I mean, you even made the Dragons because you wanted to be in the same world as they, and you made a hundred.I mean, you even made the Dragons because you wanted to be in the same world as they, and you made a hundred." I stopped her with a hand and said, "So what do I do now? I feel... I need to go find Karen, I need to..." "You need to sit down and sober up," Carroll said. "You need to go home to P'nyssa and Aaden, who're well suited to caring for you. P'nyssa, at least, has seen this problem before." Her smile was beautiful. I leaned over and awkwardly wrapped my arms around her shoulders, tears forming in my eyes. "Carroll... Thank you. Again. And again." I leaned into her, and kissed her lips. In my drunken state I forgot about how I thought I was supposed to feel around Carroll, and opened my lips gently. Her response was the same, as our tongues met and touched softly, sliding over each other. It all suddenly came back to me in a flash, and I reeled away from her. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that." There was a sad expression on her face, and she said, "Ken, you've never kissed me like that before. What's there to be sorry about?" "Nothing," I growled. She let it drop; I doubted much I could handle a second confession that night. "No, wait." "Carroll, I'm going to tell you something important. Something that's sort of strange, and sort of sick." She waited. "A long time ago, before I made Pendor, before I had Fawn, even, I was just a plain human being, wandering through human life. I had a crush on a girl about my age, her name was Lisa. I can't tell you much about her, except that I was sixteen and so was she, and was as infatuated and what have you as a sixteen-year-old can get. "And we started to get along. I can't tell you what that was like, suddenly discovering girls, suddenly having a friend, suddenly having a girlfriend. It's like nothing Pendorians, or Tleils especially, ever go through. "She was in an auto with a friend of mine, and they'd gone to a store just to get something to eat. They were coming back and Mark, that was his name, decided to take the auto up as fast as it could go, and nobody was ever able to tell me what happened then, but the right side of the car lurched down and struck the road, and the car rolled and flipped over. |