"Dawn in L.A." – chapter 4
"Connor, look out!" Dawn shrieked far too late as the prehistoric looking creature knocked him off his feet and landed on top of him. She stood and watched in ineffectual horror as Connor struggled to throw the monster off. Then, amazingly, with an up thrust of both hands into its chest, he did manage to toss the thing away from him in a graceful arch. It landed at Dawn's feet and she stared stupidly down at the monster for a second, long enough to get a snootful of the rancid breath gusting from its panting mouth, before reclaiming her senses and scrambling backward.
The creature rotated its heavy, spiny head toward her movement. Dawn knew that it had recognized her as easier prey and that when it regained its feet it would charge her. She quickly scrabbled through her purse for weapons. Her searching fingers passed over the stake, which would be useless on an armor-plated creature like this, and closed around her pepper spray. As the monster lumbered to its feet, she darted in and spritzed pepper into its lizard-like eyes. The thing roared and fell to its knees, swiping with front claws at its face. Dawn hoped it would poke its own eyes out.
She reached in her bag again and this time her fist closed around the leather wrapped shaft of Connor's knife. She pulled it out just as Connor came running over brandishing a slat he had ripped from a park bench, the only weapon he could locate on short notice.
"Here!" she cried, tossing him the blade.
He caught it gracefully and moved in to slash at the monster's throat, which was exposed because it was still busy clawing at its face. As Connor's blade impaled the soft spot under the creature's jaw, it let out another wail of pain and purplish blood gushed out, wetting Connor's hand and arm.
"You can't kill it that way," Dawn called. "Only wound it. Go for the heart."
Connor pulled out the blade with difficulty and a sickening sucking sound of tissues rending. He drove the blade back in a foot farther down where he estimated a heart should be, but only hit bone. The impact of metal hitting impervious surface reverberated up his arm.
"It's a Dracon. The heart's where the stomach should be. Try another couple of feet lower and kind of to the right," Dawn explained, dancing from one foot to the other in her excitement. She was ready to swoop back in with another dose of pepper spray the moment the thing seemed to be recovering.
Connor grunted and pulled back to drive in his knife a third and last time. He hit paydirt because, after emitting another geyser of blood, which drenched Connor's shirt front, the monster wailed one last time, thrashed around then lay still. Connor pulled the knife from its body once more and wiped the blade off carefully in the thick grass. He was on his knees panting, his sweaty hair sticking up wildly, blood coating his hand, arm and chest and spattered in an artistic pattern across his face.
"God that felt good," he breathed in exhilaration, looking up at Dawn with a warrior's fierce grin, which abruptly disappeared as he asked, "Is that wrong?"
"No," Dawn assured him. "It's adrenalin. As long as you don't get a rush from running around killing humans, I think you're okay."
Connor examined the knife in his hand. "This feels so ... familiar."
"It should. It's yours," she told him. She watched as he hefted the knife, feeling its weight in his hand.
He looked at her again. "I think there's some stuff you'd better tell me," he finally admitted.
She nodded. "If you want to come with me to my motel room and get cleaned up, it'll probably save your mother having a heart attack. We can talk there." She held out a hand and he took it, letting her draw him to his feet.
Dawn had chosen the cheapest and consequently tackiest motel in town. They drove in Dawn's car, which was actually 'borrowed' from Angel's fleet at W&H and Dawn was still amazed that no one in the building had questioned her when she took it. They stopped by a General Dollar store on the way so Connor could buy a clean shirt. Dawn ran in since Connor looked like the victim of a fatal accident, and grabbed the first T-shirt she saw, which happened to proclaim "Truckers Do It On the Road" above the leering face of a driver waving from the window of a semi.
"Thanks," Connor said dryly, when he saw the sentiment emblazoned on the front of the shirt. "Always wanted one like this."
Dawn grinned. "It's so you."
She had paid for her motel room earlier that evening while waiting for Connor to get off work, so they didn't have to bother with check in. Dawn parked in front of the door of her room and soon they were inside.
Connor went straight to the bathroom to strip off his ruined shirt and wash up. Dawn listened to the water run and was ridiculously aware of the fact that he was shirtless behind that door. She told her brain to shut up about it. However, she couldn't help but think about how Connor seemed to have bulked out since she had seen him last. He was still kind of lean and sinewy but with better defined muscles. And she wondered what his arms and chest and torso looked like naked. After all, it was a girl's prerogative to visualize.
