“I really want a burger,” I say. “How long until you’re doing burgers?”
“9.30,” the bored voice says.
“Let’s get some egg muffins and wait,” Lydia suggests, because she is a diplomatic angel.
We do that once, then twice. Each time we go back through the same window and get served by the same guy.
I delight in the fact that the young man at the window looks exactly like I expect him to. He looks the way I looked when I was his age. He looks like he doesn’t care about anything. Lucky little bastard. I care about a great deal.
“Are you okay?” Lydia interjects the question as I muse. “You keep grinning at the kid in the window and I think he’s starting to get a little freaked out by it all.”
“Yes.” I smile at her. “I’ve never been more okay. We are lucky to be human.”
She smiles back at me, though her expression isn’t pure joy like mine. She thinks I’ve been very silly, and she’s right about that. My experimentations have been reckless and could have gotten me killed. But they didn’t, and that’s the important thing.
“Burgers!” I declare at 9:31 a.m. “I would like one of every burger you have, please.”
Lydia looks on with an amused sort of slow horror as the rural chain restaurant creaks out five different kinds of burger, each one more fatty, salty, and delicious than the last. The processed cheese, the tangy pickles, the onions that aren’t cooked well enough, the bun half-toasted in some places and basically plain bread in others. It’s all amazing to me.
I give her the plain small cheeseburger, and I eat the rest of them. I am stuffed by the time I am done, but in a satisfied way that leaves me feeling sleepy.
Lydia drives me home without complaining about the fact I’ve filled her cute little car with wrappers. She seems very calm about all of this, relieved perhaps that I am safe. I didn’t think she’d care so much about me, I really didn’t.
“What did I do to deserve your loyalty?”
I murmur the question while half-asleep.
I don’t hear her response, if there is one.
I wake up as we get to my place.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call someone?”
“No. Calling people would let them know,” I say, leaping from the car barefoot and in my scratchy lab coat. It takes all my self-control not to rip it off and run through the lobby naked, but humanity and shame are starting to assert themselves a little more and I realize that if I do that there will be gossip.
So I walk through the place with as much dignity as I can muster. The man at the door nods to me on my way in. He knows my face, but apparently not the fact that I am missing. Interesting.
Lydia comes with me, of course.
We go inside my place; I get cleaned up and dressed. The suits I’ve always worn really feel almost like real suits now, heavy and battle ready. I did like not having to wear clothes. Everything else was incredibly difficult, though.
Being stuck in the form was a… mistake. I will have to do some work on that and try to understand why it happened.
“You look almost normal,” she says when I appear back in the living room, dressed all the way to socks and shoes. The shoes are particularly odd. I still have the memory of feeling grit and stone beneath my feet. Socks, then rubber. We do things very oddly.
“Thank you, a very high compliment,” I say while fighting the sensory issues that threaten to overwhelm me.
She, I notice now, looks tired and rumpled. She was wearing athletic wear to look for me: legging, sneakers, and a hoodie. It’s pink. It’s cute. She’s cute. I like her hair in a ponytail. I like her. A lot.
“Would you like to go to your place before we go to work? Or I can drop you there and you can get some well-earned rest.”
She scrunches her face up. “I want to see what’s going to happen.”
“Of course you do,” I laugh. “Let’s go.”
“Okay, but I am driving my car. You can drive yours. Then I’ll leave mine ay my place, and you can drive me to work because I’m tired.”
I debate sending her to bed, but I know she won’t go, and though I could make her, perhaps even spank her cute little ass for refusing, I am in the mood to indulge her.
