A Man with the Insecurity Shades

With a real gun in his hand, Lim went to the storage room. Miya wasn't there anymore.

The toolbox was left open. A hammer, drill, saw, and mallet were scattered on the table. The second he realized that something was gone from the toolbox, he was looking straightway over the CCTV monitor on his cell phone.

He found her! Miya was standing in front of Lim's room with a big wrench in her hand.

Lim's heart beat faster as he felt betrayed, "I can't believe in myself! How come I let my guard down and try to trust her!"

Like mad, Lim appointed his gun while tracking down Miya's position, "She's not around my room anymore. HUH! Does she think that she can trick me? You wish!"

From afar, Lim saw Miya rolling up a rag on her left fist while walking. The wrench was still on her right hand.

"Is she good at Thai boxing?" Lim thought from behind an oak kitchen shelf. He tried his best to be unseen by Miya while calculating his chance to be unhurt in this fight, "she's not even muscular, her fists must be weak. Besides, I have a gun. I'm a step ahead. But I'm in a wheelchair, does it make us even? No… No… The bullet is faster than any kind of movement. I'm still a step ahead."

Miya was getting closer to Lim. She was pounding the wrench on her hands while whistling. This scene recalled Lim's childhood unfortunate moment that oftentimes he still dreams of. A nightmare about a man who wore a strange watch pounding a mallet on his hand. That watch had neither clockwise nor digital numbers on it. Only twelve tiny pieces of gemstone glowed one by one to refer to the hour and the shape of three chains of DNA strands that showed the minutes. From afar Lim heard another man whistling. As if it was a sign of an order for a man with the mallet to torture Lim's mind, he smashed everything around the ten-year-old Lim at that moment.

In Lim's eyes, Miya was probably, if not must be, a member of that group of men who were once trying to kill him. Just because she was whistling while pounding a tool on her hand, in a similar way the men did.

He couldn't bear his anger, disappointment, and fear any longer. He just wanted to get rid of Miya to get himself safe. Lim decided to encounter Miya. Having come out of hiding, he shouted while pointing his gun at Miya, "STOP! DON'T MOVE!"

Miya petrified, didn't dare to make any small movement.

"SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!" Lim shouted.

Miya was so scared. She didn't know what she had to do to not have any unwanted piercings on her head, "Um… Shou— Should I not move? Or… Or move my hands?"

"SHOW! ME! YOUR! HANDS!" Lim thundered, he emphasized every single syllable of his words, as if it could intimidate Miya even more.

Miya was raising her hands. Indeed, she was extremely intimidated by the gun. Anyone in her position will have the same feeling, right? As her body trembled, her hands in the air were shaking, making it hard for her to keep holding the wrench. She was squeezing that big wrench, trying her best not to make it slip and hit her head. Which from Lim's point of view, it seems like Miya is about getting ready to attack him. 

"DROP DOWN YOUR WEAPON!"

"I have no weapon. You are the one with a weapon in here!" Miya tried her best to make her trembling voice clearly heard.

"DROP THE WRENCH! Do you wanna kill me with that?"

"I'm just trying to fix your plumbing… Go check it."

"Do you think I'm a fool? You try to attack me from behind? Drop that wrench and drag it closer to me. NOW!"

Miya put the wrench on the floor and pushed it straight to Lim.

"Look! I can tie myself off if this could make you feel safe," she tied herself with a rag she 

brought, "Go, check the plumbing! You will know that I'm not lying."

Lim steering his wheelchair near the kitchen island while keeping his eyes on Miya. His gun still pointing at her, just in case she made a sudden move and used the rag to strangle him.

Lim saw some tools scattered on the floor under the sink. The water pipe was so severely leaking, that even two towel mats couldn't enough to absorb its water drips. This time, Lim was the only one who was petrified. He didn't know how to fix all of these problems.

How to fix the pipe? Even now, it had bursted. The water flooded the kitchen floor.

And what confused him the most was, how to fix this situation?

Lim dropped his gun. He knew he got her wrong.

Noticing that the situation was safe enough for her, Miya rushed to block the bursting pipe with the rug in her hands.

It's not enough!

The water was spraying out uncontrolled, drenching her to the skin. She shouted, "Where's the main water supply valve? We need to turn it off!"

"At the front yard, near a small fountain beside the river."

Miya dashed outside while Lim was still in there, clueless.

She turned the valve off soon after she found it around a muddy ground near the fountain. 

What a relief! Miya was glad that she set the house free from a big disaster.

"Ahh... Finally... Wait… Why should I give a toss to whatever happened with this house and that weird man? ENOUGH!"

She went back to Lim in a mess. Her hair and her clothes were wet. Her jeans and her hands were covered by mud. Her mind and her heart were covered by anger. "YOU! I come in here to get a job! I try my best to deal with your insecurity. I try to understand that it's not easy to believe in a stranger. But one thing you have to know, as I am a stranger to you! You are a stranger to me, tho!"

Lim was speechless. As Miya detected Lim was regretful toward her, she didn't want to miss any chance to release every woman's basic instinct which would be nagging and grumbling like a machine gun to their silent target as long as there's the bullet left on it, "First! You accused me of poisoning you! Second! You accused me of trying to kill you! Third! You're the one in here who has an intention to kill someone! It's you! Not even me! You try to kill me! You don't say sorry about all of that even worse, you don't feel bad about me!"

"Wait… Listen… OK, I'm sorry about that. All of that. I'm just—" Lim couldn't find any words fitted to this situation.

"Just what? You're just suspicious for no reason and pointing that gun into my head out of the blue! And now? Like nothing, you just say sorry? What if I died? Will your 'sorry' could ever take my life back? You keep worrying about your precious life, but what about mine?"

"Well… Listen…" Lim didn't know how to apologize properly to people. He spent his last eighteen years on his own. He chose to tell a lie, "It's fake! The gun is fake! I just want to… To test you… Yeah… It's a part of the job interview."

"What? What kind of job desks a helper will have? Why am I supposed to deal with a gun during my job interview?"

"You know… Um—" he kept on telling lies to support his lie to be a perfect white lie, "I'm rich! There are so many gunmen out there trying to rob me."

"Then you need bodyguards, not a helper! I do not sign up for any dangerous job. I'm just a helper. I used to be a caregiver at a nursing home, not a life-giver. Listen—"

"I mean—"

"No… Listen, Sir, please… I'm just an ordinary helper who read a job vacancy that tells me that you need a helper in doing the daily tasks. I need money…" tears started to fill her eyes, "I badly need the money to pay my grandma's hospital bill. She needs to be cured as soon as possible." Miya couldn't hold back her tears, "And she is the only family I have. I need to take care of her. But I'm not a person with no self-worth. I can't tolerate all the things you have done to me, just for the money"

Lim was stunned, his mind was scattered. He could do nothing at the moment Miya took her belongings with her and decided to walk away, "You could find other people who're so crazy about money, hence they won't care about how you treat them. One more thing, just don't waste people's time trying to help you in facing your own insecurity. Heal your wounds! So, you will not push away one who's really there for you!"

Miya went out without a single look back.