Page 110 of Keeping Kasey
I lift an eyebrow, crossing my arms over my chest.
He lifts his hands in surrender with an easy smile. “No ulterior motives. No expectations. Just dinner.”
I know better than to believe that. Mark may be harmless, but he definitely has a crush on me. It’s not my fault he doesn’t believe my boundaries are permanent—that he believes I’ll come to trust him more as time passes.
I won’t.
But him cooking dinner really isn’t different from what we’re doing now. It’s just sitting through another meal with the only human whose company I can stand.
“Just dinner,” I relent.
A grin nearly splits his face in half. “I hope you like salmon.”
“I don’t. Now, go before I change my mind.”
Mark stands, biting back a triumphant smile, and gestures to the food. “Then you can clean this up by yourself.”
“Gladly,” I say and follow him to the door.
“My place at six tomorrow?”
I allow a small smile. “Six it is.”
I close and lock the door behind Mark, leaning my back against it as I force a deep breath into my lungs.
The exhaustion that comes over my body is absurd. No one should be this drained from a dinner, especially when it was the only human interaction I’ve had in almost forty-eight hours.
It makes me wonder how I ever survived living with a whole family of strangers.
I stop the thought as fast as it comes to mind.
Not today.
Once dinner is cleaned up, I go to the only place that actually feels like it belongs to me—my office.
It takes deactivating a lock to even open the door—something Mark has luckily never noticed. When it clicks open, the four-monitor setup calls to me like a beacon.
I fall into my desk chair and turn my brain off.
Work like this doesn’t take energy the way dinner with Mark does. It relaxes me.
My brain works on autopilot, operating in zeros and ones rather than spiraling into hopeless oblivion. I surrender to the things that make sense, not the what-ifs that haunt me.
I pull up the software that I’ve made my latest project and pick up where I left off.
Memories, thoughts, and questions creep along the edge of my consciousness, where I leave them unacknowledged. I only allow myself to focus on what is directly in front of me, and it’s a way of losing myself that no alcohol or drugs could provide.
And I would know because I tried those, too.
This—falling into the process of software creation—is the only thing that truly eases the stress, the worry, the fear.
The pain.
I don’t even glance at the time because it’s not like I’m going to stop, no matter what odd hour of the night it is. Sure, it means I’m exhausted in the morning, but it also means my sleep is so deep I can’t remember any of the dreams that plague it.
And it’s a lot better that way.
My fingers suddenly go still over the keyboard.
