There are two things you should know about me and my sleeping patterns. First is that I am a selectively light sleeper. I can sleep through a thunder storm louder than God-knows-what. If a bomb went off twenty feet away from me and a jet suddenly broke supersonic speeds, I would have slept through it. I would wake up deaf, but I could sleep through it without a problem. Touch me, however, with a feather and lightly tickle me with the tip, and I will snap straight to waking up. I donât really know why, but at least it keeps me from getting kidnapped or anything.
That being said, when someone touched my shoulder, I jerked straight upright and had stars explode in front of my eyes as my forehead smashed into some poor sapâs face. Allow me to tell someone, it really fucking hurts when you do that. I think I felt worse for the guy whose face I probably just crushed with my skull that was probably harder than a rock. They were probably in a lot more misery than I was.
âOw! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!â tears sprung up to the corners of my eyes, and they were the manly tears of pain, not the emotional ones. I took a moment to hiss the pain away and then looked through the hazy vision to see whoever I had just turned into a victim. I could make out shaggy, shoulder length hair that was about as dark as mine and an expression that matched mine.
âWhat the hell?! Who the hell wakes up like that?!â Luciano, one of my fellow coworkers at Glassiniâs, was holding the lower portion of his face with his face contorted in slight agony. âYou...aghhhh!â
âSorry...how long have I been asleep?â the lights were half off, so I assumed...through clean up. Great job I was doing as a waitress on the last shift of the day. Damn it. Luciano pulled his hands away from his face, and I was really relieved that he wasnât bleeding through the face. I donât think I would have liked that or anything. His expression was just as annoyingly agitated as ever, though I had to admit that it had gotten a lot less annoying over the past several months. Three guesses why that was--and believe me, it probably didnât have much to do with a personal effort on his part.
âAbout ten minutes,â the older man grumbled at me. Luciano was a popular guy, which didnât entirely surprise me. He was, I suppose, handsome. Tan and dark haired, he was well built for a waiter and he moved with all the grace of a swordsman. I assumed that might have been because he actually fenced and did a few other sports. Even if I didnât like Luciano for all his jackassery, I wouldnât deny that he was quite the looker in that tall, dark, and handsome way. His expression remained set in its usual irritated manner whenever it came to dealing with me, but the words that came out of his mouth next didnât match the face. âYou feeling okay? Youâve been falling asleep all over the place.â
âIâm just tired. Busy and all that,â which was no lie. Just probably not as much of the truth as Luciano wanted to know. Lies through omission were, after all, one of my specialties. After all, I had to deal with Steve, and if not for the ability to create misleading truths, I can almost guarantee that I would have been hunted down and then beheaded. Or else, you know, part of the Assembly. Things would have been different, at the very least. Unfortunately, I already knew that it was too late to cling on to things that might have been, so I just tried not to let the thought of things that I wanted get to my head.
Also, rather unfortunately, my excuse didnât seem to pass by Lucianoâs âbullshit reasonâ meter, and he was giving me a look that was rather mistrusting. Then again, heâs never trusted me, which makes me laugh a little because one, I really canât be trusted, and two, Iâm am physically incapable of lying. The entire situation was a little ironic, truth be told. Regardless, he kept that tight-faced expression of pure irritation on as though it was practiced before clasping my forearms into his hands to help me off the chair I had been graciously asleep on. As much as we tried to be a stick in the mud to each other, we were colleagues with common courtesy. That didnât make his next words brilliant in selection though. âLook, if you canât stay awake for a whole shift, you gotta do us all a favor and stay home, dumbass.â
And he lugged me off of my ass and onto my feet with his...surprisingly large amount of strength. I was, however, suddenly jolted straight into the world of the awake, and my world was suddenly...well, it just hurt. A lot. In spite of my desire to cough and wheeze my way back to normal conditions, I managed to keep myself satisfied with the smallest sound I could manage and a quick grimace as pain pummeled me viciously on the right side. If it was any more appropriate for the situation, I would have cried like a wuss. See, there was something I had been trying to keep quiet about the past few months, though given what I had gone through about a two days ago, the situation seemed all the more dire. The important thing to get from all of that? I had two cracked ribs. And they hurt.
