Josie knew it was a scam. She knew it was a scam, and she knew that Santiago knew that she knew. She could see it in his sparkling brown eyes, in the flirtatiously crooked smile he wore on his russet cheeks, in every knowing murmur he uttered in her ears. Even the parts of the scam she hadn't yet figured out, Josie still recognized as part of a system of scammery that she just wasn't familiar enough with the art of the con to understand the mechanism of... but that made them no less deceptive and dishonest and genuinely fake.
She knew it was a scam. But he was cute and he was charming and he hadn't asked her for sex or money yet, so she went along with it. "This little dimple at the very beginning of your lifeline," he purred, caressing Josie's palm delicately with a single finger and gazing seductively into her seafoam green eyes. "It's very interesting. It almost has a little bit of a snowflake shape when you trace it... were you born in a snowstorm, perhaps? Somewhere around the end of February? Maybe your mother had just a little bit of trouble getting to the hospital."
It was very clever of him to ask questions like that when he was touching her hand so delicately. Josie might have tried to play dumb under other circumstances, just to see if Santiago's supposedly mystical intuitions could pick up a garden-variety deception on her part. But when he had such a gentle, intimate caress up and down the lines of her palm, tracing her ivory skin so carefully that he was sensitized to even the slightest motion, Josie couldn't hide any of her emotional reactions from him. "Y-yes," she mumbled, blushing hard. "February 27th. Mom always said she thought she was going to give birth in a ditch on I-81."
She didn't know how he knew. It could have been a lucky guess, of course; Josie remembered reading somewhere that half the job of a successful psychic was learning how to give out twenty different suggestions while leaving the audience remembering only the one that turned out to be true. But it seemed more likely that he found it out from someone else. Santiago Delgado had been drifting through the wealthy social circles of upstate New York for a few months now, charming his way into fancy parties just like this one with his mentalist tricks--one of the other young women he'd flirted with had no doubt dropped a few tidbits of information about her, and he was just using them to prime the pump. It was a very clever scam, but Josie knew it was still a scam.
But it was an entertaining scam, at least, well worth whatever it cost in food and drink to bring the handsome young man to Carli's party, and Josie wasn't done being amused by it yet. "I thought you felt like a Pisces," he crowed, his voice still soft and mellow and cheerful but now filled with a subtle triumph that Josie wasn't entirely fond of. "They're the most empathetic and sensitive of all the signs, you know. Filled with creativity and vivid imagination." Josie nodded despite herself, her long dark ponytail bobbing up and down in unconscious agreement with Santiago's words. She'd just come home from her first semester at Cornell, and while her grades hadn't been the best, she'd already impressed a couple of professors with her artistic style. It was hard not to enjoy that feeling of being recognized for something so personal and vital.
But of course, that was how astrology worked, wasn't it? Josie might have been young, but she wasn't entirely naive. Even at nineteen, she knew that someone filled every horoscope with enough vague and positive descriptions that pretty much anyone could who wanted to could see themselves in them. Nobody would read the list of traits associated with their sign and say, 'What? Brave, imaginative, passionate, and hardworking? Boy did they peg me wrong.' Josie could appreciate the compliments without believing that Santiago had any special insights into her personality or her mystic destiny or whatever.
Still, it was hard not to flinch just a little when he said, "I can see from your heart line that you've been developing your skills in interesting directions lately--working in a new medium, perhaps? Charcoals? I can sense that you put a lot of passion into your art." She--she didn't know how he knew that. It couldn't have been any of her friends, they hadn't seen any of the work she'd been doing at Cornell. None of her professors were here in Syracuse, and she hadn't put any of her stuff onto social media, either; she wasn't quite ready for that, not while she was still experimenting and discovering what she could do.
Had... had he noticed a smudge on her hands? That had to have been it. Some little trace of charcoal left behind even after hand-washing, a tiny smear that a clever, observant scammer like Santiago spotted and used to try to trick Josie into falling under his spell. It was really smart, and Josie had to admit that she couldn't wait to see where he took it. But she wasn't fooled. Not yet. She fixed her gaze on his deep brown eyes and said, "What else does my heart line tell you?"
