by pulling me closer to deepen his kiss. I felt the hairs begin to rise on the back of his neck and started to pull away. “No,” Ryan gasped, refusing to let me go. “No, it’s okay.” Ryan’s a persuasive guy, and an even better kisser, so when his lips crashed down on mine again, I kissed him back with full force. When I lost complete control of myself, the flowing power became more intense than ever, and I realized I was not giving off energy, but rather pulling it to me.

I could feel my body sucking power right out of the atmosphere around me. The electricity from the house, and the power lines that fed it, came rushing at me in all directions. Everything felt so warm, and a whirlwind of energy began to circle around us whipping my hair about in a wild frenzy.

When Ryan’s entire body finally began trembling against me, my passion was quickly replaced with panic. I meant to simply push him back enough to separate us, but all of the energy I’d channeled had made me much stronger than normal. When my hands pressed against his chest, I accidentally knocked him back a good twenty yards. He went flying off the swing and over the porch railing, where he landed on the dirt driveway.

I’d thrown him so far that I was sure I’d hurt him, and I started to rush to his side. But as I bounded down the steps, I could feel that something was really, really off with me. Not wrong necessarily but definitely not good either. I felt scary powerful. All of the energy I’d sucked in was bouncing around inside me like atoms in a nuclear bomb.

I stopped, afraid that if I moved a muscle I would lose control of all the wild power inside me.

Holding still didn’t seem to help. The energy flowed through my body causing my arms and legs to shake with fury. My hair began flowing away from my head as if the energy was trying to escape through each individual strand. Heat began to rise to the surface of my skin, and my palms felt like they were on fire.

I was momentarily distracted from my situation when I heard a groan. Ryan had regained consciousness and sat up holding a hand to his head. I was confused because as far as he’d flown there should have been some damage done, but he looked merely shaken up, not really hurt. He looked around in a daze for a moment until his eyes fell on me.

“Jamie!”

The way he screamed, as if he feared for my life, startled me from my trance, and the fire beneath my palms suddenly exploded from me like bolts of lightning. The blasts shot straight out from my hands, whizzing over Ryan’s head by only a couple of feet, and zapped a gigantic pine tree behind him.

With a blinding light and a deafening crack of thunder, the base of the tree exploded out from under itself.

Ryan hollered my name again, but not as loudly as I screamed his, because the tree behind him was starting to fall. Unable to make myself move, all I could do was scream, “Look out!” and point at the three-foot-thick trunk falling directly toward him.

With no time to pick himself up and run, Ryan threw his hands above his head in an instinctive move to shield himself. My heart stopped beating as the tree crashed down, but to my astonishment, Ryan caught the massive trunk and held it steady above his head.

We stared at each other in disbelief for a moment. It should have been impossible. How had it happened?
What
had happened? I was worried, but I watched that infamous beautiful grin spread widely across Ryan’s face, and he threw the tree behind him in much the same manner as I’d tossed him just moments before.

“That was freaking awesome!” Ryan laughed as he rose to his feet, but I couldn’t follow his lead.

Relief, shock, and fatigue all caught up with me in that moment, and I realized that the explosion had left me feeling completely weak. My muscles were like Jell-O, and my knees buckled.

When Ryan came rushing to my aid, I screamed, “No! Wait!” But it was too late. Ryan grabbed me and electricity surged through his body. The jolt kicked him hard, knocking him on his back. His muscles contracted in wild spasms for a second, and then he fell lifelessly against the dirt.

* * * * *

It could have been worse, I guess. Though at the time I couldn’t see how. But at the time I thought he was dead. He sure
looked
dead, which meant I’d killed yet another boyfriend. Not that Ryan was my boyfriend, you know, technically, but he was close enough.

I screamed at first—so loud that I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t come to investigate even if they did live nearly two miles away—but the screams morphed into sobs when I noticed him breathing.

A wave of relief washed over me, but it wasn’t nearly enough. He was still unconscious, his hair was standing on end, and his skin looked grossly pale. I had to do something. If I hadn’t been sure I’d fry him all over again, I’d have carried him to a hospital already, but as it was, I couldn’t touch him.

I hated feeling so helpless. I tried to calm myself down, but it was useless. The crazy emotions were rebuilding the energy I’d exerted with the blast of lightning. I was already starting to feel strong again, and that made me dangerous. All I could do was sit there with him and wait.

I cried, begging Ryan to wake up, until my ears caught the sound of the faint humming I’d heard just before lunch. I sucked in my sobs and turned my eyes to the forest, focusing all my attention on the sound. It was definitely electronic. A video camera maybe? And it was coming from way off in the distance, up the side of the mountain, deep in the trees.

The harder I listened, the more things came into focus. Wind pushing its way through the pine needles. Tiny feet scampering in the branches. A nondescript rustling in the bushes. Breathing. And a heartbeat. I wasn’t sure I was hearing a human—a deer would breathe and have a heartbeat too.

