Timepiece

Once the lights stopped flickering, I sensed silent communication. I caught Emerson imitating a guzzling motion, her hand curved around an imaginary bottle.

“So … Yeah,” she said. Michael, presumably dressed as Rhett Butler, gestured for her to sit. She looked down at her skirt and shook her head. “Kaleb might be taking the pirate thing a little too far. You know. With the rum obsession.”

“It wasn’t rum,” I argued. “It was bourbon. I found it in my glove compartment.”

Michael slid into the booth across from me and leaned close, speaking in a low voice. “Drinking and driving and an open container?”

“Listen, Clark Gable, I didn’t drink and drive because I didn’t drink until I got here. There isn’t an open container anymore, because I drank it all. And also, I recycled the bottle.”

A telltale vein pulsed in Michael’s forehead. I could feel his anger, too, ripe and unyielding, which meant the three shots I’d taken in the Jeep were wearing off.

Emerson sounded a warning in her throat. “Don’t make a scene, please. My brother is watching, and I don’t want to upset Dru.”

Thomas, dressed as Gomez Addams, stood with his wife, dressed as Morticia, next to the bar. Probably double-checking IDs. Em had told me that Dru was pregnant. She didn’t have a baby bump yet, but her hand always rested on her belly. Her emotions exuded a fierce protectiveness I recognized. Mama Warrior. You don’t mess with that. My mom had been just like her.

My fingers flexed, itching for a bottle.

“Kaleb, hand over your keys right now, and we’ll give you one free pass. But if it happens again, I’m talking to your dad myself,” Em said.

At least Em cared. Just not in the way I wanted.

“You’re vicious.” I met her eyes and slid my keys across the table. Michael pulled them from my hand before Emerson could touch me, giving them to her.

“I’m also short. Which means it’s that much easier for me to take you out at the knees.” She tossed the keys up in the air with one hand and caught them with the other. Making light. “I’ll hide these puppies. Try not to kill each other while I’m gone, and if you’re going to argue, get under the table to do it.” I watched her walk away, her hoop skirt swinging from side to side, hitting ankles, knees, and chair legs. I didn’t look at Michael.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I snapped my head toward him. Neither one of us had seen his apology coming. “What?”

“About this afternoon.” He frowned before he ran his hand through his hair and slouched back against the booth. “Em told me.”

“Oh. That.”

I didn’t want to think about the uniformed soldiers posing for a picture on my hundred-and-fifty-year-old porch. A porch that had suddenly appeared to be so new I could smell sawdust.

“If Thomas hadn’t caved and let Em come to the Hourglass school…,” I trailed off. “I don’t know how I’d have handled the ripple on my own. She only had to touch one soldier, and then everything dissolved.”

“I’m glad she was there for you,” Michael said. I could hear the underlying “don’t get used to it.”

Leaning back, I crossed my arms over my chest. “She said it was the same kind of rip she saw the night she went back to save you from the explosion in the lab. A whole scene.”

“Like you stepped into a painting.”

I nodded.

“I can’t explain it, Kaleb. I can’t explain the ones I’ve seen myself.”

“Why should you explain anything to me?” A quick glimpse of skintight gold fabric caught my attention from across the room. I didn’t have anything else to drink, but the next best distraction was making her way to the dance floor. “You aren’t responsible.”

“We don’t know who’s responsible.”

I gave him a scathing look. “Yes, we do.”

He disregarded the statement. “Did you tell your dad what you saw?”

“No.” Dad had enough to worry about. “Maybe you should tell him. He’d take it better from you, anyway.”

“That’s not—”

“You and Em have fun. I’ll find you later for a breath check so I can get my keys.”

“Kaleb, wait,” Michael said, but I was already up. Shaking off the conversation and any responsibility, I took a deep breath, adjusted my sword, and went with my gut.

And took a wide step around the jazz trio to get to the dance floor.

I banished any thoughts of Em and Michael, or Michael and my dad.

Tired of being on the outside looking in. In both cases.

I followed Tiger Girl onto the dance floor. I had way more than dancing on my mind, but I had to start somewhere. She’d almost reached a group of girls in a circle when I caught her by the hand. She turned to face me.

“Oh. You.”

“Try to contain your excitement.” I gestured to the crowd around us. “I wouldn’t want you to cause a scene. Riots can be very dangerous in this kind of situation.”

“Right,” she replied in a monotone, pulling her hand away. “I’ll bring it down a notch.”

“I thank you, and the Ivy Springs Public Safety Department thanks you.” I bowed slightly. When I stood, wearing my most winning smile, I saw only her retreating backside. “Wait!”

Stopping, she dropped her head. After a couple of seconds, she looked at me over her left shoulder. “What am I waiting for? You to stop being so conceited? Because I don’t have that kind of time.”

My earlier anger licked at the edge of my vision and I blinked. I usually didn’t have to try so hard. “I wanted to ask you to dance.”

She pivoted on her heel and faced me.

“May I?” I extended my hand, pushing the anger away and pulling out the smile again, this time with increased wattage.

“Will you take no for an answer or will you bug the piss out of me until I say yes?”

“I like to think of it as persistence.” I made the mental stretch, looking for amusement behind her words.

None.

“One dance,” she said, relenting. “Then we go back to our separate corners.”

“You might enjoy it so much you change your mind about that.” I was either going to have to work extra hard for this one or move on to an easier conquest.

“And monkeys might fly out my butt, but I wouldn’t bet on that, either.”

An easier conquest it was.

To speed up the rejection process, I pulled her toward me and slid my hands down to cop a quick feel of what was truly the finest ass I’d seen in my entire lifetime, and I’d been paying attention.

She reared back and smacked me. So hard my ears rang.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Wide-open rage. It poured out of her, with no mental stretch required from me to read it. “I don’t care how much you’ve had to drink, you douche bag, no one touches me like that without my permission.”

Part of me felt like turning that rage around on her, letting all of it go, and something black and vicious clawed its way up my throat. At that exact moment, a loud whine came from the sound system. Everything went dark.

Screams and laughter filled the space as the crowd anticipated a prank. The emergency lights flashed on and illuminated a man holding a handgun. Raising it, he shot at the ceiling and hit the chandelier. The room erupted in chaos as tiny crystals rained to the floor.