The Fates (Book II)

7.7 - Engaged

Let's check in with #Treliese...

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Scene 7:  Engaged

A.D. 2015

"Rise and shine, love," Miss Primor bade her fiancé as she strode into their hotel room, wasting no time flinging the curtains wide open.

"I'm awake, I'm awake," Trevor slurred from somewhere deep in a heap of blankets. "Wish I weren't. Where'd you just come in from?"

"Just walked Cloe back to her hostel after she finally woke up this morning," Charliese informed him. She had insisted on taking care of the poor girl after she'd passed out at the bar last night, convincing Cloe's hostel buddies that she was a trusted acquaintance from home. Knowing that she could look after her better than a herd of inebriated kids who were all but strangers to Cloe, really, despite whatever sense of instant-friendship the international backpacking scene might foster. Brought her back to their hotel to sleep on the fold-out.

On which another Fate had also laid, not long ago, Charliese silently recalled now. If only the girls knew just how closely entwined their lives were.

Well, one person did know now, aside from her primordial self—and that was the horribly hungover professor tangled up in the bedspread with his spectacles hanging halfway off his curly-haired head. She could've sworn that she'd removed them for him, before helping him to bed. Realized now that he must've reached for them and donned them while in deep sleep in the middle of the night. On some subconscious nerdy impulse. How stupidly cute, she inwardly cooed.

"Ohh," he yawned, "riiight. We ran into Cloe last night."

"Yes, dear, that's right," she affirmed, reminding herself just how relieved she was that Cloe had been knocked out last night while Trevor was awake, and that Trevor had been asleep when Cloe woke today, so that no awkward drunken slips had happened. Given what he now knew about her.

"I mean, Clotho of the Moirai, turner of the spindle, spinner of all mortal lives," Trevor continued. "...which makes her pretty much the mom of the entire human race, including us. Right."

Charliese sighed. His incredulity had been hard enough to handle when he was sober, but this hangover seemed to bring out a snarky side in her beloved professor. "As I've explained to you too many times, the relationship isn't exactly maternal..."

"Yeah, just like my fiancée, even if she gave birth to the universe, isn't exactly my great-great-etc.-grandma. Whatever you say."

"Exactly. Whatever I say," she echoed with a firm, serious stare. "I'm telling you, Trevor—every word I've said about this is true. The sooner you come to terms with that, the easier this will be for you."

"But isn't that what any pathological liar would say, to her prey?"

"If you're joking, then it's not funny. And if you're serious, then—"

"Please just chill for a minute, okay? I'm neither. Just hungover. Way more than a guy my age can handle. And I love you, honey, but your voice right now is like a million cooing pigeons cooped up in my mind, and your silvery hair is so bright that I think I've gone blind."

She frowned. "So you're telling me to shut up and disappear."

With a suggestive wiggle of his brows, he shifted under the covers to make space for her. "Or shut off the lights and get in here..."