Searching for the Kingdom Key

by TylerRose.

“How did you know?”

  “She’s one hell of a liar, but she can’t fake the feel of her energy whenever she tells one. Shut up and leave me be.”

  “Don’t askany questions, Marge. Just let me in.”

  “What’s wrong, Tyler?” Marge asked, backing up to let her in and then closing the door against the cold.

  “The guy that drove me home’s kinda weird. I don’t want him to know where I live.”

  It was a partial truth. A full explanation would have taken too long and she didn’t want to give it anyway. As soon as she sat in the chair, she was surrounded by three little white dogs all wanting attention. She reached down to pet them, staying for quarter of an hour before deciding it was safe to go. Marge saw her to the door. No sooner did Tyler step off the house-walk and onto the sidewalk when a matte black Torino rumbled to life and pulled up to the curb in front of her.

  “Fuck!” she hissed. She stopped, the window sliding down.

  “Lie to me often?”

  “Now and then.” Son of a bitch! Nosy damn people.

  “Why?”

  “It’s not your business.”

  “You keep saying that. You made it my business when you asked for a ride.”

  “A ride is a ride, not a lifelong contract. And you offered. I asked for a cab. I don’t ask nothin’ of nobody,” she said.

  “Technicalities. I just wanna be sure you an’ your mother are alright.”

  Tyler took a deep breath of the cold March air and looked around. She didn’t see anyone watching from windows, but had that distinct feeling again.

  “I appreciate what you’re saying. Truth is, you’re the first to make any such gesture. I will be just fine. Mother will be when she realizes she don’t need to put up with his shit. If hours of me talking to her doesn’t make a dent, then a few minutes of a stranger’s time won’t help. Neither will putting him in the hospital. He’d only come back. An’ she’d take him because she believes she can’t make it through life without him.”

  She was really beginning to hate that grin of his.

  “You talk too much.”

  She couldn’t stop the embarrassed blush, and so glanced away. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Go home, Tyler. Your home this time.”

  “You gonna follow me?” she challenged.

  “Yes.”

  She growled in frustration, turning on her heel to stalk up the street. She had not asked for this crap. She did not need this crap. Not tonight. The car idled along behind her, stopping when she crossed Nevada and Raymer together on the diagonal. It resumed as she continued up the walk and pulled to the curb behind her when she turned for final approach to the little house.

  She forgot about the car. The living room light was on. Her pace slowed. Who was up? Mom or the prick? She mounted the steps with deliberance, focusing on the interior of the room, and paused on the lip of the porch. One more step and a board would creak.

  Flight.

  She turned around and rushed down the steps to the walk. Yanking open the car door, she all but jumped in and slammed the door.

  “Change your mind?” he asked.

  “Shut up and drive.”

  Drive he did, to Navarre Avenue. Left to Wheeling, right onto Pickle, left to the first drive, right into the parking lot. He had a one bedroom apartment he kept for quiet getaways and one night stands, but hadn’t brought anyone here since before Monica had died. He was relieved to see it clean. Demitrius obviously had been keeping it up. Fresh milk in the fridge told him his friend had been here recently.

  He called to be sure, using the apartment phone rather than his cellphone.

  “Yo, man, you usin’ the apartment tonight?”

  “No. I’m babysitting for my cousin,” Demitrius said, and Jerome could hear the little baby fussing in the background.

  “Okay, sorry to disturb you.”

  “What you got going on? Some hot piece I don’t know about?”

  “Not up for discussion. See you at Giuseppe’s tomorrow night.”

  She’d kicked off her shoes and he saw that the bottom six inches of her jeans were still wet, as were her socks. He went into the bedroom for a pair of warm socks, also finding an old pair of Monica’s pajamas. He paused, remembering, and decided it didn’t matter. He couldn’t let her sit there in wet, cold clothes. They weren’t Monica’s pajamas anymore. They were his to use as he chose. To throw away or donate.

