"I'm going to run to the bathroom," Jessie said to Hank, sliding out of the booth.
"Want me to order something for you?" He asked.
"No, if the waitress comes while I'm gone, just ask her to come back, okay?"
"Sure thing."
Rather than go to the bathroom, she made her way into a booth back behind where they were sitting. She sat in the booth and scrunched down so that she knew he wouldn't be able to see her even if he did somehow look back in her direction.
She closed her eyes and immediately went outside of herself into the pool of glassy, black water she was now quite familiar with. His thread was quite close to hers as he had very recently been intimate with her, so she was on his mind. She made her way into his consciousness and began observing the threads representing his memories. She began exploring them and noticed that his most recent memories - showering with her at her apartment, getting dressed and heading out to get breakfast, walking the streets of New York towards the diner a couple of blocks from the apartment, getting a table and ordering coffee - were all in very close proximity to the stream representing his conscious thought.
She also noticed that a significant number of the threads close to his center had her pattern intermingled with them. Some of them were brighter and thicker than others. She quickly realized while examining the various sexual encounters they had shared that the size and intensity of the thread represented how memorable the experience was, and the proximity of the thread to the center column of his consciousness represented how recent it was.
She had to perform an experiment. She hoped to learn several things as she did it. She searched out from his center thread to find the furthest thread away from his core that was both very intense, and contained her pattern. She found two threads that were brighter than all the others in proximity and looked into them. They represented what she hoped, the trip to the hotel that Jaleh had given her a glimpse of, which had happened over lunch on a workday. She had to learn the effects of what she was about to try before doing it on a larger scale. She hoped it would help her answer other questions.
She grabbed the two memories that contained the before and after lunch encounters in that hotel, along with several others that contained her pattern in the immediate vicinity of those two, and she pulled on them. She encountered quite a bit of resistance, but she drew on her energy until she pulled them free of their connection into his sphere of consciousness. She held their ends up where they had connected into his thoughts, and touched them, feeding energy, which she visualized as heat, into all of them at once. She imagined burning the ends of a nylon rope as she did this and felt the thread recoiling at the heat she was pressing into them. She fought against their resistance as they struggled to get away from the burning heat, until the resistance evaporated and the tendrils went limp in her hands. She let them go and saw them fall to where they hung, limp and lifeless against the sides of the outer dome of his consciousness.
She reentered the physical realm and looked at the timer she had set for herself. Even though it felt like she had spent minutes inside of Hank's consciousness, only 12 seconds had passed, confirming that time spent in the metaphysical realm did not equate to real time. She stood and made her way to the bathroom where she sat for a few minutes in a stall, wondering if she had done some sort of damage to her coworker. She hoped that doing it on such a small scale would help her assess the effects before she went in to finish up the job. She also hoped it would mean his first memory of being with her would be after Tom left so she could figure out whether or not he had truly forgotten the trip to the hotel.
She then made her way back to the table and they chatted until the waitress came and took their order. She mentioned not being very hungry and asked if she could just share some of his food.
"Can I ask you a question?" She said as they waited for his breakfast to be brought out.
"Sure," he replied enthusiastically.
"I was just curious about what you thought when I first invited you over to my place."
She hoped the question was general enough to avoid raising suspicions while still allowing her to see the effects of one of his memories being disconnected.
She quickly slipped into his thoughts, trying to see what his reaction would be. She could tell that he was very confused for a moment due to the altering of his memories. She was pretty sure he could no longer remember their first time together at the hotel, which would mean her call inviting him to her apartment wouldn't have the same meaning as it would if he had remembered already fucking her. She wanted to see what his brain would do with the alteration of his memory. She knew memories were pretty fluid in nature. It's believed that every time a memory gets accessed it also gets altered. Would the removal of his memory of the trip to the hotel cause him to reestablish what her call to him had meant?
She sensed the confusion he felt lingering as he tried to remember how he felt about her call. He was having to reassess his memories on the fly, and he struggled to do so for a little while before he responded.
