The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (26 page)

We stared at each other over the
half-empty containers of potato salad.

“Please?” she begged. “I really,
really want to know.”

“No.” Her obsession with sex had
to be some kind of psychological issue. “You need therapy.”

“Who gives you more burn time?”

I glared at her. “What difference
does it make?”

“I keep a list. A lot of us do. Clint
was good but Alex is a natural.” Samantha withdrew her hands, hopefully giving
up the notion she could push what she wanted out of me. “Why is that bad?
You’re the one with two fuck buddies.”

“I’m going to break up with Beau tomorrow.”
I cautiously palmed my water off the table, afraid she’d strike like a snake
and get my skin. “I’m not a cheater.”

“Faking orgasms is cheating, Miss
Can’t Do Wrong. Did you go the Meg Ryan route or Kegel him?”

I didn’t care what she thought
about me. Really. “What if I wasn’t faking? What if I just kept my powers?”

“You couldn’t O? You poor thing.
John’s that bad?” She tsked, but she also smiled with great satisfaction.
“You’re backing the wrong stallion, girlfriend. Stick with Beau and ditch John.
John will spend more money on you, but bad sex isn’t worth it.”

“What if the orgasm wasn’t good
or big enough to take effect?” I held my breath, hoping she’d give me the
answer I wanted—a percentage of healthy and socially acceptable supras were
immune to the orgasm effect, and I was one of many.

“There’s no such thing as a bad
orgasm. Admit it, you’re a cheater. And a liar. And you’re screwing two guys.
I’m so proud!” She pretended to wipe away tears. “My little girl’s all grown
up.”

“Believe whatever you want.”
Everyone always did, even when the unvarnished truth stared them in the face. I
was the only one who didn’t get to maintain blissful ignorance.

The tell-tale clip clop of Lou’s
wooden sandals echoed up the hallway outside the break room, preventing further
revelations. I began scribbling on my assessment sheet and Samantha peered over
my shoulder to copy my answers.

I was tempted to huddle over my
paper, but she grinned and tapped her finger lightly against mine. It wasn’t a
caress, it was a taunt. I still shivered.

“What did you write for number
three?” she asked.

She hadn’t pushed, not yet. “Too
much egg yolk and vinegar.”

“If Lou makes you test food
tomorrow,” she promised, “I’ll eat most of it.”

“Thanks,” I said gruffly. Potato
salads nine and ten had received short shrift. I was spudded out.

“What are friends for?” she
asked, and damned if she didn’t mean it.

Damned was right.

~ * ~

Monday was the beginning of the
end. I tackled my most difficult challenge, aside from finding the mole with
the saboteur using the candlestick in the library before the picnic. Otherwise
I wouldn’t be able to enjoy Lou’s cooking and Samantha and Alex in the dunking
booth without the interviews from supra hell hanging over my head.

If I could survive the next hour
with Beau Walker, I could survive anything.

Using a clever strategy I’d
developed the past several months, I hit Beau with my request before he could
unfold the print-out that held my DNA test results. Sometimes, if I caught him
before coffee, before he got frustrated with my feeble fading, he was more
amenable to suggestion.

“There’s this company picnic this
weekend,” I began, slipping automatically onto my naughty stool in the corner.

“Aw, are you asking me to be your
date?” He spread the charts and papers and color coded sticky notes on the
shockingly clean surface of the lab table. The whole room looked like it
belonged to someone else. Nary a petrified sandwich in sight. He must have
worked all weekend. “I accept.”

Was he accepting a real date or a
beard date, neither of which could I go on since I was, however reluctantly,
with John? I stared at Beau, squinting. “Actually, I’m going to ask you to sit
in the dunking booth.”

He paused, his hands hovering
over the paperwork. “You want me to sit in a dunking booth.”

“Yes.”

“What do I get out of this?”

“Wet?”

“No.”

“Fifty bucks?”

“No!” he exclaimed.

“Why not?”

“I’m not sitting in a damn
dunking booth,” Beau said. “We need to talk about your test results. I haven’t
shared this information with anyone yet—”

“It would only be for an hour or
so,” I interrupted. The longer we could postpone the DNA talk, the better. The
longer we could postpone the John talk, the better. “You’re the perfect
candidate. Everyone’s annoyed with you for running that fade for years.”

