by Aubrey Sage
“What are you guys doing?” he yelled. The shuffling students stopped, and everyone’s focus jolted towards him. “What is it that we came here for? Is it because we wanted to meet a girl that we could share our lives with or because we just wanted to get laid? I don’t know about you guys but just getting sex isn’t what this is all about.” He pointed his finger towards me. “I think what we all want it exactly what Enigma already has.” He looked back towards Rick. “This guy? He has nothing. If he was as good as he says, he’d have a steady girl by now.”
Rick’s face twisted into anger, and the guys who were standing started nodding in agreement.
“You’re right,” one of the guys said and all of the students began moving back to their original places.
“You little shit!” Rick growled and hurried towards the table. He flung the ice bucket off the tabletop, then grabbed Jason by the shirt. I saw it all happening in slow motion, tried to rush over to intervene, but I was too far away to get there in time.
Unfortunately for Rick, he was met with a closer, deadlier defender. Before he could even lift Jason out of his seat, Cobra landed one of the nastiest hooks I’ve ever seen right to the side of Rick’s jaw. The impact sounded like someone slammed a log against a tree, and it immediately dropped Rick to the floor.
He was out cold.
Cobra shook his punching hand up and down, trying to get the tension out of his fingers. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been waiting a long time to do that…”
Everyone at the table started laughing, and Angel seemed more amused than anyone. A few minutes later, the bouncer came by, we explained the situation, and security dragged the unconscious Rick out the door and put him on the blacklist for never reentering McMillan.
Angel and I stayed at the club ‘til closing with the guys, and not surprisingly, the guys all took a liking to her. She offered pointers to the men and gave advice as they approached girls and tried to initiate conversation. After spending a little time with a girl as hot as Angel, the guys all seemed a lot more confident when they went out to approach strangers.
“Just be yourself…” she’d say to the men. It didn’t work when I’d say say something like that, but coming front Angel, it seemed to instill a sureness in them that I had never seen in newbie students.
“You’ve got yourself a winner,” Ziv whispered to me as I sat squeezed in between him and Angel who was snuggled in my arm on my other side.
“You’re telling me.” I leaned over and kissed Angel on the top of her head, breathing in the smell of her strawberry scented shampoo. “She never ceases to amaze me.”
Angel took a sip of her orange juice, and I adjusted my arm so that I could talk in her ear.
“So what do you think? Just a bunch of club bandits and womanizers?”
Angel nodded her head and stretched her eyes open. “They’re actually a group of pretty decent guys.”
“So you’re cool with this then?”
Angel pursed her lips and made a funny face as she looked at me out of the corner of her eyes. She nodded upwards in short affirmative motions. “But,” she snapped and turned towards me, pressing her finger in my chest. “I’m watching you. And if this becomes anything but you helping out guys in need—“
I cut her off by pressing my finger on top of her lips. “Don’t worry babe,” I whispered as I leaned my face in closer to hers. “There’s a thousand girls in here tonight, and the only one who’s not invisible is you.” I slid my finger off of her mouth and replaced it with my lips. I pulled her in close to me and we melted into a warm, loving embrace.
Chapter 26
Angel
“This is bullshit,” I said to Kim as we stood atop the tall, U.S. Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles, my arms crossed and my mouth set in a firm line.
“Relax Angel. You know he knows what he’s doing.”
I took a deep breath and grabbed my growing belly. “He’s going to make me go into labor prematurely with all this stress.”
I was 6 months along, and I looked like a whale. Most people who saw me assumed that I was already 9 months pregnant because I looked so ready to drop.
“Stop,” Kim said. “You’re psyching yourself out.”
It was Enigma’s fourth magic show, and his biggest event ever. Over the last 5 months, he had gained a ton of fans, and was getting notoriety throughout the world for his amazing talents. And that day, he was going to perform one of the craziest illusions that any magician had ever performed.
He was going to fall backwards off the top of the highest skyscraper in Los Angeles.
