by L. B. Clark
“You pull this off, and I’ll believe. Having Dylan back safe is happily ever after enough for me.”
Chapter Nine
When London and I got back to the hotel room, Brian greeted us with a glance and half a nod, concentrating instead on his guitar. I didn’t recognize the song this time. All I knew for sure is that it wasn’t Pink Floyd, but it rivaled “Wish You Were Here” for most depressing song I’ve ever heard. I figured Brian had to be using the music as an outlet for his emotions, the way I would sometimes vent my own through blog posts or random bits of prose. Catharsis is all well and good, but I didn’t want to hear it.
I scooped up some clothes and fled to the bathroom. Showering away the grime and stress of a long day created the perfect excuse for avoiding the sorrowful music without any long explanations.
Worry pounded at me like the hot spray from the showerhead. Where was Dylan? How and why had she disappeared from the airport? Would we find her? Would we find her before anything bad happened to her? Would London be overwhelmed again by other people’s emotions and dealing with magic? Would we end up needing to put him on suicide watch? What the hell would I do if anything happened to Dylan? What would Brian do?
I shoved all the worry and negativity aside, squishing it down into a mental footlocker and slamming the imaginary lid shut. I’d think about it later. Right now, I was too damned tired.
I concentrated on getting clean: lather, rinse, repeat. The simple task couldn’t keep all thought at bay, but it did help me steer my brain onto safer avenues. Like wondering how London knew I didn’t believe in happily ever after.
The simple explanation was that the boys were talking about me behind my back. Maybe Brian had noticed the way I couldn’t seem to help looking at London when I thought no one could see and had warned London away. Or maybe it had just been a casual statement without any deeper motivation.
Or maybe Brian hadn’t told London anything at all. Maybe London’s ability to read people’s emotions, his empathy, could tell him more than he wanted to admit.
Better to believe Brian was telling tales out of school.
I went back to concentrating on simple tasks. I finished washing my hair, wished for half a second that I had thought to pack a razor, shut off the water, and climbed out of the shower. Dried off. Considering using the hair dryer, but decided I didn’t care if my hair went all Medusa from sleeping with it wet and settled for giving it a quick towel dry. I reached for my clothes – Happy Bunny bikini briefs, of all things, and my makeshift pajamas – and pulled them on.
By the time I opened the bathroom door and stepped out, I had managed to shut my concerns about London’s powers into the footlocker with my other worries.
Brian had traded his guitar for London’s laptop. London lay sprawled on the bed like a teenaged girl: belly down, feet in the air, propped up on his forearms. A manila folder lay open on the bed in front of him, but he ignored it in favor of the laptop screen, craning his neck to peer around Brian’s broad shoulders.
I took a seat on the end of the bed, still toweling my damp hair, and joined the boys in looking at the computer screen. We were staring at a map of Orlando. The metro area looked huge to me.
“Where do we start?” London asked.
“Near the airport, right?” Brian asked.
“Her last known whereabouts,” London said. “It makes sense.”
“No,” I said, surprising myself as much as the boys. Brian turned to look at me, and I shook my head slightly. “It makes sense, in a way, but I don’t think it’s the best place to start looking.”
“Why not?”
“Brian,” I said, turning my head slightly to make full eye contact, “What do you think happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened after Dylan got off that plane? How’d she disappear? I mean, we obviously don’t know the answer, but what does your gut instinct tell you?”
The muscles in Brian’s jaw clenched, relaxed. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and met my gaze. “I think she was taken.”
“Me, too. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Brian relaxed a little, like maybe he’d been afraid we’d think he was crazy for believing Dylan had been kidnapped. I shifted, intending to reach out for him, but he turned back toward the computer.
“You really think someone just...dragged her out of the airport?” London asked.
“Lured, maybe,” I answered. “Coerced.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw London nod. “If someone took her,” I continued, “if she’s being held for ransom or something, I think that changes things. Wouldn’t a kidnapper hold her somewhere away from the airport?”
“But where?” London asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
Brian sighed and pushed back from the desk. “Maybe we should just throw a dart at a map.”
“Probably as good as anything,” London agreed.
Without another word, Brian got up, grabbed clean clothes, and shut himself in the bathroom. I took the chair he had vacated.
“Any ideas?” I asked London.
“Nope. I meant it when I said the dart idea was as good as anything.”
I stared at the map for a minute. There was something we were missing. Something we hadn’t considered. But no flash of genius or insight struck.
The sound of rustling paper drew my attention from the map, and I turned to look behind me. London rifled through the folder full of papers, photocopies of handwritten pages. Before I could decide whether to be polite or give in to my curiosity, London glanced up and saw me looking at the papers.
“Ashe’s notes,” he said. “Some good stuff in here.”
He handed me a page, and I realized as I reached for it that he could sense my curiosity and had chosen to indulge me. Kinda creepy. It would take a lot of getting used to. A look of dismay flitted across London’s face before he looked down at the papers, using his hair as a shield. He’d felt my discomfort, just like he’d felt my curiosity. Shit.