At first I saw nothing, but the tiniest glint of sunlight reflected off something up the hill, and as I strained my eyes everything came into focus. The bush looked normal enough, but within its branches the colors blurred together a few shades darker. There was definitely a figure hiding there.

“Carter,” I breathed. I was frozen in fear at the possibility that someone was watching me. I couldn’t tell for sure, but what else could it be? The sound? The reflected light?

As I frantically tried to figure out what to do, I was startled by a horrible coughing fit. It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. “Are you okay?” I asked, tears returning to my eyes. “Oh, Ryan, I’m so sorry!”

Ryan pulled himself up. As soon as he had his wits about him his eyes focused on me. I was so sure I’d finally pushed him over the edge, freaked him out beyond repair. I was convinced that he’d run away screaming and never speak to me again. I was also convinced that that wasn’t such a bad idea, but Ryan surprised me. The corners of his mouth slowly crept upward and he said, “That. Was. Awesome!” His voice was a little gruff, but I could still hear the unmistakable excitement. The jolt had clearly fried his brain. “What?”

“Let’s do it again!”

If my face was pale before, now it was white as a ghost, and Ryan laughed at my expression. “I don’t mean the whole getting zapped part,” he said. “Though I always wondered what it would feel like to get Tasered. FYI? It sucks. But you are seriously the best kisser in the entire world. So worth it. And did you see that? For a minute I was strong like you!”

Ryan grunted as he got to his feet. After stretching all his stiff muscles, he stepped toward me with open arms.

“Are you suicidal?” I screamed, putting a good twenty feet between us instantly.

Ryan blinked. “You’re not calm yet?” he asked.

“Calm?” I screeched. “Calm? Ryan, I nearly killed you! How could I possibly be calm?” Ryan studied my face for a minute and then rolled his eyes. His smile turned to a frown. “You’re not going to let me kiss you ever again, are you?” It wasn’t really a question.

“And you say you’re not that smart.”

“Aw, come on, Jamie. Getting zapped was my own fault. I shouldn’t have touched you—I figured you didn’t have any juice left in you when you collapsed. Maybe we need to figure out a way for me to know when you’re charged up, but the kissing didn’t hurt anything. You can’t go ice queen on me over that.”

“Hello? Did you see the part where I shot lightning out of my hands?”

“Yeah, coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Lightning that missed your head by mere inches and then exploded a tree?”

“But it missed me, and I caught the tree when it fell. No harm done.” I opened my mouth to speak, but it took a minute before any words could escape it. “You
are
suicidal.”

“What are you doing?” Ryan asked when I headed around to the back deck and gathered up my things.

“I’m leaving. Playtime is over. No more practice.”

“Jamie, you can’t just quit.”

“Watch me.”

I ignored his pleading and zipped up my backpack. He chased after me as I bounded down the front steps. “Jamie, wait! At least drive back with me because we should really talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Okay, fine, then just humor me. You may be able to get home in a few seconds, but I have an hour-and-a-half drive... Please?”

Ryan gave me a ridiculous puppy-dog face, but his eyes seemed genuinely desperate. I wanted to take off, but since when have I been able to really walk away from him?

We were silent all the way back into town. A couple of times Ryan opened his mouth to say something but then thought better of it. We both knew that what he wanted to say would only cause an argument.

Eventually he found a way to bring up the subject without raising my blood pressure. “You know, right before you did the thing with the lightning you looked kind of freaky. You’re hair was flying all over the place, except there wasn’t any wind, and your eyes were glowing.”

“Glowing?” I gasped. Something about that image was very disturbing.

Ryan nodded and then cautiously asked, “What do you think happened out there, exactly? Not just the glowing and the lightning, but the thing with me and the tree. Have you ever done that before? Like accidentally given your parents your powers or something?” I wanted to keep quiet, but I couldn’t help the smirk that appeared on my face. “I’ve never exactly made out with my parents, Ryan, so, no. The lightning and the glowing and the
you
thing… all firsts for me.”

“Okay,” Ryan said, laughing. “But that is what happened, right? When we kissed, you gave me your powers.”

“It would appear so.”

“How is that possible?”

I shrugged, but then I really thought about it for a minute and said, “It must be the energy.

Remember how I told you that the energy makes me feel different? I’m obviously transferring a little of that energy to you, and it must have the same effect on you as it does on me. That’s got to be why you were so wired after we kissed that first time, and that day after I told you about me. I bet you probably had powers then too, at least on a small scale. You just never thought to use them.”

“Do you think I had all your powers and not just the strength?” I shrugged. “Probably.”

“Cool.”

I was about to explain to Ryan just how
not
cool that was, when he distracted me with another thought. “I wonder why it wore off so fast this time. Maybe the shock canceled it out.”

“Shock?” I repeated dryly. “I think you mean electrocution. I guess it could be. Or maybe it’s because you used it up quicker. It took superstrength to catch that tree and toss it the way you did. That probably takes a little more energy than running on a treadmill.”

“Maybe. It’d be easy to test the theory, though. I’ll bet we could go to the Grand Canyon after all.

We should try it again next Sunday and see if I could keep up with you.”