After Audrey and David vanished, there were several seconds of silence, only broken when Liz said: “you know what? I no longer want to know what’s going on, at least not right now. I am going in to work and then I ask you to do everything you can to keep the weirdness from impacting us Saturday. We will discuss all of this Sunday, and maybe I’ll even believe most of it then. Deal?”

  Malcolm started to ask what was important about tomorrow, when he remembered: “Ah, two years ago you two met tomorrow, and Sunday it will be a year since you signed off on this house together, or do I have those reversed?”

  “No, that is exactly right,” Carol said, kissed Liz goodbye and the nurse hurried out to take her hospital shift.

  “So, what do you guys have pnned for tomorrow?” Malcolm asked

  “Well, whenever she wakes up, we will go out to brunch and then go to the salon. We will each have half the pce to ourselves and py Style Roulette.”

  “That sounds vaguely familiar,” Malcolm replied, trying to remember where he heard the term before.

  “Liz and I each put together an envelope with four sets of hairstyles we think will look good on the other and gave them to our chosen stylists yesterday. They will pick two of the four, and we will each randomly select one of those two. We will also have random choices for makeup and hair color, though she promised mine are ‘no change' or ‘highlights only,’ and after that we will either come home and make mad, passionate love or break up over what the other did to us.”

  “Ah! You tried that with … was her name Cudette or Colette?”

  “Colette. And she wound up saddling me with that god awful shag…”

  Malcolm smiled at the memory. “I thought it was cute,”

  “You and maybe two other people on the pnet. Mercifully, one of them was Liz,” Carol replied, and then a horrified look crossed her face: “Oh dear, I hope she did not make that one of her choices!”

  Malcolm almost ughed but decided to just keep the conversation going instead: “That’s right - I took you out for drinks the next night to help you get over both the haircut and ditching Colette, and the girl I was trying to pick up went home with you instead!”

  “Went home and stayed. I really love her, Mal.” She paused, and then ughed and added: “I really hope we can survive whatever we do to each other tomorrow…”

  Malcolm gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Eh, you always look good, and she is pretty enough to make almost anything work. Just remember that, and you should be…”

  A burst of green light and a soft explosion interrupted him and suddenly not only Audrey, but David West as well were standing in Carol’s kitchen with them.

  “David!” Carol cried out and gave him a bear hug. “Awesome to see you, and in the flesh, again! Weird fashion choice though,” she added as she released him.

  “Oh! I had not meant to bring you along!” Audrey excimed.

  “I half expected it,” David said. “See if you can keep the passage open so I can return on my own?”

  “You know, I think I can, but probably not for long,” Audrey replied.

  “Great - maybe next time we can all be together in person somewhere instead of using the Astral Projection,” David said. Then he walked over and hugged his roommate.

  “What was that for?” Malcolm asked, surprised.

  “Just for being a friend. Not sure who I can fully trust on the other side yet. There seem to be a few but there are many who seem to hide agendas or just hate me too. Well, I had better get back. I will try to contact Audrey first next time, in the hopes of getting here through her ability, or maybe bringing all of you there...”

  He then turned and walked two steps - on the third his leg seemed to hit some resistance and then a green field seemed to suck him in. Audrey gasped, started to fall forward and caught herself on the kitchen table. As she righted herself, her eyes met Malcolm's and he visibly started, and then quickly turned away. Audrey was not sure, but she thought it looked like he was blushing.

  “You seem to have had a bit of an adventure,” Carol said.

  “Yeah. Got to meet Sandra. She is even more beautiful than you guys said. Made me feel like I was back in my sophomore year when I still looked more like a long-haired boy than a girl,” she said. “But she seemed nice.”

  She thought she heard Malcolm say, “You are at least as pretty as her,” but he was looking away and kind of mumbled it, so maybe she just imagined it.

  “Which of those books details the World Walkers? It appears that I am one,” she said instead of asking about Malcolm’s comment, even though that was what she really wanted to do.

  “The first one, The Apprentice's Betrayal,” Malcolm said. “I think we left them all in Carol's car, so I’ll go get it.” He seemed to be talking to the floor and hurried out.

  Both of the women looked at each other confused by his behavior.

  Carol said: “Go after him. I have not seen him act this strange… well, ever, really.”

