Excerpt: Between the Waves

He was beautiful. His ebony curls pulled back to stay out of his chiseled feature filled face even as he took off his gleaming and equally ebony metal helmet. Had this been any other young man casually disarming himself on a jousting field after having unseated four consecutive practice dummies Morgan would have been wondering to herself what metal he'd used to make it that lovely shade of black or if it was a caused by the way it was heated. But the man standing on the field, eyes shining with pride at his work, body near soaked in sweat was not simply any other man. He was the American National Jousting Champion, Reeve Talbot. And this year he was aiming to become the North American Jousting Champion. A competition that Morgan had managed to not only win tickets to but to also win a dinner with the man that she had idolized since high school.
"You know, she'll have to blink at some point." The deep voice beside her pulled her softly out of her imaginings of what this dinner might consist of; some talk of his amazing jousts, her work with unstable compounds at the college, and then maybe into the common ground of their love of all things medieval and renaissance fairish.
"That is unless she managed to learn how to breath through her eyes. Like those one creatures. What are they called?" Her mother's bird-like tones brought her back to earth completely.
"There isn't a creature that breathes through it's eyes, Mom" Morgan sighed and patted her mother's thin graying quaf as she stood from the wooden bleacher where she'd been glued for the last hour and a half. "You're thinking of the Yogi from that episode of Roseanne." The older woman was forever mixing up episodes of Roseanne and reality. Morgan simply supposed it happened when you got older and figured out the wonderment of being able to watch your favorite show over and over and over again because every episode was on a little disc that could be tossed into that thing that the kids now use to watch movies.