“I didn’t want to go,” I said. “And since you weren’t absolutely sure you wanted me to, I thought I’d hang around at least a while longer.”
“I thought you might be afraid to leaveafraid that when Doro found out, he’d just
order us back together.”
“He might. But I doubt it. He’s already gotten more than he bargained for from us.”
“From you.”
I shrugged.
“Why did you stay?”
“You know why. I wanted to be with you.”
“The husband he chose for you.”
“Yeah.” I turned to face him. “Stupid me, falling in love with my own husband.”
He didn’t look away from me, didn’t even change expression.
After a moment I grinned at him. “Not so stupid. We’re a match.”
He smiled thinly, almost grimly. “You’re changing. I’ve been watching you change, wondering how far you would go.”
“Changing how?”
“Growing up perhaps. I can remember when it was easier to intimidate you.”
“Oh.” I glanced at the television for a moment, listened as some woman tortured a song. “I’m a lot easier to get along with when I don’t feel intimidated.”
“So am I.”
“Yeah.” I listened to a few more bars of the woman’s screaming, then shook my head. “You aren’t paying any attention to this noise, are you?”
“No.”
I got up and turned off the television. Now there was only the soft, rustling sound of the rain outside. “So, what are we going to do?” I asked him.
“We don’t really have to do anything,” he said. “Just let things progress as they have been.”
I stared at him in silent frustration. That “silent” part was an effort. He laughed and moved over next to me.
“You don’t read me very much any more, do you?”
“I don’t want to read you all the time,” I said. “Talk to me.”
He winced and drew back, muttering something I didn’t quite catch.
“What?” I asked.
“I said how generous of you.”
I frowned. “Generous, hell. You can say whatever you’ve got to say to me.”
“I suppose so. After all, if you read me all the time, I’ll begin to bore you very quickly.”
So that was it! He was afraid he was going to get paid for some of the things he’d done to his women. He was afraid I was going to try to make a male Vivian of him. Not likely. “Keep that up,” I said, “and I won’t have to read you to be bored. You’re not pitiful, Karl, so, coming from you, self-pity is kind of disgusting.”
I thought he would hit me. I’m sure he thought about it. After a moment, though, he just sort of froze over. He stood up. “Find yourself a place tomorrow and get out of here.”
“Better,” I said. “There’s nothing boring about you when you get mad.”
He started to walk away from me in disgust. I got up quickly and caught him by the hand. He could have pulled away easily, but he didn’t. I took that to be significant and moved closer to him.
“You ought to trust me,” I said. “By now you ought to trust me.”
“I’m not sure trust is an issue here.”
“It is.” I reached up and touched his face. “A very basic issue. You know it.”
He began to look harassed, as though I was really getting on his nerves. Or maybe as though I was really getting to him in another way. I slipped my arms around him hopefully. It had been a long time. Too long.
“Come on, Karl, humor me. What’s it going to cost you?” Plenty. And he knew it.
We stood together for a long moment, my head against his chest.
Finally he sighed and steered us back to the sofa. We lay down together, just touching, holding each other.
“Will you unshield?” he asked.
I was surprised but I didn’t mind. I unshielded. And he lowered his shield so that there were no mental barriers between us. We seemed to flow togetherfrighteningly at first. I felt as though I were losing myself, combining so thoroughly with him that I wouldn’t be able to free myself again. If he hadn’t been so calm, I would have tried to reshield after the first couple of seconds. But I could see that he wasn’t afraid, that he wanted me to stay as I was, that nothing irreversible was happening. I realized that he had done this with Jan. I could see the experience in his memory. It was something like the blending that he did naturally with the shieldless, mute women he had had. Jan hadn’t liked it. She didn’t much like any kind of direct mind-to-mind contact. But she had been so lonely among us, and so without purpose, that she had endured this mental blending just to keep Karl interested in her. But the blending wasn’t an act that one person could enjoy while the other grimly endured.
I closed my eyes and explored the thing that Karl and I had become. A unit. I was aware of the sensations of his body and my own. I could feel my own desire for him exciting him and his excitement circling back to me.
We lost control. The spiral of our own emotions got out of hand. We hurt each other a little. I wound up with bruises and he had nail marks and bites. Later I took one look at what was left of the dress I had been wearing and threw it away.
But, my God, it was worth it.
“We’re going to have to be more careful when we do that again,” he said, examining some of his scratches.
I laughed and moved his hands away. The wounds were small. I healed them quickly. I found others and healed them too. He watched me with interest.
“Very efficient,” he said. He met my eyes. “It seems you’ve won.”
“All by myself?”
He smiled. “What, then? We’ve won?”
“Sure. Want to go take a shower together?”
At the end of the Pattern’s first year of existence, we all knew we had something that was working. Something new. We were learning to do everything as we went along. Soon after Karl and I got together, we found latents with latent children. That could have turned out really bad. We discovered we were “allergic” to children of our own kind. We were more dangerous to them than their latent parents were. That was when Ada discovered her specialty. She was the only one of us who could tolerate children and care for them. She began using mutes as foster parents, and she began to take over the small private school not far from us. And she and Seth moved back to Larkin House.
They had been the last to leave, and now they were the first to return. They had only
left, they said, because the others were leaving. Not because they wanted to be out of Larkin House. They didn’t. They were as comfortable with us as our new Patternists were with each other in their groups, their “families” of unrelated adults. We Patternists seemed to be more-social creatures than mutes were. Not one of our new Patternists chose to live alone. Even those who wanted to go out on their own waited until they could find at least one other person to join them. Then, slowly, the pair collected others. Their house grew.
Rachel and Jesse came back to us a few days after Seth and Ada. They were a little shamefaced, ready to admit that they wanted back into the comfort they had not realized they had found until they walked away from it.
Jan just reappeared. I read her. She had been lonely as hell in the house she had chosen, but she didn’t say anything to us. She wanted to live with us, and she wanted to use her ability. She thought she would be content if she could do those two things. She was learning to paint, and even the worst of her paintings lived. You touched them and they catapulted you into another world. A world of her imagination. Some of the new Patternists who were related to her began coming to her to learn to use whatever psychometric ability they had. She taught them, took lovers from among them, and worked to improve her art. And she was happier than she had ever been before.