A Restless Night

I had been restless all day. I couldn't sit still, I was out of sorts, I was impatient. We still had twenty weeks and counting til our adventures began and I was feeling the strain. I got home and decided that I simply could not pace the length of my library (You know the one, the one with all the books the Inquisition would set me on the barbie for), smoking cigarettes and being bored out of my skull.

I undressed and pinned up my hair and got in the shower. "Where are you going?" asked my mother.
"Out," I said. I was not usually so evasive, but I was not sure that my parents approved of where I went. I went to my room and chose my clothes. A pair of jeans and a thin black sweater that I liked because it was elegantly frayed and had a tendency to slip off my shoulder. I unpinned my silvery hair and brushed it out. Leaning into the mirror, I smoothed on a little powder, did up my eyes with that lovely smokey look and and put on lipstick. I grabbed my small bag of eccentric ( a smaller version of my big bag of crazy and stuffed my wallet and smokes inside) snagged my leather jacket and headed out into the dying day, driving south.

The parking lot of the lead counselor's bar was crowded. I parked by his red corvette and slid out, careful not to ding the door and walked around the front of the building. I got in the queue and was happy to see the lady counselor, doing door duty. She motioned me to the head of the line, gave me a toothy smile, and allowed me to walk by. "Yum, Opium," she said and gave me a sly wink.

The bar was busy tonight and I walked around the patrons. One gentleman who may or may not be as the counselors are gave me a good going over but I ignored him. I saw Vi and our counselor sitting together, she with a glass of wine and he with what he was drinking. They were having their one on one session, so I just waved and smiled at them and stopped at the bar. The bartender nodded his notice of me and grabbed a pint glass and filled it with black stuff, again another perfect pint, and he sat it on the bar in front of me. I put the price of the Guinness in his brandy snifter and he smiled sardonically at me as I grabbed the pint and headed over to the owner's booth.

The throne, where the lead counselor usually sat to watch the action of the bar was empty. I wasn't here to see him anyway. The lead counselor always made me nervous. It was because I didn't want to like him so much, but he was hard to ignore. He was one of those men who knew how to take up space in such a way that being in his presence was extremely intimate.

I opened my purse and took out the turkish blend cigarettes the lead counselor had given me and I lit one. I sipped my pint and wiped immediately at my upper lip and watched the bar and her patrons. They were a strange collection of people and they seemed to be hungry...and these were patrons like myself. In the alternate universe we shared with the counselors, people like this were looked down upon but were a necessary commodity to the lead counselor's stock and trade. I watched the go-go dancers for a while. I may look younger than my 42 years but I knew I had never been able to move like that, even at 16.

Finally the loud techno-goth music dimmed out to a radio station I only heard when I was at this bar. Try as I might, I could never tune it in to my radio. Bob Seger was singing Bring on the Night about a Vampire like rock star who left exhausted minions in his wake and as the sun began to rise, he began to close his eyes. I closed my eyes for a second to simply allow the din of the bar become like a murmuring chant. I liked noise and action, I loved to sense it with closed eyes and open ears. I was so absorbed in my trance, I did not hear the lady counselor sit herself down across from me.

Finally, I opened my eyes to take a drink and I saw her.
"Having downtime?" she asked.
"I suppose so. Funny, the loud sounds of the bar and the music is actually soothing. Sometimes, my world is mighty quiet," I said.
"The Boss is right, you are a lot like us," she said. She was not happy or unhappy for coming to this conclusion, she was simply stating a fact. "So, why are you here, it is not your appointed night for your one on one."
"I just came to be here, to be with...friends," I said. "May I ask you something?"
"You may ask," she said. I looked at her face. Some people might say she had a hard face, but I thought she was beautiful. The lady counselor was a real liberated woman with a range of tastes. She felt no need to limit herself.
"Are you and the other counselors really our friends? I would like to think you are, but sometimes, I wonder," I asked her.
"Well, we would never let harm come to any of you, if that is any indication," she said.
"That's great, but that really doesn't answer my question," I said.
"No, I suppose it doesn't," she said. "What you want to know is, are we friends, intimates and equals?"
"Yeah, that would do for a start," I said.
"It is funny, we have been very separate from your kind up to now," she said. "But we have had to try to rethink your kind."
"Has it been difficult?" I asked. I lit another cigarette.
"Sometimes," she said. "We are basically snobs, even your beloved counselor does not see all of your kind as any sort of equal to him. We are interested in you though, the group and what you feel and say about us and to us."
"So, you would not be opposed to being social friends with us?" I asked.
"I am sitting here with you," she said. "There are others of my kind here to night and I could seek out their company, but I am sitting with you."