Nevertheless, when Connor emerged suddenly from the bathroom, still tugging down the trucker shirt and flinging damp hair from his eyes, Dawn jumped as if he'd caught her doing something naughty. "What? Uh," she babbled, quickly picking up the TV cable guide and studying it as though that's what she had been doing all along.
"You're going to watch TV?" Connor asked, raising an eyebrow.
"No." She put the laminated card down and lay the remote on top of it. "I was... um... thinking about ... how I'm going to tell you all this." She gathered her composure, "I was thinking that seeing is believing and it might be easier for you to just come to L.A. with me tomorrow and meet some people."
Connor frowned, considering her words. "No way," he said, "you started this, you're not just going to leave me hanging. At least tell me the basics."
Dawn perched on the edge of the bed, drawing her legs up beside her. "Okay." She stopped, pondering what was essential and what to leave out of her story. There was only so much his mind would be able to wrap around all at once. She elected to leave out the "Your parents are vampires" part of the story.
"What all do you want to know," she asked.
"Well, let's start easy," he replied. "How do you and I know each other?"
"Us?" Dawn was surprised. "Oh, we're just friends ... I guess. I mean I barely know you. We met last summer when you stayed at my house." She elected to skip over their single evening of romance figuring it would only add another level of complexity. "And then your dad came and took you home."
"Then why are you here?" Connor's frown deepened. He leaned against the built-in chest of drawers, arms folded, grilling her with his eyes. "If you hardly know me, why did they, whoever 'they' are, send you?"
"They...? Send me? Nobody sent me. Actually, nobody knows I'm here," Dawn explained in a rush. "I just ... thought ... I thought...." She trailed off. What had she thought? The answer was, she hadn't. Every time that chastising voice of reason, which sounded remarkably like Giles in her head, had started to enumerate the list of possible repercussions of what she was doing, she had shut it down.
"Why are you here?" he repeated.
"I don't know," she answered lamely. She couldn't explain the compelling force that had driven her ever since she found out about Connor's mind wipe.
He looked around the room, shaking his head impatiently. "You don't know," he mocked bitterly. "Well, that's just great. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I don't want to know any of this? That maybe I just wanted to live my normal life, as real or imaginary as it may be?"
Dawn thought again of the day she had found out her own life was a sham. She had been shocked, furious, heartbroken, desperate, and she had repeatedly wished that it would all turn out to be a nightmare, that she could push the truth back into Pandora's box and go on living her own version of reality. "Yes. I get that," she told him quietly. "You have every right to be pissed at me, but.... Okay, it's like The Matrix, wouldn't you rather be like Neo and pick the blue pill?"
"Neo chose the red pill," Connor corrected. "And can you please stop the movie analogies?"
"Right."
"Fine." Connor heaved a sigh and waved a hand in the air. "Bring it on. Tell me why my life's a lie and how this happened."
"Okay," Dawn chose her words as carefully as a soldier walking through a minefield, "your dad is like my sister, kind of a superhero. When you were born, this man called Holtz kidnapped you and raised you in a demon dimension."
"A what now?"
"Like, um, hell. There's lots of different dimensions and this was just one of them. Anyway, you found a way out but you came back with a mission to kill your father, because that was what this Holtz guy had conditioned you to do."
"It's a frigging Greek tragedy," Connor scoffed dismissively.
"But true," Dawn told him. "It gets kind of complicated here but the short version is that you almost succeeded. Your relationship with your father is very ... intense. You forged a kind of truce but it unraveled over the past year. There was a woman involved who you both loved, I guess."
"Why am I not surprised," he interjected, shaking his head in disbelief. His crossed arms clenched even tighter and every line of his body was drawn tight as a bow.
"I don't really know all the details," she continued. "We were dealing with our own apocalypse in Sunnydale, while you guys were fighting yet another Ultimate Evil over in L.A."
"Well, the world's still spinning. Must have been successful," Connor said dryly.
"Yeah," Dawn agreed. She cleared her throat. "So, here's the hard part. I guess you had some kind of break down and got kind of, uh, suicidal and that's when Angel ... your father, made the deal with some powerful people to spare your life and give you a new one. A happy one."
