Free Counting Down by Lilah Boone Page A

really ready to get that personal yet.
    She wanted to be that close to him; wanted to be able to talk to him and casually touch his hand if the mood struck, but some part of her was too scared; scared of being vulnerable. Instantly she sensed that he was scared too. Not of the disasters happening in the world or the big bad that was coming, but of her.
    She turned in her chair to face him. “You’re scared of me. Not physically. You don’t think I’m going to cause you actual harm but…. it’s something else. You’re afraid of being close to me. You won’t even touch me because you’re so afraid.”
    She furrowed her brow, thinking back. It was true, she realized abruptly. He had been wearing his work gloves when they shook hands that first night and she recalled him giving her a wide berth more than once when they were working in the shelter together.
    He stared at her in silence and she could almost hear his thoughts. It was as if he was silently asking her to tell h im why he was afraid of being close to her. His face was expectant, bidding her to go on.
    She continued with caution. “You’re afraid because… because you freak out at the thought of getting too close to someone, of letting them know you.” She raised an eyebrow. “Intimacy issues?”
    He didn’t acknowledge the comment but continued to listen.
    “You have… feelings that you don’t understand.” She took a breath, clenched her eyes in concentration. “Wait, there’s more. You think something will change… that you won’t be the same and you won’t be able to go back.”
    He reclined, stretched out his long frame and rested his hands across his chest.
    “Okay that’s good,” he finally said. “Well done.” His wary expression didn’t match his words.
    “I was right? Huh. That’s a new one. I’m a little more confused than I was before though.” She didn’t question what she’d just learned about his feelings for her even though she desperately wanted to.
    “Oh me too.” Once again he shook off his serious expression and his mood lightened. “I have no idea what any of this means. All I know is that I feel something and that I know you as well as I’ve known anyone, maybe more so.”
    After a brief silence, both of them thinking but not speaking of the things they had just explored, they began talking about more business like matters.
    Abby pulled her laptop from her bag and showed him the photos she had taken of her paintings. Kyle told her about having the dreams for the past year as compared to her week, and most of what he had learned from some research he had done on the internet. They compared notes, shared theories, and tried to agree on the conclusions.
    Kyle told her about a planet or a sun, no one could really agree on what it really was. It had been discovered back in the early eightie s sitting fifty billion miles away from Earth. By 1992 it was only seven billion miles away and closing. He told her that some people, mostly made up of fringe scientists and conspiracy theorists, believed that this celestial body might be responsible for global warming and all of the severe natural disasters the world had faced over the last decade.
    “It’s something to do with the way this thing reacts with our sun.” Kyle swigged his soda before going on. “Some people think we live in a binary system, the Destroyer being the other sun in our solar system . And once every thirty-six hundred years it rolls around to cause a chain reaction that subsequently wreaks havoc here on Earth. To top that off, I ran across some tin-foil-hat theories about a black hole at the center of the galaxy and something about pole shifts that only happen once every two hundred thousand years or so. Those things combined can’t be good. But, whatever the cause, it seems the results are going to be just plain catastrophic.”
    Abby wasn’t anything close to an astronomer or a physicist, but parts of what he had said made sense. Something