"So where is your boss tonight?" I asked.
"He is in his office," she said. "Tell me, Aslinn, if you will, why do you prefer your counselor over my boss?"
"See, I was afraid you were going to ask me that," I said.
"Why? Do you think I would break a confidence? Dear Abby says that trust is the seed of friendship. If we are to be friends, shouldn't you trust me?" she asked.
"Okay, so you want to know," I sat up a little straighter and sipped my beer and composed myself. This was just crazy, I knew, because I knew sure as God made little dew berries that the lead counselor could hear every word I was saying. "My counselor is exactly as you said about him in the first summer we met, he's a romantic. He treats me and all of his ladies like they come from his time, from his world. Oh, he is pretty straightforward when we get...intense in our counseling...but he is very...courtly."
"And the lead counselor?" she asked.
"Well, he is beautiful, I will say that, and while I have avoided having a one on one with him, I don't think I could escape if our session became...shall we say 'more intimate'?" I looked at her to make sure she understood the implication. "So I try to avoid being a situation where I would be more...frank...with him."

"You know, Aslinn, the lead counselor reads the things you write. He tells me you are very passionate about your counselor and he can tell you really care about him, but he also noticed that you write rather well of him as well. It confuses him, and my boss does not like feeling confused, as well you know," she said.
"I know, and I am sometimes confused in my thoughts as well. I hate to think I grieve him. A lot of the things I write are things about the others in the group, things they have told me in the quiet of the forum, as I peruse the floor late night, they write about their loves and lusts and desires and their admiration of him,"I said. "I just reflect all those back because I know that is what they are experiencing in their one on one counseling sessions."

"I remember one thing you wrote, something you recently reposted that he especially liked, the one called The Dreamer Must Awake. He printed it out and showed it to me. He was fascinated. He said you described him with a lover's eye," said the lady counselor.
"I described him with an artist's eye. The lead counselor is beautiful like a rare work of art, like The David, carved by the hand of the master. I see his surroundings as his personal lair, the place where he shuts out the outside world, the bar, his responsibilities, even us. Where he can go around without all the trappings of what we imagine him to be. That work is a fantasy, I have never seen the lead counselor that way," I said.
"Why do you always like him in shadow? He always complains that you never look him in the face without the shadows," she asked.
"There is a kind of solace in the shadows. Perhaps if I him pulled out into the light, I would not be able to look away," I said. "I have looked many times at my counselor, but I have never felt wary of him. The lead counselor makes me...nervous."
"Ah and there he is now," she said looking over and up at the lead counselor who appeared at the table like magik. She smiled at me and got up, nodded at her boss and left us. He sat down and took her place, leaning back so he was in the semi shadow.

"How lovely you have come to visit the bar," he said. "What brought you here?"
"I was restless, out of sorts, I needed to unwind," I said. He spoke to the table in general in a voice no human would have heard over the sounds of the bar and the voices of the patrons. "Bring Aslinn another Guinness." and the bartender appeared with another perfect pint. He turned and left quickly. I sipped the pint.
"I want you do something for me Aslinn," he said softly. I knew what he was going to do. I leaned back so that I would be cast in semi shadow. "This is beginning to hurt my feelings, I think, as I can't be entirely sure. I want you to trust me."
"I know you do, and it has less to do with you than you can possibly understand," I said.
"Do you think I would bend your will? Make you do something you would not want to do?" he asked.
"I would like to think there was something in you that would not do those things. But even if I trusted you, I would not be sure I could trust myself," I said. "I know what you are, I know you are lovely, and I know that I am not dead south of my belt buckle. So, it doesn't have everything to with you."
"You are his, I just think it would be nice if you and I could look one another in the face without the 'solace' of the shadows," he said, quoting what I had said. Damn it, I'd known better than this, I should never have talked to her so candidly here. His large hand covered mine and as he leaned forward, I shut my eyes.

Suddenly I was sitting alone at the booth, the lead counselor was gone.