Touch: a Survival Story.

Mistakes: 1.1

Mistakes: 1.1

Casper sat huddled into the faded red leather of the seat, his body pressed tight into the corner. He found it was best to find small spaces when he had to deal with nerves. The nerves weren't his, although that didn't help much. There was a boy seated a few tables away and the nerves were coming off of him in waves, intensifying every time the young waitress made another circuit of the diner. Casper didn't like the other boy's feelings. They were agitating, tinged with a slightly alien, warm sort of emotion that he sometimes felt from those older than himself. It always made him a little uncomfortable.

Casper groaned as the waitress passed the older teen once more, eliciting a fresh wave of anxiety from him, and tried to find some way to distract himself. There were other emotions in the room, of course, emanating from the dozen or so customers and staff that littered the diner, but the nervous boy was, by far, the loudest of them. Casper tried to distract himself by focusing on the calmer, albeit quieter mind of an old man sitting a short way away, trying to drown out the other boy's perpetual anxiety. It helped, a little.

Casper checked his phone, drumming his fingers impatiently against the greasy table top. She was meant to be here ten minutes ago. Where was she?

He resolved to give her another two minutes, a resolution that broke with yet another wave of anxiety from the nearby teenager who, he noticed, had just moved to flag down the waitress.

Casper tapped his phone a few times, his fingers shaking slightly as he pulled up the relevant contact information in his call list. The older boy was getting more and more nervous by the second, mumbling to the waitress in a voice too low to make out from this distance. Casper took refuge in the much calmer, mildly amused feelings emanating from the waitress. He pulled up a text message box and began to type. Before he finished writing, however, the phone pinged, the text window showing him a new message.

'Hey Cas! Change of plans. Can u meet me? Tasha.'

Casper practically groaned with relief, picking up his phone and making his way to the door at a fast walk, trying to put as much distance between the nervous boy and himself as possible. A small bell chimed above the diner door as he pulled it open, drawing a glance from the balding man behind the cashier's stand who, upon seeing that he wasn't a new customer, swiftly returned his attention to polishing the counter.

As Casper took his first few steps out onto the street, the smells of car exhaust and recent rain washing over him, he felt the mood emanating from the diner change. Just as he was about to leave Casper's range, the nervous boy's emotions switched from trepidation to a strange, joy tinted relief, practically on a dime. The change caught Casper off guard and he stood still for a moment, letting himself bask in the now much more pleasant glow of the teenager's mind. Just a few seconds in, the nervousness faded away, the memory of it much easier to take in retrospect. Curious, Casper took a step or two back towards the diner, glancing in through the window. The teenager was still sitting exactly where he had been, a wide grin now covering most of his face. The waitress tended to a different customer a little way away, her own expression largely unchanged. Stepping a little closer to her, Casper felt her feelings brush once more against his mind. Her thoughts were, much like the other teen's, strangely happy, although lacking the strange, giddy quality of the boy's.

Casper grinned. It was hard to help himself. The feeling he got from the two of them was a very pleasant one. He felt his phone ping in his pocket once more and pulled it out, noting the address that now flashed on the screen. He set off at a brisk trot, his mind far lighter than it had been a few moments ago.

Casper tried to keep a distance from other people as he made his way towards the meeting point, holding his power pulled in tight around himself. Pulling it back was easier with fewer people around. That was one of the many reasons why he tended to avoid crowds. Large groups of people had a tendency to be... challenging.