  “Here, you can wear this,” he said, holding them out.

  “You keep clothes here for the women you bring?” she asked.

  “No. They were my former girlfriend’s.”

  “When you break up?”

  “It’s not a breakup if they die.”

  She was silenced, took the clothes into the bathroom to change. She hung her jeans over the heating vent to dry. She washed her face with the cleanser she found in the medicine cabinet and used the hair brush from her purse. Feet wrinkled and cold but the rest of her dry for the first time in hours, she went out to find the movie “Carrie” just starting on a cable channel.

  “Ohmigosh I love this movie,” she said, taking the near end of the sofa.

  He came around the wall from the kitchen with two cups of hot tea and halted. She was in his spot. Monica had always sat at the other end. He spent a moment deciding and chose to get over it and say nothing. It was better she sat in his spot than Mon’s for now, he thought as he put the cup down on the arm of the sofa.

  “Decaf. Do you want sugar?” he asked.

  “No. Thank you.”

  Watching quietly, sipping tea, and she snerked when the teacher slapped one of the female students.

  “Yeah, that would get her ass fired, nowadays, wouldn’t it?”

  Jerome had to chuckle.

  She would give this low but very maniacal giggle under her breath whenever Carrie did something, and burst into full laughter when Carrie went psychotic and the dying started.

  “You like this movie a little too much,” he commented.

  She grinned at him in an expression he found more than a little disturbing. “Oh baby, these people would be blown to smithereens if it was me with those abilities. There’d be blood and muck all over the walls with little bits of body parts. Every one of them that deserved it.”

  Jerome shook his head. “What school do you go to?”

  “I don’t. Graduated early because I had enough credits. I went to Rosary Cathedral.”

  “Catholic girl, huh?”

  “Atheist girl forced to go to a Catholic school. I hated every minute of it. Don’t want to talk about that,” she said, putting out her cigarette and pulling out a joint.

  “Who said smoking pot was okay?”

  “You did, when you tried to hide that joint on your desk in your office earlier,” she said, sparking it up.

  “Oh, you saw that.”

  “Of course I did.” She held it out to him. “It’s good stuff, I promise.”

  Smelled like the same weed Dicer had sold him a few days earlier at the Droghers clubhouse. Tasted like it too. Toked back and forth until it was small and she waved it back to him. He put it into the ashtray to let it burn out.

  “You usually swallow it. Go ahead.”

  “How would you know that?”

  She got up to go to the bathroom, not responding.

  *** *** ***

  The concept of parallel universes includes crossover moments.Things that happen almost identically in both. Perhaps they are exactly the same except for one detail small enough that it doesn’t make much of a difference for either. The two timelines still seem to mirror each other.

  Then there is a moment with two vastly different outcomes that, eventually, will irrevocably change how a life progresses. A highway comes to a lake and splits left and right to go around. Thus the parallel universes part to go around a bubble of conflict.

  Returning from the bathroom, passing by him between the coffee table and the sofa, she caught her baby toe on a le
g of the table and fell. Arms fast as lightning, he caught her and scooped her up. Startled by his speed and strength, breath stolen by the tingling of his energy over her from head to knees, staring at him in this close proximity, she was compelled to plant a more meaningful kiss on him. One he returned.

  The parallels parted. In one, their energies clashed in a way so painful that she started screaming like she was being burned.

  “This is wrong!” she shouted, and scrambled away to get her wet clothes on and insisted he take her home.

  Jerome obliged, not sure exactly what just happened. She didn’t say anything when he pulled up to the curb across the street from her house. She got out and went into the house. He drove home to talk it over with Landra Ahr. A few days later, he learned through a news report that she’d run away.

  In half a dozen other timelines, however, she caught her toe. She fell. He caught her, arms fast as lightning, and scooped her up. Startled by his speed and strength, breath stolen by the tingling of his energy over her from head to knees, staring at him in this close proximity, she was compelled to plant a more meaningful kiss on him. One he returned and they were at once surrounded by a sizzling of energies that caused impossibly intense surges of sexual excitement for them both.

