Page 1 of Defended By Love

Prologue

Time, bestower of gifts and thief of the essential. The delicate dichotomy that gives life and leeches it away on an intangible spectrum, the fulcrum unseen. While it is monetized in our words—we spend, lose, squander, and waste time—it is forever the wisp of an idea that we would give any amount of money for just a little more of it.

Until we wouldn’t.

Like time, love has the power to heal and to destroy. It can be the strength that moves mountains or the Achilles’ heel of whoever finds themselves in the planets-aligned path of the devastation we call devotion.

It’s rare, but if you’re lucky enough, love will swoop you up into a spiral of sensations that will send you into forever loops of lust and tenderness. Again and again, you’ll come back to the signpost that is the pure bliss of requited adoration.

It’s extremely rare, but if you’re unlucky, time can do the same. The swoops, spirals, loops, and signposts can grow into a haunting torture. For what makes time precious beyond compare, is that it ends.

When time fails to be finite, attacking relentlessly without reprieve, the only hope that remains is to be defended by love.

Chapter 1

Time. There’s never enough of it. The restraints of its dwindling availability force me to use every last morsel to its fullest.

I wake up in the morning and check my phone. I fire off emails before I’m even out of bed. I think about work in the shower. I go to work. I eat lunch at my desk, repeating a constant refrain of ‘just one more minute and then I’ll leave for the lunchroom’. I stay late, not even bothering to flaunt my incredible dedication to my bosses as they file out at a reasonable hour. Much. (Okay, I flaunt a medium amount, making sure to sigh and bustle around a little extra when they sidestep me as I race to and fro, reveling in the adjacent praise that they throw out with platitudes about noses and grindstones.)

And now, because apparently that all wasn’t enough, I’m sneaking back into the office at nearly midnight in the middle of what’s shaping up to be a weatherman’s wet dream. A storm—a big one—builds around me as I dart through the side streets. Ducking and diving between awnings and overhangs of any sort, even though they offer me little protection from the rain that somehow assaults me on all available angles, I navigate my way to the monstrosity of a building that I call home.

I mean work.

Shit.

My attitude with work has left the cute quirk stage and moved fully into obsession territory.

Actually, this might be even beyond that. Now that I’m within range of the security cameras of my building, I tug up my hood and obscure my face from the multiple cameras that survey the skyscraper that houses Felton & Nichols.

Usually companies are more concerned with how to keep people inside the building and on-task, not keeping them out to avoid extra working. That gives me the advantage with this B & E.

B & E. How did it come to this?

It all seemed so reasonable to me this morning. Tomorrow, the building is being fumigated, so at the end of the workday, the place was secured. We were ordered (quite insensitively, if I do say so myself) to enjoy ourselves for several paid days off. Just like that. No warning. Just a cold email with a mocking smiley face at the end of my digital heartbreak. Thanks for the mini heart attack, Beth, our cheery office manager. All the cupcakes, cards, and parties mask the masochistic monster who cruelly sends us on a vacation without any offer of emotional support.

What a bitch.

And so, after everyone left, I snuck down the back emergency exit staircase, taped the door so that it couldn’t manually lock and made my plan to come back in the dead of night to sneak some files back to my apartment so that I can continue during this heinous hiatus. The security system would still be engaged, so it wasn’t like I was leaving the building completely vulnerable. I just gave myself a little in.

Funny—it’s only once I’m dodging security cameras, soaked to the bone and pondering what arguments I could use to reduce my sentence should I be caught, that it occurs to me that this is crazy.

I am crazy.

I’m especially crazy because I realize that this is crazy, yet I’m still going through with it. It’s so crazy that it increases my chance at some sort of insanity plea. Which unfortunately, makes it less crazy, thus decreasing my chance at that defence. Which then, makes it crazier, therefore increasing the chance…

My foot submerges into a frigid puddle that snaps me out of my logic spiral. Thankfully. Once I really get going on a logic puzzle, I have a hard time getting out. The first time someone proposed the chicken and egg problem to me, I went into a philosophical meltdown. To this day, I struggle to eat either protein without a twinge of shame at my inability to solve dependent sequencing.

At least there will be no dependent sequencing quandary with my current situation. I’ll know that my mental deterioration occurred prior to any incarceration. Although I’m sure using a metal toilet in view of people, who have even more reason than the average person to hate lawyers, won’t help.

And yet I’m still breaking into my office building.

To retrieve work.

Because the thought of not working is more terrifying than rationed toilet paper.

The back alley behind our building has all but been swallowed by the monstrous girth of our edifice. Our architects quite literally looked at every square inch of real estate we owned and built on it. Forget shrubbery or walkways, our office building stands ostentatiously erect to compensate for every boisterous, insecure douchebag who works here.

Considering we’re the largest building west of Toronto, that’s saying something.

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