Page 386 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

She kicked her legs and screamed. Seventeen smacks could easily have been a hundred. Her bottom was on fire by the time Morgan let her up. There was also music playing loudly from out of nowhere and the light all around her seemed… odd.

Holding her bottom with both hands, Audrey looked up at the dimming sky. “Are we going home?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” Morgan said, looking up as well. “Something’s happening. In all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen this.”

The sky gradually turned as black as night. Only belatedly did Audrey realize, it wasn’t the sky. It was everything. Including her. She held up her hands, a stab of panic sinking all through her when she could barely make out her fingertips.

“Eight-oh-three, five-two-five, sixty-seven eleven,” she blurted, catching hold of Morgan’s shirt. She clung to him, knowing the vacuum was about to forever rip him away from her. “Remember that. It’s my phone number. Eight-oh-three,” her voice was growing tinny and she shouted the rest, “five-two-five, sixty…”

There was no sound at all after that.

Audrey stood in the middle of her living room, alone. The carton of ice cream was melted all over the floor and her favorite pillows. The bottle of Diet Coke was now flat stale, and her impromptu bed on the floor lay strewn all over the room. The TV was a blue screen and, although lightning had struck the house and coursed through the DVD player, the machine didn’t look at all damaged.

Turning in a full circle, she looked up at the clock on the wall. It was just past two and from the sky outside, that had to be two in the morning. She caught a whiff of something sour as she walked through the kitchen towards the den room. There were two bowls in the kitchen sink that were growing some really nasty looking mold cultures, and the date on the computer showed she had been gone for seventeen days.

So much for her job.

She had kind of liked that job, too.

Two in the morning or not, Audrey picked up the telephone and called her mother, and promptly spent the next forty-five minutes assuring her that she was all right. She debated on whether or not to call her boss, but figured calling in the morning would likely be better for her career than 2 am.

She should probably call the police, too. As she sat there debating on whether or not it could also wait until morning, the phone rang. There were only two people that it could be: her mother, calling to assure herself that Audrey really was home, or it could be Morgan.

Her hands trembled a little as she reached for the phone, almost afraid to find out. “Hello,” she whispered, closing her eyes in heartfelt prayer.

Every bone in her body melted when she heard Morgan’s smiling voice. “Hello, baby girl. How long have you been back?”

“About an hour?” Audrey burst out, on the verge of both laughter and tears, if only she could decide which emotion to indulge first. “You?”

“About the same.”

“Where are you?” Tears were winning out and she turned in a full circle trying to locate a box of Kleenex.

“California,” came his cheerful reply.

“Where in California?” There weren’t any tissues, only window curtains. She sniffled, wiping her eyes and then her nose on it. Oh well, she’d never liked the pattern anyway…

“Did you re-appear back where you disappeared from?” he asked.

“Yes, in my living room. You?”

“Back where I disappeared from,” Morgan said easily. “After all this time, MGM is still a studio. Who’d have thunk it? I must have set off some silent alarms while I was stumbling around in the dark. Anyway, the nice officers that arrested me said I got one free phone call.”

“I’ll come and get you,” Audrey said instantly. “If I drive all night, I can be there before noon.”

“I’ll see you then,” Morgan said. “Drive carefully.”

Audrey ran to get her purse, her excitement making her so jittery that she dropped her keys twice on the way out the door. Halfway down the walk, she realized she forgot to lock the door and had to go back. Securing the house, she again got halfway down the walk before she stopped, turned around and went back.

She all but yanked the DVD player out of the wall, hardly stopping to disconnect the wires. Opening the front door, she threw the machine down on the cement walkway and stomped on it twice before dumping it in the trash. It was a brand-new machine; she still didn’t care. Streaming services were the wave of the future anyway.

“I’ve got two interviews tomorrow,” Morgan said, coming out into the living room with the freshly popped microwave popcorn. “With any luck, I’ll land one of them and be able to pay you back every bit of that bail money by the end of the month.”

“I’ve got an interview, too.” Audrey followed behind him with the movies in one hand and a two-liter bottle of half frozen Diet Coke in the other. “And don’t worry about paying me back. You got us out of that horrible movie. Believe me, that’s payment enough.”

Dropping down to sit on a nest of pillows in front of the TV, Audrey began to shuffle through the movie selections. “What do you want to watch? Drama, comedy, action/adventure, or horror?”

“Depends. What kind of movies are they?” He started to sit down behind her, but she held up her hand to take stop him.

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