  Audrey nodded and followed him out.

  Malcolm had just located the three modules and the Gods of the Realms book when she reached the car. He turned around and almost collided with her. Their eyes met for a second and she heard his breath catch, and then he looked away.

  “Mal, what is wrong? You are being very odd!”

  He took a deep breath and tried to step back but the car was in the way. “I always loved your eyes, that bright blue felt so welcoming, safe, like a swimming pool on a hot summer day. I could always focus on them and remember that you were my friend and that was what mattered. I lost sight of that once, and then was tricked into messing it up even more and thought I had lost a friend forever. Then you came back, and I had my swimming pool again and…”

  “You are rambling,” she teased.

  He ughed but it was more an embarrassed ugh than one from humor.

  He met her gaze for almost a full second then shuddered and looked away. He took a slow, shuddery breath and then said: “There is just something so damned sexy about those green eyes that I find myself wanting to forget you are a friend.”

  Her eyes opened in surprise at this admission. Her voice suddenly surprisingly husky, she said: “Mal, look at me. At me. Not just my eyes but me.”

  He winced and then complied. He tried not to meet her gaze, but she did what she could to keep her eyes locked on his. “What do you see?” She demanded.

  He closed his eyes for a second then opened them and met her gaze levelly as he answered, a slight quiver in his voice: “I see a ridiculously beautiful woman that I have just now realized I have had a massive crush on for several years.”

  She smiled. “And I see a very sweet, silly man who was about to throw away a second chance at something wonderful solely to remain friends with a woman who has been wanting to hear what he just told her ever since they won a science fair together.”

  Malcolm felt his heart stop for a moment as what she had just said sunk in.

  “If it took my eyes turning green to get this out, then it is worth more than the power that comes with it,” she added. And then she was in his arms and their lips were together and it was everything she had ever imagined or hoped for. Throughout the years, she had been in a string of short-lived retionships that went nowhere because part of her was still stuck on him, and all of that emotion came out in the kiss, and she felt a matching passion from him that took her breath away. The kiss ended and they were still holding each other. “That kiss was better than any,” he started to say, then blushed slightly, and corrected it slightly to “well, almost any sex I have ever had.”

  “If that boar did not make my car undrivable, we are going to say good night to Carol, go back to your pce and see if we can at least have an even better kiss. And then maybe, if you are really lucky and really good, some even better sex.”

  “If that car is not drivable, I will carry you there on my back,” he said.

  She ughed, and her green eyes met his brown ones once more but this time he did not look away. Instead, it seemed the world just faded out of existence. He kissed her again, then pulled back, smiling, only to open his eyes in shock.

  “What the…?” He began.

  She looked around, and ughed. “I guess World Walkers don’t need cars.”

  They were standing in the main room of the apartment he and David shared.

  “One of us should call Carol and tell her what happened,” Malcolm said, his grip on her looser than it was but he could not bring himself to fully let go.

  “If you want her to know about the kiss, I will do it, if you are not ready, then you should.”

  He ughed. “This is Carol we are talking about. She probably knew about the kiss yesterday. She could tell David and Sandra were in love before either of them knew it too.”

  “You're probably right,” she said, ughing, and released him with one hand, the other still wrapped around his waist. She took Mal’s phone out of his pocket, used his face to unlock it, and had him say “Dial Carol “

  She answered on the fourth ring: “What happened Mal? Did you scare her off or something?”

  “No,” Audrey said. “We kissed and felt the Earth move under our feet. When we came up for air we were back at his pce.”

  “That was one heck of a kiss!”

  “It was. Even left him speechless for a few seconds or he would be the one talking.”

  Carol ughed and replied: “A kiss that leaves Malcolm speechless? That is the best superpower ever!”

  “Hey, I'm right here,” he said, ughing.

  “About time you two stopped flirting and finally hooked up,” she said. “Even Liz saw that you two belonged together, and she is usually as dense as a guy about such things. Thanks for letting me know - and giving me an expnation of why those four books are on the driveway. I will go start reading and will talk to you Sunday. Oh, I’ll leave them in the guest room so if you want to World Walk over here tomorrow to borrow them you can, without getting in the way of our pns.”

  “Your pns?” Audrey asked.

