Kaleidoscope of Memory (Newroom PDX short stories, #12) by L.J. Breedlove

Author:L.J. Breedlove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short stories, bdsm, university, recovery
Publisher: L.J. Breedlove
Published: 2022-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Fire Drill

A Newsroom PDX Short Story

Caution: The short stories may have more triggers and/or sex than the series itself. You’ve been warned!

I

Ryan Matthews thought the university Task Force on Innovation had gotten boring. Oh, it was productive, he conceded. Everyone seemed happy with the progress it was making. People were talking to each other, and that alone was no small thing.

But he was bored. He considered for a moment which Ryan was bored and shrugged. They were all him, right? That was one thing he and his therapist agreed on: all of the Ryans were Ryan Matthews. They also agreed that perhaps he had given up passion for self-control in order to get clean and sober — over three years ago now — and perhaps, the reason Ryan-at-20 was rebelling was that he didn’t need to be so tightly controlled now. Wasn’t there room for passion?

His therapist had mentioned a song his dad had played on road trips: country western no less. Ryan had looked it up and laughed. It should have been his theme song:

Still taking chances

Taking candy from strangers

Speedin' up on curves

Ignoring the dangers

Feel like a fool learning new dances

It keeps me on my toes

Still taking chances

Ain't scared of winnin'

Swingin' for the bleachers in the ninth inning

Still taking chances

Before chances take me away

Some guy named Michael Martin Murphey had sung it in the early ‘80s, and Ryan loved it. Teresa just rolled her eyes. “It’s you all right,” she said. “But country western?”

Ryan laughed. He didn’t live like that anymore. And maybe he missed that kind of passion. Missed speeding up on the curves, ignoring the dangers, swinging for the bleachers....

It wasn’t about sexual passion, because his sex life had plenty of passion, he thought with a grin. But one of his professors had said he used to start shit because he was passionate about issues and making the world a better place. Now it seemed like he just did it because he was bored.

And that had felt like truth. Well, Dr. Maria Lopez was on this task force — he’d have to ask her if she recognized the old Ryan after this event.

President Andrew McShane had convened the Task Force to look at ways the university could better respond to problems. After the last year of ‘problems’ at the university, no one argued against the need for that. The university had faced Covid with an unprepared Health Clinic. The Athletic Department went to a basketball tournament and turned their homecoming into a super-spreader event because Athletics didn’t tell its players, didn’t test them, didn’t do a damn thing. And people died, some of them EWN staff. Ryan still grieved their deaths.

They had Patriot Front recruiters in Campus Security who managed to place bombs in the Eyewitness News newsroom. A vice president went off the deep end, and people dismissed it as being an overly ambitious administrator until he kidnapped an EWN editor and held him hostage. Ryan would personally bear the scars of that forever. Literally and figuratively.

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