  He knew better. She was seventeen and he was 26—and he shouldn’t do this. It wasn’t illegal because age of consent in Ohio was sixteen and age difference didn’t matter. Still, he knew he knew better than to fuck a seventeen year old. Really, he did. The legal age of consent didn’t mean a mother wouldn’t make trouble if she thought her baby girl was being used by a creeper.

  But his body wouldn’t respond to his brain telling him not to do this. The body was responding to her, their auras mixing in a way that was beyond arousing. Ardent, demanding he act at once before she could run away. Her hands pushed the pajama bottoms down and his finished the job.

  On her back on the sofa, as blind in her need as he was in his, he found her an experienced young woman. Her sounds were quiet and controlled, orgasms hard and wet. And repeated. Not faked. He could feel her cum as her aura crackled and entwined with his. Every time she climaxed, the sensation caused him to slow down and reach deeper with a more thorough lunge of his hips.

  Her naked calves snaked around his thighs, skin soft and smooth. His climax rose as suddenly as his arousal had, and as soon as he was done shuddering, he was on his feet carrying her to his bed.

  Lying between her legs for more kissing and touching, knowing the Staff Power would refresh him in a matter of minutes, and he did it to her again. Her sweet voice quietly speaking his name, a sound from his dreams urging him on with frequent whispers of yes right before she climaxed and those glorious whips of hot energy zapped all over him. That was as orgasmic to him as the sex itself.

  “Please fuck my ass,” she whispered when he was going to have her for the fourth time. “Please.”

  He couldn’t refuse so agreeable a plea, and just as easily fulfilled her requests to fuck harder.

  They slept a few hours. Four in the morning, he woke to the softness of her hand stroking him hard again.

  “Please have my ass again,” she whispered in the dark. “Right like this.”

  Where they were, spooned together. He was gentle to start, and she soft as butter in his arms. Something in him snapped about half an hour in and he rolled her onto her belly for a much harder riding. She took it with a groaning “fuck, yeah.”

  “Rub your clit,” he told her when he felt his finish approaching.

  She reached a hand under herself, the motion of his thrusts pressing fingertips over the swollen nub. Only a few times and she clenched from calves to gut in a hard clitoral orgasm that squeezed her buttocks around his cock. Deep groaning cum that managed to drain him of his strength and he slipped out to collapse beside her. Out of breath, heart racing, and realizing she was the first he’d been with since Monica had died.

  A few minutes to rest and she was up and getting her clothes from the bathroom and dressing.

  “My stepfather leaves the house for work at five. Then I can go in.”

  Parked down the street on the other side of the light, they sat in silence and watched him leave the house, get into his car, and drive toward Navarre. When the light at Nevada turned green, Jerome pulled out of the curb spot and stopped at the vacated place.

  “Last night doesn’t make us an item,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t mind so much if it did.”

  “Call me in three months when the state says you can make life-altering decisions.”

  She grinned. “That’s always the answer. It’s a bitch being psychologically older than your linear years.”

  A moment of kissing goodbye and she went into the house and to her room. The car rumbled away. She decided to lie down until her alarm went off in another hour.

  There comes a pointat which the split returns. Having gone around the bubble between them, they meet again and continue and neither side knows any different.

  *** *** ***

  Her alarm went off.She sat up, groggy and tired, and got to work. She had to be more hurried about it, having lost the time she would have used last night to pack.

  She had the bag packed in a matter of minutes with two pairs of jeans, five pair of socks and underwear, a spare bra and five shirts, her business suit, plus a pair of leather boots. Her Walkman went into another bag with the cassettes she wanted to take. She knew she couldn’t carry all of them, so took the five she wanted the most. Stevie Nicks’ Wild Heart and the rest were Benatars. Wide Awake in Dreamland, In the Heat of the Night, Seven the Hard Way and Tropico. She could always buy the rest again on the other end.