Not knowing what else to do, I started reading the page of notes in my hand. I hadn’t even finished the first sentence before I was distracted by the sound of the bathroom door opening. I glanced up, and then down again. Brian in boxer shorts and a white undershirt – the kind affectionately known as a wife beater – was just not what I needed right now.
London laughed, and I looked up again.
“What?” Brian asked, dragging back the duvet on his side of the bed.
“Nothing,” London said, but his eyes were sparkling. He grinned at me, and I suddenly got the joke.
“Not a word,” I hissed, blushing.
London reached out to touch my hand, hesitated, and then laid his hand on top of mine on the arm of the chair. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said, “but you really shouldn’t feel bad about it.”
I didn’t know what to say. Especially since ‘feeling bad about’ finding Brian attractive was a new thing and one I didn’t understand myself.
London drew his hand away, pushed himself up, and crawled off the bed, headed for the shower. Shaking my head, I gathered up the pages of Ashe’s notes, tucking them back into the file folder. Boys. I put the laptop to sleep, closed the lid, and dropped the folder on top.
I took a few seconds to untuck the sheet and duvet from the foot of the bed and then turned the covers back on my side. As I climbed onto the bed, I noticed that Brian had the letter from Dylan out, his fingers tracing over the words as if he could reach through the paper and ink to stroke her cheek. I crawled across the bed, settling in beside Brian and resting my head on his shoulder. He slid his arm around me and laid the letter down.
“I’ve had this for months now, and I still don’t know what it says here,” he said, tapping a spot on the page.
I picked up the letter. No, the note; it was too short to be a letter.
“You don’t mind?”
Brian shook his head, and I began to read. As
I read, I began to grin. The note was typical Dylan, straight to the point, no pretense.
“I’m not really sure,” I said, “but I think the part you can’t read right here says that Dylan’s boss is a douchebag.”
Brian laughed as he took the letter from me. “Sounds about right.”
“Yeah. Especially since it’s true. I really kind of hate that man.”
“That makes two of us.”
He reclaimed his arm so he could tuck the note back into his wallet, and I moved back to my side of the bed. I curled up under the duvet with my back to him. The mattress shifted and bumped as he settled in, and then we both lay in the quiet room, listening to the hum of the air conditioner and the seashell roar of water running through pipes.
Exhaustion made itself felt in every inch of my body, but unlike the night before, sleep didn’t sneak up to claim me. Instead, I lay there, a prisoner to my own tangled thoughts and feelings.
Sometime later, I heard the bathroom door open. I listened as London moved around the room, turning over to look at him only when I heard him sigh. He stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at it.
“You okay?” I asked, keeping my voice low in case Brian had managed to sleep.
“Yup. Just thinking.”
I felt the bed shift as Brian turned over. “You going to be able to handle the close quarters?” he asked.
London took a moment to answer. “I think so,” he said at last. “As long as no one has nightmares, I think we’ll all be okay.”
Of course. Touching made London’s empathy stronger, and with him trapped in between us in the bed touching would be damned near inevitable. I sighed and scooted to the middle.
London’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Um...claustrophobia?”
“Just get in the damned bed before I change my mind.” I thumped my pillow a few times and settled in again.
The lights went off, one by one, and then the mattress dipped as London climbed into bed. This whole thing had been much less awkward the night before, when I’d been on the periphery. I curled up more tightly, trying to take up less space, but I ending up kneeing Brian in the butt instead.
Brian rolled over on his back and raised his arm over his head. “Come here,” he said. “Let’s give London some room.”
I didn’t even hesitate. With the lights out, I didn’t think of Brian as some tan, toned, sex-god. He was just Brian, the nice bloke I’d met on a boat. I curled up against his side, and he draped his arm around me.
“Brian,” London said from somewhere behind me, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but...fuck you.”
I felt Brian’s chest heave with a little, soundless laugh. “You want me to cuddle you, too? You can have the other side.”
“No, really, Brian...fuck you.”
I turned and groped in the dark, searching for London’s hand. I found his face first, and he chuckled. I traced a line down to his shoulder and along his arm to take hold of his hand. Bringing it with me, I turned back over and curled up against Brian, pulling London into our circle. I didn’t feel claustrophobic at all, and if London had a problem with the contact, he didn’t say a word about it.
Curled up between two guys I barely knew, I felt safer than I had in a long, long time. We’d managed to forge a bond of trust in the past day that surpassed most of the others in my life. It was crazy, but it didn’t feel crazy.
Lulled by the beat of Brian’s heart and the warmth – physical and emotional – surrounding me, I began to slip toward sleep. My thoughts drifted, as they do, flitting from topic to topic without any conscience guidance or acknowledgement. Then a thought crossed my mind that made me sit up in bed, startling cries of protest out of both of the boys. Ignoring them, I scrambled out from under the duvet and scooted down the bed to slide off the end.
“Elizabeth?” Brian sounded concerned.
“I think I know,” I said, flopping down in the chair and inching up to the desk.
