My cousin Earl had headed back to Point Paradise a week ago. He’d left me with a mangled mattress and a horrible headache. While the headache came and went, the ruined sofa persisted. Unfortunately, so did Grayson’s fixation on using me to fine-tune his weird brainwave monitoring device.
According to my mad-scientist partner, Grayson’s modified EEG machine was supposed to measure my brain’s alpha-wave activity in response to threatening stimuli. What that meant for me was regular sessions of having my skull plastered to the contraption via electrodes, then having my eyes blasted with images designed to scare the living crap out of me.
I mean, how lucky can one girl get?
Believe it or not, there was actually a method to Grayson’s madness. Through sheer willpower and deep-breathing techniques, I was supposed to learn to override my instinctual flight-or-flight responses and remain calm in the face of fear. The higher my alpha waves remained on his monitor, the better I was doing.
Fun times...
Besides learning how to not freak out in the face of carnivorous cryptids and cantankerous crazies, as part of my internship Grayson was also instructing me on ways to deflect unforeseen attacks by vile, blood-sucking creatures.
Not that I needed the practice.
After swimming in the deep end of Florida’s dating pool for the past two decades, I’d joined his team fully equipped with my own armor-plated life raft—and an arsenal of moves that could blow an entire army of despicable, handsy parasites clean out of the water.
But as for Grayson himself, he hadn’t once tried to put the moves on me.
It was a fact that both duly impressed me and annoyed the living hell out of me. Was he being a gentleman? Or—horror of horrors—was he just not that into me? The man was a master of mixed signals. But then again, I wasn’t sure if I wanted him myself.
Mainly because I wasn’t totally convinced Grayson was a card-carrying member of the Homo sapiens genepool.
You see, during the two weeks we’d become unintentional bedmates, the closest thing to a romantic gesture I’d witnessed from Grayson was when he’d gone and cleaned the toilet without me asking.
As a bona fide Earth woman, that action alone had been enough to make me question whether Grayson was a real human male, or some kind of mutant clone.
Not that I didn’t already have enough reasons to be suspicious about the guy. Given Grayson’s strange diet, encyclopedic vocabulary, and secondary bellybutton, I had some pretty serious doubts about his family tree. Was the weirdo a mere mortal? Or was he some lost, alien life form trying desperately to find a payphone to call home?
I sat up in bed and glanced over at Grayson’s empty side of the bed.
Here I am, about to turn 38, bunking with a mild-mannered Martian hiding behind a Freddie Mercury moustache. Not exactly a situation designed to send a girl over the moon...
I sighed and scratched my cheek. Half of me was dying to find out the truth about Grayson. The other half of me was worried about dying if I found out.
Still, there was a chemistry between us that was undeniable.
We just had to perfect the formula.
I ROLLED OUT OF BED and padded barefoot to the main cabin of the old Winnebago Grayson and I traveled in together. As usual, my bedmate and boss was wide awake—annoyingly alert and neatly dressed in his perennial uniform of black T-shirt, black jeans, and black boots.
Perched in his favorite spot at the small banquette booth across from the kitchen, Grayson’s short-cropped dark hair matched his moustache. His face was ruggedly handsome. And he had the kind of wiry body that comes from intense focus on something other than food. As usual, that focus was now being directed to the only thing more annoying than his apparent prime directive of lifelong celibacy—
—that stupid EEG brainwave machine of his.
“Ah. You’re awake,” Grayson said, never looking up from his precious contraption. He fiddled with a few knobs on the device, making the needles on the monitors jerk around like a Richter scale in an apocalypse.
“If you want to call it that,” I quipped.
“You’re just in time,” he said, ignoring my comment.
A frown pinched the corners of my mouth. I scrounged in the kitchen cupboard for a clean coffee cup. “Just in time for what?”
“To test my theory.”
I shot Grayson some caffeine-deprived side-eye and poured myself a cup of coffee from the carafe on the stove.
“Theory?” I asked, then took a life-giving sip.
“Yes.” Grayson finally looked up from fiddling with the monitor. “Drex, you’ve been displaying unusually high alpha waves on the last few tests. I’m trying to determine if this means my program is truly desensitizing you to strange phenomena, or if the test itself is influencing the results.”
I groaned. “Grayson, if you don’t let me drink this coffee in peace, I’ll be determining the results of your lifespan.”
Grayson’s eyebrow formed a Spock-like triangle. “Duly noted.”
I ripped open a package of Pop-Tarts with my teeth and slammed them into the toaster. As I waited for them to heat up into warm, life-saving rectangles of blueberry-flavored salvation, my curiosity got the better of me.
I turned and stared at Grayson. “What did you mean when you said the EEG test itself could be influencing my results?”
Grayson’s cat-like, green eyes locked on mine. “Non-objective anticipatory response, of course.”
I stifled another groan. I should’ve been used to this by now. “More human-like speak, please, robot man.”
Grayson studied me for a moment, then winced slightly when I took a savage bite of Pop-Tart.
“I merely meant that your anticipation of viewing shocking images on the test program could be subconsciously tempering your response,” he said. “Your expectations could be putting you into a sort of ‘prepared state,’ thus influencing your reactions to the images themselves.”
I sucked blueberry goo from my front teeth. “It’s
