When It Holds You Read online

  Reaching with both hands into the wall, he pushed slowly forward through the thick substance. He dipped into his full store of Stamina to keep from being pulled farther into the wall. The gravitational pull of his boots added to his resistance. When he made contact with Claire, a faint outline of her body showed on the screen, glowing around the area where he touched her—her arm, just below her elbow.

  Moving that hand to grasp her around the back of her bicep, he slid the other around her torso until the small of her back glowed. Depleting his Stamina further, he used his Strength to pull as hard as he could. She moved, but only by centimeters as the wall continued its struggle to pull him in along with her. He tried pulling on different parts of her body, seeing which yielded the greatest results. Thinking about it from a purely electronic point of view, he ended up with both hands cupping her butt cheeks. What could he say? It allowed him to pull her forward at a faster rate, so he kept them there.

  A great slurping noise sounded as she surged forward, finally free of the wall, and slammed into Loinerd. He flung backward at the impact, but the pull of the gravity boots saved him from flying into the opposite wall.

  “This. Game. Is. Awesome!” Claire bellowed into his ears.

  Cliff laughed. He couldn’t disagree.

  Claire was coated with glistening gray wall matter. With her long legs wrapped around Loinerd’s V-shaped waist, the substance slithered down her curves before dropping to the floor and scrambling to mold back into the mother-wall. “You can stop clutching my ass now.”

  “Oh, sorry.” He let her down, and she took a step back from him, peering down the hall.

  “With such an elaborate booby trap, I’m guessing we took the right path.”

  “Agreed. You lead the way this time—and don’t touch anything!”

  Cliff turned off the gravity boots, and they continued in the same direction they’d been heading, staying in the middle of the floor, away from the treacherous walls. After getting farther down the way, they both started to stumble. The slate flooring underneath them shifted.

  “See that chain by the ceiling?” Cliff asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Jump!”

  They leaped, grabbing onto the chain that stretched horizontally down the hall. The floor turned to liquid and began to slosh, creating small waves that reached up for them. Kicking their legs up, they wrapped their ankles around the chain and shimmied down the hall that way, hoping the metal chain wouldn’t also try to eat them.

  They made it to an opening that revealed a spiraling stone stairway. Their quest instructions had indicated their quarry would be at the top of a round tower, so this was the place to get off.

  “I don’t trust anything made of rock,” Claire said. “Let’s get up there fast and then get the hell out.” She lowered her legs and swung onto one of the lower steps, then dashed upward.

  Cliff did the same, immediately seeing the treachery of the stairs: each step disappeared as soon as Claire’s foot left it. Cliff jumped the void in front of him to be even with her.

  At the top of the steps, they landed on a gleaming, round sheet of silvery metal. It served as a floor to a small circular room. A single arched window let the pale moonlight in to shine on the object of their quest—the Dendritic Agate of Eleandor.

  Perched on a sleek black pillar at the center of the room, the pale quartz gem was the size of a baseball and shaped like an egg. It lay in a nest of woven glass filaments. Glowing pulses of warm yellow light raced endlessly through the tiny glass threads. Rather than the banding patterns typical of agate stones, this piece was marked with a spotted black design resembling a tree.

  While Loinerd and Claire stepped toward the treasure, the walls around them moved in a quiet, steady rhythm, like breathing. Cliff got the distinct feeling he and Claire were being watched. “Once we snatch this, we’ll have about two milliseconds to get out.”

  The castle gave a shudder. The metal floor beneath them stayed solid but rocked as if shaken from the tower’s depths. “And we’ve only got about three nanoseconds to make a plan,” Claire added.

  “Stand in front of the window and get ready to fly.” Without wasting time to explain, Cliff grabbed the stone in his gloved palm. While he slid it into a secure pocket at his thigh, he rushed to the window, clicking his boots into anti-gravity mode before grabbing Claire around the waist. The opening was already closing, like a giant eyelid. He ignited an extra boost of power in his boots, and they broke through the thin film of stone that had tried to lock them in.

