I know I tensed up. I had read a while ago that one of the reasons people get so hurt in collisions is that they’ll watch the car hitting them in the rear view mirror and then brace themselves in ways that don’t match the kinds of forces they’re about to experience. I guess we always do want to catch the numbers on the freight trains coming towards us.<\/p>\n
The waiter’s smile turned into that familiar almost-teasing smirk I had come to associate with Peredur, but then it faded, as did the flash of red. He set a box on my plate. “Your dessert, sir.” He said it like a pronouncement of doom rather than the casual statement. <\/p>\n
“Um, thank you?” I murmured. A similar box dropped onto Rohana’s plate. Another waiter came by with the bill, and that absolute sense of placement on the table that didn’t make it anyone’s immediate responsibility and certainly didn’t indicate anyone in particular to have to take it, because, you know, they can wait as long as we needed, provided we didn’t want any more service and we vacated the table as soon as possible for the next paying customer.<\/p>\n
I don’t blame them, I just roll my eyes at the choice of language. If my agency sent me, I’d work in food service. I would just have to prepare the charm that protects my soul.<\/p>\n
“There was something strange,” Rohana said.<\/p>\n
The rushing sound of wind that I had been hearing stopped. The portal had more of a thin, whistling bit that had been part of the background rushing and bustling, but it had been closed shut.<\/p>\n
Behind something, not by me.<\/p>\n
That made me wonder… I had not heard any portals when being visited by the Smalls. (Wee folk they were not – the lion thing had gone up past my shoulder. The troll had towered over me. Really, for Small Things, I would not be surprised if the King was some kind of Storm Giant.) I wonder if they wrapped themselves in some kind of cellophane like the -cubi had, only somewhat less obviously. Maybe it had been a concession to clothing.<\/p>\n
Taking a deep breath and trying not to focus on the obvious reaction one has to contemplating what a succubus looks like in great detail (that way lies madness!) I missed Rohana taking the bill. <\/p>\n
“Let me at least pay for the tip,” I said.<\/p>\n
“Hmmm? Oh, no. It’ll drive you and your primitive and sexist chivalry crazy for weeks if I do it all.” She smiled and picked up her dessert and her purse. <\/p>\n
“I hadn’t taken you for a sadist,” I grinned.<\/p>\n
“My treat. I told you.” She gave a little sway towards me as I stood up. “You can try making it back up to me later.”<\/p>\n
“When does your shift end?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“Oh, I plan on stringing this out,” she smiled. <\/p>\n
“I am beginning to suspect you are evil.”<\/p>\n
“Only now?” she grinned, looking back at me. “Was I not sufficiently naughty before?” she giggled.<\/p>\n
I followed her to the car with my dessert box. I hadn’t opened it. It was somewhat warm, which meant that it was likely not ice cream, but until I had verified its components, it could be chocolate or bread pudding or some sinister combination or something completely different. It was Schroedinger’s dessert, minus any cat ingredients. <\/p>\n
She sat hers on the back seat. lovingly moving a windbreaker she’d had in around it. “Not putting the seatbelt on it?” I joked.<\/p>\n
“You don’t know what it is.” It wasn’t a question. “That would only warp the box and get icing on the seat. Here, let me take yours.” She wrapped mine up with hers as I climbed into the passenger side.<\/p>\n
She opened the windows a little as we went down the highway, reminding me again of the portal question. She broke my reverie. “Were you surprised when I asked if you were gay?”<\/p>\n
“I thought I had been sufficiently naughty,” I responded.<\/p>\n
“Oh. My sister is involved in Pride issues, so it’s kind of one of my buttons.” She shrugged. “You didn’t seem to get mad.”<\/p>\n
“No, I mean, why would I?” <\/p>\n
“Just checking. So when you said fairy you meant like Tinkerbell?”<\/p>\n
“Hey, clap your hands when you say that,” I teased. Actually, Doloise had been a lot like Tinkerbell now that I thought about it. <\/p>\n
“I always wanted Red-Handed Jill to take over the pirate forces once Hook was gone,” she mused. “But the fantasy kept flirting with Hook initiating her into various mysteries which seemed like a thinly veiled reference to having sex with her father and that got icky pretty quickly.”<\/p>\n
“Um, yeah,” I agreed. I shook my head. “Yeah, it’s… kind of a long story, and I think I was just warned off from telling it.”<\/p>\n
“Like, right now? Are there pixies in the carburetor or something?” she glanced at the air vents accusingly.<\/p>\n
“Back at the restaurant. There was something strange, you said.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah, a whiff of what I thought… was Dragon,” she said. She focused on the road with a frown.<\/p>\n
“Me, too. Hey, you could be my Dragon detector. You’ll have to make some kind of neat alarm noise or something.”<\/p>\n
She made a sound something like a dolphin approximating a whinney, which was a strange thought because why would sea creatures ride horses?<\/p>\n
“I don’t know if I can make that noise again,” she admitted.<\/p>\n
“You mean the `Flipper appreciating a drive-through showing of `Black Beauty” thing you had going on there?”<\/p>\n
She laughed. “Um, yeah. Anyway, I don’t know if that hair-rising on the back of my neck feeling combined with something hiding in the pit of my stomach with a weird tingly static thing is necessarily confined only to the presence of Dragons.”<\/p>\n
“Could be worse,” I quipped. “Could be love.”<\/p>\n
She looked at me, and then put her eyes back to the road. “No, I know what that feels like. What about you? Ever been in love?” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If my agency sent me, I’d work in food service. I would just have to prepare the charm that protects my soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-seven"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}