All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 32: It's Raining Men (new title) ~ Carrie Cutforth

Song: Love the One You're With -- Stephen Stills

St. Croix -- Family of the Year

It's Raining Men

***

Pepper’s POV

Some people are like good books: you can’t put down no matter how hard you try.

Long after the last page was read.

Long after the writer is dead.

And you just kept staring at the next page…the empty one after the end of the final chapter, anticipating what’s next but it never comes.

Sometimes there are rumors of a sequel or a remake or reboot but these missives are small darts laden with antagonizing torturous poison.

And then it finally arrives after much anticipation, but everything feels…off, wrong somehow…cause they gave you more of what you asked for but it’s just not the same as the beloved tattered paperback you hold in your hands. The one you’ve read dozens if not hundreds of times. The one you know off by heart. The one that never says anything new.

David is back…

No.

Davids are back.

Goddamn it, girl: make some sense.

Let me back up and give you some context.

Atticus convinced me to come back… and I did. I KNOW, I KNOW!! You guys made me promise never to return to that asshat…but, David is out there somewhere and if someone doesn’t mind the bubble or portal or whatever you want to call it to be sure it’s open when he tries to come back…well, maybe he never will. And I would partly be responsible…

Gawd, the rationalizations of the broken hearts’ club. Sickening, right?

So I came back. I didn’t know what to expect when I made my way through the underground labyrinth of musty hallways outfitted in modernist once cream tiles turned rank. I could hear the hum of the chladni plates even before I approached the big red door, swung open, to the entrance of the lab.

And there he was when I walked in, drawing geometric patterns on the concrete floor with a sugar shaker in his usual manic energy, the bubble crocheted with lightning dancing behind him. His brown shaggy curls bouncing in delightful boyish disarray, his warm brown eyes flickering over the latest alchemy he was patterning on the floor. My heart began to flutter in my chest and I despised it for its weakness in giving in to him, while he roved around the room ignoring my presence.

Well what did you expect? For him to fall into your arms?

No, what you expected was his body to be mummified while his psychic energy was doing the Grand Tour. You imagined you’d be fixing him up with IVs and clipping toenails and storing his urine in jars. And instead he has been out and about, and walking the earth perfectly capable IN THIS DIMENSION…and he never once tried to contact me. All this time?

Temper temper, Pepper.

Finally he looked up and noticed my tapping toe, and up at my face to gage the strange fury in my eye.

He stood up and just stared at me for a cold hard minute, like he was measuring me with his eyes. My heart was strangling my throat so no words would come out.

Imagine me: speechless!

“Did you gain weight?” he finally wondered out loud.

Did.

I.

Gain.

WEIGHT???

Before I could sock him in the jaw, David’s eyes clouded. “No, it’s not you. You must be someone else…Sorry I’m confused.” He put the sugar shaker down and looked around the room again, only…as if seeing if for the first time. “The humming…it’s so loud. Why is it so loud?”