~ 1 ~ Sunset

"Don't you want to eat anything, Chris?"

Claire's soft voice startles me and gets me out of my thoughts, back to the table. I shake my head as if that could shake off the daydreams that have been haunting me for more than a month now, and look up to her. She is standing next to the dinner table with a breadbasket in her hand and looks at my empty plate with worried gray-blue eyes.

"You already know..." I answer and close my eyes. In a moment she will give me a lecture again.

But my prediction doesn't come true. Seconds pass with nothing audible but the sound of the boiling coffee in the coffee machine. Then suddenly I feel her hand on my shoulder. I open my eyes again and look up to my sister who is still looking back at me.

"Don't you finally want to tell me what happened? It might help you," she suggests, but I don't want to talk about it. To do that, I would have to tell her the truth first.

"Another time," I promise her and she leaves the breadbasket on the table as she goes to check on the coffee.

Sighing, I look at the floor-to-ceiling glass front of the living-dining-room. On the other side of the balcony railing the sun is going down, slowly disappearing behind the mountains in the distance and shining its reddish light through our windows.

It was an evening just like this when it happened back then.

It's been pretty much exactly eleven years by now. I was still new to the S.T.A.R.S. division of Raccoon City, at that time still a dreamy little industrial town in the Arklay Mountains. Its police department gave me another chance after my screwed up career at the Air Force. I had never been good with authorities which eventually led to my dismissal. But with S.T.A.R.S. everything was different.

Our captain Albert Wesker was relatively new himself when I was recruited for the Alpha team back then, and yet we weren't the only newcomers.

Jill Valentine joined shortly after me as the machinery expert, and that same day Wesker decided we all should go get a drink in the evening to get to know each other better. The sun was about to go down when we entered the bar Black Jack and had long ago yielded to the moon and the stars when we left it again. I became friends with Jill and Barry Burton and talked a lot with them until they had to go early – Barry had his family at home and Jill wasn't the type for long nights – and leave me with the others I barely knew.

Brad Vickers, our pilot and hacker, already felt sick after a couple of drinks and had to leave as well, and Joseph Frost was so drunk at one point that he couldn't drive or find the way home anymore, so Wesker and I – the only ones that could still think clearly – decided to bring him to the Raccoon City Police Department to have him sober up in a cell.

If only back then I had known what I know today, I probably wouldn't have gone to the police department with Wesker, because I spent the night in a cell as well. Unlike Joseph, though, I didn't simply fall asleep. I don't know if it was the time of day, my drunken state or something else, but I got much closer to my captain during that night than I was used to at that time.

It all began with a friendly conversation, once more we discussed the highlights of the evening, made some fun of Joseph, and naturally, everything seemed a bit more amusing than it really was because of our light-headed state, until suddenly he said: "I am glad you found the time to come with us tonight."

That was the moment when the conversation became personal.

"My pleasure. It was great to get to know the others from the team," I answered.

Wesker stopped me by waving his hand. "Honestly, as far as they're concerned, it would have been enough for me to check their files. Actually it was my plan to get to know you..."

Something about his behavior changed. Only subtly, but noticeably. And something about my feelings changed as well; I got goose bumps. So he had just wanted to get to know me better. The others didn't seem to be that important to him.

"Do you know how long I've been watching you, Chris?" he asked, wearing his characteristic sunglasses despite the darkness, completely hiding his eyes and with that his look. That was one of the peculiarities of Albert Wesker; no one could see through him. He always had his sunglasses on, even at night.

What he said to me, the tone of his voice, his posture... Everything in his appearance gave me the expression that he had a personal interest in me, the nature of which could hardly be overlooked. At first I thought it was just my imagination. Wesker had always, or at least so it seemed to me, preferred me over the others in our team, but even so I had never hit on the idea that he wanted me.

Did I want him as well? I don't know. But my body reacted to him. The goose bumps made me feel really cold when he touched me. A tingling feeling that I didn't know whether I should enjoy or fight against, went through my body from top to bottom, and for a moment I thought I was trapped in a dream. This couldn't really be happening... or could it?

I was too perplexed to act, go along or fight. All I could do was just stand there, speechless, and stare at him with my eyes wide open, afraid but at the same time excited about what he would do next. My captain's face remained expressionless, and only now I realized what he had meant by saying that he'd been watching me for so long. And how easy it was for him.

I remembered my youth, the time when I liked to put on sunglasses myself, to hide my looks from others. Could it be possible that he wore his for the exact same reason? How long had he been watching me without letting me notice, and how often had he probably gone through this situation in his mind till he finally decided that here and now was the right time to make it reality? The feeling that my own captain was basically a stalker sent chills down my spine, but in a way that it flattered me as well.

"You're one of my best men, Chris," said Wesker, who obviously enjoyed saying my name at the end of every sentence, and I noticed how I lightly blushed from the ambiguity of this statement. I was a trained pilot and an unmatched sharp shooter, the latter being my position in the Alpha team... but Wesker meant something else.

He backed me up against the cold wall of the cell right next to Joseph's, his left hand slowly went under my T-shirt and stroked my abs, the right one my backside. This way he didn't have a free hand to hold my face in place while he brought his lips closer to mine, but he didn't need to anyway. I was frozen like a statue.

And then he kissed me. Chills, goose bumps, heart pounding, and then there was that other warm feeling coming out of nowhere. I managed to free myself from my frozen state just barely enough so I could close my eyes, and can't remember anything after that.

Either way, early the next morning, Joseph, who was confused and stricken by headaches, woke me up with the question why I was sitting on the cell floor, leaning against the wall, with a hand in my open pants...