9

            My memories of the dream that night were vague, but the most important part stood out. When I stood in that field, staring at the storm ahead of me, I knew what was coming. I knew what would happen if it struck me. And I realized that I didn’t need it anymore. With my powers realized, it’s purpose in my life was fulfilled. It was a symbol of embracement, and now that I was aware of my abilities, I didn’t need its nightly reminders. I recalled waving a goodbye toward the black mass of clouds. The last thing I remembered was a deep rumble of thunder, which I interpreted as its way of letting me know it understood. The rest of the night went peacefully.

            I awoke with a blur of emotions, all of them pleasant and welcoming. Even though I was sweaty and hot, I was full of bliss. A derpy smile plastered, I gave a sigh and brought my hands to my bare chest and recalled the memories of the previous night.

            I was never going to have a night as special as last night. Magical in every sense of the word, I had completely lost myself in making my childhood fantasies come to life and spending it with the girl I had fallen so desperately for. The rest of the vacation couldn’t remotely compare to the joy of last night. Even if Mom and Dad hadn’t impeded on our vacation, our week had reached its peak. As I sat in bed and reminisced, the one thought I had was that I never wanted to leave this moment. I wanted to live last night for the rest of my life.

            I turned my body to face the backside of my future wife. Even from behind and only from neck up, she was beautiful. No matter how much she tried to deny it, I would always find her incredibly attractive. Maybe I was just hopelessly enamored and hypnotized as a result. Who cares? We were happy with each other. I reached over to her and wrapped an arm around her still naked body. She flinched for a split second, waking up, but keeping her eyes closed. I snuggled up close to her and closed my eyes, taking a deep breath into the back of her neck. I almost whispered, but then remembered myself. “Good morning sleepyhead,” I said silently, letting the small ticklish signals flow through my muscles into her skin.

            “Mmmmmmhhh…” she mumbled drowsily. “You’re so loud when you do that.”

            “Sorry,” I whispered into her head.

            She chuckled quietly to herself before escaping my embrace to sit up and rub her eyes a little bit and turning to face me. I sat up as well, and her dreamy smile filled my heart with butterflies. I leaned over for a light good morning kiss and she responded by leaning her head over onto my shoulder drowsily. “What a night…”

            “I wish it never ended.”

            “Mmm…” she yawned, rubbing my arm lovingly. “What time is it?”

            Looking over at my phone, which laid forgotten on the floor a few feet away from the jeans I had pocketed it in last night, I concentrated, and the phone rose from the ground and hovered toward us. I mentally tapped the screen, and the screen awoke showing the time to be three quarters past eight, a couple texts from Mom saying good morning and asking when we planned to get breakfast, and a nearly dead battery. Lizzie and I exchanged an unenthusiastic sigh, both knowing that the day’s start meant getting out of bed, and neither of us wanted to do that.

            “I feel like I’m going to get so lazy with this telekinesis crap,” I said, dropping the phone gently on the bedside table.

            “Electro-kinesis,” Lizzie corrected. I shot her a confused smile, and she sheepishly laughed. “I was thinking about it last night, trying to come up with an all-encompassing term for your powers and… that was the best I came up with.”

            “Did you just make it up?”

            “No, I don’t think so. I know kinesis is like movement, and obviously electro is electricity. So I figured it was like, you had the power of mentally moving electricity, so it was electro-kinesis.”

            “A bit of a mouthful,” I said. “But I like it.”

            “Actually, is that even right? Because it’s missing that ‘mental’ prefix. So it would be, what, tele-electro-kinesis?”

            I burst into laughter. “Ok, electro-kinesis I can handle, but tele-electro-kinesis?”

            “Not that I’m expecting you to call it that,” she tried to say, but I was still in full-blown laughter mode. “Geez, calm down, it wasn’t that stupid! Screw it, I’m looking it up.”

            She started to move as though she was getting up, but I found her phone first and rose it up to her reach before she got far. She muttered a thanks under her breath and snatched it from the air when she suddenly froze when her phone lit up. My laughter died in an instant, and I quickly sat up in concern. “What’s wrong?”

            She let out an exhausted breath. “I have a missed call from Dad.”

