Page 10 of After-Hours Heir

Kid: I feel like a failure.

He looked at those words, and he could not imagine any other moment in time where he might have cared that another person felt that way.

Baby: I’m quite certain you aren’t.

Kid: Are you?

Baby: Yes. I am never wrong.

Kid: LOL. I know you think that.

Baby: I know that.

Kid: Has anyone ever told you you’re arrogant?

For some reason, he imagined her saying that with a smile in her voice, even though no one had ever said that to him with a smile in their voice. But she would. She would. He just knew that. For some reason.

Baby: It has been said a time or two. But, in this instance, it means that I’m right about you. And what I believe you can achieve.

Kid: You don’t know me at all, and you’re so confident that I can achieve what I want? You don’t even know what it is.

Baby: I know that. But I

He stopped typing. He didn’t know how to say the thing that he wanted to say. He had so few casual conversations with other people in his life. He tended to talk about business. And when he was with a lover they didn’t speak at all. This woman he had never met was the first person he had ever found pleasure with, spoken to, connected to.

Baby: I don’t think you know how unusual it is for me to have a—he had to pause again—friendship.

Kid: Is that what we are? Friends?

Baby: More of one than I’ve ever had.

Kid: Well, that’s difficult to believe because you have been wonderful to me.

A low rumble reverberated in his chest, a sound of satisfaction that he had never heard himself make.

He wanted to give her things. To shower her with jewels. She could be anyone, he knew that. Yet another reason he was in no hurry to ever meet her face-to-face. But also mostly…what he could maintain in these moments, he would never be able to maintain in person. If she had to integrate into his life, rather than fitting snugly in his pocket, then it would fall apart and quickly. He didn’t want that. He wanted it to be this. It was better to crave more than to know that he could never have more. Than to kill all the little spark that they had. He felt that, deep in his soul, he felt it.

Baby: You are a singular person. I don’t have to meet you to know that. And I know that you will figure out exactly what needs to be done. I know you will.

He had never expressed confidence in another person either. But he meant it. From the bottom of his soulless being.

Kid: Thank you. We can talk about something else. How was your day?

Baby: Unremarkable. Though I would have no one else to tell about it if it was remarkable.

Kid: I’m the same. I don’t really have anyone.

Baby: You have me.

He had never been there for someone. He had never been someone else’s…person. Maybe his mother had loved him in that way, but he couldn’t remember. Maybe he didn’t want to remember. But his father…his father had seen him only as an inconvenience to be off-loaded. Short-term gain, long-term loss, it had turned out.

Christos smiled when he thought of that. It still gave him pleasure to remember how he had rubbed it in the old man’s face. How he had held it over his head. How he had made him beg.

He took pleasure in life, it was just that other people would not generally relate to those pleasures. And he had never much cared about that.

He found he cared a bit now.

Kid: You have no idea how much I appreciate that. I feel really alone. I’m missing my dad.