Beau smiled at me. “That’s not
really a problem anymore.”

That was when I realized nobody,
not even Tina Harris, had dropped by to flirt with Beau or catch us in the
supposed act. Tina in particular liked to start her day off with a hearty
ogling.

“You healed,” I accused. “In one
weekend.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking
about,” he lied. It was one of those lies a person doesn’t expect you to
believe, even without suprapowers.

“Yes, you do.” I hopped off my
stool, dragged it to the table, and sat back down, my elbows pinning most of
the papers in place. “Most of the others haven’t healed. And Adam died, Beau.
Or did you not hear?”

“I heard.”

“So what did you do?”

“Took vitamins?”

It was true he’d taken vitamins.
And stupid to think it would heal a burnout. “If you have special medicine, why
haven’t you shared it?”

He just shrugged.

“But you did get better. You’re
running your fade again.”

“Why would I do such a thing?”

“I don’t know, you never told me.
It’s not like they’ll forget you’re hot. You’re not Lou. You can’t make them
forget, can you?”

“Golly, I’m flattered. Cleo
thinks I’m hot.” He slipped his glasses out of his lab coat pocket and slid
them on. Peering at me across the table, he said, “Maybe that’s why she wants
to see me all wet.”

“Don’t be juvenile.” I hadn’t considered
that aspect of Beau in the dunking booth. Wet shirt, no shirt. Shorts. Bare
legs. Water glistening on his skin. Of course, with him fading again, nobody
would notice.

Nobody, it seemed, but me, and I
didn’t need to see it to picture it. “I want an answer. Can you make them
forget?”

Could he please make
me
forget? I did not want to be sexually aware of Beau Walker when I was involved
with John. I did not want to be sexually aware of Beau Walker, period.

“Forget what?”

Abbot and Costello, we were not.
“If you’re better, there’s no reason for us to pretend...you know.”

“I was going to break up with you
anyway.” A thin mask flashed across his face before I could evaluate it. “I
don’t date cheaters. I heard about you and Arlin.”

“You don’t date anybody.” With a
bare minimum of movement, I scooched some of the DNA papers off the table and
onto the ground, where perhaps he would forget about them. “Heard from whom?
You don’t talk to people, either.”

“Still hear things.”

Sneaking around and
eavesdropping, I bet. A couple more pieces of paper fell into my lap. “How long
does it take a supra to fully recover from the typical burnout?”

“It varies. I’m not fully
healed,” he lied.

He did expect me to believe that.

“About your test results,” he
continued. “Very interesting, I have to say.”

He wasn’t behaving any
differently around me that I could tell. If he knew I could see lies, he hadn’t
bothered to be honest. And if he didn’t know, I wasn’t going to tell him.

“As I suspected, your
sensitivities converge as some sort of truth-reading ability. Am I right?”

Well, hell.

“No.” I lay my chin on my hands,
my arms on top of the papers.

“It’s right there in black and
white.” The table between us wasn’t wide. He didn’t have to lean very far to
yank the papers out from under me.

My elbows zipped forward,
dropping my chin perilously close to the table’s surface. I squawked.

“Cleo, I’m just doing my job.
Give me the charts.”

Just doing his job? Well, so was
I. And mine was more important.

With a sigh of disgust, Beau circled
the table. Frozen in indecision, I watched as he gathered the papers I’d
flipped to the floor. Several had fallen under my stool, so when he
straightened, we were practically cheek to cheek.

“You’ve wasted months of our
time, what’s a few minutes?” he kidded, his tone less cutting than normal.

“You don’t know what you’re
talking about,” I blustered. His hip brushed my leg as he arranged the papers
on my side of the table. I twitched.

Beau placed a hand on my knee,
which, as luck and my Lily Pulitzer dress would have it, was bare. His palm was
warm and firm. “Would you relax? Jolene’s not here. Nobody’s going to overhear
us. I cleared the place, and I’m running a blanket. We have complete privacy.”

Beau was one of the most private
people I’d ever met. He was going to hate that I’d been reading his thoughts
for months. Hate me.

So I started the disclosure on a
strong, confident note. “Are you mad at me?”

