Fiction: Mia and Neely (part 5)

     They put our picture on the front page of the paper in full color for the entire world to see. The headline read “4 DIE IN HOUSE FIRE.” I guess the police were keeping a lid on the fact that it was a bomb that had killed my best friend Neely and three of our other friends, lest the culprit should think they were on to him. Of course that story would leak pretty quickly. Anyone in a three block radius of that house knew it was an explosion.

      The photo showed Mason and me sitting side by side on the grass beside the body bags. We were wrapped together in a white blanket and covered by ash and soot. My hair was a wreck. My shoes were missing and my face was twisted by grief. Not my best photographic moment. It had taken me twenty minutes in the shower to wash away all that grime.

     The caption beneath the photo read, “Mason and Mia Duncan mourn the loss of friends as house burns.” Typical second-rate journalist couldn’t even get my name right. This idiot had me married to a man I’d only met a couple of days ago. The shot was credited to G.D. Higgins. As I stared down at the paper on my kitchen counter, I made a promise to myself to hunt down G.D. Higgins and beat him to death with his own camera. I grunted and pushed the newspaper aside.

     Maybe I was overreacting just a little. But hell, could you blame me really? My emotions were running ragged and jagged. Sometimes an adrenaline-fueled photographer beating was just what I needed to level me out.

     “What’s wrong?” Mason asked from the kitchen table. The tinnitus that had plagued me since the explosion was gone. My hearing was nearing normal. I suppose it was the same for Mason. Every once in a while I would spot him rubbing one ear or the other with the palm of his hand, as if it were clogged. The doctors at the E.R. had told us it would fade with time. It had been thirteen hours.

    

     He was browsing on his laptop, and I could see that he was reading the online article about the “house fire.” He skimmed over the story and focused on the photos.

     “Why did they put our names like that?” I asked him. He shrugged without looking at me.

     “Somebody asked me our names. I said ‘Mia… and Mason Duncan.’ I guess I should have been more specific. I didn’t know your last name. I’m sorry.” But he didn’t sound sorry; he sounded amused. Maybe I should have beaten him to death with his laptop. I guess it didn’t really matter who I beat to death, just as long as I took my aggression out on somebody. I tried to put it out of my mind and focus on the issues at hand.

     “So what do we do now?” I asked, hoping he had some idea of how to find the bomber. I had never had do any telepathic detective work. The closest I had ever come to solving any crimes was when I was in the third grade. Harold Schneider had stolen a lock-box full of lunch money from the cafeteria and I was the only one who knew, because of my special telepathic skill. Even when I was eight years old, I knew I couldn’t advertise my abilities without repercussions, so I simply pushed a thought from my mind into Harold’s head.  Your granddad will skin you alive and you’ll deserve it, I told him, and I kept telling him and kept telling until he believed it and confessed to his crime out of fear.

     “You take a nap,” Mason told me.  He closed his laptop and stood to face me. “And I’ll go talk to this photographer and see if he has any more pictures of the crowd from last night. Maybe our bomber will be among the lookie-loos. If that doesn’t pan out, we’ll go to all the funerals and see if the bomber shows up at one of them.”

     “I’m not taking a nap while you go off and talk to this guy alone,” I protested.  He placed a finger over my lips to shush me so I switched modes of communication. Neely is my friend! I want to go with you.

     “You need sleep. You’ve been running on adrenaline for thirteen hours. You’ve been through a lot of stress at the party, at the hospital, at Neely’s parents’ house, at your parents’ house. You look like hell,” he smiled and kissed my forehead.

     I could go another thirteen hours without sleep. I still have adrenaline to burn. I closed my eyes when his lips moved from my forehead to my earlobe. Very nice. Nobody had nibbled on that part of me, or any part of me, for quite some time.

     “I can think of a good way to burn some of that adrenaline,” he whispered, and my mind was filled with some very x-rated images. I sighed with submission as he let his fingers do some exploring.

     Now, I am not the kind of girl who blabs all of her secrets. I do not see any need to share the intimate details of a very private activity, but I will tell you it was the most fabulous sex I had ever had in my life. The fact that I could not read every little thought in his head unless he wanted me to was a nice change from what I had experienced in the past, and what he wanted me to read was spectacular.

     Afterward, as we laid in my warm bed feeling as if our bones and our brains had liquefied, I turned to him and asked, “Should we have done that?”

     He snorted a laugh and said, “It’s okay, honey, we’re married, remember?” I socked him with a pillow.

     “It’s a good thing we’re going to see that photographer,” I said. “If he doesn’t help us, I’m going to beat him to death with his own camera.”

     And then we slept.

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