“Same ole, same ole. It’s a lot quieter here now, but I got the neighbors and still have made it to yoga twice this week so far. Need anything?”
“Nah, I’m really good. I will probably come home weekend after next to do laundry.”
“Ok hon, well, I will talk to you later. Be safe, love you!”
“Love you too mom.” I closed my eyes and hung up the phone.
I was really hoping she would have been able to disprove some part of Eve’s story, but although I had new information it still fit with what Eve had said.
“The timeline still doesn’t mesh.” I said to myself and sighed.
The logical side of me mourned for so few facts to form a reasonable hypothesis or theories, wanting to both have Eve be wrong, but at the same time having her not be a liar. I grasped at fantastical theories but came up empty, nothing made sense.
The emotional side of me clamored to be close to her again, not wanting to be parted, the addiction and obsession of sudden young love. I hadn’t seen Sammy in a while, but he had mentioned something about the Sigma house again tonight.
The knock at the door had me sitting straight up and quickly rushing to the door. I did pause and take a breath before I opened it, for my own sake and also to not seem too eager.
Eve sat on the other side, still in her wheelchair but done up quite well. She certainly looked healthier than the last time. Her blue hair hung in low pigtails on either side of her neck. She wore well worn denim cutoff shorts, vintage to be sure but not quite as retro as the bell bottoms from before, over her shirt was an old UPT letter sweater, which hadn’t been seen on campus in probably twenty years as the style had long since changed to letter jackets. In her lap she held a pizza box, from the local pizza stone.
“See, I told you I’d come back.” She beamed.
“Lucky me! You look great.”
“The wonders of a bath and pain pills, but I do feel quite a bit better.” She shrugged and I wheeled her back into my room. “Mind if I stay the night again?” she got straight to the point.
“Uh, yea… please.”
“Not gonna fuck you Simon, just so we are clear. But, well… there it is.” She seemed much more confident and less lost.
“We are clear, I’m not gonna fuck you either.” I smiled, turning her words around.
“Uh huh. I just want to be sure we don’t disappoint one another.”
“Point taken, what kind of pizza did you get?” I asked as I opened the box and set it on Sammy’s desk.
“Supreme, the best kind.” She crossed her arms.
I opened the box, and sure enough. Green peppers, sausage, onions, and olives littered the top of the pizza.
“I hate supreme, but… I’m also fucking starving!” I said as I grabbed a piece. And offered her the box.
“When is the last time you ate?”
“Oh, uh. Yesterday I think?” I pondered.
Eve just shook her head and stuffed her face and I did the same.
“Worst part about supreme pizza is the bad breath.” I mentioned.
“I brought a toothbrush this time.” Eve laughed and grabbed another piece.
Between the two of us we destroyed the entire pizza. I had originally planned on saving Sammy a piece or two to be polite, but Eve and I were both seemingly ravenous, I let her have the last piece.
“So, Ross wants to know if you want to come back to Delta tomorrow and do some role-playing?”
“What like tabletop RPG stuff?”
“Yea, we have a game going every so often, and I saw you have a players guide on your shelf earlier.” She pointed to the shelf above my desk.
“Guilty as charged, but yea, that sounds awesome actually.”
“Cool, no blindfolds and cloak and dagger kidnapping shit this time, I promise. I gave them hell for that bullshit last time. Sorry about that.”
“It’s cool, I can tell you guys are into some serious shit down there, I wont pry.”
“Ok, rules for tonight…” she started.
I straightened up to pay attention. “Rule one, no sex.” I interrupted.
“Yea, we covered that.” She smirked. “Rule two, you can ask two serious questions and I will answer them and I get the same, to get it out of the way. After that we forget about the serious shit and just have fun and spend time together. Cool?”
“You seem to have this all figured out.”
“I just know we both have serious questions, but I don’t want to get caught in the spiral we found ourselves in earlier.”
“Is there a rule three?”
“Rule three is pending review.”
“Hah! What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means I get to make up the rules as we go along!”
“Blah, fine. I agree.”
“Good. First your two questions, then I will ask mine. Anything you want to ask.” She put me on the spot.
“Ok, tell me about Albert Lucazka?” I asked my question with my newfound information.
She seemed surprised at first then said, “Oh wow, doing your research already eh stalker?”
I started to speak, but she started first.
“Albert Lucazka is… was… my father. He founded the Delta lab in the 1950’s with a couple other Manhattan Project castoffs. He died my junior year, doing what he loved.”
“That would explain the mercenary government spooks.”
“Yea, the work at Delta is pretty important to the government here. But I can’t say more than that about it.” She wavered.
“I’m trying to put together a timeline here.”
“I told you, you don’t have the missing pieces to make the puzzle make sense. But he died in 1973, my mother had died in childbirth leaving Ross, Gavin and I alone. Delta is all we have, and all we will ever have.”
“And you have been walking around this campus since 1973?” I boggled.
“Is that your second question?” She asked.
“No. It’s not.” I gave in.