  Claire wrapped her arms around his shoulders, holding on while they hovered over the moat, moving gradually forward. The extra boost of power plus Claire’s additional weight depleted the boots’ anti-gravity stores, and they lost altitude faster than Cliff had anticipated, drawing ever closer to moat, which had come alive with snapping jaws. As they sank, each snarling animal formed into a single, jagged tooth. The moat was morphing into a giant mouth.

  Repositioning an arm to hook under Loinerd’s armpit and around his back, Claire lifted a weapon in her other arm. “Get ready to swing, Tarzan.”

  Rope shot from her weapon like silly string, reaching past the moat and attaching to the high branches of one of the tall, dead trees on the rocky ground. Together, she and Loinerd swung over the moat, past the tree, and over the rocky ground.

  Claire snapped off the rope, and they continued to fling forward on momentum. Combined with what was left of Loinerd’s anti-gravity juice, they flew beyond the wall of tangled vines, landing in the tall grasses of the field beyond. Loinerd checked his pocket to ensure their prize was still there. The castle-monster howled in defeat from behind the wall.

  “Come on. Let’s get that back to my place.” Claire grabbed his hand, and they ran through the field toward the village.

  When they dashed into Claire’s hideaway and slammed the door behind them, they were breathless, in both avatar and real-life forms, exhilarated by their adventure. Claire wrapped her long arms around Loinerd, pressing close. Not for the first time that afternoon, Cliff wondered what it would feel like to hold her against him in real life.

  “Nice job, Loincloth,” Claire said as she released him. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Cliff pulled the gem from his pocket and held it up in front of one of the burning torches. “Holy shit,” he murmured. The backlight showed through the translucent stone, glowing around its edges. At the center, however, darkness remained in the shape of an embryo.

  “It’s a real egg?” Claire whispered.

  “It would appear so.”

  “Oh, no—that crazy glass nest thing. What if it needs it to survive?”

  “Too late to go back and grab it now. We’ll have to find a way to keep the egg warm here until we can sell it to a trader. Any idea what kind of creature might be growing in there?”

  “Nope. Can I hold it?” Claire cupped her hands in front of her, and Cliff gently set the egg in her palms. “I think body heat is the best we can do for now. I’d like to find out what this is before handing it over to someone else. There’s a wise man across the lake who might be able to help. But this quest ended with removing the stone from the castle, so it’s fine if you want to go your own way now.”

  There were plenty of other directions Loinerd could go in the game, including finding himself a fully programed non-player female to romance. But he was having fun with Claire. “If you don’t mind me sticking around, I’d like to see this through.”

  Chapter 8

  CLIFF AND CLAIRE DECIDED the best place to keep the egg for now was in Loinerd’s side pocket, where it could stay warm from his body heat. Once he’d secured it there, PlanetClaire said, “The time has come for you to explain your screenname.”

  They left their avatars immobile as they stood facing each other. The figures swayed in ever so slight, random movements. In the flickering glow of candlelight in Claire’s small hideaway, the effect was quite lifelike.

  “There’s
not much to explain,” Cliff said, shifting into a more comfortable position on the floor. “I’m a lawyer and a nerd, so I combined the two as my screenname—spelling it phonetically as l-o-i instead of l-a-w, because then people would’ve read it as law-nerd, and that didn’t sound as clever.”

  “Why didn’t you spell the first part l-o-y? Then it wouldn’t look so much like loincloth.”

  “Where were you when I was typing in my new screenname?”

  Claire chuckled. “Probably listening to the B-52’s rock out ‘Planet Claire.’”

  “So you’re a retro girl, huh?” Unless, of course, she was actually in her forties or fifties and had grown up on the poppy post-punk band. One never knew exactly who was on the other side of those animated graphics.

  “Yep. There was no Baby Beethoven or Kidz Bop for me. My mom converted all her cassette tapes from her college days to CDs and played them constantly.”

