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122: Fears
“Oh! There you are!” Mary exclaimed as Will shoved his way around the door to Evelyn’s fourth floor apartment, each arm laden with a brown paper sack of groceries. “We were beginning to—what on earth happened!?”
With Andrew supporting her, Evelyn limped her way into the tiny kitchen of her apartment. Before she could even pull out a chair to sit down, the rest of her ‘guests’ came flooding in to see what the hullaballoo was about. Besides Mickey and Tank, she was fairly certain she saw every other tenant residing in the building standing on tiptoe and bobbing left and right, trying to get a look at her.
“Ladies,” Andrew pushed further into the room, arms wide and herding them backwards into what had formerly been her living room, “if you please. We just need a few minutes to get settled, then if you’ve all haggled to your heart’s content, we’ll get started moving furniture.”
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World of Tomorrow 123: From Friday to Monday
With all the windows in the entire apartment thrown open wide to let in the cool night air, Evelyn slumped on the edge of a windowsill. Nearby, an exhausted Mary occupied the dressing table’s stool. Through the kitchen, they heard the return of Andrew, Will and Tank. “We did this wrong,” an exhausted Will said around his hard panting breaths as they entered the former living room in search of the two women. Andrew chuckled mirthlessly, crossing the mostly empty room to perch on the windowsill beside his wife. “Oh, now you tell me.” “Yeah,” Will continued, easing himself to the recently swept and mopped floor, then laying out, spread-eagle, with a low groan. “The stuff that had to go the furthest, we should have taken first. While we were fresh.” “I don’t know. I still think taking the stuff that was heaviest first was a wise move.” Lifting Mary, Tank took the dressing table stool then pulled her onto his lap in an intimate, possessive way. “Th
World of Tomorrow 124: Absolved
Tossing the folded piece of paper on the table, Detective Kelly pivoted and faced the two plain-clothes policemen. “Get her out of here.” “How dare you!” Andrew’s chair tipped backwards onto the floor with a loud smack as he vaulted to his feet and began shoving at the men attempting to arrest his wife. “I’ll have your badge for this!” “Mr. James, I can assure you if you don’t get out of the way, we’ll add resisting arrest to the extensive list of charges your wife is facing,” Detective Kelly surged into the fray of struggling men. “Maybe we’ll take you downtown too for aiding and abetting.” “The hell you will! Who do you think gave you that information!? Surely, you can’t be this idiotic! Why would we give you something that incriminated either of us!?” Still struggling to hold off the three men, the larger Andrew snarled, infuriated, “Get your hands off of my wife!” While Evelyn cringed over the table, frantically trying to scrape the papers they’d
World of Tomorrow 125: Unexpected
“Peter!” The shout was accompanied by loud clapping, as if somehow this would encourage some sort of hustle in the boy who loathed the onset of winter weather almost as much as Evelyn did. “Come on, kid! Get a move on or we’ll be late.” With a patient sigh, Evelyn pushed one of the folded mirrors on her dressing table to an angle where she could see Andrew buttoning his shirt behind her. “It’s far too early for it to be this busy in this two-bedroom apartment,” she groused. “He’s talking to a six-year-old boy about getting ready for school, not offering rousing locker room coaching to an entire football team after a bad first half.” Andrew tipped his head back and laughed heartily. “I hadn’t realized it was making you so moody, darling,” he managed once he’d reigned in his mirth. I’ll talk to him this morning about keeping his encouragement to a more manageable volume, but quite frankly, I’m content to tolerate a few loud mornings rather than have to
World of Tomorrow 126: Antagonized
“What did you say?” With a frightened squeak, Evelyn startled violently, dropping the empty matchbook and stumbling backwards. She crashed into her rolling chair, falling awkwardly into a sit as Andrew darted forward to catch her. Once she was stable again, they both looked up to find Will standing in the outer office doorway, his molten caramel eyes boring a hole into them. “Oh, Will!” she clutched her throat with one hand. “I’m so out of practice, I didn’t hear the lift chime. You startled me.” Accepting Andrew’s proffered hand, she stood. “Obviously and I’m sorry.” The former police officer spared a quick glance around the outer office as he entered slowly. His gaze flicked to the view from window to window, over the fine carpets, furnishings and drapes before he craned his neck to get a look into Andrew’s office. With an appreciative brow arched, he met his employer’s unusual blue eyes, darker than his wife’s and as oddly variable in shades from b
