I’ve never seen any man so handsome. “You’re leaving too, right?”
“No,” he said, nodding his head toward the town. The fire had reached the outskirts of it, and I knew without a doubt that we would not be able to save it. “There’s still Holder and the townspeople to see to. I’ll help with them, first, then leave the game and shut down the server so Paul can’t do anything until I can run some diagnostics and figure out what he’s programmed into it.”
I looked from him to the bound bodies of the pirates who lay trussed up before us on the deck. I wanted out of there, but it didn’t seem right to leave Corbin with everything.
“Sweetheart, go ahead and leave.” Corbin pulled me into a gentle embrace, his eyes as bright as mercury in the lantern light. His thumb brushed over my lower lip. “You know I’ll find you as soon as I get things taken care of here. I’m not about to let you go now.”
“Good, because if you did, I’d just have to hunt you down and challenge you to another duel,” I answered, brushing my lips against his. “I love you, Corbin.”
“Sweet words from such a bloodthirsty—and bloody—pirate,” he answered, giving me a proper kiss. “But ones I’ll hold you to. Go along, now. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”
I smiled. “Oh, what’s another half hour or so? Let’s go find Holder and my people. We have an island to restore, and a new governor’s mansion to build. And I’m not about to let just anyone do that! A captain has to have some standards, you know.”
He swatted me on my behind as I sashayed past him, but I smiled, happy, relieved, and so madly in love, I couldn’t possibly imagine how anything could ruin my happiness.
Sometimes I show a distinct lack of foresight.
Chapter 27
I don’t think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest.
—Ibid, Act I
“Are you ready?” Corbin asked two days later.
I looked around at the people of the town as they bustled around with the full extent of Corbin’s crew and the men from Bart’s that we’d rounded up and put to work. Hammers pounded, saws bit into wood, and voices murmured a happy chorus as the rebuilding of the town was well under way.
“I guess. Although now that it’s come down to it, I feel almost sad about leaving.”
He grinned at me. “And here I thought you’d be so sick of the world that you’d never want to step virtual foot in it again.”
I waved at Bas as he trailed behind Sly Jez, carrying a basket for her. Bas grinned back. Bran squawked and flapped his stubby wing at me. Everything was just as it should be. “Well, I’m definitely ready to get back to real life, but I don’t want to lose these people forever. You’re sure you’ll be able to save them?”
“I think so. I hope so. I don’t know the full extent of Paul’s customized programming, but I’m fairly certain we can remove it without damaging the program data. I’m getting a bit nervous about leaving him running loose out there in the real world, though, so if you’re ready, I think it’s time to return to reality.”
“Okay,” I said, putting a hand on my temple. It was a familiar motion—I’d taken to making sure the frames of the VR glasses were still there, but there had been too much to be done to actually press the little button that was now under my fingers. I took a deep breath and had one last look at my town and people. “Ready.”
“On three?” Corbin smiled as he reached up for his own glasses. “One, two, thr—”
The world swirled into a black vortex of nothingness for a moment, then slowly a blurry blob of color resolved itself into a familiar-looking logo blinking apparently in midair.
“Welcome to Buckling Swashes. Please log in or create a new pirate to enter the game.”
Beyond the logo, the dim outlines of Tara’s laptop and my desk resolved themselves to my returning vision.
I was home.
“So? What did you think? You’ve been playing long enough to have made officer—did you do it?”
My hand shook a little bit as I raised it up to pull off the glasses. My fingers were stiff and sore, as if I’d been gripping the arms of the chair.
“Mom? You okay?” A shadow at the perimeter of my vision moved and turned into the familiar form of my daughter. I was so happy to see her after my prolonged absence that I wanted to jump up and hug her. “You look funny. What’s wrong? Don’t tell me you didn’t like the game!”
“No,” I said, my voice a hoarse croak. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I liked it. It’s got a lot of . . . promise.”