  “Fun mom,” he said, calculating that her mom’s love of early ’80s music put Claire in her twenties, early thirties at the oldest.

  “She definitely instilled an early love of music.”

  “So now that you know I’m a lawyer, tell me what you do when you’re not storming castles.”

  “I plan…events…” Her voice trailed off for a moment before she continued. “I hope this won’t seem rude, but I prefer not to talk about my daily grind when I’m in virtual worlds. This is where I come to escape from all of that, y’know?”

  “I get it. I totally get it.” His mind was once again back on Trish, causing a somber shift in his tone.

  “You have a bad day, too?”

  “Bad weekend. I lost a good friend.”

  “I’m so sorry.” The thickness of compassion in her voice told Cliff he’d been misinterpreted.

  “No, not like that. She didn’t die or anything. We had a big fight, and I just meant that it’ll be a long time before we get past it, if ever.” He leaned back, resting against his oversized ottoman.

  “Oh. Well, I’m still sorry. That sucks.”

  “Yeah…though life will be easier if I don’t have to see her all the time. I wanted to be more than friends with her. I always have.” His gaze traveled sideways, landing on Trish’s overnight bag. Why am I spilling my guts to a complete stranger?

  “Ah, one of those girls.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every guy she meets falls in love with her. She leaves men like you in the dust as scraps for women like me to pick up, even though we always know you still really want her.”

  “That’s exactly how I feel—like one of her scraps.” Maybe Claire was a stranger, but she was listening, and he needed to talk about it with someone. “But she’s pissed because she thinks I was only pretending to be her friend, that I was only in it for eventual sex.”

  “Were you?”

  “No! I always hoped deep down that was where things would end up, but I truly did care about her as a friend and wanted to make that work. But she kept sending me so many mixed signals…which now I’m not sure were actually signals. I might’ve been twisting things in my mind because that’s how I wanted to see them.”

  “What kind of signals?”

  “This weekend, for instance, she came over to watch a movie and brought an overnight bag for a sleepover. A few weeks ago, she brought me as her plus-one to a destination wedding. Last year, she propositioned me about a friends-with-benefits relationship.”

  “Loinerd, I don’t know you or her at all, but my advice is this: stay the hell away from her. She’s got you on her hook and will keep yanking it as long as you let her.”

  “That’s what I told her! So, I’m not insane.”

  “I can’t vouch for your overall state of mental health, but in this case, you’re right on target. The only way you’ll ever get over her is to cut her out. She gots to go.”

  “She gone.” He smiled, happy that he was done second-guessing himself. Now he just had to ignore the pinch at his heart until it went away.

  “Good. Are we ready to make a plan for getting across the lake?”

  Their discussion turned back to the game, and they arranged to meet up in the virtual world later that week.

  “I hear you made quite a first impression on Patty,” Karen said the next day, leaning against the inside of the doorjamb to Cliff’s office.

  “She made one on me, too—a quick impression, but a good one.”

  “She’s a passionate person with a good heart. Lots to admire about her.” Karen sauntered into the office and pulled over a chair from the corner to sit across the desk from him. “I suppose this is a good time to let you know that I’m personal friends with her.”

  She sat back and stared at Cliff, as if studying his reaction. He was mildly surprised to learn that Karen and Patty were friends, but the news wasn’t disconcerting in any way, so he didn’t know what she was looking for.

  “I’m sure I don’t need to explain that it would be good for you to keep your impressions of Patty on a strictly professional level.”

  Ah, Cliff thought, understanding what his mentor was getting at—and simultaneously realizing her concern must mean that Patty’s impression of him hadn’t been on a “strictly professional” level.

  “That wolfy smirk on your face is exactly what I’m warning you against.”

  Cliff became aware that the corner of his mouth had raised half an inch. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m flattered you think I’d have a chance with her, and I’ll admit to finding her appealing, but I have no intention of pursuing anything beyond a client-attorney relationship with her.”

