The night had fallen quickly, almost too quickly, when the young woman and the famous illusionist had finally ended their crazed and childish antics in the hotel suite and had boarded a cab, being taken through the dark and busy city streets until they at last came to apartment complex. It was the man who had pulled her out of the cab, it was the man who dragged her up the steps, and, while both were laughing and giggling uncontrollably, she felt the warmth of his hand in hers when she was spun on the top of the platform, his arm immediately wrapping around her waist, and she felt her mind spin wildly when at last he stopped spinning her and she was standing still in his arms, though slightly dizzy.
"Criss! Christopher, stop!" she pleaded him, though her tone, her laugh, her smile—she was contradicting herself by her own body language. He could read her, openly, clearly, and he loved everything he was seeing, as it only fueled his desire to play with his new little toy.
"I'm just…I'm happy for you. You left him, and do you know what that means?" he asked of her, but when she read his smile, she read it incorrectly, and this definitely left her misreading his words.
"That I'm single?" she asked him like a child, and he only laughed at her words. She was showing her innocent side—or as Sam so thoughtfully referred to it, her "virginity."
"That, and…it leaves me to chase after you," he winked at her and his words left her face flowing deep red. She bowed her head, trying to hide it, but he started laughing even more, and he went as far as to point this out. "You're blushing! Oh my God, you're blushing!"
"No, I'm not!" she yelled at him in argument and shame, turning her head away, trying to shield her face behind a curtain of her strawberry blond hair, but this didn't help.
"Yeah, you are! You're so cute when you blush!" Criss leaned over to pinch her cheek—only to make her blush more—and although she tried to pull away, he grabbed a firm hold of her left cheek and gave it a hard pull between his thumb and forefinger.
"OW!" she yelped out just as he released her, and although he laughed, she was left rubbing the side of her face, in pain, but inside…she was smiling. "You're such a jerk!"
"That's what you say," he teased her, and she smiled—the pain in her cheek was there for only a moment before it subsided, unlike the bruises and contusions that would frequently form on her face and the pain would be there for days. She leaned into him, and the two of them both knew what was about to happen. The gap between their bodies seemed to close in, and she placed her hands on his shoulders just to steady herself as she rose up on her feet an inch or so, bringing her face closer to his, and just as her lips barely brushed his when—
"EW! GROSS!"
At once the two of them pulled away to see two figures standing in the doorway of the apartment, the one that had spoken was a young child with long ebony hair and sparkling emerald eyes, while her companion, the tall dark red-head they all knew and loved, was grinning cunningly, like a fox, at the two of them. But their attention was on the little girl, who had spoken so bluntly about that showing of affection.
"Allison, you weren't going to kiss him, were you?!" Sophia cried out, and although all three adults wanted to crack up laughing at how adorable and sweet the child was, they realized that in order to handle the situation, they had to maintain their somewhat pleased and entertained composure.
"Pretty Sophie, you don't want me to kiss him?" Alli asked of her little cousin, whose face was contorted in an adorable expression of disgust.
"No! Kissing is gross!" she responded back.
"But I want to kiss him," the younger woman loved to play with this child, but she found that Sophia, however adorable she was, was still just a child who saw "kissing" and "boys" merely forces of "cooties," which, at the age of eight, was just as bad to them as AIDS and HIV were to adults.
"Well, can I kiss her?" Christopher asked of the child, and she shook her head in defiance.
"No!"
"What about on the cheek?"
"No!"
"Come on, Sophia, just one kiss? On the cheek? Please?" pleaded Alli, who was just dying to say goodbye and send Sophia to bed for embarrassing her like that. Sophia, who was still glaring in disgust, finally broke her seriousness.
"Fine! You can kiss him—ON THE CHEEK!" Sophia ordered, and Alli beamed at her little cousin, leaning over to kiss the man on the cheek, but just as she did, he took this opportunity to tilt his head, and just a split second before she brushed her lips against the side of his face, he replaced it with his own lips. Sophia's mouth dropped, and she yelled out—"GROSS!!"—but then he pulled away and winked at the woman, who was surprised, covering her mouth with her lips.
"I'll call you."
With that, the man turned and walked away from her, rushing down the steps, while Sophia stood in the doorway, complaining about the PDA that she had bared witness to, (Public Display of Affection).
"Ew! That is so gross! I can't believe you, Allison! You kissed him!"