World of Tomorrow 127: Ambiguities
The silence hung like a thick soupy fog in the library after Octavia James made her undignified exit. Outside, the rain had begun again in earnest and the patters of fat drops against the window glass, the regular ticking of the mantle clock, and the crackle of the fire seemed to come from a distance through it. Almost as if they’d been tamped down and muffled by the tension that still coiled, wraith-like and terrible, into every corner of the large room. It vied for the most uncomfortable aspect of this whole confrontation with the echoes of Andrew and Octavia’s cruel words. Above the rush of blood past her ears, Evelyn could scarcely hear anything else, but her eyes were fixed to Andrew’s profile, slowly relaxing into its usual handsomeness after being contorted with fury. She ached for him, truly, because no matter how much he hid behind that stoic façade, she knew him as a man who felt profoundly—his love was no less fierce than his anger, his joy no less intense than his sadness.
World of Tomorrow 128: Contentious
“Andrew! For pity’s sake, you’re going to make me drop something.” Lifting the oven door closed with her foot, Evelyn tossed her hair, trying to rid her face of the stray strands clinging to the sheen of sweat from the overwarm kitchen. Their dinner guests would likely be arriving soon, and Evelyn was beginning to stress that she'd miscalculated the timing on each of the items she was cooking. She'd feel simply terrible if people gave up time with their families to be here and things weren't ready. Pivoting, she set the heavy turkey on the kitchen island seating it over the potholders she’d laid out before she removed the pan from the oven. Now relieved of her burden, she sighed, wiping at the annoying hair, then beamed a smile at her husband. Andrew accepted that as an invitation immediately. Darting around the island, he captured her around the narrow waist, tugging her up against him. “Mmm, you're warm. You know, if you’d let me help you, you
World of Tomorrow 129: National Limited
Unlike the poor Red Hook area of Brooklyn where the Sosa family lived, Will Morgan’s family home was in the Dyker Heights community between 11th and 12th Avenues. The neighborhood was affordable to a combination of working class and modestly middle class residents, a great many of whom were hard working immigrants from Italy and Ireland. As Andrew’s Rolls pulled alongside the curb out front, Evelyn watched the three younger Morgan children dart up the staircase into the house. She was pleased to see that the residents here weren’t gaunt or starved looking. Though their clothing was nowhere near the quality or caliber of the high end designs from Moreau’s that she wore, it was clean and well cared for. The children she saw had toys to play with and seemed happy despite the inequity of wealth that divided them from her. She understood from Will that his mother and grandmother were resourceful, and both were good cooks. Like her, they’d learned to
World of Tomorrow 130: Rhythms
Evelyn woke to an eerie silence. The rhythmic drone of the train’s wheels along the tracks that had lulled her to sleep beside Andrew was gone. In the darkness, she could hear distant shouts and loud clanging ringing through the air beyond the car’s windows. She rolled to her side, one hand instinctively seeking her source of comfort and coming up empty. “Andrew?” Concerned now, she sat up and called again, slightly louder. “Andrew?” “It’s alright, darling,” he said softly and she heard the bedroom door to the drawing room swing open wider on lightly squeaking hinges. “I’m here.” “What’s going on? Why are we stopped?” She flinched as he flipped the switch for the dim lights around the vanity mirror, then set his glass of brandy aside and took a seat on the bed beside her. As he’d been in Los Angeles the night El Cordonazo hit the city when the tropical storm battered the Ambassador mercilessly, Andrew was dressed for bed. With his silk sleep pants tie
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