So You Used to Be Human - Book 3 (Original Version)

Chapter 7: Twenty-One Minutes

The truth is, I've been avoiding writing this chapter.

There's this fantastic little game on the iPhone that just came out (no, I have no idea if it's out on Android since I don't own an Android anymore, so please don't ask) and it's been a great distraction for me.  I even allowed it to have push notifications so every now and again I get a little reminder that my pirates need to do some plundering or some similar nonsense.  The thing is that I know I'm using this game to distract myself and I'm still letting it do it to me.  Or since it's truth time, I'm still letting myself be distracted.

What happened isn't even that shocking, but every time I go to talk about it, I do that little thing we all do.  You know the one.  The one where I change the story, shift it to my perspective so I don't look like the bad guy in all of this.  It's important to me, to my ego and my memory that I don't look the bad guy here, and to that end, I've actually found myself changing the facts of what happened, actually changing the narrative.  All so I can look like the hero, when I know the truth of it.

I'm kind of coming to terms with it though but it's going to be hard to tell the turn of what happened, exactly as it happened.  My memory is already being affected by the bullshit I've been telling myself, so I might not get all of the facts right, but I'll try my hardest to be brutally honest.

Try to not hate me too much.

***

Three days is too long to be alone with your own thoughts.

Jaime had begun to stir about twenty minutes ago, her breathing becoming a lot less shallow and her heartbeat quickening ever so slightly as she began the slow process of waking up.  It was the longest twenty minutes of my life.

The three days preceding this twenty minutes had been horribly stressful as well, don't get me wrong, but that was a different kind of stress and I was actually actively doing something, problem solving and fixing and generally being super-fucking-useful. That was good energy, something that Jaime had admired about me when we first met, and was utterly unlike the energy of the past twenty minutes where I was just waiting for something to happen.  Where I was just waiting for her to wake the fuck up.

We were in a motel on the outside of town and I had taped down the curtains on the windows, turning the room into a vampire lair where we could hole-up and be safe for a couple of days.  Delivery options in the area were amazing, so I was always well stocked on food.  There was literally no reason for me to leave the room.  Not that I wanted to.

Nothing could have forced me from that room in the past three days.

I'd been going over all of the things I imagined I was going to say to her, but I was constantly second guessing myself as each line either sounded way too dramatic or really fucking stupid.  There was no in-between going on here at all and I was feeling utterly frustrated by the whole process.

When I'd first sensed the change in her I had thought she would be up in about five minutes or so and had prepped myself, psyching myself up with the speech I had so carefully prepaid, but the more I went over it, sometimes even muttering it out loud, the sheer lunacy and idiocy of what I was saying, just marched out, kicked me solidly in the nuts and left me panicking, knowing that no matter what I said, it was never going to be good enough.

That supposed five minutes had stretch on and on to the point where I was just getting resentful and considered just shaking her awake, or even dropping a handy lamp to "accidentally" wake her up.  Once she was awake then I could finally get through my massively revised and not stupid-at-all speech and just get on with the next part.

I positioned myself at the foot of the bed instead of my original position of right next to her.  Common sense had finally kicked in, managing to override the rising panic that was simultaneously kicking and eating holes in my gut, and I had realized that although it would normally be comforting, this was Jaime I was dealing with.  Out of kicking distance was the prime position for dealing with Jaime, especially with the bomb-shell speech I was about to drop on her head.  Hopefully it would catch her by surprise long enough for me to get all of the words out, and then I would have the chance to show her that I wasn't such a fuck-up after all.