Authors: Jessica Miller
I get to campus super early; the sun is just coming up. It’s moments like this, moments in the crisp California air, that I can’t help but marvel at the beauty all around me. The sky begins its cascade of blue, and in moments, the classic Los Angeles sun is bearing down again.
I nod off in the hallway outside my class, and my eyes barely jolt open as the last of the students file in an hour and a half later. Even sleeping sitting up, it only felt like five minutes. I look around the hallway for Roman, but figure he must have walked right past me and is already in the classroom. I go in after everyone else and sit in my normal spot, but he’s nowhere to be found.
I pull my CD-R from my bag and pass it down the row with everyone else’s from my right, and Professor Danteridge collects them as he walks down the stairs on my left. The empty chair troubles me. Maybe he’s just running late. I can just picture him sleeping in past his alarm, nestled in his black comforter in the dim light of The Brush.
Then it hits me that he could totally be ashamed of the pictures I took, and didn’t want to show face. Even though I was careful not to get any of his face, it was also possible that he just didn’t want to see himself on the big screen and listen to Professor Danteridge criticize his abs.
If that were the case, it would be a good thing, because the professor pulls out my disk from the stack first. While on one hand it’s a relief to get the assignment done and over with, I still feel the same nerves pulsing in me, afraid to expose my work to people. Fifteen minutes into class and still no sign of Roman.
“I’m sure we’re all looking forward to your work, Ms. Edwards,” Professor Danteridge says. I’m in the hot seat, about to get questioned before the slideshow because his computer is still booting up. “Tell me, should we expect more of your self-portraiture, or have you explored some new terrain, this time?”
“Um,” I stammer. “A little bit of both?”
“Answering a question with a question, Ms. Edwards,” he corrects me, popping my disk into the computer and clicking the folder open. “That, I’m afraid, will not work on your final exam.” The room fills with a forced laugh from the rest of the class. I’m not partaking in the chorus.
The professor turns the lights off and opens the first photo from my disk. In an instant, there is a giant still image glowing in the darkness.
“Well, I have a feeling you let someone borrow your selfie stick for this image, Vylette?” The professor’s accusatory tone gets another pity laugh from the class. I stand up and look the professor in the eye.
“The image is an extreme close-up of a scar running down a male’s right deltoid down to his left lower back. This image explores the canvas of the male’s torso using black and white, sorry,
gray scale
to contrast the tattoos against the skin,” I say, not stumbling once in my delivery. “Otherwise, the ink would blend in with the skin tone.”
“I see,” Danteridge replies, unimpressed, clicking to the second photo of three. “Oh, and here we have another anatomical exploration, Ms. Edwards?” The photo is a close-up of the area just underneath Roman’s left pec, with the vined-heart tattoo in soft focus on the background.
“I thought this one was a simple representation of the heart,” I say, trying to not fall into his trap of anatomy descriptions. And before I can catch my mouth, the words escape, “A representation of
love
.” Without question, the word rings true, and the professor actually looks satisfied with the response. I realize that he’s satisfied because the response is real, from my soul.
Without a word he clicks to the last photo on my disk. I have to double take the screen before it registers that the photo is not the one that I had intended. My brain anticipated the photo of Roman’s obliques, stretched out during a laugh—but what I see is the photo of him in his garb and bandana, painting the interior of the parking garage from the scaffold. It is only now, in this moment, with the image frozen in time up on the projector screen, that I see what he was painting was a tree, the color violet.
It’s hot behind my eyes. How could this have happened? Is it possible that I might have accidentally slipped it into the wrong folder? “Interesting,” Professor Danteridge says, distaste in his scowl. “Is the entire photo supposed to be out of focus?” I realize that in the moment, I had only had time to snap the one picture.
Before I can answer, there is a loud
CREEAK
from the top of the stairs. I look back and see Roman standing there, silhouetted from the light outside the classroom. There is but one swift motion of Roman looking into the dark room, catching glimpse of the screen, and exiting again with another creak. The quick flash of light from Roman’s entrance is like an eclipse—momentarily gorgeous and spectacularly blinding.
