Children of the Mirror
...26th Part: Dark...
When we'd searched half the building, we decided to stop, having found nothing yet. Krad was getting irritated, trying to over-examine everything we passed. He probably would have stood in each room for hours if I hadn't pulled him back out.
"How can we find it!?" he shouted suddenly, about halfway through our excursion for the day. "How can we find what we don't know we're looking for!? We could have passed it by already!"
"Krad, calm down!" I shouted over his outburst, shaking his shoulders.
"No! What are we not thinking of!?" he insisted.
"Maybe we'll know it when we see it!" I didn't really know, either, but I hated Krad freaking out on me. I didn't really feel like fighting with him anymore.
"But what if –" I cut him off, clamping my hand over his mouth.
"Stop it with the 'what if's, already. Now, come on. Let's keep going..."
. . .
At the end of the day, we retreated back to the room we'd spent the previous night in. I sat down on the chaise, stretching my legs across its length.
"I'll sit on you if you don't move," Krad warned, turning around and looking down at me over his shoulder. "Come on, Dark!" he complained when all I did was raise an eyebrow at him. "Move over!"
Rather than moving, I clasped my hands around his hips. "I'm not moving, no matter what you threaten me with," I told him.
"What about your life?" he tried, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Nope," I refused. "I'm tired." I pulled him down on my lap, then, and he glared at me. I laughed. "You can't be mad at me forever – and like you said, you can't hate me, either."
"Oh, yeah?" he scoffed.
I nodded once, smirking. "Yeah."
Krad still scowled at me, but he decided not to argue it any further. Instead, he got up and grabbed his book.
"How many times have you read that?" I wondered.
He shrugged, coming to sit with me again. "I haven't been keeping track." I moved my legs for him to sit between them, this time, and lean back against my chest. I propped my chin on his shoulder and read with him until I fell asleep.
It didn't take very long.
. . .
I woke again to find Krad still asleep. We were as we had been before: Krad lying against my chest, between my legs, but now his book was lying open on his stomach and my arm was strewn over the book and his hand. And one of my legs had fallen asleep.
Krad woke up sooner than I was expecting. "Artworks," he muttered.
"Yeah, good morning to you, too," I said, confused.
He pushed my arm down to get it off of his book, and I hastily moved it away from him altogether while he straightened his novel's pages. Obviously, he was too distracted to realize how awkward that could have been.
"So what about artworks?" I asked.
"It's an artwork, I'm certain of it – that thing we're looking for," he explained.
I nodded looking skeptically at him. "Yeah, that would make sense. We are in a museum, in case you forgot."
"Yes, I know that," he said. "But I also think... it's a mirror!"
"Why a mirror?" I wondered.
"Haven't you looked in a mirror inn those dreams?" Krad asked. "Sometimes those kids are on the other side, right?"
"Just the red-head," I said. I wasn't catching on to what Krad was trying to explain.
"Just the opposite for me," he said. "But that's not the important part. We have to look for a mirror of some sort."
"Are you sure?"
"Do you have any better ideas?"
He did have a point. "Well... no..." I wrapped my arms around him tighter for a moment. "But before we go looking again... just stay for a while." I laughed, "Let me kiss on you some more..."
Krad tried halfheartedly to shove me off as I laid kissed all over his face, grappling with him to keep his skin in my reach. "Dark, stop it!" he cried, laughing with me as he turned his face away and shoved at my chest.
He gave up eventually, and I ended up on top of him. His head was nearly hanging off the edge of the furniture; his hair draped down to the floor. I kissed his mouth and he kissed back, stretching his lips with a smile. His hand, which had been pressed flat against my chest, slowly curled into a fist, bunching my collar in his slender fingers. One of his knees drew up closer to his body, so I pulled his leg up over my waist before smoothing my hand back up it to his waist.
"Okay, that's more than enough," he decided, sliding his leg off of me again and wriggling out from under me.
"Oh, come on," I objected, sitting up.
Krad's lips touched mine again for a second before he turned away. "No, Mousy. That's definitely as far as I'll go..." His sentence trailed off, though.
I smirked. For now, I thought, then got up to follow him away.
Time to look for that... mirror...