“Ok, ask away.” She crossed her arms and seemed very businesslike, as if this was all a business transaction.
“Why did you leave a safe place full of doctors to come sleep in the dorm room of some random freshman?” I looked at her questioningly.
“Not giving yourself a lot of credit there Simon. You did save my life.” She offered. “But ok, it is a fair question. This probably sounds horrible and maybe I am being too open here. But, I don’t feel safe unless I am in the same room with you, I can’t really explain it other than to put it like that, since... what happened on Monday, if you aren’t next to me it feels like all the air in the room has been sucked out and I can’t breathe. When I close my eyes, I am face down in a gutter having them kick my sides and head in. But when you look at me it interrupts those thoughts and that feeling and I can get past it. Like I said, last night is the best sleep I have gotten in days.” She finished and started to blush. “Too much?” she asked worryingly.
“No Eve, I actually understand what you are saying completely, but just from another point of view. Since then, my entire driving force has been to be with you and see that you are ok. I’m certainly not a knight or a hero, but a big part of me feels a responsibility or duty to protect you and uh… care for you. I want you here, and I was honestly pretty worried you weren’t going to come back.” I chose my words carefully as to avoid any further confessions of love, which would serve only to scare her off.
“Fair enough. Ok, my turn?” She confirmed.
I readied myself, as this was her plan and she had obviously had much more time to formulate her questioning.
“Do you believe what I told you earlier today?”
“Eve, I…” I paused a moment and took a breath. “Ok, I want to believe what you are saying. I want to trust what you are telling me as truth.”
“But?” she prodded.
“But it is difficult for me to suspend reality and accept an impossible set of circumstances on the word of someone who
I have known for less than a week.”
“So?”
“So, I suppose my answer is, no I don’t believe you. But I do trust you. I trust that you aren’t screwing with me, but I find your story not based in reality.” I finished, and managed to not call her crazy which was the sentiment crawling around in the back of my head.
“Ok, that is ok. That just means you have a more rational mind and you can’t take that leap of faith without evidence. Boy are you going to be surprised though…” she grinned.
“What do you…?”
“Shhh! You are out of questions!” she stammered retaining her businesslike persona.
“Final question” She somehow got even more stiff and stern.
“If I could offer you an accelerated program where you could graduate college in a year, but by the end of that year you probably wouldn’t care anyway. What would you say?”
“I would say, what’s the catch?”
“The catch is, that by the end of that year you would probably be so caught up in your work that your degree would feel like sand under your feet and wind in your hair, you wouldn’t even bother showing up for graduation. It would also cost you a ten year personal commitment to Delta.”
“I don’t understand.” I was again awash with confusion.
“I know, and I am not asking for a decision, I am just asking a question.”
“I would say that it sounds interesting, and I would want to know more.” I answered as well as I could given her vagaries.
“Ok, business concluded!” She relaxed and sighed.
“Did I pass?”
“It wasn’t a test, I just didn’t want to spend all evening dancing around the elephant in the room, now that we have faced it we can go back to our cocoon and just be together again.” She stood up slowly and slid onto the bed to get comfortable.
My eyes wandered slightly as she moved and straightened her legs and I blushed as I caught a glimpse of her pink panties through the bottom of her shorts.
“Down boy.” She chuckled and I shrank in embarrassment. “Don’t worry, I don’t mind you looking. But, just remember the rules ok?”
“I know, but I do need to say that you are beautiful and I am glad you are feeling better Eve, really.”
“Come hold me, I really just want to be held for a while. It helps.”
“I can do that.” I replied and crawled behind her against the wall.
“I like the way your bed smells.”
“Sweat and testosterone?”
“Eww gross no.” She turned up her nose, “It just smells safe, smells like you.”
The remainder of the night passed unremarkably, we held each other, kissed a bit and occasionally got a bit handsy above the waist, but we spent most of the time talking and laughing. It was nice to be able to not have to be so dreadfully careful for fear of hurting her or causing her pain, she was recovering really well in just a matter of days, but I could tell her meds were holding a lot of her pain and soreness at bay. When we fell asleep she had curled up next to me and put her head on my chest.
Chapter Seven: Friday
I awoke feeling cold. In the night I had gotten used to her warmth and she had gotten up on her own. When I opened my eyes, our positions had reversed from the morning before.
“Hey…” she said softly and smiled.
“Hey.” I replied, “Good morning, you ok?”
“Yea, I had to take my meds. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“No, no. I was just worried since you got up.”
She laughed, “I’ve been up for like an hour.”
“Oh shit, really?”
“I’ve just been raiding your porn stash and watching you sleep like a creeper.”
“What?!”
“Kidding Simon… ok, not kidding, but you are a really heavy sleeper.”
I shook my head, “I think you like throwing me for a loop and putting me off balance.”
“Oh totally. It’s fun to take back a bit of power from someone who has disarmed me so easily and quickly.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, noting a bit of discontent in her tone.
