Page 47 of Midsummer Phoenixes
You simply enjoy the remainder of your food and try to not watch as the server greets the black-clad enforcer. They’re an odd pair, the friendly, smiling server—Amory—blushing as he pours coffee and serves cake to that guy.
It reminds you of silly fairy tales you don’t read anymore, a princess meeting a dark prince who appears just in time to save her, but you don’t want to judge. That’s not what you came here for, no.
You came here to find out what happened to you.
You had an accident when you were in your teens—a frozen lake not frozen enough to carry you, combined with youthful stupidity. You nearly drowned, but someone pulled you out. You remember bits and pieces of it, you remember someone saying,Don’t be stupid. Don’t die. Dying isn’t all it’s made out to be.
You don’t remember a voice. You remember preciously little of that day, but an ambulance was called, and you didn’t die. Everyone told you you should have. When you were back on your feet, you tried finding out who’d saved you, but by everyone’s account, you were on the shore, feet away from the lake when the ambulance arrived, and there was no one else there with you. No one to call the ambulance, but someone did call it for you.
They said you had to have made it out of the lake yourself and some passer-by must have seen you, called for help. That’s bullshit. You remember the cold water, the weight of your clothes, the panic and fatigue. You know you didn’t save yourself, couldn’t have.
You have been looking for answers ever since then, but the answers that you want aren’t here. At least, you got an amazing pumpkin soup out of it.
You leave money on the table and head toward the door.
“Have a nice evening, and see you soon,” the nice server tells you.
He is leaning on the enforcer guy’s table, and the enforcer is casting you a dirty look.
You shrug and walk away, the door chime fading as the door closes behind you and you walk into the night. If you hurry, you can still catch the subway and be home before three, maybe check the forum again. They probably shut the thread down because it got to be too much about sex, but you have no doubt the cab crowd will have built another thread.
Then again, it might be more fun to watch the tongue guy annoy other posters, at least for an hour or so.
You smile as you head home. You’ll come back, if only for the special of the day. You will have to find the key to the mystery of being alive when you shouldn’t be elsewhere, but for tonight, you are okay with that.
Soyer and Amory Chat About the Subway
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Thecreditsofthelatest episode of that show Amory and I’d been watching on my laptop flashed over the screen. He’d been using me as a pillow, but now he stretched. I hit the pause button on the auto play because he stretched in a way that told me he needed a break.
“Hey, will you tell me something?” he asked, turning his head so that I could have kissed him with minimal effort.
“Something,” I told him.
That had him smile at me, the best sight in the world. Or second best, given that I’d seen him in bed.
“Very funny. I have an actual question.”
“Ah. Then what you meant to ask was whether I would answer it,” I said and shut the laptop. If I got lucky, this would lead to making out, possibly sex. Okay if it didn’t, but I could fuck. And I pretty much always could these days. Who knew love could work such wonders for someone’s libido?
“Would you?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. Probably.”
Amory leaned into me harder, and I slid backward against my couch. He slid with me. “I’ve been wondering. What you thought, back on the subway?”
Huh. Just when I thought I’d figured out what was going on in that pretty head, he said stuff like that.
“On the subway?” I tried sounding innocent.
Which he didn’t fall for. He slapped my chest with his palm and accidentally found my solar plexus. It made me smile.
“You know what I mean. When we first met. Well, when you died that time.”
I furrowed my brow as if I had to think really hard about it. “Riiiight. I recall, very faintly. The subway.”
The fingers of my right hand tangled in his hair, caressing, but my Amory was oblivious. “Right, the subway. So what did you think? When, you know. Those guys…you know.”
