With a Pull of a Trigger

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

What Is and What Would Never Be

Flowers meant a lot to Catherine Aspen.

Not much knew about that one simple fact but that was okay because really, nobody cared anyway. Nobody cared that outside the office, she had other things to do. Nobody cared that before CIA, she had a life. Another less complicated, happier, and ultimately better life she, in the end, left behind unwillingly.

The fresh soil looked moist. Most of the people who came for his funeral had gone already, and it was just her alone, looking at the fresh grave.

Sighing, she closed her eyes.

Twenty-two years was a long time.

A knock sounded at her door. Catherine looked up from the documents she had been reading, and removed her reading glasses. “Come in,” she said.

Reini shyly went in, walking towards a seat in front of her desk. “Good morning, Miss Aspen.”

Catherine nodded in response.

Reini sat down, smoothing her skirt. “I, uh, I met with Mister Baxendale yesterday.”

Catherine’s eyebrows almost reached her hairline. “Really?”

“Yes. He, uh, told me to tell you something.”

Catherine nodded slowly, looking at Reini expectantly.

“He told me to tell you that he’ll be where his dream was.” Reini took a deep breath, closing her eyes, before opening them again, saying, “he also told me to tell you he was sorry.”

Catherine blinked once, then twice, before finally settling for closing them for a few moments, trying to hold in the tears. It was at that crucial moment, when everything she had been hoping for had shattered, breaking into millions of tiny pieces.

She supposed that it was bound to happen anyway. Love was an uncertainty, a paradise waiting to be discovered, yet a bomb waiting to be detonated. It just so happened that theirs was a bomb with a timer, doomed to break everything in reach to break into pieces.

Her heart and his were mere collateral damages. None of it mattered to the others, in the end.

Love was like that, she supposed. Love was the biggest, the grandest, the best and the worst paradox to have ever existed. Love was the enemy and the friend.

Love was the vice everyone clung to.

But it was also the vice that broke everyone in the end.

“I have my doubts,” said Catherine, her eyes still closed, “and I really don’t know what I’m supposed to believe.”

The cemetery remained silent. Birds weren’t chirping merrily like usual, and there was no windy breeze. There was only her, and a grave containing the person she loved with all her heart.

“I’m confused, really,” admitted Catherine. To whom she was admitting it to, she didn’t know. Perhaps it was to him. Perhaps it was to herself. She didn’t know.

Catherine opened her eyes, smiling sadly at the grave before her. “All I know is that I’ll be waiting. I’ll wait forever, if I have to, but I’ll wait. I’ll wait where our dreams intertwine.”

She crouched low, putting a single begonia flower in the middle of the grave. “Beware,” said Catherine. She put a single monkshood flower, and then an oleander flower. “An enemy is near, and caution.”