1:7 The Best Laid Plans, Xoxo Nyx
@ Copywrite 2019 original works of author Bloom Ariks
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Chapter 1:7 The Best Laid Plans, Xoxo Nyx
… Three Weeks After That …
I know what you must be thinking. Why?
Why would you, retired veteran and practical shut in, Kinsley Nyx Knight, be hiding behind a hedge too tall in a skirt too small? Donned in a jacket that has too many wrappy straps to know what to do with? Let alone one in front of a conglomerate that can get you black listed from every decent job in this city?
Nicky. That’s right. You guessed it. Just like everything else that has gone wrong since I got back to Haven, this is all my orphan brother Roman Nikolai Cross’ fault!
My current predicament of running through the Upper East Side in stripper wear for a working interview is unfortunate, but something I can live with.
Lucy as well as Ryan reassured me that this is what corporate ladies wear, so I’ll go with it. Believe me, weirder things have happened in my life.
Still, having to dive in a bush, spill the best coffee I’ve ever tasted down my borrowed silk blouse, all to hide from Nicky’s latest attempt at returning my fate......
Oooooo. If that were only the half of it!
After getting me black listed from the hospital in Crest. Not to mention, fired on my first day at a pediatrics office, Nicky’s latest nonsense is interfering with my ability to get to a working interview at a Vet’s office.
Not a veteran like me but an actual DVM.
I do understand that he’s upset. If not worried about me living on my own. After all he and Alex more or less spent the last two years, teaching me to read, write, walk, talk and use the toilet on my own again.
Still, I was only fully developed infant when I came out of my coma. As the swelling went down, the rest came back naturally. Not my memories, but all the rest.
Including my know how as a former physician.
I also passed every competency test there was. Proving that I’m back to being a full-grown adult after eighteen months of rehab. Along with two months of working right along doctor fancy pants at his hospital in Crest.
So he can’t tell me I’m not capable of an honest day’s work. Of Finding a new career after the military and standing on my own two feet.
Nicky was the one who recommended I start as a research analyst in the first place. At least until I completed the exams and practice hours required to get my license back. One I don’t want, but he was too busy setting me with a married man to listen.
I never had any feelings one way or another on dating sites or people meeting via the internet. Not until the blasted Witch made me a fake dating profile.
This has to be Nicky’s demented version of a pager, if not a foot stamp, considering I haven’t called him back since the dildo incident. He’s still able to track every step I take somehow. Sending new hoards of circus performers after me daily since I went radio silent.
Believe me, the Witch meddling in my ‘dating life’ is not out of a sense of concern in any respect.
It’s just his need for as much drama as entertainment in the no horse town of five hundred residents. A town he claims, ‘hasn’t been the same since I left.’ Even if it weren’t for Brian I’d be here and not Crest.
Since I joined the Allied Forces at eighteen, it was always my hope to come back to one day. This place is as exciting and beautiful as it is magnetic.
I really can’t explain what’s so alluring about Haven, but considering it’s up there with Paris, Rome, Hawaii and all the other must-see tourist traps of the world, I’m not alone in the fascination.
I do realize that Nicky and I were run out of the best city in the world, in the worst way possible during the draft, but that was just a few bad eggs. Not the city itself.
It’s also not like the Witch can’t get on his broomstick and be here in a few hours either. Even if the tweedle twap twerp takes the bullet train, it’s not that far.
Insult to injury he can actually afford a ticket with his promotion to Chief of Staff. Unlike me, who will continue to ignore his temper tantrum via otherworldly, if not humiliating summons.
Somewhere I have enough sense to know that a normal person would have just skipped the bank.
I, on the other hand, am even more motivated than less to sit across from a notary before my appointment with Courtney.
See Aspies like me, can’t deviate from a plan once they make it. Parts of me may know what a bad idea facing down the man in 1800’s cosplay is, but that nothing compared to the terror of the unknown. Being blindsided is the worst thing you can do to an autistic.
Whether it’s conscious or not, people like me have to walk through every situation mentally before we move physically. Something that becomes intrinsic over time. So much so that most don’t even realize they’re doing it.
Like figuring out plans step by step for your day, in the morning with coffee. Mentally taking a drive in your head, planning a shopping trip, or even something as mundane as washing the dishes. The more you complete a task the easier and faster that process is.
Unprecedented situations are more or less a bonk on the head. Things that make us freeze until we’re able to navigate it, even hypothetically, to get to a desired outcome.
My ‘plan’ is to sit across from a notary, then go to my working interview. All without ending up in a trophy case.
I may struggle with what decade I’m in during flashbacks, but no author would be crazy enough to make up a fictional character as ludacris as me. So while I’m not perfect, or completely sane, I don’t believe myself or my life is a bloody romance novel, like the Hispanic man waiting for me.
One that seems to have the same tracker the Witch does. Considering burner phones aren’t traceable, and even if he managed that, I haven’t given Nicky or ‘Jonathan’ my number, either of them finding me here shouldn’t be possible.
Regardless, the thin man in a tan leather trench is pacing outside the doors I’m trying to get into, but I can’t turn back. Just pray that my ‘date’ doesn’t see me slinking through a hundred-foot garden bed like a serpent.
Gaines Financial was the only notary within a thirty-minute walk of Courtney’s practice.
Otherwise, I’d barely look at, let alone approach a building so tall and imposing. With its hundred stories and darkly tinted glass, the skyscraper might as well be the black tower of Sauron in the White City in my spiraling head.
The conglomerate owning seventy-five percent of the banks in Haven only adds to that.
On a positive note, I did just find the best coffee cart in the city.
On the negative end, the hazelnut heaven is down my blouse and I haven’t slept a wink. I’d love to blame my crouching behind the bushes, and puffing my cheeks like a chipmunk who belongs in the natural shrubbery, on lack of sleep.
Instead, it’s me working out how to get into the thirty-foot glass entrance without my page of wands spotting me. Jonathan’s presence a catalyst rather than a deterrent. Due to the fact that if I divorce Alex, I’ll never have to deal with another non-con blind date again.
It makes perfect sense in my mind, considering the Witch is engaged to my husband, and only married couples can adopt kids. Not that Alex and I were ever really together. Obviously, Alex is gay, being with my brother and all.
Still, he was a crush I had in college, and the best person I ever dated. Even if that relationship was only in my head.
Our marriage was strictly platonic, and came about for as many legal, as financial purposes when I was going through rehab. Now that I’m all better, I can let them get married and adopt the baby Nicky always wanted.
Shenanigans aside I just know Nicky will be a great Dad. Plus he’ll be so busy bottle-feeding and burping an actual infant, he’ll forget all about returning my fate.
Fate meaning soul mate in gypsy culture.
He’s never been apologetic about stealing Alex from me in the past. Well, there was nothing to steal, but still. Since the whole Brian incident and me moving out, Nicky is treating me like the baby they’ve talked about adopting for a while now.
Alex wanting to wait until he’s retired and Nicky being as meddlesome as he is impatient.
I realize how badly he wants a kid, but setting me up with every rando and wackadoo in Haven isn’t going to get him a niece or nephew, and he darn well knows it!