Elgin

  *Glad you’re able to be so calm about it.*

  “Hey, hey cowboy, yoho, over here,” she was smiling with the crease of a frown between her strongly marked eyebrows, “I’m over here.”

  “Sorry, punch drunk I guess. Late hours for a cowboy,” he smiled back, letting the other matter drop.

  He saw something in her face that might have been a mixture of relief and sadness, she looked down at the tiny watch on her wrist, “I guess it is.” She stood, up and he followed suit, he led her to the foyer, and recovered her coat and his jacket.

  In the elevator she pressed the lobby button and as the door closed she turned to him, slid her arms around his neck pulled their lips together, it was a passionate kiss, greedy and long, the elevator reached the ground floor before they separated. Her hands caressed the back of his neck as she stepped away, leaving her hands pressed on his shoulders, her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “Thank you for a nice evening Elgin and thank you for your offer of earlier, but dinner and your company was more than enough.”

  He took her right hand and kissed it, “Thank you for a very nice evening as well Loretta.” They walked to the front of the hotel and Elgin slipped her into a taxi and gave the cabbie a fifty and told him to take care of the lady before stepping back and waving goodbye.

  Elgin walked back into the building, ignoring the pitying eyes of the bell boys, all of whom assumed he’d been completely taken in by the hooker’s line.

  -o-

  It was a shock to find Humph lying sprawled on his bed when he opened his room’s door. The big cat rolled to his feet with an irritated and impatient ‘yowwwrr!’ and leapt down to wind around Elgin’s feet, almost knocking his two legged partner off his feet.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Elgin looked around to see if there were any humans around to explain but the relatively plain and small room was completely empty. *Cutter?*

  *Uh, don’t know, neither does the Iffrit, but it does explain a vibration in the membrane we felt earlier, he must have transposed himself between Beauty and here directly, how he did it is beyond the Iffrit, the math to do it cleanly and accurately is almost impossibly complex.*

  “Does Humph look like he’s been doing math recently for crying out loud?” Elgin muttere out loud.