âHfffff...thanks. Iâll lock up,â oops. I didnât mean for that hissing inhalation of breath to come out. Letting it pass as a âshit I hope he didnât noticeâ moment, I straightened myself out and made sure to take really shallow breaths so my ribs wouldnât make me want to cry again. âYou can go home and whatever.â
âOkay, I donât like you, and I do doubt your intelligence, but that doesnât mean Iâm gonna let you stick around here with all those weird incidents recently,â and I had to do a little internal cringing of the mind and soul there. I knew what he was talking about. The area had, within the last three weeks, been infested with kidnappings, assaults, and murders...all aimed at women that were around my age. You know, young, stupid, and the perfect target for those kinds of things. One of the other servers had almost been raped, but, according to her, someone had come across her and her attacker and they both backed off at the same time. She quit two days later. âIâm locking up. Is your car fixed yet?â
Another internal cringe. No. That damn thing had broken down three times in the past six months. Psychics just arenât allowed to have nice things without them breaking, I swear.
âI can take care of myself,â which was true. If I could do it at that exact moment was a little bit less true. I doubt anyone can really take care of themselves with a pair of cracked ribs ailing them at any given moment of the day. âLook, we have early shift tomorrow. Just go home. Iâll be fine.â
âAnd you really are crazy. Or stupid. Iâve yet to figure it out,â Luciano said while rolling his oval shaped eyes. His neatly defined face relaxed into a serious expression that I didnât often get to see on it when dealing with other coworkers. âIâm giving you a ride to your house, end of question.â
â...youâre annoying as fuck,â I muttered. Right. One more thing you should know about me and sleep. Give me a few minutes after I wake up, and Iâll be grouchier than all hell for about twenty minutes before I get back to normal again...given I donât fall asleep again.
Turns out, Luciano ended up staying to help lock up. On some not-so-deep level, I was thankful for that because he was able to help out when I suddenly realized that raising my arms above my head actually hurt much, much more than I had wanted it to. It was admittedly painful enough to just about stop me in my tracks when I tried to put one of the boxes back on top of a cabinet. There had been a few gruff words of customary irritation exchanged throughout the course of the work, but somehow I managed to tough through it.
As we stepped outside into the hazy warmth of the late August air, I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck as they always did whenever I was out at three in the morning. Being on edge and paranoid all the time tended to make me nervous about things that other people wouldnât have thought twice about. The fact that Luciano was hanging around failed to make things any better, though I think that might have been more to do with the fact that I really couldnât defend myself if anything decided to jump out at me. I took a moment to sigh to myself before taking a few steps out into the parking lot. There was only one car there, and I assumed it was Lucianoâs. Now, I donât speak the language of car, but Steve knew the make and model. The spirit just seemed to think it was unimportant enough to disregard--that might have been because Luciano began talking about something that I didnât want to think about though.
âYou know, some guys keep coming in and asking for you,â Luciano started. I cringed a little bit at the thought. There were a lot of people that could come around asking for me, but there were quite a few that I wanted to avoid in particular. Point in case, Enforcers of the Assembly with their tendency to behead the people they were asking for. With one brow cocked at Luciano, I threw my expression into one of disbelief to make up for the fact that I actually couldnât say anything that denied knowing about it. My asshole-of-a-colleague sighed and shook his head as though I was an idiot. âTwo guys, brothers? One of them came to pick you up around Christmas time last year?â
âOh...â and another cringe, this time more visible and less inward. I hadnât seen those two since Christmas, after a short little excursion that Nicholas and I didnât talk about much. It had resulted in a lot of trauma, and for both of us, a few scars that hadnât quite healed over. If not for the fact that Faith had used whatever mumbo jumbo faith (excuse the pun, but there is no better word to describe it) powered abilities she claimed to have to fix us up, I doubt that we would have actually recovered. They had come around during Christmas. That had ended badly and awkwardly for everyone--it was just stupid to invite an ex over for the holidays. Especially when the relationship had lasted all of maybe a day and a half. Sometimes I questioned their social skills, but supposed that they had felt bad (again) that I was going to spending Christmas alone. I donât think they really understood that I spent it alone most of the time, even before the Winterfest fall incident.
