Reader

Chapter 4

"You really do look nice," Jace was holding my hand as we walked back toward town.

I smiled up at him. "You don't have to lay it on so thick." He'd told me how good I looked at least four times before we even left my house.

"Where are we going again?" he at least had the good manners to look embarrassed, and acknowledge that he was laying it on a bit thick.

"There's a cafe in town," I pointed. "We're going to go there. Mom's best friend runs it. Then, we're going to the movies."

"We didn't have movies in my town," Jace had a wistful look on his face. "There they're more concerned with training. When I wasn't practicing illusions, I was training for combat situations. We weren't close to a recognized settlement though. We just had the fundamentals there. I'm actually glad we moved down here."

I wished this was the Jace that showed up yesterday. Not the cold, hard guy that I met the day before. I was glad he was here now though, and I was going to give him a chance.

"Is this where you'd like to settle?" I asked as we turned onto the street the cafe was on.

Since history had been one of my favorite subjects in school, I enjoyed learning about life before the lights went out, and all the cities and how they functioned. We also learned about the wars after the lights went out, and how most of the people with mind powers hid.

Things were very different now. Villages and communities weren't close. Many people lost their lives, and the Assertives killed even more. This is why I had no problem with the role I would play.

Once the illusionists were more powerful, we started hiding in almost plain sight. Personally, I'd rather live further out. I don't feel comfortable being this close to the other community. I was paranoid, but I was afraid of us being discovered.

"I'll go where you go," Jace looked down at me. "I mean that." I blushed and looked down, but he tipped my head back up. "I also want to be allowed to call you Rix. I'm so very sorry about my behavior last night. You didn't deserve it, and after Rayanne started talking about you, I knew I'd made a mistake."

"Do I want to know?" I was curious, but mostly I was enjoying the fact that his hand was still on my face.

Jace shook his head. "No. I've since found out her words were all lies."

"Come on," I tugged on his hand, wanting to put all of this behind us and move on. "We're here."

The cafe was so cute, and Kat and I begged to come here as much as we could. It was summer, so they had little tables sitting outside and the flowers in the pots gave off such great smells. I loved sitting outside under the big umbrellas. Joli, the owner of the cafe, saw me and motioned for us to sit anywhere we wanted. I grabbed a couple of menu cards and led the way to one of the out of the way tables on the patio.

"This is really nice," Jace put down the card after studying it for a few minutes. "We didn't have anything like this in my village. Really, it was more of a place to train soldiers."

"Did you hate it?" I put my card on top o his.

"Looking back, yes," he folded his hands on the table. "At the time, since it was all I knew, I liked it."

Joli came and took our orders before I could ask him any more. After she walked away, Jace started asking me about life in our village. I smiled as I talked about how we were mainly a farming community, and that soldiers were trained, but mostly we grew crops to send around to some of the other Underground communities that were close. We were also a good training center for those with our talents, we had older people here who were rather educated, so we were all taught more than just how to read minds.