Dahlia has lived in our universe as an immortal for centuries. She has a soft spot for this universe - all the good and all the bad - and has made the best of an admittedly bad situation. Her universe? It...went through some things, but who cares, w...
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MARCUS HAD TAKEN care of our bookings. The nearest and safest portal, according to him, was in Greece, so we were due to fly out of Johannesburg on Thursday morning.
And that meant that we had a few more days trapped in Marcus's house.
Trapped was the most appropriate word for it. It felt like I was locked in a small matchbox and starved of oxygen. Despite spending most of the time shut in their respective bedrooms, Marcus and Simone felt like omnipresent beings. I felt them everywhere, every second of each day.
I needed to distract myself from, well, everything.
Which was kind of difficult when distractions were few and far between.
Marcus didn't own a television, and the books he read weren't exactly my taste. Tolkien? Orwell? Pass. Wells? Hard pass. It was as if he'd wanted to understand what humans believed other worlds to be like. As if he wanted to...relate to them in some way.
So I spent most of my time on my phone, texting Veena, checking up on other Neutrali in my phone book. My human friends were active in the group chat, and only one person had mentioned going to my condo and finding it locked up. I muted the chat and forced myself to accept that the life that I'd carefully built – no, cultivated – was gone. The ruins of Neutralis awaited me. Yay.
Simone was cordial, for the most part. The three of us ate all our meals together. Marcus was an incredible cook, and he was only too happy to make anything our hearts desired. Sitting in his kitchen, sharing meals that he'd prepared, felt disgustingly domestic. The only difference was that we ate in graveyard silence, the only noise from the odd clanging of silver utensils against the ceramic plates.
Two days before we were due to leave, Simone asked Marcus to take her to her place to grab some personal keepsakes. She wasn't trying to run, she promised. Oddly, I believed her. She seemed just as resigned to her fate as I was. Choosing Marcus to take her, instead of me, was a loud statement. I was actually happy to see the both of them leave.
However, left to my own devices, I found myself in a black hole of my own thoughts.
Memphis didn't have an evil bone in his body. He didn't deserve his life getting cut short like that. And wasn't it sickening of me to feel that it was unfair that we never got to reconnect after all these years?
And we never would.
Instead of sinking further into the hole, I grabbed a bottle of wine and a glass from the kitchen and went upstairs. Snooping wasn't my thing, but hey, the opportunity had presented itself. I told myself that if Marcus had left his bedroom door unlocked, then he didn't mind my snooping, and sure enough, the doorknob twisted in my hand and the door opened.
Much like the rest of the house, Marcus's room was pristine. No cleaning lady had come by over the past few days, so this was definitely all him. I, on the other hand, would've been lost without Jane, my cleaning lady. Marcus clearly didn't have any issues cleaning up after himself.