He told me that the stunt was dangerous and that the possibility of him having an accident was real, but he refused to tell me how he was going to actually pull it all off. That’s how he was with all of his magic tricks. He’d tell me about them and show them to me, but he’d never tell me how they were actually done. A few times, I talked his staff into giving me the lowdown on some of his cheap card tricks, but even they didn’t know how he performed some of his wilder stunts.
And this illusion? I didn’t like it one bit.
In his last show, his highlight was when he buried himself in a coffin, five feet underground and somehow dug his way out, and in the show before that he somehow managed to sneak a $20 bill into the pocket of everyone in the audience. He still hadn’t explained the logic in giving everyone $20 back after they paid $120 to get in the show, but it had a pretty dramatic effect, nonetheless.
And I could easily accept his sleight of hand tricks or his escapism acts when there were people standing by to save him in the event of an accident, but this one? No one could save him from a fall off of the top of a building, and no matter how I processed it in my head, I couldn’t figure out how he could make it work.
The crowd nearly packed the entire rooftop, and they all rattled off around me. I looked up to the night sky and blinked at the stars before I said a silent prayer. Please, don’t let anything happen to him.
Two spot lights suddenly lit up at the edge of the skyscraper, and a dark, foreboding music started to play in the background, sending chills rushing up my spine. I could hear mumbling behind me and as people turned around, I matched their actions to see Nick stepping out of the rooftop elevator and walking slowly towards the crowd. He was dressed in all black, black jeans and a loose black shirt with the top few buttons undone. He looked good, despite the fact that he wasn’t smiling.
His face was serious as he waltzed forward, every step seemingly matching the beat of the music. The audience had no clue what he was about to do, and only Kim and I had any idea of shock that was to come.
I wanted to run to him and tell him to stop and not do whatever it was he planned, not to risk his life, but right before the show started, he forbade me from doing such a thing.
“This is my dream,” he said. “Let me do what I have to do.”
And I wasn’t going to be the destroyer of his dreams. After all, he had already made my dreams come true in more ways than one.
The last 5 months had been a whirlwind romance, and every day only seemed to get better. He drove me to work, cooked for me, rubbed my feet, and was with me during every hospital visit and pregnancy class. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t want to make love with me and tell me that I was beautiful, even after I gained 20 pounds. In fact, my swollen stomach and chubby cheeks only seemed to make him want me even more.
We decided not to give the baby a name until he or she was born, but there wasn’t a day that he didn’t talk about how excited he was to become a father. Nick insisted that I move out of my apartment and that he move out of his bachelor pad, and we had already put an offer on a small house in the valley. In the meantime, all the baby clothes and furniture were piled up in the corner of his living room.
Kim ended up surprising the hell out of me. After my third month of pregnancy, Nick wanted me to stay home and rest, so I took a chance and procured a backseat roll to let Kim run the operations at Flutter
fly. And what a home run that was… Once she was in the driver’s seat, her attitude towards work did a total 180. She brought in more clients in the past 2 months than I had in the previous 4, and the company had record-breaking earnings since she took over. With Nick’s magic shows being a success, and Kim’s ability to manage the company, I was considering taking a shareholder-only position, so I could stay home and raise our child.
Nick permeated the huge mob of people, and as he continued to step forward, people backed out of his way so that he could proceed. The music intensity rose as he grew closer and closer to the edge of the building, and once he was there, he paused. There was a small ledge on the side of the skyscraper where the spotlights were, and he had to take a step up so that he was standing on the edge, lights blaring right on to his body, and when he did, the entire crowd fell silent, and you could literally hear people suck in the air and hold in their breath.
He was right on the edge of death.
I reached out and grabbed Kim’s hands and she pulled close to me and gripped my arm. You could feel the wind from that high elevation, blowing strongly, and I knew that at any moment, if the breeze picked up or he made one wrong move, he would fall off to certain death.
The music stopped, and Nick looked out at the crowd in front of him, and lifted his arms as if he were an angel about to fly to heaven. Then, in a brief moment, I saw him look at me—at least I thought it was me—deep in the center of the crowd. He winked at me once and made a sly grin before he leaned back on his heels and tilted backwards, falling cleanly off the building.
