“I am not sure, but I think it’s chicken in some curry sauce or I don’t know.” He raised both hands. “All kinds of unknown food is here.”
She found an interesting potato dish and an interesting vegetable dish and then meat on skewers, maybe deep-fried. She wasn’t even sure, but she quickly loaded up two plates and still quite a bit was left in the containers. “I don’t know how much you ordered, but it looks like they were generous.”
He nodded. “Honestly, there was a language issue, so we made do with pointing.”
She laughed at that. “At least you can probably count on it being authentic.”
He shrugged. “I was so damn hungry that it didn’t seem to matter.”
She nodded. “I hear you there.” As she sat down and picked up a forkful, she watched as he leaned over hesitantly and sniffed it. “So tell me. What’s going on? You don’t normally look like that, when you’re about to try new foods.”
“My sense of smell is off the wall, as in seriously powerful. And it makes no sense.”
“What? Like just suddenly? I don’t think that’s a symptom of being sick, at least not of anything I’ve ever heard of before.”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense.”
“I got it.” She shrugged. “Sometimes these things don’t make any sense.”
“Yeah, I know. This one is particularly bizarre.” But he dove into the food, forking up the first bite.
“Is your sense of taste affected?” she asked, wondering at the look on his face.
“It’s heightened. Everything tastes better.”
“But in a good sense?”
“Exactly.” He pointed his fork at her. “But my sense of smell is making things worse. Like, I would go down an alleyway and cut through to the other side to save myself going around a block, but the scent of urine just wrecked me, so I had to take the longer route to avoid it.”
“Ha. You have a fair bit of experience with alleyways, so your olfactory senses should be used to it.”
“I thought so, but, honest to God, the smell was so intense, I couldn’t handle it.”
She frowned. “Did anything happen? Did you get hit over the head or fall and hit your head? Has anything weird happened that could have caused it somehow?”
He shook his head. “Nothing that I know of.”
She hesitated, wondered about asking, and then finally decided to do it. “I might as well ask, since I don’t know jack shit about this stuff,” she said in her typical style, “but is it psychic?”
He looked at her and then laughed. “Is what psychic?”
“I don’t know.” Feeling stupid, she glared at him because it was his fault she felt that way. “You’re not allowed to laugh at me when I ask questions like that. Remember?”
He smiled. “Right, I forgot that golden rule.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but, when you think about it, if I don’t ask, I won’t get an answer.”
“No, you’re quite right. Sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed at you.”
She nodded with grace, even though he continued to grin at her. “So I’m not asking if your nose is psychic but if it could be a symptom of a psychic session or some vision or something.”
“I have no idea.” He looked surprised. “I didn’t even consider that because there’s no connection to a person that I can see.”
“Right, and I guess that connection thing is what you’re all about, isn’t it?”
“Well, that and numbers. I keep telling the victims out there in the world that I don’t want anything to do with them,” he said in a harsh voice.
Her eyebrows went up, as she listened to the tone of his voice. Quietly she spoke. “It’s really getting to you, isn’t it?”