by C. S. Starr
It was a good use of his limited free time. He’d never felt stronger physically than he had in the past year or so, and his parkour friends, while not terribly close, were more into strategizing how he cleared fences and scaled walls than how he balanced budgets. It was escapism at its finest.
A newish girl, April, showed up a few minutes before he’d finished up for the night. Tal thought she was cute, with a bleach blonde pixie cut and green eyes that seemed to invite a challenge. She nodded at him as she wrapped her weak ankle.
“You’re done?” she chirped, pulling up her socks.
“Yep,” he replied, wiping his forehead with his t-shirt.
“Sorry I missed your moves. I hear you’re good.” She stood and smiled brightly at him. “Another time.”
He glanced at her for a second and quickly weighed a few pros and cons before he fumbled in his bag for a pen and paper. “Call me sometime and we’ll go out together.”
She looked at the piece of paper before tucking it into her shoe, her eyes gleaming. “Will do.”
He walked away with a smile on his face. He’d had good luck with girls through parkour, short and long term. Alvi, the last girl he’d dated for six months, was an amazing traceuse. He’d grown bored of her, she tired of him, but the sex never faltered. It had been bar none, the best of his life. There was a physicality about it that led him to rise to the occasion in ways he’d never imagined. It had made a lot of the other stuff not matter for months and months.
When he walked through his front door later that night, his house was quiet. He showered, and sat down to look at the monthly budget. Financially, West was doing very well. He’d raised taxes two points and it had led to a great surplus, which he hoped he’d eventually be able to use to start upgrading infrastructure in more rural areas to encourage people to move outside the city core and grow more of their own food.
He was flipping through his mail from the week when he found a small envelope addressed to him in the most precise handwriting he’d ever seen. It was card-sized, and he reached for his father’s letter opener to break the seal.
It had a picture of a pier on the front and was from the Elected Governing Body of the Democratic Republic of East, thanking him for meeting with their representatives briefly and extending an olive branch for the future. No requests, no demands. Just a simple thank-you card.
Tal felt uneasy possessing it, since it was a reminder that he was keeping a secret from the person who allowed him to keep his region in the lifestyle he felt they deserved. Lucy’s leniency on her oil pricing, and the taxes Tal could subsequently place on it kept a lot of things going. He immediately balled it up and threw it in his trash can. Tal’s feelings about his contemporary shifted on a daily basis, but there was always an underlying thread of respect present, because she was great at what she did, and meeting with Lucy’s enemies, no matter how he’d been ambushed into it, or how little had actually been said, felt fundamentally wrong. Like a betrayal.
He’d just fallen asleep when he woke up to the phone beside his bed ringing.
“How fucking dare you. You knew…And still, you went and fucking saw her. You couldn’t resist, could you?” she hissed.
Tal hadn’t received a late night phone call from Lucy for more than two years. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. “Hi.”
“Go fuck yourself. And now I suppose you talk to her every fucking day, and you’re balls deep in her every time you’re in Seattle—”
He’d had enough of her insinuations about him hiring people because he was sleeping with them. It wasn’t the first time she’d made one; every time Tal hired anyone moderately attractive, there was a dig. “You’re nuts, you know that? You’re absolutely nuts. I’m not fucking Zoey. She reports to Rika. I don’t talk to her, and I don’t want to have anything to do with her. I have no idea why you care so much, or why you’d be obsessed with a girl whose heart you broke, but you don’t have to worry about me and Zoey. There is no me and Zoey. I don’t understand why we’re having this conversation—”
“You knew you’d get a reaction out of me. That’s why—”
“I hired her because I was hiring people, and she asked me for a job. That’s it. I don’t know why I have to explain myself to you.”
“You’re so fucking dense. You really have no idea why I’d be mad?” The bitterness in her voice seeped out and for a moment, Tal considered hanging up to avoid the toxicity. He knew that would piss her off more though, so he decided to stick it out for a few more minutes.
“I know exactly why you’re mad, and it’s childish. You’ve moved on, let her move on. I think you’d be happy that someone you once cared about is successful.” He did his best to speak calmly and rationally, partially to irritate her, and partially because he didn’t want her to know she still affected him, and her late night call had left him unwittingly nostalgic.
“I suppose you’re all having a good laugh about it too.” Her tone turned emotional and raw, and Tal’s heart ached, as it always did when she spoke from hers.
“No one’s laughing. What? Do you want me to fire her?”
“No,” she squeaked. “I don’t want that.”
“Then what do you want?”
“You know that’s a stupid question to ask me,” she mumbled. “I…I should go.”
“Night, Ce,” he murmured. “Sweet dreams.”
The phone clicked and she was gone. Tal hung his up and stretched out in his bed, both confused and saddened by her call. He’d missed their calls for a while, then forcibly convinced himself they’d been stupid from the beginning, but the pain in her voice, which she masked so well in their work calls took him back to some of the moments they’d shared, and he found himself lost, adrift in them for the better part of the night.
Copyright © 2014 C.S. Starr
All rights reserved.
