Page 57 of Veiled Fantasies

All good news to report to Jill when she came back. Along with everything else he’d been meaning to say.

He let himself into the room and walked to the desk. Somehow, the room felt strangely still. He turned around. Something was different. Not just the freshly made beds.

Jill’s books, diary, and bathing suit were all gone, and one out-of-place slip of paper lay in the middle of the bed.

Jill’s handwriting. Messy and a little smudged. As he reached for it, an oozing feeling roiled in the pit of his stomach. A signal he knew all too well—the one warning him that everything was about to fall apart.

He skimmed the note quickly. His heart slowed even as it thumped heavily, echoing like a clock nearing midnight. When it struck twelve, his world would fall apart.

He managed a second read-through, more to punish himself than to understand. She was gone.

Without a layer of ice to protect him, the message stabbed straight into his core like a dagger plunged deep and twisted to maximize the pain. Have a good trip? He’d be falling for the rest of his life.

He slumped to the bed, wanting to make some sound of protest to the empty room. But what to say?

Goodbye forever.

His heart struck twelve. An eternity later, a dull thirteen sounded. The signal to go back to transparency, to dull all feeling away.

He ignored the fluttering at the periphery of his vision—Jill’s note, falling in long, idle wafts this way and that. Flying away.

Chapter Twenty

Delayed? Jill couldn’t believe it.

Feeling bitterly cheated, she stood clutching a wall at her departure gate. All she wanted was to get away. She couldn’t handle this. She couldn’t wait a second longer. Not another delay.

But she had to. The world was a harsh place, remember? What was one little delay in the grand scope of things?

An eternity. Printed words were a blur. She snapped the cover on her book, the one she’d hardly put a dent in given the time she’d spent in…other pursuits. She tried leafing through a magazine, but turned the pages so quickly, they tore. Even her old mainstay of personal entertainment—making up stories about the people around her—failed. Try as she might, her half-hearted stories faded into images of Erik and all the wonderful lives she might have lived with him.

She slapped her own thigh in a reminder of her resolution. The one about facing reality. But what if reality was too harsh to face?

She looked out the window. She’d be leaving part of her heart here in the desert, or rather, taking the desert with her. The barren, burned part. The emptiness.

Why hurry that?

Just when she felt ready to crack, boarding commenced. Entering the plane after the vast vistas of the past week was like crawling into a tomb. She wondered if she might be allowed to stay there forever. After all, nothing awaited her but an empty apartment in a different foreign city. There was no home.

She counted the rows to her aisle then squeezed past a dull-eyed businessman and a casually dressed younger man to reach her window seat. Once there, she curled her arms around her torso and closed her eyes tight.Goodbye Dubai. Forever.

The man beside her either didn’t notice her closed eyes or didn’t care, because he aimed a long, one-sided conversation in her direction. A litany, actually, of his miserable week in Dubai. The terrible treatment. Crap hotel, crap food. Nothing to do. Trapped. He was going to sue everyone between Iceland and Dubai. He was going to write to the newspapers. He was going to—

A stewardess hovered by their aisle. “Sir?”

The man looked up quickly, a guilty expression clouding his face.

“We’d like to invite you to business class.”

Jill watched his jubilant form dance away with mixed feelings. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Unfair, like a lot of other things in life.

She contemplated her own ghost in the window, then let her eyelids succumb to gravity. At least there was one less person around to watch her tremble and cry, because the tears would come again soon. And the trembling? That had never stopped.

Something stirred, but she kept her eyes resolutely shut. A new arrival was coming into her row. She found herself praying. Let it be a deaf mute, please, or a very quiet nun who doesn’t speak English, Russian, or Spanish. Let it be a sleeping drunk. Let it be—

“Hey,” came a familiar voice, barely above a whisper. Gentle sound waves tickled her ear. Or was that a pair of soft lips, hovering nearby?

She didn’t move. Didn’t even dare to open her eyes, but they went ahead on their own, focusing on the reflection in the window.

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