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Stories from the Verse
Con Verse Lea
Chapter 20: Beam 127
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Takano 64
Beam, Bron, and Ashleigh ate at her mother’s, and settled in to sleep on the living room floor, which was apparently the norm. The bathroom was not quite an outhouse--it was an outbuilding with cold running water for a shower, sink, and flush toilet. Bob and Dawn stayed in the nearby woods; they would know if they were needed.
Beam fell asleep easily enough, and true to form awoke a few hours later. He was surprised to find that Ashleigh, who had been curled against him when he went to sleep, was missing. Propping himself against a wall to sit up, he dozed on and off until dawn, and with the growing light of morning her shadow appeared at the door.
“I missed you,” he said. It was the least confrontational way he could think to ask.
“Oh, I just--I needed to use the bathroom.”
It was a long time, he thought. What he said was, “Are you all right?”
“All right? Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, you’ve been using the bathroom for several hours. Dinner wasn’t so bad as that.”
“Oh,” she said, and seemed stuck.
He wanted to ask where she was, where she went, but felt like the better strategy was to wait and let her tell him. Eventually she did, coming over to settle beside him and speaking in soft tones.
“No one knows,” she said. “Well, obviously my father knows--but my mother doesn’t know about who we are. I received word that a group needed me, so I went to help them.”
“And that’s all you can tell me?”
She shrugged. “You aren’t--well, I don’t know what I can tell you. But it’s not something we talk about.”
Beam nodded. Not much point in discussing what she should have done; this was the way they did things. He wasn’t really one of them, only married to one of them to form an alliance. They were going to have to figure this out--but not here and now.
“Come back to bed,” he said. “You’re going to need your sleep.”
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #463: Characters Unsettled. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
