He came, and she went.
* * *
It was one o'clock in the afternoon, and Peter was in bed.
He lay there staring at the ceiling. Time didn't matter anymore.
Every now and then he took a gulp of Scotch from the bottle he
had opened after Ivy left. Normally he never drank hard liquor.
But today it seemed like the most natural thing to do. He needed
something to help him escape from his own mind, something that
would inevitably force him into sleep, where he could hide, even
if just for a couple of hours, from his dilemma. It was too soon
to try and think things through. Through? How, he wondered, does
one think through being through? With every swallow from the
bottle the reality of it all slipped a little farther away.
What he wanted to know was, what would they do for the future?
His instinctive reaction to anything that threatened Wallaby - in
this case, his being flung from the company - provoked fear and
anxiety for its future, beyond the potential misery of his
personal fate.
He had given nearly ten years of his life to Wallaby. The time
when it all began seemed like a lifetime ago.
He drifted.
Never socializing with the jocks, pot-heads, or any other group,
Peter Jones was considered an oddball student. He had been an
orphan most of his life, living in a Los Gatos home governed by
an elderly couple.
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