All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 17: Sea Foam

Music Track List:

Agnes - All I want is you

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Emma's POV

I felt so weary in the hipster's arms as he held me pinned back to his hot-water heater chest, my small frame encased inside his large gangly one. This wasn't like me. To give up so easily without fighting within an inch of my life. Sure, for a skinny guy he was stronger than he looked. But...whatever the hell that had just happened to me earlier tonight...it took its toll; I guess: there just wasn't any fight in me left. And maybe...maybe the fight wasn't there because I...trusted him...strangely enough. How else can you explain me letting my guard down long enough for him to pull that stunt over his shoulder? I scolded myself for giving into my instincts and allowing him the brief upper hand. You should know better by now, Emma! Never trust anyone.

Perhaps it's not even him you trust, I questioned myself. Perhaps it is the man with the soft warm brown eyes and the cedar cinnamon scent from the dream.

Only it wasn't a dream, I cruelly mocked myself glancing down at my blood stained shoes. I closed my eyes for a brief moment and my mind flashed back to that moment when I was in back in his arms, his coarse hot jaw brushing up along the cold skin on my neck. My blood warmed at the thought and I became suddenly conscious of the hipster's hot breath on my neck. The hipster who was for all intents and purposes the same man from my dream. And at the same time: not the same man.

I despised this increasing feeling of softness I felt in my chest the more the hipster yammered on to me. How I was sinking down into him and drawing from it all the heat and comfort I could muster. Ugh. Where is my cold detachment when I need it most? I hated this feeling of dependency. Of want. Of neediness.

I violently hurled my head back to butt-head the hipster in the face but he swerved in time.

It was hard to concentrate and hold onto the soothing words the hipster caressed into my ear. I answered him but couldn't tell you what I said. My mind just kept going back and back over what happened. Between this latest "episode" and the one at RAW...what the hell was happening to me? Perhaps I was going crazy...just like Gran. Wasn't I too old for latent schizophrenia? When is the onset? Or maybe the stress of all my world travels was finally bringing me to psychosis.

Or perhaps Gran is right...and you did find a rift...

Nonsense! I shouted at myself. Utter and complete nonsense! I shook my head clear and brought myself back to the present reality.

"David," he had said his name was. David. My heart clenched and wondered if David was also the name of the man from "my dream that wasn't a dream." Were they one and the same person? Maybe my dream of the hipster's doppelganger was just his ideal manifestation that my mind had conjured up. That made the most sense.

"...just looked like you fled the scene of a crime," this David, the one who pinned my arms back, was saying.

Oh yeah...that. Thanks for reminding me.

If this was a dream, how could I explain the blood on my shoes? The all too visceral sensation of the blood splattering on my hosiery while my ears nearly bled from the deafening crackle of the gun. I flinched in the hipster's arms in remembrance of the chilling successive pops, and wondered if he felt me doing so.

And in my ears, here was this David cooing an offer of help.

And at that moment, I desperately wanted to be helped – despite the wall of defenses I had built around myself of never accepting any help from anyone. Let alone a man. And maybe...he could help...there was something he had said...something back in the lecture hall.