9. A New Relationship

Read from the Beginning
Read Part 8

Gilbert headed home and fell into bed. He had been asleep for about an hour when Mark Boyle started to wake up across town in apartment 407 in Arlington Eagan’s apartment building.

It was just before noon when Boyle's alarm clock jarred him out of a dreamless sleep. He groaned and sat up on the couch in the small apartment that had become his entire world. The layout was exactly the same as Eagan’s apartment and every other in the building.

Boyle never slept in the small bedroom. It had another purpose. Most of his time, when he was not at work, was spent in the apartment’s main room. A comfortable leather couch that doubled as a bed shared the space with a big screen television, a gaming console, a couple of cheap shelves filled with video games and an end table for his beer.

There was a nearly empty bottle sitting on the end table. Boyle reached for it and drank the warm beer. He grimaced as it went down and then tossed the empty bottle into a plastic recycling container, half filled with last night’s empty glass beer bottles. At least I recycle, he thought. He used to be proud of that fact. Now, he felt nothing.

He sat back on the couch for a moment, briefly considered going back to sleep and then headed for the shower.

It took awhile for the hot water to make its way to his shower, as it always did. When it was warm, Boyle stepped under the spray and let it bring him back to life. If you could call what he was living a life. He let his head fall forward onto the tiled wall and wondered for the millionth time how he had come to this.

When Boyle left high school, his ambition had been to become a video game programmer. He’d attended technical school where they taught him to program computers that were decades out of date. It should have come as no surprise that when he emerged he was only qualified to work on machines that were as old as he was, which almost no one used anymore.

He found work in a small manufacturing facility that specialized in creating prototypes. He programmed the old CNC equipment to create whatever the engineers wanted and when that was done he programmed it to create something else.

But Boyle didn’t give up on his dream. He set aside the small bedroom in his apartment for his office, bought some used office furniture and started educating himself. He saved up for a cheap computer and an internet connection and then used those to learn how to build a faster machine. Once he had a serviceable computer, he set out to learn the new technologies that powered the latest video games.

He knew what he wanted to create. He had been an avid gamer for as long as he could remember. Instead of cable television, he spent his entertainment budget on a subscription to a gaming network, giving him access to a world of other players and a window out of his crappy apartment and into the world he really wanted to live in.

For a while, he had been learning, a little more each day. But lately, he had been beset by a lingering depression, a feeling that he would never reach his goal, never escape this dreary life. His bedroom/office had fallen into disuse and he spent more time playing old games and drinking beer and less time working on his future. Well, no time, lately. He had fallen into a routine. A rut, to be more accurate.

To add some stress to his depression, there were rumors at the company of another round of layoffs. The older systems were giving way to newer technologies. Instead of relying on programmers to tell them what to do, the new machines had access to a near limitless list of pre-programmed jobs. Untrained workers could tell the machines what to do by pressing a few buttons. The only good news what that the new tools were expensive and it wasn’t clear whether his firm would invest. But the threat of it filled him with dread.

The hot water started to run out and he hadn’t washed his hair yet. Quickly, he lathered up and rinsed before the warm water was completely gone. He threw on his clothes, briefly considered shaving but abandoned the idea. He grabbed his car keys off the kitchen counter on his way out of the apartment.

His apartment was at the front of the building so he didn’t have to walk far to get to the stairwell. He started down and was surprised to see the door to the 3rd floor hallway open and Sandy Gallagher leaning against it.

“Hi, Mark,” she purred at him. He stopped short.

Mark had spoken to her once, about a year ago or so at one of the ill-fated building holiday parties that the new manager had thrown in an attempt to create a sense of community. It was an awful little affair held on the small square of lawn behind the building. No one had anything in common with each other, so they sipped free bottles of beer and waited together for the delivery pizza to arrive.

Sandy had been (and remained) the only other person in the building who seemed to be near his age, so he had introduced himself. There were maybe a couple dozen words shared and then it was over, all but the pizza eating anyway.

She had never looked at him again, though he sometimes pretended it was because he came and went on an odd schedule. And now she smiled at him from the doorway to the third floor, in her nightgown. A question about why she was home at this hour was playing in the back of his mind, but it couldn’t get to the front because he was wondering why she was nearly naked. He realized he could see through the thin, white material to her small nipples.

“Um, hi,” he replied when his attention made it back up to her eyes and he realized she was waiting.

“Can you help me with something?” she asked.

“I was on my way to work.”

“It will only take a second.” She smiled at him and led him across the hallway to her apartment, which was situated directly beneath his.

She led him through the living room and into the kitchen, pulling a light bulb, still in its box, off the shelf as the went. “Can you help me put this in,” she asked sweetly. “I can’t reach it. See?” She stretched up toward the light socket, she was a few inches too short. Boyle didn’t notice that as he was caught up in the movement of her short top rising up her legs until he could see the white strap of a thong, high on her hip.

His eyes slid off her exposed legs to the kitchen chair behind her, a steady enough platform to allow a person much heavier than her reach the light. What was going on?

Boyle was not the kind of guy that girls came on to. He had been, when he was younger, but the more dedicated he became to pursuing his dream of becoming a game designer, the more ridiculous he began to look in the eyes of potential dates. He became accustomed to the confused look a date would get when he finally told her that he hoped to make a living making video games one day. It usually put a serious road block between him and a second date, to say nothing of sex.

“Well, are you going to do me...this favor or aren’t you,” she teased.

“Yeah...sure.” He took the bulb, reached up to the fixture and threaded it into the socket. The light, which was already on, came to life in his hand. He flinched and she reacted immediately by throwing her arms around him.

“Wow! That was a little scary,” she smiled up at him.

Certain that she was making fun of him, he untangled himself from her and backed away. “Well, there you go. Nice to see you, Sandy.”

She moved quickly by him and beat him to the front door, closing it securely and turning the deadbolt. “You’re not going to leave without letting me thank you, are you?”

“I’m going to be late for work. I really should go.” He felt like he said these words with some authority, but in reality his mind was spinning and it came out weakly. Logically, he knew that what he desperately hoped was happening couldn’t actually be happening. Even if it was, it would all end as soon as she found out who he really was. She was all smiles, playing with her blonde hair and batting her blue eyes. He really did not want to see her change when she learned what he was all about. That was never pretty.

“I should go,” he started, but she pressed her little hands to his chest, which he noticed had the effect of pushing her breasts together nicely, and pushed him backward to the couch. He fell into it and was surprised by how comfortable it was, but only for as long as it took for Sandy to climb on top of him. Then he forgot everything but her. She put her elbows on his shoulders and looked down into his eyes.

“I want to thank you,” she said, “and I plan to.”

Her eyes had seemed blue before, but for the life of him, Boyle couldn’t tell what color they were now, they were just beautiful. So beautiful. Her lips parted and she kissed him, deeply. He lost his breath and felt the fear start to loosen its grip on him. Maybe she would understand. He opened his eyes and looked into hers again. Yes, he was sure she would understand.

She pulled back and smiled. He realized something was happening to his body that hadn’t happened in the presence of a girl in a long time. She realized it, too, and settled herself onto him more securely.

“I’m going to thank you properly for helping me,” she said. “And then you’re going to do one more favor for me.”

He may have said yes. Later, he would swear that he could not remember anything that had happened after the time he first saw Ms. Gallagher in the stairwell.

Read Part 10