I rush behind the row of students to my left and make way to the doorway. “Ms. Edwards?” Professor Danteridge calls out. “Ms. Edwards, do you need to be excused?”
I drown out the rest of his words as this dark world is again immersed in light on the other side of the door. At first my eyes fail to adjust, and once they finally do, I don’t see Roman anywhere. It’s cold and stale out in this hallway, with rows of empty wooden benches lined along to the exit. I pick my feet up and begin at a sprint down the sandstone corridor, aiming for the glowing red light of the exit sign. This tunnel seems never ending, like the red and blue strobe lights flickering at
Eighty8 Lounge
. Once I barge through the double-doors of the stairwell, I have one of two choices: up a level, or down. Roman could have gone either way, and I have no idea if I’m on the right track in the first place. The stairwell reeks of musty, stone-worn air, and I blindly choose to go down.
There are two sets of stairs per level, and two levels I could go down. I’m guessing he headed outside; it’s the most logical deduction I can make. When I get to the last door, the fresh air embraces me like a net. The expanse of the campus is wide, and although there are people straggling about, it looks more empty than full. With a few steps onto the terrace I look around for Roman, but there is no trace.
THE END
Bonus Story 15 of 20
Sirens wailing, the fire truck pulled up on the street that had begun to fill with emergency vehicles. Gabriel leapt down from the truck and made a dash for the burning house ahead of the rest of his squad. They let him go as they always did. Each man in the squad knew better than to try and stop him anymore. Everyone in Firehouse 54 thought that it was for the thrills and the adrenaline rush, but it wasn’t.
Gabriel was looking for something that would kill him.
Ever since his partner Brent had died Gabriel found that he didn’t much care if he lived or died. He looked for reasons to keep on living, but he couldn’t really find any apart from helping those in need as he and Brent always had. He figured that if he died while helping someone else it would be a good death and an end to the nightmare of living a life without his partner and best friend.
The house was a roaring inferno when his squad arrived on the scene, but they had just received a radio transmission from the chief who was already on the scene. The chief told them that a bystander claimed there was another person in the building on the top floor. The other firefighters waited until they were on the scene to completely suit up, but Gabriel had done so in the truck on the way over so that he was ready when they pulled up.
The door was closed, but he lowered a muscular shoulder and slammed into it at a full-out run. The door shattered inwards off the hinges as he hit it full force. He used his momentum to leap the first five steps of the stair case. He landed hard and began to run up the stairs, taking them three at a time with his long legs. Heat baked him inside his suit, but he shrugged it off like it was nothing. In fact, if you asked anyone in Squad 54 they would say that Gabriel was almost immune to heat. They would tell you stories of how the man had walked through solid walls of fire to get to people in need.
He rounded the corner of the stairs at a run and continued up. The building was only five floors tall, but running up five floors in full gear that weighed more than sixty pounds was not an easy task. Gabriel seemed to ignore the weight of his equipment entirely as he ran up the stairs three at a time until he reached the last floor of the building.
The fire had started on the fourth floor and the fifth was a raging inferno. Flames roared all around him as he made his way down the hall. Boards creaked and groaned in the ceiling and the floor as the flames compromised their structural integrity. Halfway down the hall Gabriel began to yell.
“Fire department! Call out!”
Over and over he yelled the same phrase to try and grab the attention of the person that was supposed to still be up here. He strained his ears for the sound of someone calling out, but nothing came to him. Further down the hall he repeated the call, but still no sounds other than those of the building as it collapsed around him. He made it to the door at the end of the hall and yelled one last time.
“Fire department! Call out!”
He started to turn around, but the smallest of sounds stopped him in his tracks. He yelled out once more and stood still, his ears strained to hear the noise again. The noise came again. The sound had been a woman moaning. He pinpointed that the sound had come from behind the door on his left. He thumped on the door with his hand as hard as he could and called out.
“Stand back from the door! Stand back!”
The roar of the fire made it hard to hear yourself think let alone the commands of someone on the other side of a door, but he hoped the woman had heard him. He took a step back and slammed a kick against the door just under the knob with all his might. If you asked his fellow squad members, they would tell you that no one could break down a door like Gabriel. This time proved to be just as easy as the times before. The door flew back, the top hinge broken and the jam was hurled into the room.
