All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 15: Fastest Shooter (Part 2)

Music Track: THERE IS A TAVERN IN THE TOWN (The Drunken Song)  ~ Folk song

FALL ~ Daft Punk

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EMMA'S POV

I went to Gabriel's thing – this lecture that he was giving. So yeah, apparently he's the hot shit atheist the party was for but his face still didn't seem familiar to me. Perhaps because I don't watch PBS or some other boring old-white-men-in-cardigans fare. I finally put two and two together when Gabriel walked up to the podium and the packed auditorium exploded into applause. I guess scientists are the new rock stars. Who knew? This "people gaining notoriety for their brains not their beauty" thing was so divorced from the Hollywood D-set I've encountered the last few months, the people who only ever cared when their next Botox appointment was. I thought: I can't really still be in Los Angeles. It felt like I had walked into another reality. Or Communist China.

I wasn't even sure why I was here other than he was here and I was with him. Rather, waiting for him. This wasn't like me. I don't wait around in the wings for guys.

It. Does. Not. Happen.

But here I was, backstage, watching him from the wings, while he went blahblahblahblahblah to the enraptured audience who hung on his every word. Occasionally a handler or backstage crew member would shoot me a sympathetic smile, realizing I must be bored out of my mind and obviously here for only one reason that it didn't take a rocket scientist to guess. Their arched eyebrows and flat smiles said: "Oh, I see..." when they got one good look at me, and I could only imagine how I looked to them. A leggy blonde in a slinky dress, standing backstage like some groupie or worse!

Ugh! I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remind myself they were narrow-minded eggheads whose last lovers were obviously the palms of their own hands.

I don't know why I just didn't tell Gabriel to join me at my hotel suite after. I mean... that's obviously where this whole night was heading. A quick pleasure-intensive tousle before going our separate ways. He back to wherever hence he came, and me back to the road less travelled.

But after the lecture, people would want to speak to him, and then go on to congratulatory drinks, and there would be hangers-on, both men and women, and he might forget all about me if I wasn't standing here to tempt him as the best offer of the evening, and then...

Goddammit Emma. He's just a man. Stop behaving like a school girl.

But was he just a man? He seemed something more. More powerful than a man. More... well, just...more. I thought back to his tease about being supernatural and rolled my eyes at the thought.

I stared up at the intricacies of the backstage ceiling, the ropes and curtains and lattices and metal bridges. I thought about how it all looked like a bundle of chaos to me, but must be all arranged in an order that makes sense to someone... like the spider whose web only she understands the pattern of.

I began to pace, which engendered a look of caution and quiet from a backstage organizer towards my high heels clanking loudly on the long wooden plank floorboards. I politely smiled and kicked them off and resumed pacing, throwing my gaze up at the ceiling and clasping my hands together behind my back. I don't know how long I planned to do this. As a child I used to spin and spin and spin in circles, just daring myself to get dizzy but I rarely did. I always suspected it was an inner ear thing. I won't elucidate what Gran suspected.

I closed my eyes and continued to pace in a meditative laps, and just imagined the sundry of weights and pulleys above my head, where each of them were or where I expected them to be.  If I did this long enough I would turn into butter like the old tiger who ran round the tree too many times. My legs and feet certainly began to feel like butter, and I wondered how long I had done this for. Just another endurance test to push my body to the point of collapsing. How long was this lecture, anyways? Surely it had already been forty-five minutes or had it been only five?