“Do you think I’m this way with everyone? I don’t just randomly choose a guy every year and cling onto him for a week. I’m not like this normally, you are dangerous. I keep looking for a reason to doubt you, to second guess… but I keep coming back empty.”
“A week?” the mention of Gavin’s time limit suddenly took the wind out of my chest.
“Oh. Not going to talk about that right now.” She suddenly seemed upset.
“I haven’t paired off with someone in, like forever. You don’t understand, this is part of me that I thought was dead. I feel like a stupid lovesick little girl.”
“Isn’t that good?” I was having trouble keeping up with the conversation.
“It’s… inconvenient. Damned fucking inconvenient and it’s going to make things hard, for both of us.” She shook her head and stared briefly at the wall. “Is that a ballerina?” she said looking at a poster on the wall.
“Uh yea?”
“You have a poster of a ballerina bent over in a tutu on your wall?”
“What, it’s pretty!”
“Hmph. I thought it was a flower, this is the first time I actually looked at it.” She shook her head.
“Eve, I don’t want to be a problem for you. Gavin said pretty much the same thing, that I was going to be inconvenient and a problem for you. If that’s true, I really am sorry.” I offered.
“It’s fine, but I’m just not used to this. One week a year I get to cut loose, have fun, not worry about appearances or politics or anything. Just party, be drunk, and have fun. This whole week has been fucked.” She seemed angry.
“Oh, sorry.” I thought she was pushing away.
“No, no. Not you, you are great. Seriously, these past couple days have been amazing. But things are going to get complicated, and move very fast. Do you think you can handle that?” She was starting to work herself up and was visibly upset.
“Complicated?”
“You know how we talked about a puzzle with missing pieces? By tonight I will have thrown the rest of the pieces at you and you will realize it’s a three dimensional cluster fuck and not just a pretty picture laying flat on the table. I just want to be sure you can handle this, because most people can’t. I don’t want to get my heart set on… you. And then have you crumble on me!” She shouted, the first time truly raising her voice.
“You are really worried about this.” I tried to comfort her.
“I’m tired of being alone Simon, you are the first…” she burst into tears and all manner of decorum left her as she collapsed into my arms.
“Look, I’m not leaving, I’m not going anywhere. This is all very new, but very special. I don’t know what you are worried about, but if it means we can do it together, if we can be together… I am open to it. But it’s these secrets that are in the way, I need to understand this, I need to understand you.” I held her close and touched her hair.
She took a deep breath and dried her eyes on her sweater.
“You still up for gaming with my brothers later?”
“Oh yea, I had forgotten about that. Sure, sounds like fun.”
“Come to Delta around noon, bring a character if you have one already, then we can just plug and play.”
I nodded and could tell she was on her way out the door which tugged at my uneasiness.
A kiss and a longing look into my eyes and she had wheeled herself into the hallway. “Simon, thank you. Even if it all falls apart now, I just… thank you for this. It has been the best two days I can ever remember having, and it will carry me through a lot. Even if, well, even if you walk away.”
“Eve, I…”
“See you in a couple hours, don’t be late, ok?”
I nodded and watched her wheel down the hallway toward her guard and the elevator. She didn’t look back.
Yelling and crying wasn’t the best
way to start the morning, but I could tell she had a lot of stress and worry built up. She balanced my uneasiness, and lack of trust and understanding with her own insecurities and secrecy.
I pulled my old role-playing folder out of the bookshelf and paged through it, I wasn’t sure what sort of game I would be walking into but settled on my old standby Cleric that I had played throughout high school with my small group. He was a sort of healing paladin that does much more healing than fighting, but can do both in a pinch. A hybrid type that is useful in almost any situation. Bundled the sheets of paper into a folder and grabbed my dice, shoving it all into my bag.
I met Sammy in the café downstairs, and sat down at our normal table.
“Is it safe to come up yet?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you need to put some panties on the door handle or turn the whiteboard magnets upside down or something. We need a signal for when not to come in.” he lowered his voice to a whisper, “I came up and you had your hand up Mavin’s shirt. Which is cool and shit, but I had to come and sleep down here!”
“Aww, damn man I’m sorry. It was nothing that serious, you should have just coughed or knocked or something and come in. It’s your room too.” I genuinely felt bad.
“Next time I will, but if I’m hot and heavy with some girl you better not come in and fuck it up, it will be your turn to sleep down here!” he laughed.
“Oh yea, on your giant mountain of cleanish but dirtyish clothes. Real romantic!” I laughed and poked.
“Don’t worry, Ill just use your bed and blame the messy side on you.” He said coldly and sipped his orange juice.
“That’s messed up.” I just shook my head, hoping he was joking.
Across the café I saw Tammy and Mackayla eating together and I managed a wave, to which they both smiled and waved politely before returning to their own conversation.
“Can I go grab a nap now? Is it safe to go up?” Sammy pushed.
“Yea man, I have to go up and grab my jacket, but I think I will be gone most of the day.”
“Alright, you two love birds going to actually come up for air today?” he poked fun.
Deltas: Delta Horizon Book One Page 6