Repetition Compulsion

20.

Anyone who has ever lost some kind of power knows all about the dangerous after-effects of losing that power. It had taken so long—7 months to be exact for Troy to completely strip Sera of her power, but it was only after that night that she consciously started to feel the after effects of him having taken her power. She felt bare, naked and exposed...vulnerable.

Sera could feel Abimbola's eyes on her during the entire car ride, but she didn't budge. She refused to budge. She just kept her eyes looking forward with her jaw locked whilst slowly reciting a mantra inside her head to avoid losing her mind.

***

Abimbola:

Abimbola was going through his second mid-life crisis. The last one had barely left him breathing. So he knew he had to find a positive way out of this ordeal. He knew Sera was sad. He just didn't quite know how he could fix it, or if he could fix it. He never was able to fix Tatiana, but with Sera it just felt different. Maybe this was his fate. Maybe he was doomed to only meet troubled women until he could find a way to fix them, or at least love them back to happiness. 

He reached for the car radio, and turned the volume up because the silence was killing him. A loud, earsplitting opera song blasted from the radio, knocking him out of his thoughtful trance. He reached back towards the radio, turned it down and then braced himself to have what he liked to call "the talk" with Sera. 

"It's not my place to say any of this, but I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't say it anyway. " There was a pause before he continued. "You remind me a lot of someone that I know...someone that I used to know. She too had a tendency to bottle up all her negative emotions inside, only to blow up, once her body had had enough. More often than not, she tried to sell the public this idea that she was perfect...flawless." he chuckled, wiping his chin with the palm of his hand.  "But no matter how perfect she presented herself to be, every so once in a while she came undone. When that happened, I usually took her out for a ride, and when she was ready to let go of everything, she just stuck her head out and screamed, for minutes on end. "

"And did it help?", Sera replied.

"Well, I would think so", he chuckled. "She always had the biggest, goofiest smile on her face once she finished."

"Mmh"

"Mmh?"

Then there was silence.

"Tell you what?", Abimbola proposed, whilst opening the roof of his car. "If you get up, and scream whatever is making you sad away, then I promise you can play your own music, and I won't bring up anything you don't want to talk about tonight, deal?"

"Like...I must scream?", Sera asked, seemingly trying to follow his thought process.

He nodded. "You have nothing to lose."

"Let me get this straight...I must get up and start screaming randomly? And that's all its gonna take for me to be in charge of the music?"

He nodded again, a hint of amusement written all over his face. He knew his music was lousy, but he loved seeing Sera's reaction to it, and even more so her reaction to the suggestion that she had the power to change the music.

He watched proudly and amusedly as her face sparked, going from sad, to daring. He couldn't hear her thoughts. But if he could, he assumed she would be thinking something like: 'Fuck it! You only live once!'

He liked that about her. He loved how she could be sensitive and sassy at the same time. That was all the power she needed. 

She bit her lower lip, unbuckled her seatbelt, looked over in Abimbola's direction and whispered "Challenge accepted."