Chapter Three
Kid: I think I might be having a breakdown.
C HRISTOS LOOKED AT his phone and frowned.
Baby: Why is that, Kid?
Kid: Work. It’s always work, I know.
Baby: Work can be stressful.
It was a strange experience, looking down at his phone, reading these words and experiencing…empathy for the faceless woman who was typing them.
Christos was largely unfamiliar with empathy. It was a useless emotion.
Even so he found that he almost wanted to offer something like comfort to this woman. He had never experienced a feeling like that, not in his memory. It was possible he had felt such things before. But he could not readily recall.
He was the sort of man who conducted himself with ruthless precision.
While he indulged the pleasures of the flesh when the need arose, he was not a libertine.
He was not given to excess. He had never been one for illicit substances, but if he was pressed, he would say he imagined this was what a drug habit might feel like.
There he was, in his penthouse apartment, his ruthlessly pristine apartment that had not one shred of softness, sitting on the edge of his couch, a glass of scotch to his left, his phone in his right hand, staring at it like an addict waiting for his fix.
Hiding it. Like it was wrong.
It did feel wrong. It felt like a line of cocaine.
Maybe that was why he liked it so much. Because nothing was truly forbidden.
Connection, though, that he withheld himself from, and maybe it was why it felt so intoxicating to indulge this now.
Baby: What happened?
Kid: It’s nothing…
Her text paused for a while. He knew that he was skating against the edge of their rules.
The rules they had about revealing too much about themselves.
He wondered if she was someone with a degree of notoriety or fame.
It was possible. He didn’t care: all that he knew was that she prized her anonymity as much as he did, and that made this work.
But he wanted this. He wanted to do something for her. He wanted to find the right words to type out to make her feel better.
It was funny, he did not feel this compulsion at any other point throughout his day.
He thought back to Sylvie Jones’s expression when he had told her that he was going to speak to the board to begin finalizing his purchase of the company.
She had been devastated. But this was business, and he couldn’t understand the personal nature so many people applied to it.
Businesses succeeded, and they fell. It was the natural order of things.
At least, in this world where nature had been imposed upon by men, it was.
In a capitalistic society, it was how the earth turned.
He saw no more cause to feel emotional over a company like his consuming a smaller one than a lion eating a gazelle.
And if someday he was weak enough that the same could be done to him, he was no hypocrite. All was fair in the arena.
It did not mean he wouldn’t fight. But he wouldn’t sit down and weep about it. People like Sylvie Jones seemed to think a family business meant something. That it was their family. Family meant nothing to Christos. He was therefore unmoved by such sentimentality.
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.
He could not understand that. He did not miss his father. He didn’t miss his mother either. It was possible that he might have missed the void where she once was, as it was that void that had sucked him in, seen him thrown away into that life of hard labor. He just couldn’t remember.
Baby: I know a great many people love their fathers.
Kid: You don’t?
How did he tell her he didn’t love anyone? How did he tell this woman who seemed so lovely, so nice and kind that love was a foreign concept to him?
Baby: No.
That was simpler.
Kid: I’m sorry. He must be a bastard.
He chuckled.
Baby: You have no idea.
Kid: I know. I know I don’t really have an idea of you at all. But I feel like I do.
He wanted her to maintain this distant idea. This fantasy. He wanted her to believe that he was good. That he was a man who could be trusted. A man that she could lean on.
He wanted to be that for her because he knew that it wasn’t true. Because he knew that it wasn’t him.
He did. Truly.
Was this a role-playing fantasy?
He wasn’t used to questioning himself at all. He wasn’t used to examining his motives. He simply did whatever was expedient at the time. But this wasn’t expedient. It made no real sense.
Indulgence.
Maybe that was the problem. He had made it thirty-eight years without an indulgence, and now he couldn’t resist this one that had dropped into his lap. He didn’t believe in fate. He believed that a man made his own fate.
With blood and sweat.
Tears accomplished nothing.
Baby: If you were here, I would kiss you.
He decided to move it into intimate territory.
They could talk, and honestly, he enjoyed it as much as he enjoyed their more charged encounters.
But sometimes moving it to sex felt more comfortable, because at least if it was sexual he could categorize it.
He could make it about the physical reaction he had to her, and not the emotional one.
The truth was, in the months that he had been talking to his mystery woman, he had not slept with anyone.
She had been his all-consuming focus. His night and his day.
She had been…everything.
Everything.
Kid: I wish you were here. I
The text paused for a long moment. And then…
Kid: I want to meet.
Sylvie could barely breathe. She couldn’t believe that she had typed that.
She didn’t want to meet him. She was destroyed and crushed after today.
She couldn’t tell him all the things that were riding around inside of her, and she wanted to.
She had this feeling that this man could be her ultimate fantasy.
The port and her storm. She needed someone.
So desperately. But as soon as she said it, she regretted it, because the stakes were too high.
What if he didn’t like her? What if he didn’t…
His response came slowly, but it was definitive.
Baby: That isn’t a good idea.
Kid: I know it isn’t. It’s just that I want you. I am so tired of writing to you and wishing that you could hold me.
She was getting emotional now. Ridiculous. Their conversations were personal and impersonal all at the same time. The sexual encounters steamy, but not…this.
They didn’t talk about holding one another.
But it was what she wanted.