            “Oh…” I said uncertainly. “What do you plan on doing?”

            She sighed, staring down the notification. “I’ll answer it. Whatever happened it probably isn’t good news, but I’ll still need to check in.”

            I got up to kiss her on the cheek before reaching for my phone non-magically. “I’m gonna hop in the shower, will you be alright on your own?” I sent a quick text to Mom letting her know that we were just getting up, and to head to breakfast without us.

            “I’ll be fine,” she replied unconvincingly. I frowned, watching her take deep breaths to avoid getting worked up. Knowing Lizzie, the last thing she wanted was to involve me in her familial dramas, even though I’ve told her over and over that I wanted to support her. She’s always been a big proponent of fighting her own battles, though acknowledges that I have her back as well. I ultimately turned to walk into the bathroom, deciding that I would let her do what she does best, and come back supportive after I took care of myself.

            In the bathroom, I tried to see what kinds of things I could do with my powers before stepping in, ultimately not finding anything worth noting. I wondered if the nozzles on the shower were electrical, but my attempts at turning them telekinetically failed, so the shower ended up being incredibly mundane. I forced myself not to be disappointed. I needed to learn to control myself in public, it wasn’t worth throwing my powers at everything that moved.

            I turned my thoughts into planning the events of the day. It was Tuesday, and on the original schedule, we had planned to do the “animal tour”, which was to say the zoo and aquarium. All in all, we had only lost a day from the events of the museum, so there was still a lot we could do from the original schedule. We could just move the freedom trail hike to a different day and cut whatever we felt was least important. There were a couple of museums we included just to fill out some space that I thought could be skipped, for example. Honestly, even the idea of going with Mom and Dad was starting to grow on me. While I still wanted to enjoy my time with Lizzie as much as possible, I knew that my parents were suckers for vacations, and I did genuinely enjoy the ones we had together.

            I stepped out of the shower feeling much more awoken, the day having a new bittersweet feeling to it. Unhappy at leaving yesterday behind, I was still optimistic at today’s potential. Lizzie was still on the phone when I got there, now facing toward the window, head down, her free arm massaging her face stressfully.

            “What will it take to convince you?” she sounded exhausted, fully mentally checked out, barely hanging on by a thread. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew that however it looked, she’d look flat out miserable. What the hell had happened in the ten minutes I was in the shower for? “She’s not gonna until she’s absolutely sure you won’t hurt her again.”

            Hurt her? Again? Uh-oh…

            “That shouldn’t matter! You shouldn’t be hitting her, period! Especially not your own fucking wife. Are you- I’m not even gonna dignify that with a response. Look, all I’m asking for is a promise. I don’t care if she says something ‘stupid’. Yes, promises. She doesn’t feel safe, that’s why she left! No she didn’t- I’m not going to argue with you about that. For God’s sake Dad, you’re a grown ass adult, you should know better than to resort to hitting women you have a problem with! I’ll be the judge of what’s dangerous for me, I’m a grown ass adult too.”

            Her dad said something that made her hiss inwardly, holding in a snappy response. I took that moment to go up to her side and give her a side hug. She nearly shoved me off the bed with a glare, but I just held my hands up in surrender. I knew she was stressed, and she wasn’t a fan of physical contact when frustrated, but I also wanted desperately for her to know that I was with her. I wanted her to know I had her back, no matter what. Part of me wanted to tell her that, telepathically or otherwise. She flicked her hand in a “go away” motion.

            I was torn. Every part of me wanted to stay and make sure that she knew I had her back. I wanted to support her while she was so clearly distressed and struggling. I’d feel horrible about abandoning her if she really needed me there. I wanted to be a shoulder she could cry on, the person she could trust with her deepest insecurities. But at the same time, Lizzie was tense. She wasn’t in a good state of mind, and me trying to insert myself into her problems could be overstepping my boundaries. She already hated involving me in her parents’ constant drama, and it only seemed like things were as worse as they’d ever been. Lizzie was a smart girl, capable of handling herself most of the time, even under stressful circumstances. She may look broken now, but she had a strong heart.

