“It’s a deal.” I hesitated, though, trying to figure out the right way to word this.
“Uh oh. That bad?” Alex shifted in his seat so he faced me. “Maybe talk first, then pizza, because that face is freaking me out.”
“My thinking face freaks you out?” I aimed for a teasing tone, but I must have missed the mark because he just looked worried. “It’s nothing. Just… something you said a few days ago just got stuck in my head and now I need to figure it out.” I drummed my fingers across the book cover. “You joked that part of the reason I fell for you was that you were the only psychic out there, so there was no competition. Do you remember that?”
“Vaguely,” he said slowly. “I’m not following, though.”
“It got me wondering if it was really true.”
Silence. When I stole a quick look at Alex again, his brows were wrinkled into a frown, his lower lip caught between his teeth like he did when he was thinking hard about something. I let him be, letting him turn it over in his head like I’d been doing for the last hour.
“So, you’re wondering if there are other psychics out there somewhere?” he asked. “I mean, I know of at least one other.”
“Wait, you do?” What the hell?
“Yeah. You do, too.” He raised an eyebrow. “Thomas McAvell was psychic, according to the story. That’s supposedly why he went crazy and killed his family.”
“Huh. I guess in all the chaos that day, I forgot about that.” I trailed off, adding that new information to the questions circling in my mind. “What are the odds that two people who can see ghosts would live in the same state, let alone nearly in the same town? Does that mean it’s way more common than we thought?”
“I wish I had some answers for you, Donovan, but I have no idea. I’ve spent most of my life avoiding anything to do with my abilities,” Alex confessed, voice soft. “If there’s anyone else nearby, the ghosts don’t seem to know about it, because they all come to me.”
“Would it be something you’d consider researching?” I asked carefully. With how much Alex appeared to hate his gift, I didn’t want to push him. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, of course, and I’ll drop it if you’d prefer we just leave things as they are.”
Again, Alex was quiet, eyes distant. No matter what he decided, I’d stand by him, but I did hope he’d at least consider looking. If there was someone out there who could help him, maybe that would give him some peace.
“The way things have been hasn’t been so great,” he finally said. He kept his eyes straight ahead, the picture of calm, but he kept tugging and twisting the hem of his sweater, tugging at a loose thread.
“You have a whole team backing you up now, though,” I reminded him. “You don’t have to handle it all alone anymore.”
“Yeah, but I still can’t control it. I didn’t even know I could use crystals to protect my house until my asshole ex did it. Even then, I haven’t tried to learn anything about how to do it myself.” He sighed heavily, his head falling back against the loveseat. “I guess we should at least look into what possibilities are out there. As much as I hate him, Nate knew more about my own abilities than I do. There’s a freaking crystal shop in town and I’ve never even set foot in there.”
“There is? Where?” I ran over my mental map of Lowery’s Crossing, trying to place a crystal shop.
“It’s on Race Street, right by the dog grooming place, remember?”
We’d walked the town end to end, backward and forward and sideways, on our evening dates, but it still took me a second. “I thought that place was a plant shop or something. I assumed that’s where Raina got all hers.”
“Nope,” Alex shook his head. “I mean, I’ve heard they do sell plants there and they keep a lot in the windows, but mostly they sell crystals and stuff like that.”
“You’ve really never been in? I thought you were basically on a first-name basis with all the small businesses in town.”
He flushed, tugging harder at the thread. He was going to unravel the whole sweater at this rate. “It’s kind of stupid, but I never went in there because it… I don’t know. I guess it felt like I was validating what I could do if I did? It doesn’t make sense, but going in there would have made it feel more real, somehow? As if going out at midnight to find dead bodies isn’t real enough. I told you it’s stupid and I just—”
“Alex.” I leaned in and kissed him, my preferred method of slowing the avalanche of self-doubt that sometimes slipped free. I grasped his hands in mine at the same time, forcing him to relinquish his stranglehold on his sweater. “Hey. You’re not stupid and you’re allowed to feel however you want about your ability. If I were in your shoes, I don’t think I’d be nearly as calm about it as you’ve been.”
“If you were in my shoes, you’d have your house protected and have the ghosts trained to knock at the door already.” He laughed when he said it, but that self-mocking undertone was still there.
“After everything you went through with your mom, moving around, and trying to run your own business while dealing with something like this on your own, with absolutely no support… Alex, you’re fucking amazing. It kills me that you don’t see what I see.”
“I believe that you believe I’m awesome. That counts, right?”
I prided myself on being a level-headed man, but there were times, like this, where I truly hated the people in Alex’s past who’d made him feel like this. The worst offenders being his own parents just made it all the worse.
“That counts,” I agreed, running my thumb across his knuckles until his shoulders loosened. “I’ll just keep telling you until you actually believe it, too.”
“I still say that counts as a form of torture. Compliments are so awkward,” he groaned.
Laughing, I leaned in and kissed him again, lingering until I had to pull away or risk getting us into a compromising position. The doors of the shop were locked, but the windows faced the street and if I did what I truly wanted to do, we’d get arrested for public indecency.
