What We Lost

Mason

Burial Plot (Reimagined)-Dayseeker ft. Seneca

I all but burst into our apartment. Tonight’s disagreement left a bitter taste in my mouth. I shucked off my coat,carelessly letting it fall behind me onto the floor, not even an attempt to hang it on a hook by the door. I did this because I knew he couldn’t stand it. Usually, Bash would stop to pick up it up, hang it in his proper place with a weary sigh.

My passive aggressiveness knew no bounds.

Most of the time, I didn’t do it specifically to piss him off. Chaos just seemed to be my natural state of being. I never walked my shoes to the closet, instead I left them where I took them off. I always slung my gym bag by the front door. There was always a clutter of dirty coffee mugs in my office I cleaned out once a week, if I thought about it. The only things I kept meticulously organized were my research, my writing, and my kitchen.

Sebastian? Not so much. Everything had its proper place. Even me, apparently.

I felt Bash’s eyes on me, probing, searching for an in.But I wasn’t having it. Not tonight.

“Mase,” Bash’s deep voice was heavy with concern.

I was the source of Bash’s constant frustration. You’d think he would be used to it by now. He tossed his keys onto the table by the front door with a clatter that seemed too loud in the tense silence.

It might as well have ben the starting bell for a cage match.My back was to him, my jaw set hard

“Oh, I’m sorry that I don’t run my career moves by my fiance for prior approval,” I snapped over my shoulder, the words laced with a venom I really didn’t feel.Except I think maybe this time I did. Hurt had a funny way of twisting up inside you. Without waiting for his reply, I stormed into the bedroom, eager to put even a temporary distance between us so I could seethe without those goddamned concerned blue eyes boring a hole straight through to my soul.

“You don’t.” Bash stood there in the doorway, his frame taking up far too much space. "When you get a story in your mind, you don't care about anything else. You put on blinders."His presence felt like a barricade, too tall, too broad. Immoveable. Unshakeable. “But babe, this is way more than a career decision and you know it.”

The soft ‘babe’ cut through the tension straight through to my resolve.

The word practically collapsed me in on myself.

“It’s a cult, not a country club. You could get fucking hurt, Mason. Hell, we don’t know what they are doing there. The only thing anyone knows about The Everlasting Fount is a fucking blurb on the FBI cult watch list. What if they figure out that you are there specifically to drag them out into the open? ”

“You act like they are going to Heaven’s Gate themselves as soon as I cross over onto their property. I will be fine,” I said with more certainty than I felt.

Because I had to believe it, didn’t I?

Sebastian shook his head, “No. You won’t. You write the crime after it happens. You don’t have to live it. Those are two very, very different things.”

Plopping down on the edge of the bed, I shrugged.

“So you say that because you do...whatever Expendables style bullshit it is you do for Athos and see whatever it is you see, that you are the expert in what I am going to go through?”

Fucking Athos.

That was how I had met Bash, through his position with Athos-private security, investigations, nefarious government dumbfuckery-whatever it was they did or claimed officially not to do. Responsible for everything and nothing at the same time.

There had been some kerfuffle in D.C three years ago, Athos had accidentally stumbled onto the fact that a pompous good ole’ boy senator from North Carolina had a son with a harem of girls chained in a basement. An entire wardrobe of women he had bought everywhere, from Osaka to Oakland. I wanted the story. But all I came away with was a boyfriend in the form of an Athos operator that didn’t answer my questions then and sure as hell didn’t answer any of them now.

NDA may as well have been Sebastian’s middle initials.

“Little bit,” Bash conceded with a reluctant nod while he watched me wrestle with my frustration. “It isn’t going to be a couple of paragraphs describing horror happening to someone else, Mason. You are going to be in it. You are going to make yourself a victim. For three months? John said your contract was for extraction was going to be after three months in that fucking snake pit. Three months, Mase. There isn’t any guarantee that they won’t make you in three hours!”

“Excuse me?" I fired back at him. "You don’t get to lecture me about timelines. You leave for weeks or months at a time. I don’t even get to know where you are, Bash, I just have to hope that you don’t come back in a body bag or, even worse, don’t come back at all."

