Heather cupped her elbows with her hands. “I guess.”
“If you want to go home, we have to go. Max left orders for us to be taken through as soon as we are ready to go, and since the portal’s going to open soon, I suppose sooner rather than later would be our best option.”
Heather’s throat went taut and thick. “He could not even take me himself” The bitterness in her words seared the back of her throat and tongue. “I guess that’s it then. He really doesn’t want anything at all to do with me.”
Christy hugged her. “I’m so sorry, Heather. I am. I really wanted it to work out for you. I did.”
“Me too.” tears drowned her eyes and then ran down her face. “I did too. I wanted us to be together and to have some kind of wonderful life together, and I guess I never thought about him being a dragon, or about how that would all work out. I mean I did think about him being a dragon, but I never wondered how we could…” She stopped there. Her head swum at the amount of things that she had hoped for, had wanted. She whispered, miserably, “I never wanted all the things I wanted with him, not even with Todd. Maybe that’s my fault. I mean, he never offered. I just got caught up in the romance of it all.”
Christy’s shoulders slumped. She looked around at their surroundings. “Well, who could blame you? It is a castle and a fairy land.”
“There’s no such things as fairies. So, I guess you mean elves.”
They looked at each other, both of them trying to smile at the flat joke but neither of them really able to. Christy finally said, “I guess we should change back into our old clothes.”
Heather looked down at the soft and very lovely violet dress she wore. She did not want her old clothes; she wanted that dress. She wanted Max and that world and everything that might be, but even as she wanted those things, she knew that she would never have them. “You’re right.”
The wings beat the air. The portal was above them, its glorious colors flashing and shining and Heather stared at it, her heart aching and hurting and her whole body shaking with misery that made the dragon she was riding aboard fidget and twitch below her, a sure sign that her leg muscles were too rigid and she needed to relax them to keep from harming him.
She did; making herself loosen her muscles was hard but she managed it and just as the portal took them in, spinning them through a field of sheer white nothingness.
Spires and tall buildings appeared in her field of vision. They zoomed straight down, the dragons moving at a dangerous speed to keep themselves from being seen by humans as they aimed for a deserted alley.
The dragons touched down. Wind whipped her hair as Heather climbed off and then they were gone, their scaled bodies flashing for a second and then vanishing in a burst of speed and strength.
Heather sighed, “So now what?”
Christy chewed on her bottom lip and then looked down. “Your heel’s fixed.”
Heather looked down at the boot that Max had fixed. “Yeah. I hope it holds. I don’t know where we are; do you?”
Christy shook her head, “No. let’s get out of this alley. That seems to be the first logical step.”
It was, but with every single step, a sense of disorientation and dislocation settled in and stayed in Heather. She stopped at a newspaper stand and bent to look at one, her mouth dropping open as she saw the date. She nudged Christy, who also looked, groaned, and then took her arm, leading her away from there.
Time was funny over there, and it seemed she had lost a few months in the world in which she moved. Heather trudged down the avenue, her nose wrinkling at the smell of the pollution and car exhaust and her forehead crinkling too as the noise of cars and trucks and people crammed into tight spaces beat against her eardrums. The place was so loud!
Christy said, in a sad voice, “Well I guess I am going to have to figure out what to do next. I am sure I got fired at some point.”
Heather shot a look at her face. “You care about Blake, don’t you?”
“What? Hell no! He’s…” Christy’s face softened. “Oh shit. I don’t want to talk about it. The good thing is I still have an apartment thanks to my paying my rent for a whole year. Not sure if you can say the same, so if you need a place, mine is yours too.”
“I am sure I will.” Heather surveyed the shoals of pedestrians clogging the gray concrete sidewalks. “Do you think anyone even missed us?”
“No. I mean they likely figured I went to a different job. Your boss is a dick who probably figured you left like everyone else. Our neighbors don’t give a damn. I mean, it’s the city. Nobody really knows their neighbors. And since neither of us have any real sort of family there’s probably no way anyone reported us missing or anything either.”
“You are probably right.” Heather’s mood flattened yet again. “I don’t know what to do now. I guess I can say I lost my mind and ran off for a tour of some exotic country or something and try to get a job. I don’t even know what happened to my stuff either.”
They were in front of the building that Heather had lived in now. Christy said, “Well, let’s go in and ask or at least try to get into the place.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
The lobby was the same as ever, but it looked uglier, dirtier and more run down, or was it that she had simply been away long enough that she could see just how seedy it was?
Either way, it felt gritty and a little dingy. They went up the stairs, and she tried her keys. They didn’t fit, but the door swung open to reveal a middle-aged man with beady eyes and a suspicious glare. “Can I help you?”
Christy said, “Oh shit. Heather, you big dummy, you got the wrong apartment!”