But that was something to deal with later. Or never. I didnât intend on crossing paths with them again.
âNicholas and Brian, huh? Dunno why they think guessing at my shift is a good idea. You didnât tell them anything did you?â admittedly, I didnât want to see them either. It wasnât just the Christmas incident driving me there. There were some awkward tensions between me and...well, both of the Stone brothers. I didnât want to get into their relationship, and I wasnât ready for either of them to be forging (or reforging) one with me. Not to mention a few other things that were on my mind...those were the real problems, but it wasnât like I could honestly walk up to them and tell them about an entire community that existed in the gaps beneath the one that they knew.
âDidnât say a word.â
âGood, and I wonât say a word about you and Michelle,â a little widening of the eyes in surprise. âYeah, I know about you two. You thought Michelle could keep her trap shut? Probably lasted all of two days before I knew.â
âSo youâre the âone person that she might-have-sort-of-toldâ,â and that growl of irritation that escaped Lucianoâs throat was like music to my ears. I donât think I have to reiterate that I dislike him, do I? âIt just had to be you.â
âI told you, I wonât tell anyone. I keep my promises where I can,â because breaking them was something that my parents did, and I was convinced that I was nothing like them. Luciano and Michelle were apparently recently in a relationship, which had not only lessened the amount of complaints that reached my ears about how the world seemed to lack good men, but had also made Luciano infinitely more tolerable as a human being. It was as if the moment he was happy with someone, he was less interested in making the world suffer with him in his pit of loneliness. I couldnât say that I was ultimately surprised though--Michelle was the kind of person that men adored I suppose. Small and too helpless to be left alone in the eyes of those that held that testosterone fueled protective streak. As much as I disliked Luciano, I was aware that he wasnât lacking in the protective department, and he wasnât actually that bad of a person. âIf you hurt her though, Iâll kick your ass.â
âYeah, yeah,â and with a roll of the eyes Luciano put the last box up onto the cabinet. He gave me a look, and I stared right on back at him. âCome on, letâs get the hell out of here.â
âFor once we agree on something,â and I walked right outside into the warm air of late summer. It was August now, and school was going to start in a month. It was hard to believe that only eight months had passed since my last big fiasco. Harder still to believe that in another two, I was going to be charging headfirst into my next. No. Not a fiasco...just something I had to do. The air filled my lungs, cleaner than I remembered it being when I walked in to do my shift at Glassiniâs. I was telling the truth when I said I wanted to get out of that stuffy back room of the restaurant. It was confining, it was hellish, and it was everything that I didnât really want to deal with the last few months. I didnât want to be there any more than the next person that worked there. I just didnât want to go home either.
âI figured Iâd find you here,â a cool, rich voice of icy dark tones cut through the air like a tempered blade. I could practically feel my body temperature drop. I knew that voice, and it had been another one that I was avoiding. I hadnât heard it since an invitation to a party that I didnât end up showing up to. I turned on my heel to face the owner of the voice and felt a chill roll down my spine when I ended up locking eyes with him. He still had it.
âJoshua,â my voice came out concise. Not welcoming, but not repelling either. Figures as much, doesnât it? I got away from the two that had been pressing at my mind for all of eight months, and I forgot that Joshua had something that Nicholas didnât have. The willingness to use cunning and deceit. For all that Nicholas was competent at, Joshua was always a step ahead of him. Always. That was why he was standing in front of me at two in the morning at my workplace instead of Nicholas or Brian. I stared straight into his frozen eyes and tried to keep myself level headed. âLuciano, you can go on without me. I can guess what this is about.â
And I really could. It boiled down to a single sentence that couldnât leave either of our mouths until after Luciano had given his usual looks of distrust and irritation at being brushed aside as simply as that. It wasnât until the sound of a car door slamming shut and an engine starting reached my ears that the words came out. Words that I absolutely hated saying and words that I hated hearing. They never lead to anything good, after all.