“I’ve confirmed my latest
trainee, the sham who’s been under my nose for months, possesses one of the most
rare supra skills in our generation, and you want to know if I’m mad at you?”

“Well, yeah.”

He removed his glasses, but the
tape gave way and the temple clattered to the table. He didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m not sure how to answer that.”

“It doesn’t matter how you
answer. I’ll see the truth anyway,” I said glumly.

“Fascinating.” Without taking his
gaze off me or his hand off my leg, he groped for a clipboard and a pen. “Can
you turn it off?”

“No.” Why was he still touching
me?

“Is the effect visual or do you
hear the truth?”

“Visual.” He wasn’t petting me.
His hand was just...there.

“What happens when you’re under
the influence of intoxicants?”

“I piss a lot of people off.”

“I can see that.” Finally, so he
could scribble on his clipboard, he moved his hand, leaving a chilly place
above my knee. “Have you ever amped?”

“No, and I don’t do drugs, so
don’t ask me to.”

“I wasn’t going to. Does orgasm
negate it?”

I flushed. “None of your
business.”

“It is my business.” Without the
glasses, he had to tilt his head to see the writing on his clipboard.

“Doesn’t it negate it for
everyone?” I countered, reluctant to tell him what I’d only just discovered
myself. The tests he’d want to run... I licked my lips. “Samantha says it
does.”

“Samantha isn’t an authority on supra
response to physical stimuli just because she has lots of sex,” Beau said. “Are
you going to balk me now there’s no reason to? Cat’s out of the bag, Cleo.”

I sighed. “It’s more complicated
than that.”

“Yuri and Al have you searching
for spies, no doubt. Their secret’s safe with me. Yours, too.”

“How did you—”

“It’s what anybody would do with
a supra of your talents in this particular corporate environment,” he said,
though he wasn’t being entirely accurate. I couldn’t tell which part was untrue
or incomplete, though, because omissions didn’t show up as lies.

“You said you confirmed it. Did
you suspect?”

“Since the first time I saw your
DNA chart.” He masked slightly. Could be braggadocio, not wanting to admit he
hadn’t pegged me sooner. Could be something else.

“Why were you always telling me
how much I sucked? I don’t suck,” I said. “You owe me so many apologies.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t.” He
masked—and his mask apologized—but he forged ahead. “You’re a wash as a
chameleon. It’s such a subsidiary skill, I can’t believe you can generate any
sort of fade.”

“God, you can’t stop, can you?” I
swiveled my stool until I faced the table instead of him, my knees pointed away
and my skirt tugged down as far as it would go. From this angle, there was no
way he could put his nice, warm hand on my leg unless he wrapped his arms
around my waist. “Despite your dire predictions, I can fade, which is another
reason I don’t suck.”

“You kind of suck,” he said.

“And you’re kind of a liar.”

“Is there anything else you’d like
to tell me?”

“Go jump in a lake.”

Beau kicked my stool until I
swiveled back to face him. He wedged his foot in the bars to keep me from
turning away. It also pinned me between the table and his thigh, far too close
for comfort. “Do you know what I can do?”

“Annoy the shit out of anyone in
under five seconds.”

“I’m not proud of it,” he lied,
“but it is a skill I’ve been honing for years. Do you know what else I can do?”

“Wait, are you saying you
are
supra annoying?”

“I’m a chameleon,” he answered
evasively. “The good ones don’t just fade, Cleo.”

“So you really can alter your
melanin to match your camo pants.”

He rolled his eyes. “Are we going
back to day one? Cleo, please. I am begging you. I can do this if you can do
this. Set aside the bickering and the sexual tension. Temporarily. We can fight
later. I’ll even let you read a few lies so you can feel like you’ve gotten one
over on me. Right now, let’s do some business.”

Sexual tension. Oh boy. Though I
didn’t know how I could feel any tension of the sexual variety after my weekend
with John, Beau was dead right. Long before he’d burned out, I’d noticed him on
some primal level and apparently he’d noticed me. Whether we wanted to notice
or not.

Why, I have no idea, and I didn’t
care. My reputation was on the line, my job was on the line, and supra safety
was on the line. It would be a relief not to argue. It would be a relief to be
completely frank with somebody truly equipped to help me understand myself.