She studied Connor's tense face and could almost see words of denial hanging in the air over his head like a thought balloon in a comic strip. 'This is bullshit. Bullshit!!' But he remained silent. Contemplative.
Finally he spoke. "But you're here to wake me up from my delusion. And why is that again?"
Dawn shook her head in frustration. She jumped off the bed and began to pace. "Doesn't the fact that you've had two encounters with the paranormal in the past two weeks seem kind of coincidental to you? Maybe it's a sign. Maybe you're not meant to ... ignore your destiny and just hide out in Pleasantville. Maybe if you try to, your destiny will come after you anyway and you won't be prepared to deal with it."
"You just make that up now?" he asked caustically.
"It makes sense, doesn't it? You have things, important things to do in this world."
"According to you."
Dawn threw her hands up in a helpless gesture. "Maybe I'm totally wrong. Maybe I should have abided by Angel's decision, but it's kind of late now. I'm here. You know the truth, or some of it, and now you have to decide what you're going to do with it."
Connor scowled, "Thanks."
"Go ahead, add 'bitch.' I can hear you thinking it anyway," Dawn teased and surprised a smile out of Connor.
He shifted his weight off the furniture and stood up. He ran both hands over his face and through his hair, blowing out a deep breath.
"I know it's a lot to process," she said gently. "Believe me, I know. I've been through something similar but that's another long, confusing story. I'll tell you sometime."
"Yeah?" he looked at her curiously.
She changed the subject. "So do you want to come to L.A. with me tomorrow and meet Angel and my sister, Buffy, and the others?"
"Your sister's named Buffy?" Connor half smiled.
"I don't know what my mom was thinking," Dawn agreed. "Guess she was having a flashback to her sorority days when she named her." "My youngest sister, Meghan, made us all call her 'Barbie' for almost a year when she was ten," Connor reminisced. "She refused to answer to anything else and swore she was going to have her name legally changed when she was old enough." His grin faded abruptly. "But that never happened, did it?" he asked. "Or if it did, I wasn't really there to...."
"Don't even start," Dawn warned. "You'll drive yourself crazy. The best thing you can do is to accept all your memories as real, both the ones from this life and the ones from your other life." She put a hand on his arm and advised, "Just ... don't think too hard about any of it."
Connor looked down at her intently. "You're definitely going to have to share your 'similar experience,'" he informed her. "All right. I'll take the day off work tomorrow and make up an excuse for my parents, and then we'll go to L.A. and meet these people."
Dawn nodded then a thought suddenly occurred to her. "Oh! I forgot to mention that everyone's memories of you have been erased except Angel's and those of us who are from Sunnydale. The mind wipe was supposed to have affected everyone except Angel and we haven't figure out yet why it didn't touch me and Buffy and Xander."
"Xander?" he asked with a raised brow.
"Yeah. We're just chockful of weird names. Buffy's other best friend is named Willow. And before they died, there was Anya and Spike ... and Tara."
"It sounds like you've lost a lot of friends," Connor said with quiet sympathy.
"More than what's fair," Dawn agreed. She shrugged sadly. "Casualties of war." Before she could begin to get all weepy, she changed the subject. "Anyway, the people from Angel's team who you'll meet but who won't remember you are Wesley, Fred and Gunn."
"What about the woman?" Connor asked.
"Huh?"
"The one you said we both loved."
"Oh, Cordelia." Dawn realized. "She's in a coma."
"And how did that happen?" he asked.
"More long story. Let's save it for tomorrow," she begged.
Connor nodded, suddenly looking as completely drained as Dawn felt. There was a purplish bruise forming on his forehead from his battle with the Dracon and his skin was as sallow as Dawn remembered it being last year.
"You look like you could use some rest," she added. "I'll meet you here tomorrow morning."
He agreed, holding out his hand to shake hers. "I can't really say it's been nice to meet you under the circumstances," he said with a wan smile. "But if anyone had to come and ruin my life, I'm glad it was you."
"You're welcome, I guess," Dawn offered ironically. She suddenly realized that Connor's car was back at the coffee shop. "Let me give you a ride to your car."
"No. It's not far. Besides, I want to walk for a while, to think about all of this," he said.
Dawn nodded. She saw Connor to the door. "Don't get into any more fights on the way home," she admonished. "You don't want to rip your cool new T- shirt."
He smiled as he glanced down at the novelty shirt then waved goodbye and turned to walk off into the night.
