“I’d complain about the mess,” she said, “but under the circumstances, I think I’ll let it go.”
I caught her eye, and we both smiled. Then, as though she’d suddenly realized what she was doing, she frowned and looked away.
“You’re a dab hand with that magic sword, you know,” said Gil, from the chair he was standing on.
“Thanks,” Danny said.
“Have you got a broom?” Anna said, looking over the field of insectoid wreckage. “We ought to . . . tidy up. Or else I may end up joining Lisa.”
There was a push broom tucked away in the sex closet, along with a bucket and mop. Everyone helped push the tables to the edge of the room, and then we took turns shoving dead mosquitoes into the corner by the door where Lisa had vomited, which Gil charmingly designated the compost pile. Danny filled the bucket with water—the tap still worked, just like the power and Internet—and did a little mopping over the worst of the stains.
After taking my turn on burial detail, or at least compost detail, I sat down in a booth as far away from the still-drumming windows as possible. Evan, a napkin taped to the back of his neck in place of a bandage, sat down opposite me.
“I think this shirt has just about had it,” he said, plucking at the gore-and-ichor-encrusted thing. “If I’d known this was going to happen, I would have packed some extra clothes.”
“If I’d known this was going to happen, I would have stayed home,” I said.
“Yeah.” Evan watched Lisa, pushing the broom with one hand over her mouth, and shook his head. “I guess I would have too.”
I still was not feeling exactly charitable, but some amount of sympathy twanged. “Are you all right?”
“I think so. Lost a little blood, but that seems to be it.” He patted the back of his neck. “Hopefully the damn thing wasn’t carrying demon malaria or something.”
“Let’s hope. I don’t think Danny’s first aid kit includes holy water.”
“Thanks, by the way.”
I shrugged. “It seemed like the thing to do.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Danny.”
My residual sympathy evaporated. “Please don’t.”
“When we were in the closet—”
“Evan. Seriously.”
“She gave me a blowjob, since you’re asking.”
“I am not asking.”
“But she didn’t seem excited about it. All business, you know?”
I put my head in my hands. “Why are you still talking?”
“I’m trying to be reassuring! I think she’s still into you.”
“You are the absolute worst reassure—reassurer in the history of the world.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not a word,” Evan said.
“Besides,” I said, “all you’re saying is that she’s not into you. Which, I mean, obviously.”
“Ouch. That hurts, man.”
“Good.”
Evan sighed. “I just wanted to say . . . I don’t know.”
“That you’re sorry for going into the sex closet with my ex-girlfriend literally hours after we broke up in order to power some kind of magical coffee transportation machine?”
“Yeah. That.”
“Okay. Apology accepted. Now can we please never talk about this again?”
“Fair enough.”
“Guys?” Danny called, from the now-clear center of the room. “We need your input.”
Once again, everyone gathered in a circle. Everyone looked at Danny, who gave a short sigh before stepping forward.
“Okay,” she said. “Obviously, we can’t stay here, unless anyone has an oil tanker full of bug spray they’re not telling me about. That means firing up the machine again.”
“Point of order?” Gil said. “How many cans of magic beans are left?”
“Three,” Danny said. “If it comes to that, we can try it with regular beans, but we should assume those three are all we’re going to get.”
“We don’t seem to have any way of controlling where we end up,” Jason said. “I looked the thing over, and there’s no hidden panels or anything.”
“No manual controls for the warp drive?” Gil said.
“Not unless you want me to try taking it apart.”
“Let’s leave that for a last resort,” I said.
“Agreed,” Danny said. “So we’re going to have to roll the dice again. That means a new pair in the closet.”
“There are (n(n+1))/2 pairs in a set of n elements,” Jason said. “For seven of us, that’s twenty-eight combinations, of which we’ve used up three.”
“I’m ruling some of those out, though,” Gil said. “Some of us are in a committed relationship here.”
“And some of us are brother and sister,” Evan said. “In fact, why don’t you just leave Lisa out of this weird erotic math session entirely?”
“Evan!” Lisa said.
“What?” he said. “I don’t want my little sister used for sex to power the warp drive, and that makes me the bad guy?”
“I would like to do it,” Anna said. Everyone stopped talking to look at her, and she looked down and flushed. “With Brian. If that’s all right.”
I looked at Anna, who wouldn’t meet my eye, and then at Danny, who locked her gaze onto mine.
“That works,” she said. “If Brian’s willing.”
I swallowed. “Sure.”
For the briefest moment, there was something awful in Danny’s expression, as raw and painful as an exposed nerve. Her businesslike mask slammed back into place an instant later, but that tiny glimpse tore something inside my chest. My heart flip-flopped like a dying goldfish.
“Great,” Danny said. “Go ahead. I’ll give you a minute or two before I throw the switch.”
It was a good thing the sex closet was overwhelmingly saturated with the scent of coffee, I reflected, or it would be getting decidedly stuffy from repeated use. I closed the door behind me and Anna, leaving us in near-total darkness, close and warm.
“Are you sure about this?” I kept my voice to a whisper. “You barely know me.”
