Run (The Tesla Effect #2) (16 page)

“Okay, gross—let’s not do a remake of
The Fly
. Better: maybe tomorrow morning I’ll have a ‘fro with gold highlights,” she said, grinning.

“Your hair should only be red,” Finn said sternly. “I did not approve this disguise, and as your entangled-other I believe I have veto power. It’s in the fine print.”

“Dream on,” Tesla shot back. “I love this disguise. It’s very freeing, you know. I was having a blast tonight until your mayday came over the wire.”

It was out before she could stop it, and while it didn’t sound like much to Bizzy, just more of their usual, annoying banter, Finn and Tesla were immediately reminded that Sam had revealed—deliberately—that they’d been drinking, and dancing. And that it had been memorable.

“I can imagine,” Finn said, and Tesla looked at him quickly, blushing.

“All I mean is that anything…unique about my looks is covered up, so no one will notice me.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure that’s working quite as well as you think it is,” Finn said, his voice once more taking on that softly teasing tone that had wavered for just a moment.

“Really?” Bizzy asked, thoroughly disgusted. “You’re flirting
now
? Talking about her hair and how hot she is instead of the
un-freaking-believable scientific breakthrough you’re both a part of
??”

Finn shrugged, Tesla laughed, and Bizzy gave up. “Fine. It should have been me—neither of you deserves this. Why don’t you guys go make out or something, and we’ll talk tomorrow. It’s late and I’m tired. So, you know. Get out.”

“Geez Biz. Touchy,” Finn said, pretending to be aggrieved. Still, he did not hesitate to stand up, grab Tesla’s hand, and pull her toward the door. “We’ll talk tomorrow. When we’re not so tired. Or wound up. Or whatever it is we are.”

When Bizzy had shut the door behind them, Finn and Tesla stood in the hallway, her hand still in his. Tesla swallowed, suddenly unable to look up and meet his eyes, even when she felt him looking intently at her.

“What do you want—” Finn started to ask.

“Would you mind if I—” Tesla said at the same time.

They both stopped, Tesla’s eyes still on the floor.

“I don’t want my dad to know I’m back,” she said suddenly, rushing into the strained silence. “I’m going back tomorrow, Finn—I hadn’t intended to come home yet, but … I had to find out if you were okay. Would you mind—can I stay here tonight?”

When she did, finally, look up at him, she found his warm, brown eyes, lit with a golden intensity. She forced herself to exhale, long and slow, when she realized she wasn’t breathing.

Without a word, Finn turned, their hands still clasped, and led Tesla down the hall to another room—his room. The old house settled with a sigh, the chill of November winds and all that the dark contained safely locked outside.

CHAPTER 19

The moment he heard the door click shut behind them—he and Tesla on one side, and everything else in the world on the other—Finn felt better. No, not better—he felt like he was himself, for the first time in…days? Years? Ever?

Tesla spoke, and his moment of reflection dissolved, the tiny, scattered pieces of his insight quickly absorbed and forgotten.

“Finn, I—thanks for letting me stay here, and—can I get a shower? And I don’t want you to think, I mean this isn’t about—”

“Of course, and yeah, I totally get it,” he said. He was surprised by his own gentleness, a quality he had never associated with himself. She was nervous, self-conscious, and she seemed young and vulnerable as she stammered in front of him, not wanting to be misunderstood. He had expected when he opened his mouth that he would say something smartass, something to accentuate the sexual awkwardness and increase her discomfort, but…he simply didn’t.

“Oh. Thanks,” she said, her relief obvious. “Ah, and can I borrow something to wear?”

“Sure,” he said, his grin giving her some warning. “I think you’ll look much better in my clothes than Sam’s, anyway.”

Tesla tried not to, but she felt the heat of her blush creep up her face, even as she said with meager bravado, “Oh, I don’t know. I think I look pretty good.”

Finn paused as he rummaged in his dresser drawer to look at her, taking in the faded jeans that sat low on her hips, the tight T-shirt, the worn green flannel that he knew was far less soft than her incredible skin. “Well, I do have to give you that,” he acquiesced.

“Here,” he said suddenly, tossing in quick succession a pair of boxers covered in hearts with little endearments written on them, like those Valentine’s Day candies, and a zippered hoodie that, as she caught it deftly and got a look at its size, was obviously far too small for Finn. He laughed at the pointed look she gave him, holding the tiny shirt up in front of her. “I think it’s Bizzy’s,” he said. “She always leaves her shit in the dryer and it winds up in everybody else’s laundry.”

“And these?” Tesla asked, holding up the boxers. “Just a random choice?”

Finn laughed, relieved to know both that he was still himself, capable of exploiting the sexual awkwardness of the situation a
little
bit, and that Tesla was laughing about it.

