Page 110 of Blow Me Down
I waved at Bas as he trailed behind Sly Jez, carrying a basket for her. Bas grinned back. Bran squawked and flapped his stubby wing at me. Everything was just as it should be. “Well, I’m definitely ready to get back to real life, but I don’t want to lose these people forever. You’re sure you’ll be able to save them?”
“I think so. I hope so. I don’t know the full extent of Paul’s customized programming, but I’m fairly certain we can remove it without damaging the program data. I’m getting a bit nervous about leaving him running loose out there in the real world, though, so if you’re ready, I think it’s time to return to reality.”
“Okay,” I said, putting a hand on my temple. It was a familiar motion—I’d taken to making sure the frames of the VR glasses were still there, but there had been too much to be done to actually press the little button that was now under my fingers. I took a deep breath and had one last look at my town and people.
“Ready.”
“On three?” Corbin smiled as he reached up for his own glasses. “One, two, thr—”
The world swirled into a black vortex of nothingness for a moment, then slowly a blurry blob of color resolved itself into a familiar-looking logo blinking apparently in midair.
“Welcome to Buckling Swashes. Please log in or create a new pirate to enter the game.”
Beyond the logo, the dim outlines of Tara’s laptop and my desk resolved themselves to my returning vision.
I was home.
“So? What did you think? You’ve been playing long enough to have made officer—did you do it?”
My hand shook a little bit as I raised it up to pull off the glasses. My fingers were stiff and sore, as if I’d been gripping the arms of the chair.
“Mom? You okay?” A shadow at the perimeter of my vision moved and turned into the familiar form of my daughter. I was so happy to see her after my prolonged absence that I wanted to jump up and hug her. “You look funny.
What’s wrong? Don’t tell me you didn’t like the game!”
“No,” I said, my voice a hoarse croak. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I liked it. It’s got a lot of… promise.”
“Really?” she asked, her face suspicious. I gave an experimental stretch, gingerly moving my tight shoulders before I tried to get to my feet. “Well… good. So what did you do in game? You spent a long time there. It must have been a couple of weeks or something?”
My knees creaked and popped like an old lady’s as I got to my feet, my legs stiff from the hours of incapacitation. “What did I do?” I asked, creaking my way toward the hall and the downstairs bathroom. I paused at the door to give her a wry smile. “Not much. Just took over Bart’s crew and governorship of Turtle’s Back, helped expose and destroy a villain, fought in a blockade, killed a couple of men, and fell head over heels in love with Black Corbin. I’m going to take a long bath. I’ll tell you about it later, after I’ve had a lengthy soak.”
Needless to say, Tara wasn’t going to let me get away with an exit line like that.
She followed me into the bathroom and sat on the counter while I slipped into the tub with a grateful sigh for indoor plumbing and hot-water tanks.
“Shoo,” I said, closing my eyes in ecstasy as the heat sank into my stiff limbs, wishing I’d had the foresight to bring in a bottle of merlot.
“Not until you tell me everything,” she said, making herself comfortable on the counter. “And I mean everything!”
In the end, I told her everything… well, almost everything. I left out details about the nights spent with Corbin. I had thought about skirting around the whole issue of my feelings for him, worried that she would not react well to the idea of her mother having an interest in anyone but her father, but she surprised me. In fact, she seemed to totally gloss over the point of my romantic feelings, and focused on those she felt were far more important.
“So, if you marry him, does that mean we’ll be rich? And I’ll get to try all his cool VR stuff first, before everyone else? I could be like a beta tester! Do I still have to go to school if we’re rich?”
I opened my eyes to glare at her. “Whoa, hold on there, missy! First of all, no one said anything about marriage.”
“You married him in the game,” she pointed out. “You slept with him, didn’t you? So that means you have to marry him.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that sleeping with someone by no means meant they had to get married, decided that wasn’t a message I particularly wanted her to be receiving, and changed my answer. “Yes, I married him in the game, but we haven’t talked about what we will be doing in real life. There hasn’t been any time to discuss that yet.”
“You said you loved him,” she said, a familiar stubborn look descending over her face.
“Yes, I did. And I do. But no decisions have been made about how we’ll proceed from here.”
She frowned, twisting a strand of her hair. “You mean that he may not be in love with you outside of the game?”
Her words hit me with the impact of a Mack truck. Despite the heat of the water, a cold chill swept over me. “No, I—I just meant—sometimes people—
you don’t think he is that sort of person, do you?”