His eyes roved over the room in search of the source of the noise and then he spotted it. A silver blanket in the corner of the room near the window. He rushed across the room and pulled up the edge of the fireproof blanket. Afraid of what he would find he pulled back the blanket anyway and was pleasantly surprised when the wide-eyed stare of a woman came into view. Her face was blackened by soot, but otherwise she seemed to be alright.
“I’m gonna get you out of here!”
She nodded her head and tried to speak, but coughs racked through her body. Gabriel reacted without thinking of his own safety. He pulled off his mask, something a firefighter was never supposed to do and placed it over the woman’s face. He made her hold the mask in place since he didn’t have time to fix the straps to fit her head. The air was filled with smoke and it tasted bad, but otherwise it bothered him not in the least.
“I’ve got to lift you to get you out of here! Okay!”
She shook her head and yelled back at him. “You can’t!”
She threw back the blanket and right away he could see why she thought that he couldn’t lift her. She was a short, heavyset woman. Maybe two hundred pounds, probably a little less because she was short. He guessed in his head. Nothing that he couldn’t lift without a problem.
“Stop worrying! Let’s go!”
Before she could protest any more he reached out and lifted her into his arms like a man carrying his bride on his wedding night. Her eyes widened ever more behind the mask as he handled her as easily as he would have a young child. He raced out of the room as the ceiling began to collapse. The squeal of wood on wood resounded throughout the house as it began to fall apart beneath his feet.
He could vaguely hear the Chief as he yelled for him to ‘get his ass out of there now’ in the earpiece connected to his mask that was now on the woman. He ignored the voice and focused on running down the stairs. His long legs held firm as he ran down the stairwell at a breakneck pace. One slip and they would both be in a world of hurt, but he had no choice. The house had begun break up. With a grunt he leapt the railing on the last landing and hit the floor on bent knees. Boards rained down around him and the woman in his arms and he ran for the door. Just as they reached the door the house gave out a tremendous groan, shuddered on its foundation, and toppled inward. Gabriel leapt through the door and landed on his back with the woman still held tightly in his arms as the house crumbled behind him.
He rolled over and got to his knees as the paramedics rushed forward with a stretcher and oxygen. He laid the woman on the stretcher and took back his mask. She reached a hand out to him, but he turned away and started for the fire truck. For those few seconds inside the burning house he had been alive like he hadn’t been in years, but now it was over and all he felt was hollow and empty. The Chief laid a hand on his shoulder.
“That woman wants to thank you Gabe.”
“Have Romeo take the thanks for me Chief.” Gabriel said and shrugged off the Chief’s hand as he continued to the fire truck.
The Chief was a good man, but he just didn’t get it. Gabriel didn’t want to be thanked. He had saved her because it was his job and a dragon always does the job put before him no matter how hard or what the outcome was and he knew all about bad outcomes. He knew about those all too well.
*****
Like all dragon shifters Gabriel’s parents left him in a nest stocked with food before he hatched. It wasn’t that they didn’t love him or want to see him be born. None of that had anything to do with it. It’s just the way it was and has been for a millennium. For four months he incubated in his egg with no knowledge of his surroundings. He didn’t even know that the dragon that was to be his best friend and partner was right next to him. Male dragons stay in pairs for their whole lives. No matter what. There are no female dragon shifters only males. When the males choose a mate they must choose carefully for each dragon can only produce offspring once in their lifetimes and dragons live a long, long time.
After four months Gabriel broke free from his shell encrusted prison and had his first look at the world. He is already the size of a toddler thanks to the nutrients gathered from the sun. The egg was small in the beginning, barely bigger than the palm of a hand, but before he was finished hatching it had grown to the size of a beach ball.
He turned his head from side to side and took in the world around him. All he could see were the walls of the nest, a huge black oval-shaped egg, and nearly a ton of canned food and dried meats. Hunger exploded inside him as he looked at the dried meat. He tried to stand, but his legs wouldn’t support his weight just yet, so he crawled over to the meat and grabbed a handful. As he stuffed it in his mouth and began to chew he heard cracking sounds. The other egg had begun to hatch.
