Integrity by E.J. Noyes

Author:E.J. Noyes [Noyes, E. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642474657
Publisher: Bella Books
Published: 2023-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Averting a disas-TER

I woke up startled and gasping from a nightmarish dream about carrying a faceless someone away from a monstrous tsunami. The person in my arms, clutched tight against my chest, was important. I didn’t know who it was, I just knew I had to keep them safe. But no matter how fast I ran, the wall of water kept inching closer and closer until it pooled around my legs, trying to pull me under.

Not hard to figure out where that dream came from, right, Subconscious?

Sophia stirred when I untangled my body from hers. A morning-clumsy hand fumbled over my hip. “You okay?” she mumbled. “You’re all sweaty.”

“Just running marathons in my sleep, as my dad used to say.” I sat up on the edge of the bed, twisting to look back at Sophia. The soft morning light washed over her, highlighting the reddish tints in her dark hair, the smoothness of her skin, the sleepy smile. The image of her lying in rumpled sheets was one I wanted to imprint into my memory. Gorgeous. Desire twisted my insides. If I was a regular person, and we were a regular couple, or even a couple, then I would have slipped back under the sheets and shown her that desire. Instead, I stuffed it down, and left her lying there. Intimacy was another delay I couldn’t afford when there was work to do.

I tried to keep the morning as normal as I could. Normal for us… My regular yoga and workout, a “relaxing” walk hand-in-hand along the beach in the fresh morning air, a quick swim—Sophia in a bikini was a wonderous thing—then breakfast at a hipster café. I thought we’d been found, but it turned out to be a guy who couldn’t find his girlfriend and once he did, they left in a cloud of young love.

Love. A silly wistful want that kept bobbing to the surface, driving home how nice it would be if this were real, you know, without me carrying a backpack full of laptops and hard drives around and constantly worrying that I’d been found, and that this might be my last moment of freedom, that I’d failed in the most basic task I’d been assigned by Halcyon. I longed for the realness where I could balance my work and a girlfriend, where I wasn’t lying to her almost every minute. I wasn’t lying outright to her face, but lies of omission were still lies.

I’d been steeling myself for a solid dose of persuasion to extract Sophia from the café, but once she’d finished her breakfast, she gulped down the last of her second coffee and reached across to take my hand. “Time to start our workday grind?”

Grind wasn’t far from the truth. Sophia remained engrossed in her work, still dancing in her chair, this time with a set of chunky headphones on her head. And I…I struggled. An hour in and I was already so frustrated that I felt like tossing the laptops out the window.

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