  “Keep it that way. I give you this advice not just as a mentor but also as a friend. Patty’s an intelligent woman, but she’s stupid when it comes to men. The last guy left her pretty raw, and it’d be just like her to try to heal by jumping into an ill-advised tryst with someone adorable and off-limits like you.” The petite, all-business blonde pointed a stern finger at him. “Every word of this is off the record—including the adorable.”

  “Got it.” Cliff smiled. How could a woman of Karen’s brains not know that drawing such a firm line would only make Patty more attractive to him? But he had no desire to take advantage of someone in an emotionally vulnerable state and wouldn’t risk his career. Patty was safe with him.

  The weeks surrounding Thanksgiving passed with family gatherings in the North Shore suburbs, virtual adventures—sometimes with PlanetClaire, sometimes without—work, and absolutely no word from Trish. As days and then weeks passed, Cliff was surprised when Lyssa didn’t try to step in as mediator, but he appreciated her staying out of it.

  He knew it was better for him to stay away from Trish, but he wished he could know what she was thinking. Was she giving him space because she realized how tough she’d made things for him, or was she still pissed off, thinking he’d never valued their friendship? He didn’t want her believing that. At the moment, however, he was just going to have to let her sort it out for herself.

  One late mid-December afternoon, he was back at the shabby but cozy coffee shop where he’d first met with the people from Rock This Town. This time, he sat with Chelsea and Jackson at a worn wooden table at the edge of the main room. Only a few other people gathered in the ground-floor space. The already darkening sky made the windows black and glossy, but stained glass pieces hung halfway down the larger panes, reflecting the warmer glow of the inside lighting.

  Cliff walked Chelsea and Jackson through the finer points of the documents he’d drawn up. Patty had texted she was running late, so they’d begun without her.

  “She doesn’t really pay any attention to this stuff, anyway. She takes care of the creative side; we take care of the business end.” Chelsea laughed. “Which doesn’t make my job sound real glamorous, but you know what I mean.”

  “There’d be no business end at all if Patty didn’t do such spectacular job planning the fundraising events,” Jackson said.

  “Yeah.” Chelsea nodded
. “You’ll have to excuse her if she’s extra frazzled when she shows up. She’s begun setting the groundwork for the spring gala.”

  “Our biggest event of the year.” Jackson rubbed his bony hands together. “I’m sure your firm would like to buy a table, right, Mr. Walsh?”

  “Already workin’ it, eh, Jackson?” Chelsea teased.

  “You can count us in,” Cliff said.

  “Hey, hey, there she is!” Jackson called, glancing toward the front door.

  Cliff turned to see Patty lugging a bulging, multi-colored bag at her hip. Its thick strap was slung across her shoulders. She’d pulled her wild curls into a ponytail and covered the top of her hair with a knit newsboy cap. Her green eyes shined, carrying the festivity of twinkling Christmas lights and wintery weather within them.

  “Hi, hi, hi!” She bustled over and thudded the bag onto the floor next to the empty chair. “Sorry I’m late. Again.”

  “Not a problem. What’ll you have?” Cliff asked as he pulled the chair out for her. “I’m buying.”

  “You’re so sweet.” She sat and unbuttoned her thick wool coat. “Chai latte, please. The biggest they’ve got. Whole not skim.”

  “Coming up.”

  A few minutes later, Cliff rejoined the trio at the table, delivering a huge, steaming mug of the frothy beverage along with a plate of hazelnut biscotti.

  “How’d you know that’s my favorite?” Patty asked.

  “Lucky guess.” Cliff grinned, looking into her grateful, sea-green eyes as she stared up at him.

  “You feelin’ like two of us are suddenly not welcome here?” Jackson asked.

  Cliff shifted his gaze to see the older attorney giving Chelsea a sideways glance.

  “Knock it off, Jackson. You’re always ruining my fun,” Patty scolded.