She pinned her thumbnail between her teeth. “No. I mean yes.” She rolled away from me. “Not exactly…I don’t know.”
“The people watching, then?” I wanted to touch her, to soothe whatever thoughts plagued her.
“Yes.”
“I can have the security camera footage pulled and find out who they were.”
She groaned and buried her face in the pillow. “Please don’t. I’ll die of mortification.”
Settling next to her, I stared at the blonde strands hiding her from me. “If you don’t explain, I’ll never know. My robot brain, as you call it, simply isn’t capable of seeing into the heart of someone else. It can’t even see into mine, if I have one.”
Her shoulders relaxed a faint bit, and she rolled over so she faced me. “Do you know how disarming that is?”
“What?” I couldn’t help myself. I ran my fingers along her bare upper arm.
“When you admit your flaws like that.”
“Why is it disarming?” I peered into her light eyes.
“Because most people spend countless hours of their lives trying to cover them up.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No.” She rested her palm on my cheek, her warmth flooding my veins. “You aren’t.”
“Neither are you.” I pulled her closer, and she rested in the crook of my arm. “Are you going to tell me why you’re upset?”
“I thought you couldn’t read emotions?”
“I can read yours sometimes, when you let me see them. But other times you hide from me.”
“It’s safer that way.”
A question formed in my mind, one I hadn’t thought to ask. “Will you tell me about you?” Her words came back to me: “Ask the right questions.” Maybe this was one of them.
“What do you want to know?”
“I know the mechanics of your childhood—where you went to school, what your parents did, that you loved them, the names of your friends. But would you tell me something you remember vividly?”
“Why?”
Wasn’t it obvious? “I want to know you. All your secrets—I want to keep them. You can tell me anything, and I wouldn’t judge you. Had an unhealthy obsession with One Direction? Fine. Slutted it up senior year to get back at mommy? No problem, though admittedly that wouldn’t be my favorite. Fifty bodies in the back yard? I don’t give a shit.”
She snorted. “I think that last one is more your speed.”
Yes. “But I want to know about you.” I thought I’d collected all the data I needed, but the closer I got to her, the more I realized how much I didn’t know. “I want to see things through your eyes.”
“Empathy. The one thing psychopaths lack.” She shook her head against my shoulder. “You want the one thing that it’s impossible for you to have.”
“Humor me?”
“Fine. Let me think.” She fell into another silence, one that put me on edge. Silence was bad. But when she spoke again, I could hear the smile in her voice. “One summer, my friends and I got into our heads that we were going to be runners. It was this whole craze at the time. I’m not sure why, maybe the summer Olympics or something. Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve noticed from our exercise in the yard, but I’m not particularly suited to running.”
“You looked good to me. I rather liked watching you move, though I had wished you’d been running toward me instead of away.”
“Then it wouldn’t have been a very clever escape attempt, now would it?”
“True.”
She rested her palm on my stomach. “So, one morning, we’re out running around my neighborhood. The sun’s already hot, and I’m hustling along in the middle of the slower girls’ group. We’re making decent time, and turn the corner to pass by my house. My dad is out in the yard setting up the sprinkler before he leaves for work. He pauses and waves at us as we approach. Then my mom steps out of the front door and walks over to the hose pipe. I begin to laugh before she even finishes her mischief. Sure enough, the sprinkler starts up and sprays my dad. He stands there for, I don’t know, like a five-second count.” She giggled and stopped to collect herself, and I found my lips twitching along with her laughter. “He’s wearing his work suit and is soaked. By this time, the slow group has stopped, and we are all laughing. He turns and sees my mom trying to sneak back into the house. Then he takes off running. She screams and tries to hurry up the steps, but he grabs her and hugs her to him, soaking her just the same.” Her laughter infected me, and I smiled at the mental image.
“They sound like a pair.”
“They were.” Her laughter tapered off. “They had me late. A surprise baby to a couple who’d tried a decade prior to have a child. Mom was forty-three when I was born. Dad was almost fifty.” Sadness colored the memory, softening her voice. “I knew, you know? I knew when Mom died that Dad wouldn’t be far behind. They were inseparable, even when she got sick. He never strayed far from her side. It was like he was going through the treatments, too. The chemo was so hard on her, sapping her strength. But her spirit never waned. She always had a smile for me, even when she was too tired to lift her arms to hug me. And my dad was like a plant under her sun. When she burned out, he withered away soon after.”