“Really?” she asked, her face suspicious. I gave an experimental stretch, gingerly moving my tight shoulders before I tried to get to my feet. “Well . . . good. So what did you do in game? You spent a long time there. It must have been a couple of weeks or something?”
My knees creaked and popped like an old lady’s as I got to my feet, my legs stiff from the hours of incapacitation. “What did I do?” I asked, creaking my way toward the hall and the downstairs bathroom. I paused at the door to give her a wry smile. “Not much. Just took over Bart’s crew and governorship of Turtle’s Back, helped expose and destroy a villain, fought in a blockade, killed a couple of men, and fell head over heels in love with Black Corbin. I’m going to take a long bath. I’ll tell you about it later, after I’ve had a lengthy soak.”
Needless to say, Tara wasn’t going to let me get away with an exit line like that. She followed me into the bathroom and sat on the counter while I slipped into the tub with a grateful sigh for indoor plumbing and hot-water tanks.
“Shoo,” I said, closing my eyes in ecstasy as the heat sank into my stiff limbs, wishing I’d had the foresight to bring in a bottle of merlot.
“Not until you tell me everything,” she said, making herself comfortable on the counter. “And I mean everything!”
In the end, I told her everything . . . well, almost everything. I left out details about the nights spent with Corbin. I had thought about skirting around the whole issue of my feelings for him, worried that she would not react well to the idea of her mother having an interest in anyone but her father, but she surprised me. In fact, she seemed to totally gloss over the point of my romantic feelings, and focused on those she felt were far more important.
“So, if you marry him, does that mean we’ll be rich? And I’ll get to try all his cool VR stuff first, before everyone else? I could be like a beta tester! Do I still have to go to school if we’re rich?”
I opened my eyes to glare at her. “Whoa, hold on there, missy! First of all, no one said anything about marriage.”
“You married him in the game,” she pointed out. “You slept with him, didn’t you? So that means you have to marry him.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that sleeping with someone by no means meant they had to get married, decided that wasn’t a message I particularly wanted her to be receiving, and changed my answer. “Yes, I married him in the game, but we haven’t talked about what we will be doing in real life. There hasn’t been any time to discuss that yet.”
“You said you loved him,” she said, a familiar stubborn look descending over her face.
“Yes, I did. And I do. But no decisions have been made about how we’ll proceed from here.”
She frowned, twisting a strand of her hair. “You mean that he may not be in love with you outside of the game?”
Her words hit me with the impact of a Mack truck. Despite the heat of the water, a cold chill swept over me. “No, I—I just meant—sometimes people—you don’t think he is that sort of person, do you?”
“I don’t know him, Mom,” she said with shrug. “I just had a couple of e-mails from him, that’s all. You know him better than me.”
“I only know him in the game,” I said slowly, a wave of doubt crashing down on me. I hated to think about it, I didn’t want to think about it, but what if Tara, in her innocence, had inadvertently hit upon a truth? Everything I knew about Corbin was from t
he dratted game—what if he was a different person outside of it? “Sometimes people use situations like that to role-play.”
“Yeah. I like to be a pirate. I get to be all the things I’m not really. It’s cool.”
I thought about that for a minute. “Corbin likes to role-play. He’s a very good pirate.”
“Well, that makes sense. He made the game.”
“Yes, he did,” I said, the words falling from my tongue like little drops of acid. “And I know absolutely nothing about what he’s like in real life, outside of his pirate persona. He could be totally different. He could . . . regret some things.”
She eyed me as I sat like a frozen block of horror in the tub. “You’ve got a horrible look on your face, like you’re going to be sick. You want me to leave so you can barf?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” I was too miserable to make up my mind. My stomach had balled itself up into a wad of unhappiness and doubt.
“I’ll go,” she said, hopping down off the counter. She stopped at the door to give me an enigmatic look. “You’re always telling me I’m being a drama queen, but you know what? Now you’re doing the same thing.”
I made an outraged noise. “I am not!”