Samantha broke the tension in the air with a laugh—a light, cheerful laugh. Alli felt her entire face flow red, her body trembling, and her mouth still covered by her hand, she closed her eyes and grinned proudly behind her fingers so Sophia couldn't see. This all felt like a dream, a pleasant, peaceful, wonderful dream that just seemed to pull her deeper and deeper into it. She felt like she was a princess in this dream—no, better, an angel!—and this man…this illusionist, Christopher, he was the one here to mend her wings and let her fly. She felt her body warm up to the aftershock of the kiss, and she tried not to gush up in front of her little cousin just because everything around her seemed to be nothing more than a wonderful fantasy.
"Alli?"
She looked up to see her friend smiling at her, and she smiled back. Then she looked down at the child, who was gagging out of disgust of the display of affection and admiration.
"What are you gagging at, Sophia? Pretty soon you're going to be kissing boys, too," Alli commented quickly, and the look on the child's face was absolutely priceless. It went from disgusted to shocked and terrified. Alli gestured the child into the apartment where she was instructed to get ready for bed—Alli wanted to inform Sam about her day as soon as possible. Despite the little girl's argumentative glare at her, she sulked towards her bedroom, leaving the two adults in the living room, staring at each other with brimming faces.
"So, am I to take it that the cute little display the two of you put on out there a sign that you finally broke up with that bastard and you're now with that hot, sexy man that we all love to call CRISS ANGEL?!?!?" Sam practically exploded in the living room, having screamed the man's name so loud that Alli doubted that anyone could hear her—in Alaska.
"Yes?" Alli couldn't believe that the word just slipped out so plainly and commonly out of her mouth. She would have at least been jumping around and cheering and yelling and screaming with excitement and happiness with her friend. No, when the world finally seemed to be at peace and everything seemed to be just perfect and wonderful and exciting, Alli was the only person who seemed to be calm and not even noticing the dramatic change around her. She would be the sore thumb sticking out in a sea of jeering people.
"'Yes?' You've finally broken up with that son of a bitch, and you're with this great guy who seems to worship the ground you walk on, and all you can say is 'yes'?" she criticized her friend.
"He doesn't worship the ground I walk on."
"He might as well. I mean, since the two of you met, it seems to be that he doesn't want to be anywhere unless you're there. He showed up at the fucking club the night we went!"
"He explained to me that he was heading there with his brothers."
"He offered you to sleep in his bed with him!"
"Actually, that was my fault. I didn't want to sleep alone, but I felt like I was burdening him. So, technically, he slept with me."
"He called you up on stage during his magic show! After that, the two of you disappeared together."
"And we came back. Trust me, that was nothing."
"I don't know. Everything that's been going on with you two seems to point towards the fact that he is totally interested in you," Sam told her friend quickly.
"How can you tell?" It was rhetorical question, Sam knew this, but this didn't mean that she wasn't going to stop glaring at her friend for even speaking such heinous words.
"Alli."
"No, I'm serious. I mean, knowing a man like Christopher, who probably has thousands upon thousands of women who idolize and admire him, he's probably one of those types of guys who likes to flirt and play on different kinds of women. How do I honestly know that he's in to me? What if I'm just another name he can add to his Bingo book of babes he's nailed when he's out on the road?" Alli suddenly realized that every word she had spoken was a poison-covered nail she was digging into her own heart, but she knew that everything she was saying, despite how hurtful it was, was the honest truth. How could she know he was interested in her for real?
"Well, let's ask him!" Sam immediately went for the phone, but Alli—who had grown a habit of keeping Sam back from certain things over their long and steady relationship of being friends for years—beat her to it, her arms outstretched as if to shield the other woman from the phone.
"If we call him up and ask him, chances are he's going to lie to us and try to deceive us. You never confront a man about being a player if he is one himself," Alli informed her friend, having gone through that experience dozens of times before when she was younger, and Sam should know this, too.
"Well, how are we supposed to figure out if he's a player or not?" Sam asked of her friend, who was only staring back in confusion and disbelief in herself that it ended up being this way with her. Her history of abusive and tormented relationships led her to doubt and become suspicious of everyone around her, even those that she desired to get close to. It was a sad truth, but as she was looking at herself in this situation, from the third person point of view—however hard it was to try and do this through a typical stubborn and biased mind—she found that when she had pulled away from the commands and dominance of past boyfriends, she was really just this little girl who was finding it hard to truly find a real relationship. In her vocabulary, after all these years, "relationship" didn't exist unless along the ways it would be followed by "pain" or "hurt" or "fear."
"I don't know. I need to think for a little bit."