            Lizzie made the choice for me, by storming out of the bedroom in just a bathrobe, phone glued to her ear.

            I was left with my own thoughts, trying to figure out what to do. Lizzie made it clear she wanted space, so I should respect her wishes. It had just hurt a bit that she so blatantly cast me aside. Lizzie would be the one person I would tell anything to. She’d always been the one to catch when I’d been even slightly upset, and made herself the perfect person to vent to, or to share opinions to. Yet when I wanted to return the favor, she tended to shut me out. I shouldn’t judge her for it. Emotions are dynamic and hard to control. If she’s feeling tense, she may know herself well enough that venting might not accomplish anything. It’s not like she doesn’t eventually tell me what’s wrong either, she just wants to wait until she’s composed. And I can admire that she doesn’t want me to feel uncomfortable during a tense conversation.

            If only she knew that being away during those conversations made me even more uncomfortable.

            What good was being a superhero if I couldn’t handle mundane problems?

            I called Mom letting her know something came up, and that I’d tell her what plans we’d eventually settle on when we got there. She insisted to come up and help with whatever was going on, and I just told her to hold back, as even I didn’t really have much of a say. She pried, but I fought for Lizzie’s privacy, and eventually she relented.

            I almost asked her where I could get a wedding ring.

            I spent the next several minutes looking up rings online, trying not to cry at the absurd prices. I wasn’t even out of college yet, how the hell was I expected to pay hundreds of dollars for the perfect ring? I also knew next to nothing about rings, what made them pretty, what made them valuable, anything like that. I racked up my brain for people who might know a thing or two about that, and I turned up empty. I doubted Eliza would know, and most of my college friends weren’t into that stuff either. Lizzie’s mom was an option, but certainly not now when there was this kind of drama.

            Ten minutes later, I get a knock on the door. When I answer, I see a red-eye Lizzie with smudged glasses and disheveled hair. I opened my mouth to react but lost whatever I wanted to say.

            “Sorry, I didn’t have a key so…” she said with a strained voice. I turned to look and confirm with my own eyes, and sure enough two sets of card keys were laid out on the TV’s table stand.

            She let herself in, and just collapsed onto the bed, head buried in her hands again. “I’m sorry I walked out, I just couldn’t deal with multiple things at once…”

            “I get it,” I said, and I did. “Want to talk about it?”

            She took a deep breath, and for a second I wondered if she was going to keep it inside. But she brought her hands off her face. “Dad and Mom’s arguments escalated. Dad hit Mom, and Mom didn’t feel safe at our house anymore, so she went to stay with her brother. Now she’s refusing to come home unless Dad guarantees he won’t hit her again. For some reason it’s so hard for him to make that promise. He’s like, ‘I don’t want to hit her, but if she’s gonna keep threatening me, insulting my intelligence, then I’m gonna do what I have to do.’ He’s an actual maniac.”

            I got next to her and rubbed her shoulders. I had met both Doyle and Ramona LeClair before—Lizzie’s father and mother—and had gotten a glimpse of their tense lifestyles for myself. It was an uncomfortable experience, but this... this was something far beyond anything I’d witnessed thus far. “I’m… I’m so sorry to hear this…”

            “There’s nothing I can do to convince him, especially not over the phone…” she said somberly and through bouts of hiccups. “Why? Why is this happening? Why to me? Fuck him honestly, fuck him.”

            “No one should feel unsafe in their own house…” I agreed.

            “I think I have to go home.”

            I didn’t hesitate. “Alright, then let’s go home.”

            She looked at me taken aback. “You’re really ok with that? I don’t want to ruin your vacation.”

            “I’m happy with that,” I insisted, and hugged her closely. She wrapped my arms around my waste appreciatively. “Family always comes first. We’re young, we’ll have plenty of time for our own vacation. Go home.” Besides, the vacation was pretty much a dud anyways. I had lost Frank his job at the museum, and Mom and Dad were going to baby us for our first time away as a couple. Not to mention if the situation with Lizzie’s family lingered, we wouldn’t be having much fun anyways.

            “I don’t deserve you,” she cried.

            “You have an amazing heart, Lizzie.”

            “I love you.”

            “I love you too.”

            ___