Someplace to Be Flying by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online

battered sofa and began groping each other, hands going up T-shirts and cupping crotches, faces attempting lusty sexual expressions that only came off as pathetic leers. Lily sighed, returned her eye to her viewfinder and finished the roll.
    “You owe me,” she told Rory afterward as they climbed the stairs toward the smoke and noise of the club above.
    “No, Spin does,” he said, pausing in the stairwell so that they could hear each other talk.
    Lily stopped beside him and adjusted the strap of her camera bag. She was earning way too much stuff in there as usual. She doubted she’d used even half of the lenses she’d brought along.
    “I’m not talking about a paycheck,” she said.
    “I know. And you’re right-I do owe you for getting you into this. But I wanted the best and so, naturally, the first person I thought of was you.”
    Lily had to smile. “Flattery’s good-but you still owe me.”
    “This is true.”
    Lily had known Rory Crowther for years. He was a freelance writer, forever working on the proverbial Great North American Novel, paying the bills with articles and the occasional short story, but mostly with the jewelry he made in his apartment on Stanton Street and sold through various craft stores and at fairs. They first met while working on a piece for In the City, Newford’s entertainment weekly. Early on in their relationship, they had explored a more romantic involvement than they shared now, but they soon realized that they got along better as friends. Ten years later, they were still loyal confidantes, getting together at least once or twice a week, maintaining their friendship through any number of ultimately unhappy relationships and, in Rory’s case, a failed marriage.
    They were here in Your Second Home for an article on the reemergence of punk on the Newford music scene that Rory was writing for Spin magazine. The club was a blue-collar bar during the day, a music club at night.
    When he came by in a cab to pick her up earlier in the evening, she’d told him about what had happened last night, but gave him only a bare-bones version, no more than she’d told Donna in an email she’d sent oft this morning: She’d been mugged, but a cab driver had come by in time to help her. Yes, she was fine now, really, and she didn’t really want to talk about it anymore. She just wanted to put it behind her.
    She had no idea why she was so reticent about sharing the details of her experience with her two best friends, yet had been willing to blurt out to Joey Bennett that she’d been out walking the streets looking for animal people. It wasn’t that what had happened was so impossible, or at least it wasn’t only that, but she found herself no more able to understand her reluctance than she was able to discuss what had happened in any more detail than she already had.
    “Come on,” Rory was saying. He nodded his head back down the stairs where Bitches in Heat were probably shooting up now. “It wasn’t so bad. Be honest. It was kind of like passing the scene of an accident, wasn’t it? You don’t really want to see what’s going on, but you can’t stop yourself from looking.”
    “I suppose. But you know what kept me shooting?”
    Rory shook his head.
    “The thought of how, ten or twenty years from now, they’ll come across these pictures in a scrapbook or somewhere and realize just how pathetic and foolish they really were.”
    “If they live that long.”
    That took Lily’s smile away. “If they live that long,” she agreed.
    They continued up the stairs, a wall of sound hitting them when they reached the top. Helldogz were on stage-it was a canine theme night, Lily supposed, since the third band, who’d played in between the sets by this band and the opening act Bitches in Heat, had been a couple of rappers who called themselves Howl. Helldogz’s lead singer reminded Lily of Henry Rollins-he had that same look of pumped-up muscles topped by a buzz cut, neither of which