The crowd loved it but I was still fighting the heat in my cheeks.
The rest of the band laughed and I heard whistles too. Once the song ended he kissed the back of my hand and bowed to me before helping me off stage. I covered my face with my hands as my friends and family heckled and joked.
“Don’t do that!” Beck said pulling my hands away. “It was awesome, frigging awesome!”
“It was embarrassing,” I countered.
“It was hot!”
I rolled my eyes and looked back to the stage to see Caleb watching me.
Sorry, he’s a jerk.
It’s ok. I’m alive, I joked.
You looked seriously hot if that helps.
I just laughed and shook my head at him.
“Look at you two,” Beck crooned. “You’re so cute. It’s like you’re having a conversation with your eyes or something.”
“They practically are,” Kyle butted in with before I could say anything. He bumped my shoulder with his. “It’s just disgusting.”
He was smiling when I looked up at him. He was trying, really trying, and it made me want to sigh with relief. I bumped his shoulder back with mine and he laughed. Beck had Ralph bouncing up and down to the beat of the next song and I smiled as I focused on Caleb once again. He was doing that thing again, where he played so perfectly but his eyes were perfectly locked on mine at the same time.
I smiled before glancing over at Dad to see him and Jen talking over the music and laughing. I saw in his mind he was telling her a joke about a guy walking into a bar. I shook my head at him. Then I picked up the thoughts of a girl next to me; she was looking at Caleb and imagining snagging him up after the set. Going dancing or sitting at the bar and then whatever else he wanted to do. I glanced at her she smiled at me.
“Oh my, they are so hot aren’t they!”
“They are, yeah. Especially mine,” I inched forward.
“I know! The leather is hilarious!” she said laughing. “I love the bands here. They are always so eccentric and crazy!”
In her mind she assumed since Zeke pulled me on stage he was the one I was talking about.
“Um, no, the lead singer isn’t mine. That one,” I said pointing at Caleb and she balked.
“He’s your boyfriend?”
“Yep.”
“Well-” and the next word that came out of her mouth I had never used before and didn’t have any plans to.
Then she turned without another word and stomped straight out the door of the club. What had just happened? I looked back to the stage to see Caleb trying to stifle a laugh. I glared at him making him laugh harder.
Beck all of a sudden grabbed my arm, almost jerking it out of the socket.
“You have to come to the bathroom with me!”
“I do?” I asked sarcastically.
“Yes!”
“Whoa, wait,” Kyle interjected. “I’m coming too.”
“To the little girl’s room?” Beck asked with her hands on her hip. “Even you can’t finagle your way into the ladies bathroom, Kyle.”“I need to stay with Maggie.”
“What, why?”
“I just do,” he answered firmly.
“Kyle,” I said and gave him a look. “I think it’s ok if we go to the bathroom without you.”
“Caleb asked me to watch out for you.”
“He didn’t say follow me to the bathroom!”
“I’ll wait for you guys in the hall.”
“Whatever, let’s go,” Beck yelled and whined as she pulled me behind her, Kyle right behind me. “Jeez. Why are you so precious all of a sudden?” She looked back at me and smirked but you could tell in her tone she was irritated and her mind was confirming that. “I wish I had every male in a half mile radius gawking after me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you not see? Every guy in this place has his eyes glued to you like you’re only wearing a corset or something.”
“Beck.”
“I’m serious.”
She walked into the bathroom door, pushing it until it banged loudly against the wall behind it, skipping two girls who were already in line.
“I’m sorry, she’s… I‘m sorry,” I told them and bolted in the door after her. “Look, everyone is just a little on edge because of everything that happened with the kidnapping, that’s all.”
“That has nothing to do with all these guys out there that don’t know you or anything about you, Mags.” She went in her stall but kept talking to me, to my embarrassment. “And the lead singer of Caleb’s band,” she yelled from her stall, “pulling you on stage like that, ugh. I’m telling you, Mags,” toilet flushed, stall door opened, “you’ve seriously changed since high school, ok? You have no idea what you look like do you? You’re like a movie star or something.”
