The Bridge (yes, I'm getting to the story--sorry! Some background)
by
The days and weeks and months afterwards were spent in training. I lost myself in class work and sword-fighting--anything to keep busy. Something told me I had no choice but to move on. He was in my mind, but we had both made our choices, there was no going back.
And so time marched on, as the saying goes. I took out my patent on the pill, and set up a little corporation under a fictional name. I funneled most of my cash through diverse investments, some legal, some not. In the meantime, I kept my cover as a slacker--no fundage, no hassles. I made the most of my time and the connections in my neighborhood--I had a pretty decent fake set of papers at the ready in case I had to drop everything and bail in a hurry. The workmanship was good, but sometimes I suspected it was hot enough to melt the steel lock-box I kept it in.
I managed. For the most part, it was like anyone else's life, with just a few minor complications, like when my then-fiance wanted to know about the swords....I never told. He developed his own fiction surrounding them and my "vida loca," a story of some kind of very old-school organized crime with a medieval rule of omerta. I never disabused him of that notion--it was almost true. Very old-school. Medieval. That he stopped asking questions was part of the reason I kept him.
He didn't know about the other bank accounts, the odd jobs. He knew about the fights, because the blood-stains were pretty hard to cover up, but he never threatened to turn me in. And he knew that I sometimes had another on my mind, but he wouldn't ask.
For better or worse, he accepted that I was a monster, and I accepted his indifference to that. And when the probverbial fecal matter hit the rotary oscillator, I knew he would accept that I had to do what I had to do.
Posted on May 1, 1999, 8:57 PM from IP address 207.103.118.184