Her hands touched my shoulders, tentatively, as though she expected me to bolt. “Yeah. It’s just . . .” She took a deep breath. “I don’t have a lot of . . . experience. You know?”
“Oh.”
“So just . . .”
I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see me, and said, “Okay.” Groping in the dark, I found her arms and pulled her closer, running one hand up to cup her cheek and guide me to her for a kiss. After a moment, her mouth opened under mine, and she pushed herself against me. Her breasts, larger and fuller than Danny’s under her white sweater, pressed tight against my chest.
I could see her in my mind’s eye, blushing, half eager, half scared. I put my hand on her side and felt the rapid thumping of her heart. She broke away, gasping for air, and leaned back against the stacks of coffee, pulling me with her. I kissed her, from her cheek down to the hollow of her neck and back again, and let my hand stray down to the soft mound of her breast. She stiffened a little, then relaxed.
I could see—
I could see Danny, looking at me, that one instant of honesty on her face. I felt like someone had reached through my ribs, grabbed a handful of viscera, and twisted. My erection, only halfway there, wilted like I’d jumped into ice-cold water.
“Brian?” Anna whispered in my ear, when I paused. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, pushing her back against the coffee again and trying to banish Danny from my mind. It was no good. Her face kept sneaking in at odd moments, when I slid my hands under Anna’s shirt and over the sheer fabric of her bra, when she untucked my shirt and ran her nails up my spine. None of it produced the desired response; the patient was flatlined. Dead on arrival. I could feel the magic, the strange, static tingling, but it didn’t make me feel like it had with Danny. It was a strange, crawling sensation, running over my skin, like many-legged insects.
“I�
�m sorry,” I said, after what felt like an eternity. “I can’t.”
“What’s wrong?” Anna was breathing hard. “Is it . . . is there something I should be doing? I don’t—”
“It’s nothing to do with you. I just . . . can’t.” I groped for the closet door. “We should see if there’s still time to put someone else in here.”
The outside light was bright enough to dazzle my eyes, so I couldn’t see Danny’s expression when she said, “Already?”
“I can’t,” I said. “It’s not working.”
“Not working like you can’t feel the magic?” Danny said.
“Or not working like you can’t get it up?” Evan chimed in from outside the kitchen.
“It’s my fault,” I said. “The magic is fine. I just . . .”
“Christ Almighty,” Danny said. She was standing beside the magic coffee machine, staring at it worriedly. “We’ve still got ten minutes or so left on this. Who else is going to have a go? Evan?”
Evan, standing in the kitchen doorway, looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure I can . . . I mean . . . we just—”
“Gil?” Danny said.
“I’m not going in there with anyone but Jason,” Gil said firmly.
“Well—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Lisa pushed her way into the kitchen and shouldered me aside. “Out of the way.”
Anna, who had appeared at the door of the sex closet after straightening up her shirt, said, “Wait. I’m not—”
“Neither am I,” said Lisa, “but this hardly seems like a time to quibble.” She stepped into the closet, and Anna gave a helpless shrug as she closed the door. Then, opening it again, Lisa added, “And no smirking, Evan. You and Brian are next up.”
The door slammed closed, the kitten calendar flapping briefly.
Anna, unlike Danny, was not quiet. The rest of us retreated to the front room to get a little distance from the thumps and moans.
“Well, well,” Gil said. “Little Lisa’s grown up all right after all.”
“Shut up,” Evan said, hands over his ears.
“Do you know if she ever . . . you know. With girls?” I said.
“No. I don’t know anything. I’m not hearing any of this.” Evan stalked off to try and find something to stuff into his ears.
“I’m more worried about whether it’ll work,” Danny said, watching the swamp through the windows. “The coffee maker was halfway through its cycle.”
I wanted to talk to Danny, badly, but she hardly spared me a look.
“What are you doing with Lisa’s iPad, Gil?” Jason said.
“Just updating her Twitter for her,” Gil said, tapping away. “So it reflects a full and complete record of what’s been going on.”
There was a particularly loud moan from the kitchen, and a thump as though something had fallen over.
“It’s working,” I said. “Look.”
Green static fuzzed the swamp, getting stronger and stronger until the mosquitoes and the rotten flowers disappeared in a mass of flickering pixels. Danny had the magic sword in her lap, clutching the hilt tight enough to turn her knuckles white.
The landscape that materialized as the static cleared was better than the swamp, but not by much. It put me in mind of some blasted Scottish moor, which I’d never seen except on the better class of BBC programs: an endless sea of grass and small rocky hillocks, with a tree here and there for variety. Clouds, gray with predawn light, scudded past overhead, driven before a wind strong enough to rattle the glass in the windows.
“Great,” Gil said. “Just great. Looks like a fun place.”
“I don’t know,” Jason said. “It has a certain charm. Very romantic in the classic sense.”
“I’m going to see what’s out there,” Danny said. She got to her feet and opened the front door, kicking the corpse of a mosquito out of the way. “If I’m not back in half an hour, avenge my death.”
“What?” Gil said. But Danny was already letting the door slam behind her. He turned to me. “Was that supposed to be a joke?”
“A reference, I think,” I said.
“The Simpsons,” Jason said. “That was a good episode.”