To be continued....
"Connor, look out!" Dawn shrieked far too late as the prehistoric looking creature knocked him off his feet and landed on top of him. She stood and watched in ineffectual horror as Connor struggled to throw the monster off. Then, amazingly, with an up thrust of both hands into its chest, he did manage to toss the thing away from him in a graceful arch. It landed at Dawn's feet and she stared stupidly down at the monster for a second, long enough to get a snootful of the rancid breath gusting from its panting mouth, before reclaiming her senses and scrambling backward.
The creature rotated its heavy, spiny head toward her movement. Dawn knew that it had recognized her as easier prey and that when it regained its feet it would charge her. She quickly scrabbled through her purse for weapons. Her searching fingers passed over the stake, which would be useless on an armor-plated creature like this, and closed around her pepper spray. As the monster lumbered to its feet, she darted in and spritzed pepper into its lizard-like eyes. The thing roared and fell to its knees, swiping with front claws at its face. Dawn hoped it would poke its own eyes out.
She reached in her bag again and this time her fist closed around the leather wrapped shaft of Connor's knife. She pulled it out just as Connor came running over brandishing a slat he had ripped from a park bench, the only weapon he could locate on short notice.
"Here!" she cried, tossing him the blade.
He caught it gracefully and moved in to slash at the monster's throat, which was exposed because it was still busy clawing at its face. As Connor's blade impaled the soft spot under the creature's jaw, it let out another wail of pain and purplish blood gushed out, wetting Connor's hand and arm.
"You can't kill it that way," Dawn called. "Only wound it. Go for the heart."
Connor pulled out the blade with difficulty and a sickening sucking sound of tissues rending. He drove the blade back in a foot farther down where he estimated a heart should be, but only hit bone. The impact of metal hitting impervious surface reverberated up his arm.
"It's a Dracon. The heart's where the stomach should be. Try another couple of feet lower and kind of to the right," Dawn explained, dancing from one foot to the other in her excitement. She was ready to swoop back in with another dose of pepper spray the moment the thing seemed to be recovering.
Connor grunted and pulled back to drive in his knife a third and last time. He hit paydirt because, after emitting another geyser of blood, which drenched Connor's shirt front, the monster wailed one last time, thrashed around then lay still. Connor pulled the knife from its body once more and wiped the blade off carefully in the thick grass. He was on his knees panting, his sweaty hair sticking up wildly, blood coating his hand, arm and chest and spattered in an artistic pattern across his face.
"God that felt good," he breathed in exhilaration, looking up at Dawn with a warrior's fierce grin, which abruptly disappeared as he asked, "Is that wrong?"
"No," Dawn assured him. "It's adrenalin. As long as you don't get a rush from running around killing humans, I think you're okay."
Connor examined the knife in his hand. "This feels so ... familiar."
"It should. It's yours," she told him. She watched as he hefted the knife, feeling its weight in his hand.
He looked at her again. "I think there's some stuff you'd better tell me," he finally admitted.
She nodded. "If you want to come with me to my motel room and get cleaned up, it'll probably save your mother having a heart attack. We can talk there." She held out a hand and he took it, letting her draw him to his feet.
Dawn had chosen the cheapest and consequently tackiest motel in town. They drove in Dawn's car, which was actually 'borrowed' from Angel's fleet at W&H and Dawn was still amazed that no one in the building had questioned her when she took it. They stopped by a General Dollar store on the way so Connor could buy a clean shirt. Dawn ran in since Connor looked like the victim of a fatal accident, and grabbed the first T-shirt she saw, which happened to proclaim "Truckers Do It On the Road" above the leering face of a driver waving from the window of a semi.
"Thanks," Connor said dryly, when he saw the sentiment emblazoned on the front of the shirt. "Always wanted one like this."
Dawn grinned. "It's so you."
She had paid for her motel room earlier that evening while waiting for Connor to get off work, so they didn't have to bother with check in. Dawn parked in front of the door of her room and soon they were inside.
Connor went straight to the bathroom to strip off his ruined shirt and wash up. Dawn listened to the water run and was ridiculously aware of the fact that he was shirtless behind that door. She told her brain to shut up about it. However, she couldn't help but think about how Connor seemed to have bulked out since she had seen him last. He was still kind of lean and sinewy but with better defined muscles. And she wondered what his arms and chest and torso looked like naked. After all, it was a girl's prerogative to visualize.
