Page 64 of Corruption
“And clearly you could,” I observed.
“I threw up after the first drag of the cigarette.”
“What?” I exclaimed.
He turned a bit more toward me. “The second one was better than the taste of vomit.”
I looked at him in surprise, and he offered a faint smile, which prompted a bigger one from me.
“I rarely smoked them. Only when I felt stressed out.”
“Isn’t this your home?” I asked.
“It used to be.”
“Why is your home stressing you out?” I questioned.
“Why is yours?”
“Mine isn’t stressing me out. As you already pointed out, I haven’t had one in my hand for years,” I reminded him, holding up the cigarette.
“Living with a cheating scumbag, I’m sure brings Zen to the house,” he retorted. “Don’t you ever get tired of lying to yourself?”
“I’m not lying! I like my home. I chose that home. I designed it!” I defended.
“And yet you go to sleep completely shattered every day, because it’s easy to pick a place where you want to build a home, but it’s so much harder to actually make it into a true home.”
I was growing irritated by his words. They struck deep because we both knew how right he was. I took a deep drag of the cigarette, letting it briefly ease my worries, even though it burned my throat since I hadn’t smoked in ages.
“And what about this place? You call it home, and yet you seem more stressed here than in that torture building you personally created for me!” I snarled, acknowledging his home as my personal hell.
“I just have a lot on my mind,” he deflected.
“Being a vigilante?” I questioned.
“No, and don’t talk about it as if you have any right to judge.”
“I do!” I exclaimed. “You kill people, claiming it’s justice.”
“Because it is. Because this world will always be filled with individuals who escape the consequences of their crimes. Someone has to be the one to make the hard decisions.”
“If we all thought that way, you know there would be nothing left.”
“Maybe having nothing left is better than what we have now,” he pointed out, shocking me with his words. “Is the world beautiful, Alison?”
“Huh?”
“I asked if the world is beautiful.”
I blinked rapidly, uncertain how to respond. We were all aware of what the world looked like. Perfection seemed to be an unattainable ideal, and we were so far from it that some people might willingly choose death over life.
“It isn’t, and you know that,” he sighed. “So would it truly matter if there was nothing left?”
“There are good people in this world.”
“And they always seem to pay the price, don’t they?”
I despised how accurate he was. My heart ached as he threw this harsh reality in my face. Yet, it was so easy for me to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others when my own life constantly demanded my attention. Maintaining the façade of perfection was a relentless task.