Lisa emerged from the kitchen, looking extremely satisfied with herself. “Did it work? Did we get somewhere good?”
I waved at the new landscape. “Somewhere, anyway.”
“Wow. Watch out for glowing black dogs.”
“Where’s Anna?” I said. “I need to apologize a few dozen more times.”
“Getting cleaned up, I think.”
I went around the counter and back into the kitchen, where I could hear the sound of running water from the bathroom. I sat at the little table and waited. The magic coffeemaker glowered at me from the counter, the two remaining cans of magic beans sitting beside it. Two chances left to get home, or at least somewhere that wasn’t a total dump. Given our progress thus far, I didn’t like the odds.
Anna came out of the bathroom, looking like she’d just stuck her head under the tap. She tugged at her mass of blond curls for a moment, then gave up and sat down heavily in the chair across from me.
“It’s going to be a mess no matter what I do,” she said. “My hair, I mean. I need a brush and some conditioner. I think it still has mosquito gook in it.”
“Yuck.” I looked down at my sweat-stained, ichor-splashed shirt and winced. “Yeah. Look, I just wanted to apologize again. It really wasn’t anything to do with you. You’re beautiful, and you seem great—”
“I get it,” Anna said, holding up a hand. “Danny, right? You guys just broke up.”
I nodded. “You’ve probably overheard every other person here asking me about it.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t really help it.”
“It’s all right.” I sighed. “Anything to add?”
To my surprise, she appeared to take this question seriously, cocking her head and putting on a thoughtful expression.
“You said she was mad because you don’t know what you’re doing after graduation,” she said.
“Right. I guess I can’t blame her. Who wants to go out with someone who might be living in his parents’ basement in a few months?”
“Do you know what she’s planning to do? After you graduate, I mean.”
I blinked. “I don’t . . . no, not really.”
“She never talked about it?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I figured she’d go on working here.”
“I don’t know her,” Anna said, “and I don’t know you. Maybe that makes this easier. But have you thought about whether she wants to spend the rest of her life working in a coffee shop?”
“I—”
It was one of those moments where you can feel the world shift around you, crystallize and reform along new, unexpected lines. I thought back to that conversation, the things she’d said. About my future. And the L word, the scary one, the one I hadn’t been willing to commit to.
She hadn’t been trying to figure out if I’d be making money, or if I had a job lined up. She’d wanted to know if what we had was worth enough to take a risk. And I’d told her, no, it wasn’t.
“Oh,” I said, out loud. “Fuck.”
“You should talk to her,” Anna said. “I think there’s more between the two of you than maybe you realize.
I swallowed. “I think you’re right.”
It was half an hour before Danny returned, covered in bits of bramble and in extremely poor humor.
“I was trying to get down a slope, and I ended up in a pricker-bush,” she said, in response to our stares. “There’s nothing out there. Just hills and mountains and grass.”
“It’s better than the swamp,” Gil said.
“We’ve still got two sets of beans left,” Evan said.
“If we use up the last one, and end up somewhere really horrible, we’re going to regret it,” Jason said. “I hate to say this, but this may be as good as we’re going to get.”
“What are you
suggesting?” Danny said.
“We could load up all the food we can carry from here and start walking. See what we can find.”
“Give up, you mean,” Evan said flatly. “Give up on going home.”
“Think about it this way,” Jason said. “What if we try two more worlds, and end up with that swamp full of killer mosquitoes again? Or more dragons?”
“I don’t know about you,” Evan said, “but I have a life I’m not ready to give up. I have family. I have plans. I’m not going to just abandon everything to . . . to tromp through some wilderness.”
“You think I don’t?” Jason said. He was quiet but intense, maybe as intense as I’d ever seen him. “I’m saying that maybe we’re not meant to get home, and we ought to accept it.”
There was an awkward silence.
“When you say ‘meant,’” Gil said, “are you referring to . . .”
“I have no idea,” Jason said. “My personal metaphysical model of the world went out the window about the time we figured out that the magic coffee machine slash warp drive was powered by sexual intercourse. But I’m not going to rule out the notion that all this is by design. That we’re here for some kind of purpose.”
“If that’s true,” Evan said, “I’m going to find whoever planned this and kick his ass.”
“I’m sure the gods are just quaking in their boots,” said Lisa. “Assuming they exist, and wear boots.”
“I was raised Unitarian,” said Gil. “Do you think it’s too late to convert to worshipping Thor?”
Having spent the past few minutes sidling closer to Danny, I edged around the magic sword and whispered in her ear.
“Do you think we could talk? Alone?”
She turned to me and narrowed her eyes. “Do you really think you have anything to say?”
“Yes,” I said. “I really do.”
After a moment of silence, she nodded. While the others continued arguing, the two of us slipped toward the kitchen. I caught Anna’s eye as we went, and she gave me a covert thumbs-up. Danny led me back through the kitchen to the storeroom, which had a door we could close behind us. It smelled of gasoline instead of coffee. Danny set the magic sword down, carefully, and turned to face me.
“Okay,” she said. “Talk.”
“I’ve been doing some thinking.”
Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy Page 29