Tesla walked quickly down the hall and into the bathroom. She found clean towels, neatly folded and stacked in the cabinet under the sink, as well as a worn scrunchie to put her hair up on top of her head. She shimmied out of Sam’s clothes, left them in a pile on the floor, and allowed herself a full ten minutes standing under the hot water. The last of her worries and tensions lifted and dissipated with the clouds of steam, all of her muscles relaxed, and she even found an almost-full bottle of body wash that smelled like mint and honeysuckle.

Thank God there are girls in this house
, she thought.

After her shower, her skin faintly pink from the hot water, Tesla hesitated only a moment before grabbing one of the toothbrushes in the holder and using it. She caught her own glance in the mirror and laughed silently, unable to pretend to herself that she wasn’t thinking of the now eight-year-old burger and beers she’d had earlier, and the probable state of her breath because of them. Whoever’s toothbrush she had, it was a sacrifice on both the owner’s part and hers that she was nonetheless willing to make.

Clean, refreshed, and relaxed, Tesla shook her long dark hair out and, after sort of peeling them off her eyeballs—which was nasty—she put the dark cosmetic lenses in an empty cup that sat on the counter, and put some water in it to keep them moist. And finally, she put on the clothes Finn had given her. The boxers were big, of course, the elastic waistband loose and barely hanging on at her hip bones, so she rolled it a few times, which didn’t help so much as it just made them shorter. The hoodie, however, made of some incredibly light, black cotton, with just enough spandex in it to hug her torso in the most intimate way, was incredibly small on her. The waistband hit her at her natural waist, a full seven inches above the boxers, the long sleeves just reached the middle of her forearms, and the fabric clung to her shoulders and ribs, clearly outlining the curve of her breasts.

She looked at herself in the mirror, and despite the fogginess from the steam, she could clearly see that her outfit was sexy, totally hot, in fact, in a Beckett kind of way. Meaning that the clothes were incidental, except in terms of what they revealed and highlighted.

Tesla shook her head, not in the least surprised that at a second’s notice Finn would find these specific items for her to wear—or that she would wear them without protest tonight.

She took a deep breath, opened the door, and padded silently back down the hall to Finn, her heart flitting about wildly, bumping up against her sternum and ribcage like a moth caught in a lampshade, unable to escape the rising heat.

When she opened his bedroom door, Tesla was working hard to keep her courage up. She stepped inside and turned to softly close the door before taking a deep breath and finally looking at Finn.

Naturally, he was lying back on his alarmingly large bed, looking perfectly relaxed atop a blue and black plaid comforter, with his shoulders and head supported by two pillows. He cocked one eyebrow up, and the corresponding corner of his mouth went up with it in such an over-the-top, come-hither leer that Tesla laughed out loud.

“Oh my god, you look like a total perv,” she said. “Very appealing.”

“I’ll have you know that I am considered too sexy for my shirt, as Right Said Fred aptly put it, and pretty much everything else.”

“By whom?” she scoffed, crossing her arms over her chest, over the too-tight fabric.

“By the person best able to judge such things—myself.”

“Well, you might want to reconsider your credentials,” she said, walking over to the bed as she considered him with mock seriousness. “You might be too moronic for your shirt, I suppose. And pretty much everything else.”

“Shows what you know,” he said, highly dignified, and then he patted the bed near him. “Come sit down, we have stuff to talk about.”

Tesla swallowed, once, and the sound of it seemed over-loud, at least in her head, a great nervous gulping that gave away everything.

Finn didn’t seem to notice, though, as she came to the edge of the bed and sat on it, as far from him as she could get. Finn’s smile was slight, and fleeting.

“So, Abbott, we’ve got this entanglement thing going on. We know almost nothing about it, and I think we should begin by comparing notes.”

Tesla nodded, but waited for him to begin.

Finn, always so relaxed to her eyes, put his hands behind his head, his fingers laced together, and crossed his legs at the ankles. He stared up at the ceiling, ignoring Tesla as he recounted out loud what he had been experiencing that he thought was likely attributable to the entanglement.

“I think we can safely assume that when we went down into the Bat Cave last summer to find your dad and we got knocked out, some of what we experienced when we came to was part of it.”

“How do you mean?” Tesla asked. She hadn’t even begun to think backwards and pinpoint the effects.

Finn spoke eagerly. “Remember when we woke up and started talking, you had been drugged and I’d been hit in the head?”

“Of course,” she said, frowning, unsure where he was going.

“It’s still a little fuzzy in my memory, but I’m pretty sure you said “Ow,” at the same instant I had a terrible pain shoot through my temple, just where I’d been clocked with the butt of a gun. And then I felt dizzy and nauseated, even though it was you who had been chloroformed.”

