SEEK And Find

Chapter 15

Anna awoke, spitting out a strand of her own hair and confused why her room was so bright. Why weren't the curtains drawn? Where the hell was she?

And then she got a good look around. The room was completely alien to her; only her suitcases in the corner jogged her memory. Ibiza. She was literally a third of the way around the world from her house. Grinning into her pillow, she kicked her legs for a minute, eventually screaming in random joy. It was real! She wasn't dreaming, she was really in another country!

With Elsa. Sitting bolt upright, she looked around the room and tried to decide what she should do. Take a shower? Find food? No, of course not. The first thing she wanted to do was find Elsa, to confer about what they would be doing for their first day of the unified vacation.

That proved a little more difficult than she had expected. Once she disentangled herself from the sheets and pulled on her shirt and jeans from the day before, resolving to shower soon, she tried Elsa's room first. Empty. Then she looked around the kitchen, living room, dining room, the spare bed, the lavatories... nowhere to be found.

Had Elsa really ran off and left her? It was pretty late in the morning, judging by how much daylight there was outside, but that didn't seem like her. What was she going to do in a house in Ibiza all by herself?

Walking out the back door, she saw the delightfully blue swimming pool and a dozen elegant beach chaise lounges, ready to play host to sunbathers. A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth at the thought of making use of all that later. For now, the mystery remained: where was Elsa?

At last, when she went back upstairs to get her phone to call her, she spotted the sliding glass door at the end of the hallway. In the dark, she had barely noticed, but it led to a second deck. Funny how unimportant it had seemed when she knew she wouldn't be using it soon.

Elsa glanced up from her book the moment she heard the door. Her hand came up to drag her sunglasses off her nose and she smiled wide, earnestly happy to see Anna there.

"Hey, Rip Van Winkle."

Anna laughed quietly, dipping her head. Partly due to her being teased about waking up late... and partly because she needed a moment to recover from Elsa's swimsuit. It was fairly modest for a bikini, but a bikini nonetheless, showing off more stomach and shoulder and leg than she was prepared for so soon after getting out of bed.

"Hey. Um... took me a while to find you, I was afraid you ran off."

"Ran off where? The party is obviously wherever you are." Her grin widened. "Even if you put it on hold by sleeping."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to snooze until noon."

Elsa shrugged, sliding a bookmark into place and laying the book - Pride and Prejudice, without any zombies at all - onto the table next to a coffee mug. "It's okay, really. You're on vacation; sleep in as much as you want."

"I don't want to sleep," Anna assured her, finally walking over to plop down in the nearest chair. "I want to hang out with you, get crazy! What do we do first?"

"Well..." Leaning a little closer, Elsa muttered, "I already had breakfast, but if you want to get ready, we can go grab lunch in town. Just a local place, pick one and see what they have. Then we'll figure out what kind of trouble two cute women such as ourselves can get into."

Already standing, Anna laughed, "When you put it that way, it almost sounds like one of us might end up pregnant."

"Stranger things have happened on this island, I'm sure," Elsa told her with an air of mystery.

One quick shower later, they were getting into a shiny silver car that couldn't have been more than a year old and pulling onto the roadways. Elsa pushed a button or two until she brought up a pulsing techno beat, then turned it almost all the way down to "background noise" level.