With that the woman turned on her heel and walked from the living room into the hallway, and then closed the door to her bedroom behind her. Her mind was a thick fog that wouldn't clear, no matter how hard the light would shine from within. The light was dim, it was faint, so it wasn't shining enough. The warmth that used to exist inside her when she was little—an innocent child that was free from any bondage, any sin—was gone, long gone, thanks to the sins and wrath of the people who have been around her. That light that was once the innocent child's soul, was now dim, and it was going out. A simple flame upon a candle, struggling for its life as the rain poured down around it. She tried to keep that light shining, that warmth that made her live and survive, she tried to shelter it, to keep it, but it became too hard for her to bare it, too hard to keep it.
In her mind, she was listening to her own words speak from within. She heard those words over and over again. How could she say such a thing? She was only hurting herself. She was only destroying whatever bit of sanity she had left. Yet, despite her inner arguments, despite her wish to take them back, she knew…she knew it was the truth. What she said was the truth. There was always the possibility that the one that you love could end up not truly returning those very same feelings. And in the end, that person will leave you, abandon you, and will leave you to fall back into the darkness that you had worked yourself so tirelessly in order to escape….
Her mind filled with images, images that she hated and loathed with every bit of her being, but she couldn't erase them as they formed from nothing within the shadows. She saw that man…the man she had thought she had grown close to, flirting, charming, courting…kissing other women, women that weren't her, women that he probably didn't even know himself. It churned her stomach, twisted and knotted it. She couldn't believe she was doing this to herself. Why? Why was she tormenting herself like this?
Because there was no one else to do it….
After a few minutes of trying to shove these thoughts out of her mind, Alli finally reasoned with herself and decided that it was time to relax and try to clear her mind by going to bed early. It had been a long time since she had tried to fallen asleep any time before midnight, and strangely enough, she knew it was probably for the best. She had a wild day, a crazy, insane day, and she knew that it was probably the stress and excitement that was causing her to think like this. She changed out of her clothes, plugged her cellphone into its charger, and fell into bed. The moment her head hit the pillow, she was drifting off into this peaceful world within her mind, a world that she felt herself slowly and slowly drift away into, until the string consciousness that was wrapped around her waist gave a very powerful and choking pull, and she felt her body fall forward while she was pulled violently from that dream world and back into reality. She awoke with a start, and suddenly realized that her phone, plugged into its charger on the nighstand beside her bed, was vibrating loudly. The sound of it had awoke her from that dream.
She turned over onto her side and reached for her phone. She quickly scanned the screen on the front before flipping it open, just in case it was someone else who was trying to contact her—someone she had rid her life of earlier that day, (or could it be yesterday?). She read the screen, and inside, she was warming up like as if she had stepped into a spa, and her entire body felt chills rise up and then down along her arms and spine. She took a breath, trying to maintain her calm heart, and then opened her phone to read the text message that had been sent from the man she knew had taken control of her heart.
"U wanna go out on a REAL date???"
-Liz Comic-
Liz: Alright, I think I overdid on this chapter.
Crys: Yeah you kind of did. I mean, you made Alli seem like a complete depressed psycho.
Liz: Well, that's what we call paranoia. Honestly, if I was dating Criss Angel, I think I'd be thinking the same thing. I wouldn't trust him for shit. He really is a flirt.
Crys: This coming from a major Criss-Angel-Loyal-Fangirl here.
Liz: Hey, I'm speaking my mind, and when you really think about it, Criss may be hot, attractive, amazing, talented, and absolutely a mind-blowing freak, I think when you look at it from reality and see how he is, I wouldn't be able to trust him. I know he probably wouldn't sleep or date other girls, but he did kiss other girls while he was with JoAnn, and he was constantly flirting. I wouldn't be able to trust him.
Crys: I think you just totally pissed off thousands of fangirls.
Liz: So what? I'm speaking the truth. It'd be like you trying to go out with Mario Lopez. He'd be a total flirt too. In fact, we know he's a player! He went out with that chick from "Dancing With The Stars" just because!
Crys: Yeah, well, he's not with her right now! And I thought I told you never to say that I like him at all!
Liz: But you do! You also still like Sasuke from Naruto.
Crys: And you happen to like Envy. In fact, you're dedicating the next chapter to him, aren't you?!?!
Liz: No ::::::is totally lying::::::
Crys: Whatever. Anyways, for those of you who are reading this, it has been a long time since Liz has updated, and the reason for this is because she has been quite busy and unable to get much done. She is also struggling through writer's block--and soon to be head-trauma--and will probably update as soon as possible. The next chapter is dedicated to Envy from FMA.
Liz: IT IS NOT!!!!!