My heart felt like it stopped, and it all seemed to happen in slow motion. In fact, one member of the crowd even reached out and tried to grab Nick, tried to prevent him from slipping off the building. But he was too late. Nick was gone.
A couple seconds passed, and I looked around, while a few braver members of the audience inched close to the edge and tried to peer down. There was no sound of a crash, but I wasn’t sure if he had died. How long would it take to reach the bottom of a skyscraper after falling off? Would you hear the impact from so many stories up?
“What the fuck happened, Kim?” I asked. “What is the fucking trick?”
“I don’t know,” she mumbled.
There was a crashing noise that made me literally jump, and then suddenly the music started playing again, but this time it was different. It was a music that I recognized easily as I must have heard it 100 times already.
The theme song of Game of Thrones.
I turned just in time to see the rooftop elevator opening again, and out stepped Nick like I had never seen him before. His usually short hair was very long, obviously a wig, falling just past his shoulders with the slightest bit of crimp. He wore thick leather boots, canvas pants and a leather tunic that wrapped tightly around his upper half. A thick mane of fur and feathers was draped around his shoulders and a longsword was holstered at his side.
He looked just like Jon Snow.
I wanted to die.
On either side was Ziv and Cobra, equally dressed in matching fictional attire, looking like members of the ‘Night’s Watch’, and they all carried themselves and played the part well.
“What the fuck is this?” Kim muttered.
I was at a loss for words.
Nick pulled his sword out of his holster and pointed it towards the crowd, quieting the few who started to mumble about the what had just happened.
“Silence!” he yelled in a funny English accent. “I stand before thee today on a very important day!”
Ziv and Cobra drew their swords and grunted as they shoved them towards the sky.
“A day which will be remembered by you, and most especially me,” he continued. “For today, I shall take my honor and lay it on the line before the heavens.” He rubbed his finger across the edge of his sword. “I have challenged death with the sole of my boots, and I have done what many deemed impossible.” He pointed the tip of his sword towards at the edge of the skyscraper. He sheathed his sword, and Ziv and Cobra followed suit. “But now, I face a greater challenge… a challenge of the soul, a challenge of the heart.”
He turned his head towards Ziv and then towards Cobra. “Men,” he grunted.
The three marched forward, Nick leading the way, and the crowd parted expertly this time to give the trio room. Step by step he marched, and it was several seconds that they plunged through the crowd, before I realized that he was heading towards me.
I looked at Kim and she looked back at me, both of us having no idea what was going on.
Finally, the three of them reached us, and when they did, Nick immediately knelt down on one knee and held a hand out towards me.
“My lady,” he said and bowed his head before me.
“Nick, what are you doing?” I whispered quietly but forcefully and placed a protective hand over my belly as I looked at the hundreds of eyes that were focusing on me.
He ignored me and continued his act. “My lady, I offer you my heart, my soul, and my sword.” He looked up and winked at me when he said ‘sword’. “Allow me to serve you, act as your hand, your protector, and I promise you that I shall never disservice or dishonor you.”
Cobra rustled in his pocket then sat a small, wooden black box in the palm that Nick still had extended.
Nick opened the box with purpose, and inside was a glistening diamond ring, more beautiful than any I had ever seen.
He changed his voice back to his normal, American accent and smiled brightly. “Angel, I love you… Will you marry me?”
Off in the distance, amongst the silence there was someone in the crowd who whistled loudly.
My hands were shaking, and as soon as he said those last words, I could feel the tears starting to swell in my eyes and my chin tensing up.
I nodded. “Yes…” and when his eyes sought assurance, I said it again. “Yes.”
The crowd all began to clap and cheer, and my fake husband Jon Snow/soon-to-be real husband Nick Campbell rose from his knee and slid the ring onto my trembling finger.
He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in gently, careful not to harm my bulging belly and planted a kiss right on my lips. I must have kissed him a million times by then, but that kiss was just as powerful as the first, and as I stood there with the wind of the Los Angeles sky blowing through my hair, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.
Nick was my enigma.
And the love we shared was definitely not an illusion.
The End
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