She nodded her head at me. “Yes, you are, too. I mean, why would he be any different outside the game? You’re the same person, right?”
My blood froze.
“Mom?”
“Er . . . I suppose I am the same. Mostly the same. Oh, who am I fooling? I was brave and witty and sexy and all sorts of other things in the game that I’m not in reality.” I waved the loofah around in a pathetic gesture. “He’s going to take one look at me in real life and know that my brain lied to him about the sort of person I really am.”
She rolled her eyes. “Man, and you say I exaggerate.”
“This is different,” I said, sinking down into the water, well aware that I was behaving moronically. But I couldn’t stop myself. “I have never really met Corbin. So much of an attraction between people is a chemical thing. What if we don’t mesh well? What if I’m not exciting enough for him? What if—”
“Sheesh! Get over yourself already! Why don’t you just call him and ask if he still loves you and all that stuff?”
“It’s not that easy,” I said, flicking the water, cold at the thought of what I would do if the real-life Corbin wasn’t as madly in love with me as I was with him.
“Doctor Tara’s Love Counseling Shop is now closed,” she said, leaving the bathroom, her voice drifting into the bathroom as she went upstairs. “Call him up and tell him you want to see him. It’s only a little after midnight.”
I sank lower into the water and thought about what my smart-alecky—but sometimes wise-beyond-her-years (she got that from my side of the family)—daughter said, and by the time the water had chilled to the point where it matched the coldness inside me, I had come to a decision.
“It’s up to the man to call first,” I told Tara on the way to bed. She was lying on her stomach on her bed, watching the Friday Night Late Late Movie. She made a face at me. “There are some dating rules that are inviolable, and this is one of them. The guy calls first.”
“This is 2005, Mom, not 1905,” she quipped. “Call him.”
I closed the door on her and went to my own room, sitting in bed while the two halves of my psyche battled each other. After a half hour of dashing, daring Amy struggling with worried, confused Amy, I finally gave up and reached for the phone.
Only to realize I didn’t have Corbin’s phone number.
“Hell,” I said, then got out of bed and peeked around Tara’s door. She was still up, on her cell phone with one of her equally night-owl girlfriends while she painted her toe-nails a repulsive shade of purple.
“ . . . and I said, no way, and Celie said, yes way, totally, and I said—oh, one sec, my mom wants something. What?” She covered the mouthpiece of the phone and narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re not going to go all love-struck on me again, are you? ’Cause there is only so much I have to take; then it gets freaky.”
I pointed an admonishing finger at her. “Less attitude, please. I wanted to know if you have Corbin’s phone number.”
She grinned and uncovered the phone. “She’s gonna call him. No, not Celie, my mom. Yeah, the computer guy. I don’t know, I’ll ask. What are you going to say?”
The last was addressed to me. “None of your business. May I please have the number?”
Tara frowned and told her friend to hold on for a moment. She pulled her laptop onto the bed and clicked around on the screen. “His cell phone, you mean?”
“That or his home phone number.”
“Meh. I don’t know if I have it.” She loaded up her e-mail client and flipped through a couple of messages. “Nope. I’ve got the office number and addy, though, if you want those.”
I wrote them down on her notepad, asking as I did, “You don’t happen to have his home address?”
She shook her head and picked up her phone. “Nope. You still there? Yeah, I know, but she’s old. I mean, she doesn’t have a lot of choices, you know?”
I closed the door on Tara’s dissection of my love life and returned to my room, curling up in bed with the phone while I debated my choices. Unfortunately, about this Tara was right—I didn’t have too many options. A phone call to the offices of Buckling Swashes (which resulted in the expected voice mail—which I didn’t leave, chickening out at leaving a personal message that could well be listened to by a secretary or receptionist) and one abortive attempt to get Corbin’s unlisted phone number from directory assistance later, and I was defeated. I spent the night restless, held in the grip of one dream of frustration after the other.
“Right, that’s it,” I told my haggard face in the mirror a few hours later. “This is ridiculous. Time to be proactive, Amy.”