  Six thirty in the morning, she was on her way out the door and up to Starr Avenue to catch the bus downtown. A few blocks walk to the Greyhound bus station and she was on her way to California by seven thirty.

  Jerome’s fist bangedagainst the dashboard repeatedly in his frustration and indecision. She was going. He could stop her but he couldn’t take her anywhere. Couldn’t take her back to the warehouse, with Starbird, L’Roc-ai and Landra Ahr there. Three extraterrestrials in the house would have been too a hard thing to explain. He couldn’t take her to Chen. Chen would not harbor a runaway. He could just see the look on Chen’s face if he showed up with her.

  “What?!” he demanded when the console beeped Landra Ahr trying to get him on the phone.

  “What are you doing? You have been parked downtown for an hour.”

  “None of your fucking business,” Jerome growled and ended the transmission.

  He drove to Chen’s Kwoon, in desperate need of his Sifu’s counsel.

  “You do have to let her go,” Chen told him. “She has to find her own way out of her bad situation.”

  Chapter Three

  Monday morning, Tyler arrived in Los Angeles, California. A long, boring ride it had been. She’d hardly slept at all for having to be alert to danger. Her eyes had been out the window nearly the entire time, doing her best not to think. She let her mind go blank so she wouldn’t be a huge bundle of conflicting emotions as she crossed the country. These would be lost days, like an airlock between old life and new.

  She couldn’t remember a single thing she’d seen but trees, fields, cows and dead corn until they reached Texas. Then they saw desert, fields and cows. Across the desert of New Mexico into the desert of Arizona. Mesas and desert. Finally up into California from the Southwest. Stop after stop after stop with transfers in Nashville and Dallas.

  By the time she got off the bus in Los Angeles, Toledo was a long ago dream and all she could see was forward.

  She already had the name of a good (enough) and inexpensive by-the-week hotel. Already knew to ignore the guys outside the bus station and knew where to catch the metro to take her near enough her hotel in West Hollywood. With a constantly rotating stream of wannabe actors, there was always a room empty or about to be empty. Her payment of an entire month in advance got her the room just vacated that
morning, with the guy and his stuff sitting on the street, having been thrown out.

  She was already employed by a temporary agency that had a branch in Los Angeles. All she had to do was show up at the office in the morning and give her employee number. The transfer to the local office would take maybe ten minutes and she could get the ball rolling for a decent office job. She’d take anything at this point, more concerned with getting an income going than what the work might be. Once she had income, she could get a better place.

  Her room was small, of course, but had a clean refrigerator, stove and sink. She went next to the local office of her bank to move her account. No one noticed the birthdate on the account and the birthdate on the ID were different. Her money would be safe and she re-deposited most of the cash she had been carrying so it wouldn’t be stolen.

  Her mother would have to be the one to report her missing. The note she’d mailed before leaving Toledo would take care of that. Mother would let her go just to let her be away from the prick.

  A hundred bucks in her pocket and not even noon yet, she took a long walk. She found a place to get a decent meal, found a bookstore, bought a map and a tour guide book to the city. She walked, leaving both the map and book in her backpack for now and not really caring where she ended up. West was the ocean. The worst that would happen was she would find it.

  Warm sunshine, so delicious on her face. Warm breeze. Four days ago, she’d been walking up to her knees in snow in a blizzard. She sighed in satisfaction and kept on walking in the direction of the smell of the ocean. She could smell the salt in the air, practically feel it on her cheeks.

  Two hours of walking and she was at a beach. She sat on a bench with a cold lemonade and watched the water and the birds, all but ignoring the people. She got herself a late lunch and studied the transit map of buses and subway lines and figured out how to get back to her hotel.

  On the way back, she celebrated her first night in Los Angeles with a small pizza at a place around the corner. Writing in her journal at the table, no one bothered her. She took the leftovers home and watched a movie before bed.