Beautiful Musician by Sheri Whitefeather Page A

had a bit of a thing
for me, even when we were kids, but she’d been better able to hide
it then.
    I glanced down at the foot of her bed
and noticed that Dingo, the dancing dog, was curled in a ball,
keeping her company. He was another of her hallucinations. There
were four of us altogether and she called us her “people,”
regardless of whether or not all of us were human.
    I was friends with her other people,
but sometimes they got on my nerves, especially when I wanted Abby
to myself. Dingo was cool, though. He didn’t talk or do anything
annoying or abnormal. Abby said that he danced, but it was typical
doggie stuff, jumping around in circles and whatnot.
    He lifted his furry head and perked
his ears at me. I put a finger to my lips, warning him to be quiet.
Sometimes he could be rambunctious as hell. He was a Jack Russell
terrier, and they were a feisty little breed.
    The dog settled back down, and I sat
in a chair in the corner and watched Abby. We’d never kissed or
touched in a sexual way, but I wanted her.
    Damn, I wanted her.
    I’d been with lots of women in 105. I
wasn’t famous, not like the rocker who inspired my creation, but my
career was beginning to bud, and I got my fair share of
long-limbed, sultry-eyed groupies. But recently, I’d stopped
partaking of their favors. I couldn’t bear to fuck someone who
wasn’t Abby.
    I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t see the
need. I was already a weird-ass guy, invented by a beautifully
strange girl. No drug could ever expand my mind the way Abby could.
But don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a teetotaler. On occasion, I got
bleary-eyed drunk and painfully maudlin. Other times, you could
catch me on the happy side of the bottle, charmingly, laughingly
wasted.
    Tonight I was neither. Tonight I was
blindingly sober and admiring the girl I loved.

Chapter Two
     
    I dozed off in the chair, but I kept
waking up every few hours and watching Abby. She thrashed a bit in
her sleep. I wanted to climb into bed and hold her, but that might
cause the kind of intimacy neither of us was ready to deal with. So
I stayed where I was.
    In the morning, she sat up and blinked
through the sunlight stealing into her room. She had the biggest,
brightest blue eyes, framed with silky lashes. Her pajamas were out
of sync. They had a Christmas print on them, even though it was
nowhere near that time of year. But Abby didn’t pay attention to
that sort of stuff.
    She petted Dingo, but he didn’t bounce
to attention. He wagged his tail and went back to sleep.
    When she spotted me, she smiled.
“Seven. How long have you been there?”
    “ All night.”
    I returned her smile, and she made a
girlish sound, a sigh of sorts. The devil-may-care tilt of my lips
was a source of fascination for her. She’d named me Smiling Seven
because she said that I had a secret smile that enhanced my psychic
powers.
    I was considered an empath, which
meant that I was able to read people’s emotions, to feel what they
felt. I was clairvoyant, as well, predicting events destined to
happen.
    Of course I didn’t know everything
about everyone. Mostly I felt what Abby wanted me to feel about the
people associated with her, whether they were real or
imagined.
    In the real world, she had a matronly
aunt named Carol and a twenty-year-old sister named
Vanessa.
    The sisters adored each other. They
even looked alike, except that Vanessa took better care of herself.
She wore stylish clothes, had longer hair, and wasn’t mentally ill.
But that didn’t mean she didn’t have issues. Vanessa spent most of
her time worrying that she was going to develop schizophrenia and
become just like Abby. There wasn’t much I could do about Vanessa’s
fears. I already had my hands full with Abby.
    “ Why are you being so
quiet?” she asked me.
    “ I was
thinking.”
    “ You’re always
thinking.”
    That was true. I was always trying to
figure things out. Abby’s poor little mind moved at a dizzying
pace. Either that or it slugged