Talents

"…No, Mom. Yes, I understand. Mom, I'm on my break right now. Yes, I still have three hours of work left. Mom, if it bothers you so much you could have called me, you didn't have to create the connection. Alright. Bye."

Blaine closed the connection and sighed as he put his face in his hands, his arms resting on the table in the employee break room. His head was quiet once more and the silence was like a fresh breeze. He took another sip of his Coke and stood up to throw his empty Cheez-it bag away.

A moment later, he turned to sit back down for two more minutes when his co-worker, Alex burst through the badly painted door and almost ran him over with the force of his enthusiasm.

"Jeez, Alex!" Blaine cried, jumping back in the small space and clutching his heart.

"Sorry, man, but I gotta tell you, I just sold one of our major antiques!" Alex explained, as he turned to open the fridge and get his lunch out.

Blaine capped his soda and put it back in the open fridge, his heart still racing. Alex was an interesting person. He was one of those people who could be too much at times and he always seemed a little too hyped up. He could get away with five hours of sleep and seemed to like everyone. Blaine usually found his head pounding after working with the other kid and was glad he could control his…talent.

"That's great," Blaine said, forcing a smile. "Was it the Grand Piano?" The Grand Piano at Musicians' Lair had been collecting dust in the back room for what seemed like forever before Alex came around and brought it out onto the sales floor.

Alex nodded excitedly, his mouth full of chicken salad. He closed the fridge and sat down in Blaine's vacant spot, who in turn, frowned.

"Yes. I was like finally!" Alex explained once he could talk. "I told the guy, I said, 'you have no idea how long this has been here.' It wasn't cheap either," he added as an afterthought."

"Rick will be glad," Blaine said softly. "I have to get back out there before he asks why we're both in here."

Alex laughed. "You're right, our boss is crazy. See you later!"

Blaine turned his back on the blond man and opened the door to the sales floor. A customer passed by complaining about guitar picks or something of the like. Blaine snorted and walked on to punch back into work in the other room.

His talent was, for lack of a better word, useful. In his second year of high school, he realized he could hear people's thoughts. He was sitting in Biology, when another boy exclaimed, "Damn, this class is so boring. I wonder what Tony's doing…" and the voice faded away. Blaine snapped his head up, searching the room with wary eyes because while Dalton students do swear, they do not swear where a teacher can hear them. But nothing happened. The students hadn't stirred. They all wore the same expressions of intense concentration or utter boredom. Even the teacher standing in the front of the room gave no sign that she heard the boy, she just continued talking about atoms and molecules and the like. Now Blaine was scared. Something was wrong. The voice was so clear but why had no one else heard it? It terrified him to no end and he spent the rest of the period on edge, his heart racing and his palms clammy.

After that experience, his entire immediate family knew. He chuckled as he remembered the day he told his mother that he heard thoughts in his head (It wasn't funny then but he could get a little humor out of it now). She immediately assumed the worst until he began conversing with her entirely in thoughts. She stumbled back and fell into a nearby chair while he tentatively spoke in thoughts to her for the first time. His family life was never boring or the same after that.

He considered himself a mind reader. Mind reading was something he equated with a door. A door can be open, closed, bolted shut, or just locked. It was quite simple actually. When he opened the 'door,' he could hear people's thoughts as if they were speaking directly to him. When he closed the door, their minds were shut out from him.

He could also speak to people in thoughts. He called this 'connecting.' This happened when the door was open, closed or locked, but never bolted. It was like knocking on someone's door. He could knock on whoever's door he wanted to connect with and vice-versa, form the connection, and carry on a conversation in thought form. He could carry thought conversations with multiple people, but it was tricky and required his utmost attention. He could even force connections with people, but it was against his moral code and was equitable to breaking and entering.

As for keeping a door bolted, he only bolted the door at night before going to sleep to prevent any accidental connections or thoughts from entering his mind. It had never happened before and he intended to keep it that way.

Now, six years later, he thought he had a good handle on mind reading. It took quite a while to figure out that it came naturally to him, like walking. Just like a baby, walking is a process. First, they roll over, sit up, crawl, and then take wobbly steps. After a while though, walking is second nature and when very young children want to go, they go. It was the same for Blaine.

When he was working or out of the house, he usually allowed people's thoughts to walk right on in. It helped if someone was thinking about shoplifting, and allowed him to understand what went on in people's heads when they did weird, unusual things or were rude.

His talent did have a downside though. He could only hear clear-cut, spoken thoughts. He could not access the unconscious entirety of the human mind, and in a way, he was glad because he knew that people didn't usually think in a neat manner; their thoughts were scrambled, and didn't make sense.

He slid his time card through the machine and walked back out onto the floor where a few people were lining up near the register with various musical books and assorted equipment in their arms. He sighed. It was going to be a long three hours.

After his shift, in which he had to make a list of orders, calm an angry customer, and wash almost ever surface in the shop, he exchanged his work shirt for a sweatshirt and walked out into the setting sun. It was four in the afternoon, but New York City was still bustling with life.

First things first: coffee. He would head to the small café on the other block before returning to his apartment to study for an upcoming exam he had later that week. Although he was only a part-time student, he had been able to merge two majors together and study online. It was like his personal heaven. Now if he could only get the coffee maker in his small kitchen to stop leaking, his life would be close to perfect.

He sighed and buried his hands in his sweatshirt pocket while he debated what he would order. He always went to the same café and found he could sit at a table near the windows for hours reading. Blaine read everything. In fact, he was currently finishing a very popular novel about a man on a seemingly impossible mission.

As he rounded the corner, the scent of strong coffee filled the air and washed over him, beckoning him forward. He felt a strange pull towards the shop and wasted no time walking to the heavy doors. Anticipation curled in his stomach and for a single second, he hesitated, something was pulling him towards the café.

Then he saw him: a boy, a year or two younger than him, was clutching a coffee in his pale grip, and the pull that felt so much like a thin rope, ceased its incessant tugging.