Nevertheless, when Connor emerged suddenly from the bathroom, still tugging down the trucker shirt and flinging damp hair from his eyes, Dawn jumped as if he'd caught her doing something naughty. "What? Uh," she babbled, quickly picking up the TV cable guide and studying it as though that's what she had been doing all along.
"You're going to watch TV?" Connor asked, raising an eyebrow.
"No." She put the laminated card down and lay the remote on top of it. "I was... um... thinking about ... how I'm going to tell you all this." She gathered her composure, "I was thinking that seeing is believing and it might be easier for you to just come to L.A. with me tomorrow and meet some people."
Connor frowned, considering her words. "No way," he said, "you started this, you're not just going to leave me hanging. At least tell me the basics."
Dawn perched on the edge of the bed, drawing her legs up beside her. "Okay." She stopped, pondering what was essential and what to leave out of her story. There was only so much his mind would be able to wrap around all at once. She elected to leave out the "Your parents are vampires" part of the story.
"What all do you want to know," she asked.
"Well, let's start easy," he replied. "How do you and I know each other?"
"Us?" Dawn was surprised. "Oh, we're just friends ... I guess. I mean I barely know you. We met last summer when you stayed at my house." She elected to skip over their single evening of romance figuring it would only add another level of complexity. "And then your dad came and took you home."
"Then why are you here?" Connor's frown deepened. He leaned against the built-in chest of drawers, arms folded, grilling her with his eyes. "If you hardly know me, why did they, whoever 'they' are, send you?"
"They...? Send me? Nobody sent me. Actually, nobody knows I'm here," Dawn explained in a rush. "I just ... thought ... I thought...." She trailed off. What had she thought? The answer was, she hadn't. Every time that chastising voice of reason, which sounded remarkably like Giles in her head, had started to enumerate the list of possible repercussions of what she was doing, she had shut it down.
"Why are you here?" he repeated.
"I don't know," she answered lamely. She couldn't explain the compelling force that had driven her ever since she found out about Connor's mind wipe.
He looked around the room, shaking his head impatiently. "You don't know," he mocked bitterly. "Well, that's just great. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I don't want to know any of this? That maybe I just wanted to live my normal life, as real or imaginary as it may be?"
Dawn thought again of the day she had found out her own life was a sham. She had been shocked, furious, heartbroken, desperate, and she had repeatedly wished that it would all turn out to be a nightmare, that she could push the truth back into Pandora's box and go on living her own version of reality. "Yes. I get that," she told him quietly. "You have every right to be pissed at me, but.... Okay, it's like The Matrix, wouldn't you rather be like Neo and pick the blue pill?"
"Neo chose the red pill," Connor corrected. "And can you please stop the movie analogies?"
"Right."
"Fine." Connor heaved a sigh and waved a hand in the air. "Bring it on. Tell me why my life's a lie and how this happened."
"Okay," Dawn chose her words as carefully as a soldier walking through a minefield, "your dad is like my sister, kind of a superhero. When you were born, this man called Holtz kidnapped you and raised you in a demon dimension."
"A what now?"
"Like, um, hell. There's lots of different dimensions and this was just one of them. Anyway, you found a way out but you came back with a mission to kill your father, because that was what this Holtz guy had conditioned you to do."
"It's a frigging Greek tragedy," Connor scoffed dismissively.
"But true," Dawn told him. "It gets kind of complicated here but the short version is that you almost succeeded. Your relationship with your father is very ... intense. You forged a kind of truce but it unraveled over the past year. There was a woman involved who you both loved, I guess."
"Why am I not surprised," he interjected, shaking his head in disbelief. His crossed arms clenched even tighter and every line of his body was drawn tight as a bow.
"I don't really know all the details," she continued. "We were dealing with our own apocalypse in Sunnydale, while you guys were fighting yet another Ultimate Evil over in L.A."
"Well, the world's still spinning. Must have been successful," Connor said dryly.
"Yeah," Dawn agreed. She cleared her throat. "So, here's the hard part. I guess you had some kind of break down and got kind of, uh, suicidal and that's when Angel ... your father, made the deal with some powerful people to spare your life and give you a new one. A happy one."
She studied Connor's tense face and could almost see words of denial hanging in the air over his head like a thought balloon in a comic strip. 'This is bullshit. Bullshit!!' But he remained silent. Contemplative.
