Dara, Page, and the Secrets of the Multiverse

▷ 12.2

Page stood in queue for the next car in the subway, checking his watch for the nth time. Classes stretched on for too long, separating him from his recent addiction for as long as he was able to endure. Iris never told him reading it could take more than a whole week with the letters as small as a needle's eye and the pages as thin as cling wrap. There were an insane amount of words in the first section alone, and with finals looming closer, he had less and less time to spend with his dear fairy, Dara.

It was strange, certainly. He went into the whole thing blind. The hardbound wasn't like the books he saw in bookshops in malls or even the ones in Iris' shop. There was nothing, resembling those classic or secondhand books whose jacket had long gone away, leaving behind its naked and unremarkable guts.

But he had never encountered such a story before. The characters were fully fleshed out, each perspective explored upon by the author as if they were complete and real people. He specifically loved the main character's perspectives. Dara, a small fairy from the most rural town in the land, had to secure the rest of the King's treasures to avoid some main evil from getting them and controlling the land. There were several political dealings within that plot, and Dara fought valiantly with blade and wit.

Characters for him came and went, usually serving him the story rather than living fully in it. This book was different. Whenever Page was in class or when he was researching for his upcoming thesis, he would often catch himself thinking about what Dara would have done if she was stuck with this kind of work. His thoughts would wonder whether she had eaten or slept or defeated the next bully in the academy arc while he did menial tasks like wash the dishes or sweep the floor. One time when he did the laundry and decided to read while at it, he ended up forgetting to turn the washer on. The verbal and physical beating he got from his mom was more terrifying than the big bad Dara had faced in the previous chapter.

The next few days were filled with silly blunders like that. He knew he needed to stop, to get his head out of the clouds and focus on his studies, but he couldn't. It was always Dara, Dara, Dara—nonstop—in his head, and he went crazy if he didn't get to read at least one page a day in her story. Was it the dust? Was he under some sort of spell? Seriously, his finals were next week, and he hasn't studied a wink.

Dinner came and went, his mom snapping at him to avoid eating like a starving kitten. The dishes passed by his hands as he hurried through them. Without even touching any of his essays due this week, he snatched the book from his nightstand and plopped onto his bed. Hours bled by, with him turning page after page after page. The words flitted by, each one bringing him deeper and deeper into the lore. There were mermaids now? Talking trees? Whoa.

It was when he reached the chapter when the male lead, some side character who found Dara and nursed her back to health, that he felt the need to stop for a second. He hated that side character, and he didn't even know why. It wasn't because he didn't have dimensions. Just...reasons.

Page read on, running his pointer finger across the lines. It was a downright confession scene, where the character corners Dara and tells her everything he has felt for her. It annoyed Page for some reason, so he started reading aloud.

"I would have crossed heaven and earth and hell for you," Kalasta said, his voice thickening into a dark, foreboding shadow. It slithered around my heart like a thousand snakes ravenous for blood. Squeezing, tearing, sinking their fangs into the cold flesh of my being. "All you have to do is to tell me."

"Tell you what?" I asked.

Kalasta leveled his gaze towards me. Everything in him begged for me, for what I was not certain I could give him. "Tell me you love me, Dara," he said. "Because I do."

Silence. My words failed me. Even more so when he whispered against the wind separating us during this languid night. "I do love you."

A gasp filtered out of Page's lips. He felt like an intruder in this intimate scene even more so now than when he accidentally read spicy books. He was about to move on to the next paragraph when a loud crash resounded from the hallway outside his room. What the hell was that? Did his mom trip or something? With a cordless vacuum? Why was she even vacuuming so late at night?

Page exhaled a short gust through his nostrils and shut the book, setting it back on the nightstand. Someone might need to go to the hospital with that kind of fall. He yanked the door open, and a shadow zipped past him in a flash. A strong grip wrestled his hold on the door and shut it with a strong slam.

"Listen to me," a tall woman with striking red hair, blue eyes, and freckles across her nose stared down at him. She gripped his shoulders and shook him some sense. "You need to run. Now."

He opened his mouth to answer, but his words died out in his throat. There was a woman in his house, in his room, telling him to run. Better yet, he recognized who the woman was. It was how he pictured her in his head. Believe it or not, he stared up at the real-life replica of Dara the fairy. That was right—from the book.