Something is not right. I thought it was the deal with Formosa, the water company we've been in negotiations with for well over ten months to bring clean drinking water to three remote Sub-Saharan African villages. Their CEO Lee Teo Hahn abruptly cancelled our meeting to finalize the specs for installation set to begin next week. In the last five years I've learned you can feed the poor but if they don't have clean drinking water they still die. I know Hahn is angling for more money out of the deal, Taylor already apprised me of his shady dealings and his penchant for high stakes gambling. But I'm certain I can keep the deal on track, even if I have to use a few unconventional tactics. Then Ros mentioned we have a major problem with one of my most loyal financial analyst, Richard Jenna. By 9am tomorrow the whole world will know about some mistakes Richard made as a young stock broker, but I have my legal team working an immunity deal for him with the SEC. I thought it was the absence of my assistant. She never takes time off but she's been out all week helping her sister-in-law care for the kids as her brother had his long awaited kidney transplant. But the office is a well oiled machine, it's not that...Anastasia. Her name floats like a delicious fragrance lingering in the air. She continues to be the most off thing about my entire existence. She hasn't been to Escala all week. Why hasn't she come back? I know she's safe because Barney gives me a daily update from the surveillance cameras I had installed in her building. Barney said she hadn't altered her routine all week straight to work then right back to her apartment. I wanted to go to her to beg her to come back. She's the difference, with her Escala felt like more than a spacious well appointed cage. With Anastasia everything was different. Even I was different, better, cured...Grey don't even go there that rabbit hole, holds nothing good, and honestly I don't truly deserve good not after what I did to her. I'm worst than the monsters I've hated all these years. I took the one beautiful different good thing in my life and in one night irreparably broke her. I deserved every wrong thing life could do to punish me. I deserved to be punished...if I could just...Business, I have to focus on business. People will begin to think I enjoy running a circus, the sick secret to any circus is the lie everyone tells themselves that you can tame a wild beast. I knew different once a beast, always a beast. I need everything under control again. My work is never off, I'm always in control. That one fact has kept me at the top of my field all these years. It wouldn't fail me now. I have absolutely no more patience for all these unscheduled events and other people's personal conflicts. I've got to get things back under control. I never could control Anastasia,not fully. She gave herself to me so willingly, so beautifully physically, but never her mind. I never quite knew what was going on in that beautiful, complicated, brilliant mind of hers. While it drove me batshit crazy, a small part of me enjoyed her independent thinking. She is my ultimate aphrodisiac. I could almost hear the delicious sound we made every time I plunged deep into her always wet for me depths...dammit any more thoughts like this and my erection would burst through my trousers. I'd been without her for five days but it felt like an eternity. I physically ached for her, and that was different. This is exactly why I chose contracts over relationships... until Ana...she made me want to do so many things I'd never done before but with her they never seemed so difficult. Now breathing felt difficult, thinking of her causes weird constrictions in my chest. In fact ever since she walked out of Escala I hadn't taken one solid deep breath. Life felt shallow and I was more convinced than ever something was not right. Ring!
"GREY" I say more forcefully into the receiver than I intended. The sound of my ever affectionate mother's voice responds. Unaffected by my terse greeting she brightly begins to inquire about my evening plans and the possibility of having Anastasia and I join her for an early dinner. Mother has always possessed a bottomless reserve of patience and persistence where I am concerned. Realizing she doesn't deserve my clipped responses nor wanting her to know how I'd fucked up any hope of her ever seeing Anastasia again I respond to her inquiries while cleverly evading her bigger question. "My apologies mother, Anastasia is tied up and unavailable to join us tonight." Suddenly my mind transports me to the beautiful portrait my Ana presented that night tied up in my playroom that's indelibly etched in my mind for eternity, only to be crushed by the superimposing image of her beautiful porcelain face streaked with tears as the elevator doors slammed shut on my one chance at... "I'm sorry mother what did you say?" My face settles into a pained expression as I listen to mother attempt to negotiate dinner with me, tonight. Were they tears of anger or pain? I shake my head to dislodge the memories, questions,and judgments. I feel like crap and would rather spend the evening watching video footage of Anastasia walking to and from work. At least this daily routine assuages my constant need to storm to her apartment and rip the door off the hinges, barely. Instead I agree to a dinner. I promise myself I won't indulge my mother's fascination with Anastasia. But part of me wants to keep this brief fleeting Anastasia experience alive a bit longer. She's mine and I want to believe she really is just tied up but coming home to Escala, to me, soon. But I sense the pretense of keeping us coupled in my mothers eyes might be my demise. Saying her name aloud already has the power to cripple me. It doesn't help that Anastasia has quickly become my mother's favorite topic of discussion and her newest attempt to cure me of what she deems the last barrier to me living a happy life. It's sad mother won't accept I'm a lost cause. There is no happy for me. All the doctors pronounced me a case for which there is no cure. I've always known even before the diagnosis there was no fix for me. I know mother believes Anastasia is the elusive missing ingredient to the cure she'd sought all these years. Perhaps, but if that were even remotely true we will never know, because true to form I completely fucked it up...like always.
"We're here Sir." Taylor's announcement jars me out of my thoughts. Suddenly realizing we'd just arrived at Seattle General and I'd spent the entire ride thinking of her. I'm going to make a piss poor dinner companion tonight, but mother will forgive me, like always. I still don't know why mother tries so hard to get close to me. I assume she is working under some fairytale notion that her love alone can turn a beast into a human again and I will one day return that emotion. The grave fault in her master plan is I will always stay far enough away and detached enough for her to never see the truth. I'll never be worthy of her love, and I can't return what I don't have. I will not stay long, I'll tell her I have some important business matter that just came up, running a multi-billion dollar company has got to come in handy for something.
As I round the corner to the hall leading to mother's office I hear it, one shot.
I exchange a quick glance with Taylor and without saying a word he unsheathed his gun and takes the lead as we both run in the direction of my mother's office. As we turn the corner Taylor suddenly stops. If not for my excellent coordination and complete aversion to touching other humans I would have run directly into his back. I look around Taylor's shoulder and see the most foreign yet familiar sight, my mother lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. Going against two decades of training myself to refrain from touch I dive to the floor and gather what has already become my mother's lifeless body in my arms. It's all happening again. I'm four years old with a dead mother, again. They've turned me back into a helpless ashtray all over again. But this time no one will save me...I better not let her go. Holding her tight in my arms I have my last coherent thought, no one will hurt my mother again.
There is so much noise and commotion going on but I can't hear anything. All I know is my saving grace, my mother is dead,again. Hours pass or maybe minutes but I can't seem to let her go. They keep coming to hurt her, but not this time. I won't let them hurt my mommy ever again. No, not again. This cannot be happening again. I yell for a blanket these idiots don't realize she's just cold, I need to warm her up. I'm bigger now I can fix this. I will keep her warm. How much fucking money do I have to give someone to get a goddamn blanket! At some point a blanket appears, good, now I can wrap her up. I'll do it just like those breezy fall evenings she would curled up in her favorite Adirondack chair with her cream cashmere coverlet and her favorite romance novel. I'd look on watching the breeze catch her hair. I was so quiet she wouldn't even know I was there watching until I feel asleep in that same position. She loves those stupid books, and I'd sneak and read them sometimes full of those perfect people and their perfect love. I would make it just like those days. I find myself rocking mommy in my arms keeping her warm and then someone touches me. I know they are touching my back because I feel it burning through my clothes like a searing hot brand on my skin. But they won't stop and the pain multiples dimensionally. Then from far away I hear the blood curdling scream of a little boy...only belatedly realizing it's me.