Small groans escaped the egg as the youngling inside tried to get out. A bulge formed near the top and moments later the egg split and Brent came into the world. Gabriel didn’t know his nest brother’s name yet, nor did he know his own, but right away he felt a bond for the being before him. He grabbed a double handful of the meat and carried it over to the egg. When he held the meat out Brent snatched it away and shoved it into this mouth with gusto.
Unable to talk they nonetheless, formed a language of their own made of grunts, mewls, and a rudimentary ability to read each others minds. The bond they formed was an unbreakable one and when the time came for them to leave the nest and find their way in the world they did so together, knowing the whole time that they would always have the other at their back for support and protection.
That had been well over two hundred years ago and now Gabriel was alone. It had only been a few years, but to him each day seemed like an eternity.
~~~
Gabriel rode back to the firehouse in quiet as he did after every call. The men had thought it was shyness at first, but had soon come to realize that he just didn’t like to talk. They let him have his space out of respect. He was the best damned firefighter any one of them had ever seen.
When they reached the firehouse he climbed down from the truck and stripped off his clothes in front of his stall. Once they were hung up and what needed to be washed was thrown in the huge bin for washing he went to his bunk and laid down with his hands over his eyes.
He found that every time after he helped someone he thought of his brother. He couldn’t help it. With his hands over his eyes he pretended to be asleep, but if anyone wanted to look close enough they could see the tears that rolled down the sides of his face and wetted the pillow.
The rest of the day went by pretty uneventful and when his shift was over Gabriel did the same thing he did every night. He went to the bar, got fall down drunk, and stumbled back to the firehouse where he crashed on the bed. This routine continued for a week before anything interrupted it.
Gabriel lay on his back on the bench and hefted the weights into the air once more with a groan. The weight should have been too much for a man of his size, but he lifted it with relative ease. At two hundred and ten pounds he had the strength of a man twice that size. He stared to bring the weights back down to his chest, but a hand guided the bar to the rack. Puzzled, he opened his eyes and saw Randall Mullen, whom the whole squad called Romeo because of his way with the ladies, face appear.
“What is it Romeo?” He asked, a little annoyed.
“You’ve got a visitor Gabe.”
“Tell ‘em I’m not here.”
“That’s just the thing. She’s standing right over there.” Romeo pointed to the corner of the living area at a woman who stood there with her purse clutched to her chest. “She insisted that she be let in to see if you were here or not. I figured that she wouldn’t be able to notice you without your suit and mask on, but she picked you right out.”
“Tell her I’ve been called away and I’ll slip out.” Gabriel said as he sat up and wiped the sweat from his face with a towel.
“I won’t Gabe. I’ll do a lot of things for you man, but I don’t see why it would hurt for you to talk to this woman. All she wants to do is thank you for saving her life the other day. I think it’ll do you some good to get some human interaction for once.”
“What the hell do you know about it?” He mumbled as he got up from the bench and walked toward the woman with the towel over his shoulder.
*****
Samantha Nate reached out a nervous hand to the man that had saved her life no more than a week ago. It wasn’t that the man before her had saved her life. That wasn’t why she was nervous. It was his beauty. His chiseled features. Even under his unkept facial hair she could see that his jaw line was long and elegant and ended in a strong chin. His hair was long and golden. His eyes were green, but they were like no other green eyes she had ever seen in her life. They seemed to glow with an inner light that she couldn’t understand. He wore only pants and a towel draped over his shoulder and right away she could see how he had been able to lift her like an infant. His chest and shoulders were broad and bulged with corded muscle. He had a stomach that looked to her like you could grate cheese on it.
As he took her offered hand a jolt of excitement ran through her. Don’t be silly, she told herself, a man like that wouldn’t even take the time of day to look at a woman like you. When she pulled away her hand, she realized how warm his had been. Like he had just held them over a fire or heater on high. She fumbled in her head for the words she had practiced. In the car on the way over she had said them a thousand times, but now they eluded her. Finally, she found her voice.