  “Ask Malcolm, if you ever let him up for air. Talk to you Sunday,” Carol replied and hung up.

  “I believe we were just told to go back to kissing,” Audrey said.

  “It did kind of sound like that,” Malcolm agreed. “I have to admit I like that pn.”

  She put her hands on his shoulders and smiled up at him. His hands slid down to her waist. “I really do love those green eyes of yours…” he added before their lips connected again.

  Several hours ter, Malcolm awoke with a mass of red curls covering his chest and a warm body curled up beside him. “So it was not a dream this time?” he mused aloud, not realizing she was awake.

  “Aww! You’ve had dreams about me?” he heard Audrey’s pyful voice say.

  He hoped the room was too dark for her to see his blush. “Uh, yeah, I guess I have,” he confessed, a little nervously.

  “Were they good ones?” she pressed.

  He took a deep breath before answering. “Remember back in our junior year when I seemed to be avoiding you for about two days?”

  She was surprised that she actually did remember that and said so.

  “Well, the night before that I had a dream where we were out riding our bikes, and you hit something and fell off. I stopped and helped you up and you kissed me. I do not think there was more to it than that, but I woke up and, uh, well, the bed was sticky…”

  There was a short moment of silence and then: “Oh! You had a wet dream about me!” she said; she tried not to ugh but could not help it...

  “Yeah, but you were my friend - heck, until I was assigned David as a partner for a computer b project, you were my best friend, ever. And having a dream like that about a friend seemed, somehow, wrong. I was afraid you would somehow sense it and not want to be my friend any more.”

  “To be honest, at that point I was kind of hoping we could somehow be more than friends. But I was happy to just hang out, regardless,” she replied. “Oh, you know, I had a dream kind of like that, at about that time, too, and even one which you were in, but, uh, well, you were not the guy who, ah, triggered me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, it was the night after we spent most of a day watching all those Errol Flynn movies…” she began, but hesitated to continue…

  Curious to see where this was going, Malcolm prodded: “Captain Blood? Robin Hood?”

  She ughed: “No, strangely it was, ah, General Custer. There was just something about that uniform…”

  “Really?” It was Malcolm’s turn to try not to ugh and fail.

  “Yeah, in the dream, we were watching They Died with Their Boots On and he just stepped out of the screen. You said ‘Hi sir. I am Malcolm and this is Amazing Audrey, and we both love your work’”

  “That does not sound like me…” Malcolm said.

  She ughed again, and continued: “He said, ‘could you leave us for a moment?’ and you said, ‘If I can get your autograph first, sure.’”

  “Now that DOES sound like me,” he admitted.

  She swatted at him pyfully and continued: “He signed a huge book you happened to have with you for some reason, and you left, oddly whistling a song that I knew back then but do not remember now. And he said he came out of the screen because he loved my eyes and wanted to make love to me…”

  “Cannot bme a guy for that. Even back when they were that beautiful blue but especially now,” Malcolm said.

  She rolled over, and rose up on her elbows, one to each side of his chest and positioned her face inches above his, her hair cascading down and forming a kind of waterfall around their heads. “You really love my green eyes?”

  “Audrey, I like everything about you. I think I always have, but it scared me back then. Scared me so much that I let our friendship pse when I thought you wanted to be with someone else - based on a lie, I now know but I did not then. I was afraid I might ruin things for you, or that it might hurt me too much to see you with someone else and just lost contact.”

  She ran her eyes over his face while considering this, and then asked: “But it does not scare you now?”

  “Oh, no it terrifies me - but in a way that I now find more empowering than petrifying, if that makes any sense.”

  She met his gaze, her eyes catching the light that filtered through her auburn curls and smiled. “That makes more sense than anything else since I was called in to that bizarre murder scene,” she said, and lowered herself to kiss him.

  The kiss was deep, passionate, and she felt him stirring when she broke it off. He reached up then and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her down to his side. With a light ugh, he said: “I know it kind of feels like I am ready to go again but, well, I’m not sure if this will make sense, especially coming from me, but, unless you really want it, I think I have had enough sex for a while. I just want to cuddle.”

  “That is more than okay with me,” she said, moving over and snuggling against him. “You can hold me as long as you want.”

  The couple drifted off to sleep in each other’s arms. Completely unaware that they were being watched…