Free Collide by Alyson Kent

started to drool from the thought of all that goodness
soon to be sitting in front of me.
    Akira stared at me, and for a moment it
almost looked like his cheeks had taken on a light pink hue, but he
turned his attention back to the menu before I could really study
his face. A few more minutes of silence passed between us before a
waitress came, and I grinned when Akira ordered the same thing that
I did, only he went for a strawberry shake instead of
chocolate.
    “What have you found?” he asked once the
waitress left to put our orders in. “Mr . . Baker? Said that you
had borrowed three books and asked if they were for the project I
had mentioned.”
    Excited about my finds, I pulled out the
three books and spread them out on the table after making sure that
the surface was good and clean. Joe’s had never been dirty before,
but I wasn’t taking any chances with the precious cargo from the
store. I didn’t want to lose Mr. Baker’s trust in me, and the only
way to do that, short of robbing the man blind, would have been to
damage one of his books. I shuddered at the thought of his
wrath.
    Akira was silent as he went
through the books, and commented about how odd it was that the one
book lacked any input on the Oni , since, according to him,
they’re some of the best-known legends in Japan.
    “Though the Tengu give them a run
for their money,” he said as our food arrived and I shuffled the
books back into my bag. “Most people think they have encountered
either an Oni or
a Tengu at least
once in their lives, though they don’t remember most of the nitty
gritty details. The thing is, Oni tend to be better drinking buddies while
the Tengu are
more stuck up about things like rules and honor and such. You
almost never see a Tengu hanging out in a bar, but Oni ? They hate to miss a
party.”
    It was my turn to stare at him.
    “What?”
    “You just started talking about these legends
like they’re real and about to walk through the door, sit down and
order a drink.”
    He reached out and flicked my nose, but
pulled back when I growled and took a swipe at him.
    “Every story,” he said, his face suddenly the
most serious I had ever seen it, “has a grain of truth. Compare it
to your own alien abduction stories, if you will. They’re doing
more studies into them, but everything that’s been documented leads
people to believe that something happened, even if the original
person who had the experience can’t remember all of it.”
    I shuddered a little, and thought of Maria
and her lack of memory. Something had happened, it was painfully
obvious that that was a fact, but she either didn’t want to
remember, or she remembered and didn’t want to talk about it, which
made all of her claims of amnesia one big, fat lie. I was inclined
to give her the benefit of doubt in that regards, though, because
along with being more level headed than I, Maria was extremely
honest. She once dragged me all the way back to a gas station when
she realized she had accidentally walked out with a candy bar that
she thought I had paid for in order to confess to the clerk. She
then gave him twice what the candy had originally cost to both pay
for the original and cover any extra expenses it’s removal had
caused.
    I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I
didn’t notice our food had arrived, much less Akira reaching across
the table again until his fingertip lightly brushed against my
bruised jaw. I snapped away from him and the strange tingle so fast
that I cracked the back of my head against the booth.
    “Oooooowwwww,” I moaned as I gingerly rubbed
my head. I was extremely grateful that Joe’s had decided to
renovate a few years ago and put in new booths with padded backs
instead of the plain wooden ones that had been there since the
place had first been built. It still hurt, though, and I shot a
glare at him.
    “Sorry,” Akira said and glanced down. “I keep
forgetting that you don’t like me touching you.”
    It’s not
that