Nope, she takes a sip and instead of swallowing it, she spits it into my mouth before pushing it closed. Her lips brush against mine before I can react to what she just did.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Beep! Beep! Beep!
My eyes flutter open and reality settles back in.
Of course, it was another fucking dream.
It’s been five days and I’ve relived five different memories. I fucked up and now she’s gone. Maybe just from my life, or maybe, from this world entirely. She’ll probably haunt me in my dreams until the day I die.
I deserve it.
I shouldn’t have let her walk out the door that night. I have no idea what happened, I can’t find a single trace of her, like she vanished into thin air.
No matter how many cameras I hack or how many leads I try to follow, I can’t find her. I keep replaying the voicemail she left me. The weight in my chest gets heavier every time I hear her voice break right before the loud sound of wreckage.
No one knows how much she means to me. At the time, I even refused to admit it to myself, so no one knows how much this hurts me. They have absolutely no idea how much I’m crumbling under this mask I put on every morning.
It’s morbid, but I check the obituary section on the news website again like I do every morning, praying I never come across her.
If I don’t see her name next to a picture of those blazing green eyes, then it gives me hope she might still be out there somewhere.
When I don’t come across her name, I get up and continue the cycle. I’ve always prided myself on being organized. I want everything to work efficiently. It didn’t always bore me, but it works.
I will live a boring life if it means I get to control the outcome.
My friends and company depend on me to keep a tight ship. I, for one, prefer having a meticulous schedule. Wake up, work out, go to work, sleep, my routine visits to the club on Tuesday and Saturday nights, then repeat.
It leaves little room for error or surprises. Errors? I can fix, but I don’t do surprises. Surprises seem like organized chaos I have no control over.
I thrive in situations I can control.
He who has control, has all the power.
I went into tech, knowing full well that I didn’t have to deal with people face-to-face. And when I do, it’s usually transactional, something good for business and nothing more. I refuse to pretend to care when I don’t. Emotions aren’t really a thing I do, I’ve protected my mask of indifference for a long time.
My father taught me at a young age that emotions were useless. They make people weak. While I may hate my father, I agree with him on this. Emotions are messy; I don’t have time for messes in my life.
At least that’s what I thought, until her.
My need for control was one of the main reasons I started Torres Security, with the help of my best friend Gavin. We practically grew up together, and he’s the only person I trust to never betray me.
It took Gavin years to break through my walls. He’s like a brother more than anything else. No one else is even close to knowing the real me, just him and Maze. But, I had to fuck it up and push her away.
How fucking stupid can I be?!
I keep to my routine like everything is normal. To the outside world, it is.
No one, not even Gavin, has noticed my well-placed mask, but day by day I feel the mask cracking.
I’m not sure what feels worse: being numb or feeling EVERYTHING.
Before she came into my life, I was numb. Everything was a dull grey, and I simply went through the motions.
I was just a mask among many others.