"Well," he explained, "you said Tom had just left you and you needed someone to talk to. I wasn't sure why you'd pick me since we hadn't really even talked much in a while. I mean, the guy in me was imagining it meant we were going to have sex, but realistically I couldn't have really been expecting what happened that first night."
She felt overjoyed at the results of her experiment. Hank had initially seemed a little confused by the change in his memories, but his mind had eventually just reconnected the dots and moved on. That meant she could likely finish the task she had started and clean up the workplace mess that Jaleh had created for her. She hoped that Hank hadn't had a chance to tell anyone at work about his escapades with her.
"Man, I have to admit to things being a little hazy about those days after Tom left. Which night was it that I called you?"
"It was Sunday night. I remember it was after midnight. You said he'd just left you."
"I guess I was pretty vulnerable then, eh?"
"Well, I'll admit the thought had entered my head," he confessed. "I figured I might find a way to take advantage of the vulnerability, but I didn't need to. I would say ravenous was a better description of the way you greeted me."
She had the answers she wanted to have. She had a much clearer understanding of the timeline of events now. Jaleh had taken control on a Wednesday. It was late Sunday evening when she'd managed to drive Tom out of her life. She had called Hank immediately after. Based on the number of really intense threads inside of Hank's memories that contained her pattern, they had been fucking a lot since then. Her experiment involving his memories had been successful. It was time to take it to the next level.
"I just remembered," she said, "I was supposed to call my mom this morning to make plans to get together with her. I'll be back in a second."
She stood and made her way behind where Hank was sitting again and took a spot in the same booth she had been in before. She immediately went into his consciousness and began examining the patterns. She saw one thread that grabbed her attention as it had a pattern she recognized as Tom's in it. She reached out to see what it was. She saw Tom coming into the apartment Monday morning and finding Hank naked in the kitchen, just moments after he'd fucked her.
That had to be a real swift kick to Tom's gut. He hadn't even been gone 24 hours and there was already another man in his place. Jaleh had done a spectacular job pushing Tom away and making him feel like she didn't even care that he was gone. The hope of making a swift reconciliation with him was slipping away from her.
She reached to find a bright thread containing her pattern that was farthest away from his center. She looked in to find it was an image of her welcoming Hank into the apartment that first night, completely naked. Within seconds, Hank was all over her.
She searched for all the threads near that one that contained her pattern, the farthest one out being her late night phone call to Hank. From that point inward towards his main stream of consciousness, she searched for and extracted and cauterized every thread she could find that had any of her pattern in it, including all the ones that were so close as to represent her sitting in the diner with him.
Again she slipped back into the physical realm and noticed that only 20 seconds had passed. She waited several minutes again and then made her way to the table. She had to play this one carefully in case she missed some things.
"Hank?" She said, with just enough surprise in her voice to make it sound like she was surprised to see him, but not so much that he would find it odd if he somehow remembered she had already been there.
She once again slipped into his thoughts and immediatly felt his confusion. At first he thought he should have been expecting her, but then he suddenly had no idea why. To him it felt like those times when you walk into a room and completely forget about why you are there, except on a much larger scale. He actually had no idea where he even was or why he was there. There were several long moments of confusion, and then she could see his brain trying to make sense of this change to his memories.
"Jessie?" He said after his confusion began to fade, genuine surprise in his voice. "Fancy meeting you here!"
It had worked. At least on some level. Only time would tell if he had any memories of having sex with her. She really hoped she had managed to clean up the mess Jaleh had made of her workplace environment and that Hank would just reconnect all the dots in all of those memories without too much stress.
"Yeah," she replied. "Tom and I used to come here all the time for breakfast. I was supposed to meet my mom here for breakfast, but she just called to say she can't make it. You with someone?"
"I'm... uh... I'm," he paused, a very puzzled look on his face. "Ya know, I'm not actually sure. It seems like I ought to be, but I can't imagine who it would be."