Tara was buried under the usual detritus of her bedroom—a miscellany of stuffed animals she refused to part with, pillows of all shapes and sizes, blankets, clothing, and a gypsy shawl she’d found in my closet and claimed as her own—but I pushed them aside to locate her head. Her eyes opened just enough to send me a squinty-eyed glare.
“Do you know if Corbin’s office is open on Saturday?”
“Nnnnrf,” she answered, closing her eyes firmly and burying her face into the mound of stuffed animals that clustered around her pillow.
“Thanks, you’re a big help. I want you up no later than noon, remember. You’re not going to spend the whole day sleeping.”
“When you marry Corbin and we’re rich, I’m so never getting up,” her voice answered from the mound.
My jaw tightened at her words. “Let’s just hope we get the opportunity to have that particular battle,” I said under my breath as I snatched up my purse and the paper with Corbin’s office address, and paused to have a quick look in the mirror next to the front door. The face that looked back at me looked the same as Amy the pirate—but would Corbin see it the same way?
“Proactive,” I told the mirror Amy. She nodded back, adding, “Take charge of every situation, and direct it to the result you want.”
“Now if only Corbin will see things the same way . . .” The drive to his office didn’t take too long, it being located in an industrial park that was on the fringes of the local mall. At the rear of the complex of low, two-story buildings a Jolly Roger flag flew in front of a door bedecked with a scowling pirate holding a sign that read, ’WARE, LANDLUBBERS! THIS BE THE OFFICE OF BUCKLING SWASHES!
Unfortunately, beyond the sign, the windows were dark. I tried the door nonetheless—it was locked.
“Well, hell. Now what?” I asked myself. Curiosity won out, and after a quick look around the deserted section of this part of the industrial park, I stepped over the couple of low shrubs and leaned up against the window, cupping my hands around my eyes so I could see into the darkness. Dimly visible were a couple of desks with the obligatory computers and desk paraphernalia, beyond which was a tall potted pa
lm that seemed to be sporting a number of stuffed, garishly colored parrots. The walls were covered in artwork that I recognized from the game—pictures of ships, one of the inside of Corbin’s cabin on the Squirrel, and an overhead map of Turtle’s Back. To the back of the office was a door with a pair of crossed swords on it. I leaned in even farther, trying to make out the words on the sign that hung above them. . . .
“Hoy, there, lass! Can I be helpin’ ye?”
The voice came from behind me, startling me so much I jumped a good foot in the air as I spun around, guilt and embarrassment battling with adrenaline as I stammered out an excuse. “Oh! I’m sorry! I was just looking . . . I was hoping . . . er . . .”
A man swung his leg over a bike, evidently having just ridden to the office, which explained why I hadn’t heard him approach. He was a little taller than me, wearing a pair of jeans and a South Park T-shirt, along with a neon pink and lime bike helmet, and impenetrable sunglasses. He paused in the act of pulling the helmet off.
“Amy?”
I stopped stammering, narrowing my eyes as he yanked the helmet from his head. “Yes, I’m Amy.”
He grinned and took off his sunglasses, holding out his arms as if he expected me to run into his embrace. I ran my gaze over his long face, took in the tousled black hair, and warm, engaging eyes, happiness filling me as I realized who he was. “Holder!” I shouted, flinging myself at him.
He laughed and hugged me just as hard as I hugged him. “One and the same. And, wow, look at you! Much better in person than in pixel. Corb’s one hell of a lucky guy.” He looked around me, toward the car, then back to the office. “Where is the boss man? Inside? Were you two playing some sort of voyeuristic game? Do I want to hear the details? Of course I do. Tell me everything.”
I stepped back, my happiness at seeing him fading. “I don’t know where Corbin is. I haven’t seen him since we . . . er . . . returned.”
“You haven’t? Well, it was probably late,” Holder said, slinging a backpack over his shoulder. “Did he say when he’d meet you here?”