Page 19 of Shattered Veil

I chortled at the sight. “That’s funny.”

He smiled at my amusement but replied, “It is not funny, Jay—”

“If you’re tryin’ to get remorse out of me for this one, it’s not gonna happen.” I added, “In fact, I should have done more.”

He sighed heavily. “Bottle up the crazy, Turner. I know you can do it.”

“Instead,” I offered, “I should talk to HR and tell them that Tommy dragged us to an inappropriate venue for a work event and proceeded to assault an innocent woman.”

“And then…technically…you assaulted him,” Shawn stated. “That’s not gonna end well for you. Like I said,” he whispered, “bottle up the crazy.”

He turned back to focus on his work, effectively ending our conversation, and I used the rest of the work day to ponder how I could render Tommy unemployed.

‘Damn…I’m buzzed.’

Spoken in Cassie’s voice, the words played over and over in my mind. They weren’t real. They had never left her mouth outside of the confines of my brain—not to me, at least—but damn, did they feel like they were. Friday night, in my first forbidden dream, they were there. Saturday—yep. Sunday and Monday? You bet your ass. Tuesday, though? Somewhere between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, my testosterone-riddled brain had made the connection. Mid-sleep, those cursed words left her lips, and they were my tip. My clue. My internal realization that I was, in fact, dreaming.

I recognized the dream. Unlike the nights before it, I was…aware. I felt as though I had control. I consciously told myself, ‘You’re dreaming, Jay, snap out of it,’ and despite all of it, I followed through. I bent the laws of my imagination as far as they would go. At some point, while unconscious, I had come to the conclusion that doing those things with Cassie in my mind wasn’t…forbidden. It was just a dream.

And the things we did were fucking filthy.

It was waking that was the problem. Instead of flinching myself into reality, heavily breathing until I fully woke and racing to the shower, I was face down. Face down and bucking my hips into the fucking mattress. I didn’t even get a chance to open my eyes—after what I believe were four thrusts, I came so hard that my hands fisted in the sheets, and I had the primal urge to bite. My teeth sank into my pillow, a sound came out of me that could have easily been mistaken as pain-induced, and I rode it out until my muscles ceased their clenching.

I opened my eyes, and the erotic haze was lifted. I cursed myself with a, “God dammit,” that was immediately followed with, “Oh, no,” as I realized the mess I had made of both my mind and my sheets.

One swat at my phone on the bedside table, I saw that it was—of course—two o’clock in the morning. It was always two o’clock in the morning when I would wake from my dreams of her. I threw my pillows to the floor, yanked the fitted sheet off of the closest corner of my bed, and used it to wipe myself clean the best I could. With the evidence of my most recent sins having somehow escaped through the fly of my boxers and splattered across my sheets and duvet, I contemplated the hours of the local laundromat. I flopped on my back onto the naked portion of the mattress and reached for my phone for a quick Google search, finding that all laundromats in Salem weren’t open for several hours. Just south of Roanoke, though—there was a twenty-four-hour laundromat there.

Did I want to drive twenty minutes to the laundromat and twenty minutes back, spending several hours just to wash my bedding that was partially covered in my own sticky body fluids? No. Of-fucking-course I didn’t want to do that—especially not at this hour. However, this hour, as unappealing as it was, would allow me to perform my walk of shame in the cover of the early morning.

So, I went. I rinsed off, packed up my things, and drove across town to the laundromat at two o’clock in the morning. My eyelids heavy and my mind buzzing with further thoughts of remorse, I fought sleep as I watched my sheets tumble in a circle through the glass door of a washer. By the time I transferred them to the dryer, I was in the process of berating myself. I was inflicting this self-punishment because even though it was just a dream, I knew what I was doing. I know how my mind and heart work and, don’t ya know it, deciding to lucid dream-fuck Cassie Cohen and finish myself off onto my bed was mentally crossing a line.

And if I thought I was grumpy before…that wouldn’t have even compared to my mood throughout the morning.

I arrived at work with palpable bags under my eyes. I set down my across-the-shoulder laptop bag at my cubicle. I began to fish my glasses out of the side pocket…and Shawn caught my eye. His head had swung on a swivel to view me, his eyebrows high as he noted:

“Jesus, Jay, ya look like shit.”

I let out a long breath through my nostrils. “Brooks,” I began slowly, “you know I like you. I do, man. But I will literally pay you not to talk to me today.” I considered my last sentence and then rephrased to, “I’d literally pay not to have anyone talk to me today.”

He frowned. “So, you haven’t talked to Cas—”

“No,” I snapped, gently placing my glasses on my face. “I haven’t.”

“Okay, okay,” he replied, nodding. “I only take cash.” I shot him a warning glance, saw the light-hearted joke in his eyes, and he held up his hands in defense as he smiled. “Or beer.”

I sighed. “Beer. I’ll get you a beer.”

Shawn tapped both of his index fingers against his desk one after the other, as if he were playing the drums. They rapped the counter three times, he gave me a curt bob of his head, and he spun back to focus on his work.

It was uneventful; the remainder of my work day—quiet. My morning had mostly consisted of searching on the company-wide software to see if Tommy had been assigned any clients yet. He hadn’t. My thoughts of sabotaging his success and inevitably getting him fired dwindled down as the day went on, and I was able to focus on my work. I popped my headphones in, listening to music that could only have been described as Emo Grunge to try to drown out the noise in my mind, and before I knew it, I was seated in the kitchen space eating my lunch.

Alone. I was eating my lunch alone…and though the lack of disruption further put my mind at ease, I was curious why I was given the opportunity of alone time in the first place. It wasn’t until I saw Shawn out of the corner of my eye, swiftly redirecting Paula from accounts payable away from the break room, that I realized that it was his doing.

Shawn laughed a bit too hard, the sound itself not believable in the least. Paula, who is a talker, smacked his arm in a playful manner, and he glanced back at me quickly with a pinched expression on his face. I let out an amused breath at the sight of Shawn metaphorically stepping on a landmine by diving into a conversation with one of the most verbose middle-aged women I’ve ever met.

Paula was lingering by Shawn’s cubicle when I returned. Her fire-engine red head was thrown back in laughter—loud laughter—and she invited him out to lunch. I heard the hesitation in his voice, which he quickly masked with a cough before agreeing on a nearby deli, and they were out the door.

Shawn didn’t return for over two hours.

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