The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [94]
There, below his gaze, The Everborn lay centered and divided into two uneven stacks beside an open notebook containing review notes. Stepping aside, he gathered his reclining leather desk chair from beneath the desktop work space, positioned it, and seated himself. He lifted a hand to wipe the sweaty droplets from his face and receding brow and from the saturation of wet sweat about his neck and upper chest. He wished he had a handkerchief for times like these, like the one the balding Nazi officer in Raiders of the Lost Ark always seemed to have handy.
It was then when he noticed his pajama leg bottoms and the hem of his bathrobe, and his feet. They were soaked with a dewy wetness and soiled with streaks and clumps of mud and yellowed grass-confetti as though he had taken a sleep-induced stroll across the outside grounds of his home.
He remembered the bright lights once again.
He remembered stepping into them.
He remembered dreaming of a journey, though not of the journey itself, but of its purposeful and imposed destination...a snapshot of memory, as it was, of a canyon much like the one described within the...,
....described, within the book.
Something was happening, something not quite right.
Something very, horribly wrong.
He caught sight of the digital desk clock. It was 12:37 a.m..
It was time for a few answers, a hefty dosage of comforting explanation.
Before he could possibly get himself to read further.
It was time to telephone that most valued client of his, and pronto.
One rude awakening deserved another.
25.
A Telephone Call for Ralston Cooper
Out of the chrysalis of late evening came forth emergence of the new day upon the stroke of twelve. Ralston Cooper was wide-eyed and wired inside the recreation room of his Brea home, lounging restlessly amidst weight sets and exercise machines and intermittently drawn towards the enclosed spa he spied from time to time from the opposing side of a spacious window of glass.
He had disrobed fully from whatever he’d been wearing, if anything at all, in the hours before. He was stretched nude upon his back across a padded benchpress, his eyes glazed and his attentions darting from the spa to the ceiling to Jessica saddled atop a thin stretch of bar surface protruding past the dart area and towards the pool table. In turn, Jessica’s view shifted from Ralston to the bar she straddled, then to the overhanging glassware secured and suspended upside-down and inches from her now-habitually bobbing head. She would have been nude also if not for the XXX-tra large tank top of Tweety-bird logos shrouding her body down to her upper thighs.
Her gaze returned to her boyfriend across the room. Whew! What a goddamn whirlwind weekend, she awed. When Ralston chose to party with her, he chose to party, and he did so ten-fold when he had good enough reason to.
They had been alone together for seemingly numerous hours in the aftermath of full-fledged indulgent celebration and would not wind down for at least another day. Ralston wanted to be rested and coherent by the time William Behn had absorbed the new novel and summoned his presence for the all-important business luncheon and propositional chit-chat. More green bud would take care of the come-down, and that would start by dawn. That was a promise. Or the intention.
Jessica enjoyed the considerably free lifestyle Ralston had provided for her from the get-go, though emotionally rocky and unstable as it was. But she had witnessed the lives of girlfriends past and present devoted to a wide variety of men who used them for financial crutches and as scapegoats for their abusive temperaments; Ralston could very well have been one of those bastards, but he was secure in his own rights and he didn’t give a shit how Jessica was to a certain degree using him for a financial crutch.
She had grown to care for him and to love him even more so than she had in the beginning, and her only two