“Beck, high school was only a couple weeks ago.”
“I know! That’s what I’m talking about!” she yelled and I stopped washing my hands to look at her. “You are so different: confident, pretty and important.” She sighed. “You don’t even talk to me anymore hardly. I was the last person you called when you got home from being kidnapped.”
I could feel my moods start to plummet, the thoughts of the other girls jammed in the bathroom coming to me against my will.
“Beck,” I said softly and went to hug her but I bumped into a girl who was coming to the sink. “Excuse-” I started but before I could finish, I was hit with a vision, right there in the middle of the crowded ladies room.
~ Nineteen ~
The girl who touched me was a small, waif of a girl. She was young, just graduated from high school too, and was going through a rough time. Her dad was a drug addict and they were being evicted. All she wanted was to get away.
In the vision, I saw her being woken up in the middle of the night and yanked by her hair from her bed by someone who had come to collect money her father owed him. He thought if he threatened his daughter’s life that her father would pay, but he didn’t know that her father could care less. He was in too deep, too far into the addiction. The girl I was looking at was going to be kidnapped tonight and killed as revenge for her fathers’ transgression four days from now.
As I watched it all play out so did she, as they did when the visions hit. She was dazed and her breathing was ragged. I gripped her arm to keep her steady and realized we’d both somehow sunk to the floor together. Beck was attempting to get our attention by snapping in front of us and waving.
I saw Kyle pushing his way through the girls at the door to get to me. He bent down, grabbing my arm gently to steady me.
There were a couple energy ribbons bouncing behind Beck’s head. Oh no, no! What could I do? Everyone was going to see and I couldn’t stop. My body was too worked up. I looked at Kyle helplessly, knowing there was no way to explain or make him understand. And he looked back knowing there was nothing he could do either. I hid my face and took a deep breath. Kyle pulled my face back to look at him with a hand on my cheek and I didn’t think, I just acted, or reacted rather.
I remembered Caleb and practicing reigning it in and kissing seemed to have worked, so without any thought to consequences for Kyle or me or Caleb, without any wonder to what Beck would think about seeing me kiss Kyle, without any thought at all really except to keep everyone from seeing what I was…
I reached up from my knees on the floor and kissed him.
I held his collar for stability and though Kyle’s mind was shocked and unsure, his hands definitely knew what to do. They snaked themselves around my waist and he had an inkling, an after thought really, that there was more to this. That there was a very good reason I was kissing him that had absolutely nothing to do with my wanting him, but he didn’t give a flip at the moment. This was what he had waited for for two years and he was going to savor it.
He kissed nothing like Caleb. His lips felt all wrong and not like the love I felt all through me when Caleb took my lips. All I saw and felt was Kyle’s want and desire for me. With Caleb there was love, protection and adoration mixed in with a need to make me happy and comfortable but with Kyle, he was solely focused on the fact that he’d wanted me for so long and could never have me. That thing inside me that told me what I was doing was so, so wrong was pulsing and screaming uncomfortably. I pulled back, hoping the short kiss had been enough to stop the uncontrollable Visionary in me.
“I’m sorry,” I told him quietly, looking up into his unbridled eyes. “I was losing control. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“Maggie, what happened?” he asked breathlessly.
“I had a…” I looked at Beck sitting there waiting for her own explanation with wide unbelieving eyes and knew I couldn’t give him an answer. Beck’s mind screamed the fact that she was confused at why I was kissing Kyle. “It was nothing.”
I turned my gaze on the girl and begged her with my eyes not to say anything. Her eyes swept over me with a look of fright. I needed to talk to her. She couldn’t go home.“It wasn’t nothing!” Beck yelled and stood. “That was definitely something. Why the hell did you kiss Kyle! And the lights flickered and they must have some kinda glow-in-the-dark paint in here because everything was glowing blue.” She looked at the girl. “You saw it too, what happened?”