The Rack was busy with the after school rush when Amanda saw Nate come up to the counter. She finished giving the smoothie she had made to her current customer and then turned to Nate.

"Could I have my usual?" he asked, smiling.

"Sure," Amanda gave him a big smile. She glanced around and added with a tone of disappointment, "It's really busy; I can't get a break for a while."

"I can wait," Nate said, "I don't have to be anywhere for a couple of hours."

"That would be great," Amanda said, then set about making his Latte. When she handed it to him, he rested one of his hands over one of hers while taking it and they exchanged smiles.

"I'll be right over there," he nodded in the direction of his usual table.

"I'll join you as soon as I can take a break," Amanda sighed and turned to her next customer.

For the next twenty minutes or so, Amanda and Josh were busy taking care of the crowd. From time to time she would glance over and make eye contact with Nate. After one of these exchanges, she turned to her next customer and saw Jessi standing there. "What do you want?" she demanded.

Jessi frowned slightly, "I'll have a pineapple orange banana smoothie."

"Kyle's favorite," Amanda observed with a hint of scorn.

"I like them too," Jessi said defensively. "Kyle and I like a lot of the same things."

"Yeah, I get it, you have a connection," Amanda said and set about making Jessi's smoothie. When she finished she set it on the counter in front of Jessi, took Jessi's money and then turned to the next customer. Jessi watched her for a moment with a slight frown and then picked up her smoothie and headed toward the back patio.

On her way there, as she came to where Nate was sitting, she paused for a moment and then abruptly sat down at his table.

Nate looked at her in surprise and sat up, "What do you want?"

"Kyle doesn't like you being with Amanda," Jessi said. "He doesn't trust you to take care of her."

"And he sent you to tell me this?" Nate asked in a hostile voice. "You're trying to get me to stay away from her?"

"No," Jessi said. "I want you to be with Amanda."

Nate frowned for a moment at this response and then nodded, "So that you can be with Kyle."

"But you didn't take care of Amanda," Jessi said. "You hit her, and held her in your room."

"I didn't hit her," Nate protested, "I just pushed her. I had to keep her there, Cassidy told me to. I didn't know what was going to happen when he found out that she had seen my papers. I wasn't supposed to have had those papers."

"It's wrong for you to hit her or push her," Jessi said. "Don't do it again."

"Or Kyle will come after me?" Nate responded with a hint of derision.

"No," Jessi answered in a cold voice, "I will come after you." Her eyes burned into his and he paled in response.

"Jessi," Amanda said angrily coming up to the table, "Are you going to go after all of my boyfriends?"

Jessi looked up at Amanda standing angrily next to the table and said, "No." She looked back over and met Nate's eyes, "Nate doesn't want me coming after him." She gave him a thin smile, picked up her smoothie and stood up, saying to Amanda, "He's all yours."

She walked away from the table heading toward the back patio.

Amanda sat down at the table in her place. "What did she want?"

Nate, visibly shaken, slowly answered, "I think she wants you and me to be together." He took a breath and collected himself then he smiled and looked at Amanda, saying, "Boyfriend?"

Amanda blushed, "Well we do kind of like each other."

"I very much like you," Nate reached out and took her right hand between his hands. He raised it up to his lips and kissed it.

Amanda blushed and smiled. Then her face turned more serious and she said, "I've just had a bad time for the last year or so. I thought I had a great boyfriend, someone I could count on, but it turned out Charlie was cheating on me. Then it was really confusing being with Kyle, with all his secrets." She glanced at Nate and he nodded. "When he told me everything that had been happening it was too much." She glanced toward the patio where Jessi was sitting and added, "And I couldn't compete with Jessi."

"Well, I'm not interested in her," Nate assured her. "You don't have to worry about that."

"I'm not," Amanda smiled, "Then you and I went out a couple of times and it all got tied up with Kyle and Latnok and everything." She shook her head, "I just want to go slow."

"I can do slow."

Amanda smiled at him and rested her left hand on his forearm. "Thank you," she said. Then she looked down at where her fingers rested on his tattoo and frowned.

Nate followed her gaze, "You're wondering about my tattoo."

"I am," she admitted. 'It's just that I'm so tired of secrets. Latnok really bothers me. I don't mean to pry…"

"But you want to know why I have a Latnok tattoo," Nate nodded. "That's a reasonable question. I don't usually talk about it. It's supposed to be a secret."

Amanda frowned and sat back slightly.

"But I don't want to keep secrets from you," Nate continued. "Kyle told you about Adam Baylin and his experiments with extended human gestation?"

"Kyle was in a pod for years," Amanda said. "It made him very smart."

"That's an understatement," Nate said ruefully. "Well, I'm sort of the result of an experiment one of Adam Baylin's followers organized."

Amanda looked concerned, "You were in a pod too?"

Nate smiled and shook his head, "Nothing nearly so dramatic. My mother volunteered to have my gestation extended an extra month. It meant that she had to spend the last month and a half of her pregnancy in bed on drugs to prevent labor. She also had to have a C-section, but she had already had one of those with my older sister, so she was likely to have had another one anyway. It was pretty much the same technique they use with women who are starting to go into labor too soon."

"Why did your mother volunteer to do that if she didn't have to?" Amanda asked.

"She and my father are both brilliant. They wanted their child to be as bright as possible. They heard about the study and wanted to be a part of it. There were a couple dozen of us that were a result of the study. We were all given these tattoos. I'm not sure why, I guess they wanted to use them to help track us as we grew."

"Did it work? Did an extra month made you smarter?" Amanda asked.

Nate shrugged, "Probably. Who really knows, though? I'm in the top half of a percent on IQ tests, but I was probably going to be really smart anyway because of my parents."

"The top half percent is very smart," Amanda was impressed.

"But by no means unique," Nate pointed out. "In a country of three hundred million people, a million and a half of them are in the top half of a percent. That's a lot of competition. I still have to work very hard."

"You're very competitive," Amanda frowned. "I noticed that about you before."

"My whole family is," Nate said. "My mother spent a month and a half in bed on drugs to try to have a smarter son. She expects a lot of me."

"My mother expects a lot of me, too," Amanda said. She leaned forward and asked, "So you're really like everyone else? You can't use your mind to levitate or anything?"

"Kyle can levitate?" Nate said, incredulous. "I wonder if that's how ...?" He smiled and said, "No, I'm really just a normal guy."

"I think that's what I need," Amanda said, "someone that doesn't see me as a helpless child."

"Oh, I don't see you as a child," Nate assured her.

Amanda blushed.