Page 5 of Felix

I hurry past, keeping my head down and passing the large Elite 8 Studios sign lit up in bright yellow neon. That’s Vegas for ya. Outside, the day is bright, and I hitch my bag more securely over my shoulder as I walk toward my car. Seeing as I filmed a scene late this morning with Trevor, named Bruiser on set, I have a few days before I’ll be back.

We all have nicknames, or porn aliases, here at the studio. There’s Tink. Bruiser. Dixon, aka Dix, who’s worked here far longer than I have. He’s dating Niko, also known as Adonis. And Teddy, of course, the resident teddy bear who drunk-married Niko’s friend Kipp. We lost some of the other regulars, who quit for one reason or another, hence the call for new talent. But there are a handful of guys who film part-time, too. And me? Well…

I go by Felix.

That piece of me gets left behind as I slide into my car and shift focus. I have a different sort of work to do this afternoon, one where my companions only know me as Emil. The lab where I’m a research aide is inside one of the psych buildings on campus. I’m a first-year master’s student, which means I’m well acquainted with these buildings, but my unpaid job as an aide is new.

“Hey, Emil,” Lucy says as I enter the space. Like me, she’s working on this graduate study. We met just last week.

“Hi, Lucy. How’s it going?”

“Good. I talked to Nicole.” The project lead. “She asked us to go through these forms and add the approved candidates to the electronic database. We’re supposed to transfer all the info over and assign each a number.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

Lucy nods, and I pull up a chair next to her in front of the computer. I look through the forms as Lucy opens the program where we need to input the candidates.

“Are they all from the same nursing home?” I ask, flipping through the papers.

“Um, not sure. It should say, though?”

“Yeah, it does. Sorry, I have a tendency to speak my thoughts aloud,” I admit. “It’s a chronic problem.”

Lucy shoots me a smile. “No worries.”

“What’s this?” I ask, pointing to a line on the form that says study eligibility. “This one indicates ‘N-D.’”

“Oh, uh… Non-dementia. For the control group, maybe?”

“Nicole said it’s a blind study, though. So the participants should all have some degree of dementia, including those in the control group.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, it comes to me. “Oh, a baseline? The non-dementia participants would provide a comparative baseline for the cognitive training.”

“Wouldn’t the control group do that?” Lucy counters.

“For immediate effectiveness of the training, yeah. But not for long-term impact, right? We’re trying to determine whether these cognitive games help with memory retention, so comparing the results to a group without dementia would provide an indicator into what’s considered a ‘normal’ degree of memory loss after the fact.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Lucy says, huffing a small laugh. “You know, I feel bad for saying I love this stuff when our study is focused on dementia, but I really do love this stuff. It’s fascinating.”

“I know what you mean,” I reply, nudging my glasses into place. “It’s like a puzzle, except we don’t know the picture. We have all the pieces, but we have no clue how they’re going to come together or into what shape. And, at the end of the day, it might not even make a recognizable whole. But that doesn’t matter. Our job isn’t to force the pieces to be something they’re not. We just stand back and interpret whatever we’ve created.”

Lucy shakes her head. “Shit, I think you might be a bigger nerd than me when it comes to this stuff.”

I chuckle. “Guilty as charged.”

“Come on,” Lucy says, a smile on her face. “Let’s get these candidates in the system.”

It takes about an hour to work through the thirty-two forms Nicole left for us. It’s not the entirety of the study group, but it’s a good start. Once done, Lucy and I head our separate ways. I don’t have classes today, but I do have plenty of coursework to get done, so I drive straight home to dig in. I just make a quick stop at the convenience store down the street first, seeing as I’m low on energy drinks—a bad habit I can’t quite bring myself to quit.

As I’m stepping out of the store, admittedly distracted by thoughts of the paper I have to write, I bump into someone.

“Sorry,” I mumble, regaining my balance, only to nearly fall on my ass when I see the guy I stumbled into.

He’s tall. Like, really tall for how lean he is. He looks like a damn model or maybe even a K-pop star, with fine features, dark eyes winged with equally dark liner, and black hair falling messily above his shoulders in an artful, layered style. He’s about my age, if I had to guess, and for the briefest of moments, he stares at me in shock. Then his expression smooths out, and he smiles.

“I, uh…sorry,” I say again, jolting when my phone rings. I shoot the guy an apologetic wince before turning away and fishing the device out of my pocket. When I reach the corner, I glance back, expecting him to be gone. He’s still watching me. I walk out of sight, putting the phone to my ear. “Um, hello?”

“Hey, bro.”

“Bec?” I ask, checking the time on my phone. I guess school is out. “Something wrong?”

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