The
audio of this story can be found here
for your pleasure.
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Once a week I visit our other office for a 10 o'clock meeting. I usually arrive around 9 AM and sit in the coffee shop on the top floor of our building, getting work done until the 10 AM starts.
Every time I'm there I see the same woman come in. She's petite no more than 4'10" and she consistently wears cowboy boots and one of those long dresses I see on Home on the Prairie TV show. I've always imagined she gets up at 4 AM to feed the chickens and sweep out a stall or two before she heads into work to do her tech career. Her hand sports no wedding or engagement ring and her hair is a heavy cloud of dark reddish color she usually keeps loose but pulled back with a hair clip. She normally sits alone, perhaps scrolling on her phone, but more often than naught, gazing out the picture windows to the view of the mountains our vista allows.
The coffee shop is the top floor of a busy business and it is constantly abuzz with activity: Executives using the spot to meet with vendors or to have off the record conversations, engineers topping off their caffeine fix for the nth time of the day, people waiting for a meeting to start - or actively meeting via Webex in a booth against the wall. I am, we are, invisible in the hustle and bustle of the space - but never alone, always in public.
What no one knows is that I have an intense empathic power. With concentration, I can learn to experience a person, their general thoughts, their feelings, wants and desires from a distance - without having to speak to them. I have been studying this woman for weeks and weeks now. I come in, I find a spot with a good view of the cafe tables and I wait and pray she shows up. Inevitably she does, almost always alone, almost always with a slightly lost or internal look on her face.
I reach out with my powers and start to train them on her. The first thing I do is stare at her while projecting the feeling "I am being watched" to her from across the room. Five or ten second later she looks up and starts scanning faces around the room. When she gets to mine, I allow myself to get caught and then drop my eyes as if I am ashamed at my staring. I feel her study me through the connection and as she does I project "I like him looking at me" to her.
After a few minutes of dodging her eye contact, I look back and this time catch her looking at me. I smile shyly and then go back to my laptop and the work therein.
Weeks of this pattern are repeated, until one day I see her enter, eagerly looking around the room to see if I am there. We make eye contact and smile. This time, instead of ducking my head, through the connection, I kiss her exposed neck and breath through my nose to tickle the hairs on the exposed length of her. She immediately smacks her hand to her neck and spins to confront her assaulter - there is no one there, no one but me from across the room, touching her through my connection.
She looks back at me as she heads towards a table across the room from me, and as I smile, I softly "hmmmm" just outside her ear. Again her hand comes up to cover her neck, but her eyes never leave mine from across the room. I smile at the continued eye contact, wink and get back to work at my laptop.