Tesla’s mind raced over his words, recalling the event, what they’d said, how she’d felt. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I do remember that. I didn’t really have a headache—I woke up, and I thought I was going to throw up, and I was dizzy when I sat up, the room was definitely spinning. But once I started to scoot around the boxes Nilsen had stacked up, once I was getting closer to where you were, I did have a sudden, sharp pain in my head. And then it was gone.”

“Of course, my concussion and you being drugged could have produced the exact same symptoms in both of us,” Finn said. “And I’d be satisfied with that explanation if that was all there was to it.”

“There is more, though,” Tesla said, shifting her body to move in closer to him and sitting cross-legged, facing him on the bed. “There’ve been—other things, weird things I couldn’t explain.”

Finn, equally caught up in the conversation, sat up, too, his forearms draped casually over his bent knees. “Like what?”

Tesla blushed, suddenly, and Finn leapt into the breach.

“Look, Tes, we’ll just have to agree not to be embarrassed by this, we have to tell each other everything if we have any hope of figuring this out. Agreed?”

She nodded, her cheeks bright pink, her eyes, one blue and one green, so much more startling for not having to compete with the bright flame of her red hair. They stood out like sparkling gems in the pale complexion of her face, framed by the dark cascade of her hair.

“When we first jumped together,” she said, so quietly that Finn had to lean in to hear her, one hand on the bed a mere two inches from her knee, his weight suspended over that hand and his face much, much closer to hers than it had been.

“Yeah?” he prodded softly.

“When we were at Dodie’s, you, me and Sam. Do you remember I stayed while Sam went to drop you off on his bike, before coming back to get me?”

Finn nodded, his eyes intent on hers.

“I remember feeling—weird—when you were walking away, heading out the door with Sam.”

“Weird how?” he asked, and she did not notice the strain in his voice.

“Weird in that as you moved away from me I felt—I felt a kind of tightening in my chest, like I was struggling to breathe, like there was a band around me pulling tighter and it was somehow all about you, and feeling like I didn’t want you to go, and part of it was—well, fear, I guess.”

Tesla blushed again as Finn continued to watch her, saying nothing. “Does that sound stupid?” she asked. “It’s not even a thing, really.”

Finn brought his free hand up to her cheek and touched her skin with the side of his hand. Just once, a single, gentle stroke, even as he shook his head.

“No, it doesn’t sound stupid, and yes, it really was—is—a thing. I know exactly what you’re talking about; I’ve felt it too.”

They talked and talked, emboldened by their similar experiences to tell each other about every single time they’d felt that strange, tight feeling in their chests, every time they’d been aware of what seemed at the time an over-concern with the other’s whereabouts, and safety. They marveled at the degree to which they seemed
tuned
to each other, and Tesla pointed out that it was not dissimilar to the way she’d felt about Max for a long time after their mother had died, and still did sometimes.

“It’s like, concern, but it’s more than that. It’s hyper-awareness, like even if I’m not thinking about you I always kind of am, just on the periphery, and it’s worry, and protectiveness, and a discomfort with distance, all wrapped up together.”

“Exactly,” Finn said. “And of course there are lots of documented cases of people having an unexplained connection—like twins who seem to know things or even be able to communicate; it even happens with some that don’t know each other because they’d been separated at birth. It’s like Bizzy said, the entanglement exists between and among us all, it’s just not something most of us perceive.”

They both sat silent for a moment, occupied with their own thoughts, until something occurred to Finn. “You know when you jumped back a few days ago, I felt it.”

“You did?” Tesla asked, startled.

Finn nodded. “Yeah—I mean I didn’t know what it was at the time, of course, it was just this totally random onslaught of emotions and adrenaline, I felt fear and excitement—a little bit of anger—exhilaration, I don’t know what all. It took like half an hour just to calm down, and I had no idea what had happened. I had already suspected I was losing my mind; thank god I talked to Bizzy before I felt you make the jump! When Sam told us the next day that you’d gone back, and about what time that had been, it all fit together. I knew I’d felt what you felt, when you jumped—along with my own worry, or anxiety, or whatever, about whatever it was that was happening to you, too far away for me to do anything about it.”

“Shit,” said Tesla, at a loss for anything more elegant to say.

“Tell me about it,” said Finn, nodding in a somewhat grim manner.

Tesla looked down again, picking at a thread in the comforter. He watched her for a moment, then folded his long legs to sit cross-legged, too, facing her, their knees touching, as he took both her hands in his and waited until she looked up at him.

“What?” he asked simply.

“You’re probably just going to tell me again that nothing happened, but you know I felt things too, tonight. From very far away, I might add—from eight years in the past—things we both know you were feeling, and—Finn, it was
awful
. It hit me out of nowhere, and I’ve never felt like that before—so much rage, I didn’t know what to
do
with it. And the loneliness, the sense of being completely alone, and it was all so bitter, and—”