“Think you know what?” London asked.
“Where to start.” I grabbed my laptop, sat it on top of London’s, snapped up the lid, and hit the power button. I squinted against the sudden light and tapped in my password.
“What the hell are you on about?” Brian asked.
“Logic,” I replied. “It just...came to me. Just now.”
“I hate when that happens – you get a brilliant idea just when you’re falling asleep.”
I nodded in agreement with London as I fired up my web browser. “I’m glad it happened this time, though. Well, no – I wish I had thought of it earlier. But I’m just glad I thought of it.”
“Are you going to actually explain what it is you thought of?” London asked, leaning on the back of my chair.
“Okay, so. I worked at a summer camp a few years ago – one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done, but at least I didn’t try to be a camp counselor. Anyway, we all had training at the start of the summer on what to do in emergency situations – like missing campers.” I had pulled up a map of Orlando, and now I zoomed in. “One of the basic ways to search for a person is what they call an expanding circle.”
“Start in the middle and work your way out,” London said, catching on.
“Usually, you start your search wherever the person was last seen. But in this case, yeah, the middle, I think, since we’re assuming they moved her away from the airport.”
“So where does that put us?” London asked.
I zoomed out and in again, trying to figure out a good midpoint. “Um. The mall I think.”
“Cool,” London said. He reached around me to push the lid down on the laptop. “One less thing to worry about.”
I took that as my cue, and we both went back to bed. I felt more hopeful now that we had a plan. Armed with that hope, sleep was a lot easier to find.
Chapter Ten
The incessant chirping of someone’s cell phone alarm dragged me out of sleep. Brian fumbled on the bedside table until he came up with the phone and shut off the alarm. The room was still dark, the sun not yet up. I was beginning to suspect Brian of being a morning person. As I drifted back to sleep, I wondered how Dylan would deal with that. Both of us tended to stay up late and sleep in when work and school weren’t getting in the way.
The next time I woke, I was alone in the bed. The sun was up now, the first thin light of dawn creeping in around the thick curtains. Brian and London were huddled around the laptop, talking in low voices. I listened to them long enough to know they were mapping out a route for our search circle, and then I dragged myself out of bed to get dressed. The sooner we started looking, the sooner we’d find Dylan and this whole nightmare would come to an end.
The boys gathered up phones, key cards, and wallets while I pulled on my shoes, and we headed for the car. No one had much to say on the walk to the parking lot. London looked like he enjoyed mornings about as much as I do.
At the car, London opened the rear driver’s-side door and motioned me inside. Definitely not a morning person. I climbed in and turned to reach for the belt, but London stopped me with a word: “Scoot.” I scooted, and he squeezed in beside me.
“Contact,” he said. “Easiest way to reach both of you.” He fished his iPod and a long cord out of his pocket. Talk about being prepared. And I thought I had the packing thing down to a fine art. He plugged one end of the cord into the music player and leaned between the front seats to plug the other end into the auxiliary port on the car stereo.
“You’re in charge of this,” London said, firing up the iPod and handing it to me. He fastened his seat belt just as Brian started backing the car out of the parking space and then slumped against the window, eyes closed.
I fiddled with the iPod as we followed the loop around the resort area and then turned onto Buena Vista Drive to head away from Disney. London had an eclectic mix of music, even according to my standards, and I didn’t recognize half the bands. I found a lot of my favorites, too, though – even some of my more obscure favorites
- and after a minute or two of scrolling I chose Elvis Monroe’s “Comin’ Around,” a song that both Dylan and I loved.
Looking up from the iPod, I noticed that Brian had a GPS map pulled up on his phone that he glanced at now and again as he drove.
“You don’t really need the GPS,” I told him. “We’re going straight up I-4.”
“Coffee first,” London explained.
“Awesome. Wait...did you program that thing for the nearest Crackbucks? Because that’s probably a bad idea.”
“Why’s that?” Brian asked, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.
“I remember trying that once, when I lived here. Bob...um...my GPS took me to the Outlet Mall food court. We don’t wanna do that.”
London cracked an eyelid to look at me. “You named your GPS?”
“Yeah. Bob. Don’t ask.”
London smiled and shook his head, closing his eyes again. Glancing into the rearview mirror, I could see Brian smirking. Fine. Whatever. Let them be amused.
“Anyway,” I said, “There’s a Starbucks by the mall.”
Brian found his way to I-4, and we made good time heading north. We grabbed a quick breakfast at Mickey D’s, taking a few minutes to sit and eat. Then we piled back into the car, grabbed coffee in the Starbucks drive-through, and began our search.
Hollywood portrays search and rescue operations as dramatic, pulse-pounding events. This one, at least, was the polar opposite: boring and tedious, except for the minor amusement afforded by Brian swearing at and flipping off the crappy Orlando drivers. London had the worst of it, of course; not only did he have to concentrate on trying to find Dylan, he also had to ride leaning forward so that he could rest his fingertips against Brian’s neck. He couldn’t even brace himself with his other hand, since it was firmly gripped in mine.