Finally he spoke. "But you're here to wake me up from my delusion. And why is that again?"
Dawn shook her head in frustration. She jumped off the bed and began to pace. "Doesn't the fact that you've had two encounters with the paranormal in the past two weeks seem kind of coincidental to you? Maybe it's a sign. Maybe you're not meant to ... ignore your destiny and just hide out in Pleasantville. Maybe if you try to, your destiny will come after you anyway and you won't be prepared to deal with it."
"You just make that up now?" he asked caustically.
"It makes sense, doesn't it? You have things, important things to do in this world."
"According to you."
Dawn threw her hands up in a helpless gesture. "Maybe I'm totally wrong. Maybe I should have abided by Angel's decision, but it's kind of late now. I'm here. You know the truth, or some of it, and now you have to decide what you're going to do with it."
Connor scowled, "Thanks."
"Go ahead, add 'bitch.' I can hear you thinking it anyway," Dawn teased and surprised a smile out of Connor.
He shifted his weight off the furniture and stood up. He ran both hands over his face and through his hair, blowing out a deep breath.
"I know it's a lot to process," she said gently. "Believe me, I know. I've been through something similar but that's another long, confusing story. I'll tell you sometime."
"Yeah?" he looked at her curiously.
She changed the subject. "So do you want to come to L.A. with me tomorrow and meet Angel and my sister, Buffy, and the others?"
"Your sister's named Buffy?" Connor half smiled.
"I don't know what my mom was thinking," Dawn agreed. "Guess she was having a flashback to her sorority days when she named her." "My youngest sister, Meghan, made us all call her 'Barbie' for almost a year when she was ten," Connor reminisced. "She refused to answer to anything else and swore she was going to have her name legally changed when she was old enough." His grin faded abruptly. "But that never happened, did it?" he asked. "Or if it did, I wasn't really there to...."
"Don't even start," Dawn warned. "You'll drive yourself crazy. The best thing you can do is to accept all your memories as real, both the ones from this life and the ones from your other life." She put a hand on his arm and advised, "Just ... don't think too hard about any of it."
Connor looked down at her intently. "You're definitely going to have to share your 'similar experience,'" he informed her. "All right. I'll take the day off work tomorrow and make up an excuse for my parents, and then we'll go to L.A. and meet these people."
Dawn nodded then a thought suddenly occurred to her. "Oh! I forgot to mention that everyone's memories of you have been erased except Angel's and those of us who are from Sunnydale. The mind wipe was supposed to have affected everyone except Angel and we haven't figure out yet why it didn't touch me and Buffy and Xander."
"Xander?" he asked with a raised brow.
"Yeah. We're just chockful of weird names. Buffy's other best friend is named Willow. And before they died, there was Anya and Spike ... and Tara."
"It sounds like you've lost a lot of friends," Connor said with quiet sympathy.
"More than what's fair," Dawn agreed. She shrugged sadly. "Casualties of war." Before she could begin to get all weepy, she changed the subject. "Anyway, the people from Angel's team who you'll meet but who won't remember you are Wesley, Fred and Gunn."
"What about the woman?" Connor asked.
"Huh?"
"The one you said we both loved."
"Oh, Cordelia." Dawn realized. "She's in a coma."
"And how did that happen?" he asked.
"More long story. Let's save it for tomorrow," she begged.
Connor nodded, suddenly looking as completely drained as Dawn felt. There was a purplish bruise forming on his forehead from his battle with the Dracon and his skin was as sallow as Dawn remembered it being last year.
"You look like you could use some rest," she added. "I'll meet you here tomorrow morning."
He agreed, holding out his hand to shake hers. "I can't really say it's been nice to meet you under the circumstances," he said with a wan smile. "But if anyone had to come and ruin my life, I'm glad it was you."
"You're welcome, I guess," Dawn offered ironically. She suddenly realized that Connor's car was back at the coffee shop. "Let me give you a ride to your car."
"No. It's not far. Besides, I want to walk for a while, to think about all of this," he said.
Dawn nodded. She saw Connor to the door. "Don't get into any more fights on the way home," she admonished. "You don't want to rip your cool new T- shirt."
He smiled as he glanced down at the novelty shirt then waved goodbye and turned to walk off into the night.
To be continued....