Sebastian didn’t understand.

I needed this so damn badly, not just to emerge from the shadow of my father’s career as a journalist or my brother’s success as a documentarian, but to prove to myself that I was more than what they saw, more than what Bash saw. I needed to know I was an actual author, not just some hack churning out brief forays into voyeuristic violence for quick digital consumption.

I had once heard Bash refer to me as a ‘true crime influencer’. Fuck that. I’d published nine books. Nine. But to Bash? It meant nothing to him.

“Sebastian,” I began,“I was going to tell you.” And I was,soon as I figured out a tactful way to do so without a blow-up. Obviously, I fucked that up. “I knew you wouldn’t understand. I knew you wouldn’t agree...”

Bash scowled, the lines around his eyes etching deeper with worry, but he closed the space between us. He sat down on the bed. the mattress shifted beneath his weight as he reached for my hand. His touch was a whisper of comfort breaking through the tension. I hated how he could still make my heart flutter. Lifting my hand, he pressed his lips to my knuckles in a gentle, protective kiss that held so much tenderness it nearly fractured my resolve.

That was all it took for my mind to sprial into self doubt.

Just leave it, Mason. Forget it. Hyper-focus on something else to write.

“You are damn right I don’t agree,” he paused. Bash was trying his best to tiptoe around the reason he knew I was doing this, “You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone, Mason. Not to your dad. Not to Mickey.”

Ouch. Way to just grind salt into the wound.

" I have to prove it. I’ve got to prove it to myself. I’ve got to know that I can do this, " my voice quivered.

“Mason, you don’t understand,” Bash murmured, his thumb caressing the back of my hand. He seemed to think he could just put out the fire of my ambition with a gentle touch. I mean, he could, usually, but not tonight. Tonight I was finally making my stand.“If you go in there, babe, you’re not coming out.”

His words were a cold bucket of reality dumped over my head. But I didn’t want reality. I wanted the story, the immersion, the truth, horrific or mundane. I convinced myself that this was going to be my making.

“Your body may come out, but your mind won’t,” he continued, his voice dropping register. “For the rest of your life, you’ll be trapped in that fucking compound.” With each word, his grip tightened, as if he believed he could pull me back from the edge with his willpower alone.“You’ll never be the same...”

With a heavy heart, I pulled my hand away, setting it on my lap where it trembled slightly.

I couldn’t touch him. Hell, I could barely look at him right now. If I didn’t put some distance between us, the fire in me would be extinguished, smothered beneath my love for him.

“I know the risks,” I said, finally finding the last remaining scrap of courage to meet his gaze again. “But this is something I have to do. If nobody ever calls these assholes out, everyone will just keep thinking they are singing ‘Spirit in the Sky’ and building wheelchair ramps for elderly widows. I know something really fucked up going on in there, Bash. I can feel it. ”

He was right that I had no idea what was going on behind the impenetrable walls of Reverend Wright’s commune of a salvation factory deep in the woods of Upstate New York. But I knew what he was doing at his church, if you would even call it that, in New York proper. Wright and his army of righteous serene faced disciples were hitting the streets harder than the NYPD ever had, rounding up every misfortune they encountered: addicts, homeless, prostitutes, the mentally ill, to offer them salvation in the way of Wright’s own personal edict of good works and self denial. From the outside, The Fount looked like the God-send they claimed to be, catering to the marginalized masses offering help and hope.

But I knew without a doubt that Wright and his disciples were selling Jesus to the disenfranchised at exorbitant prices. I had my guy follow Wright’s money trail and oh, man, was I fucking shocked. It turns out being a bible-wielding conman is profitable work. Those that joined Wright’s ranks, the ones that had any kind of financial standing at all, would gratefully sign over their equity to The Everlasting Fount in order to find themselves closer to God-or just Wright, who fucking thought he was God.

Close enough.

Cults taking over real estate property, bank accounts, investments-that was old news. Any charismatic bullshit artist could talk a desperate person into relinquishing control of their life. The compound in upstate New York was where my curiosity lie. It was where his inner circle trained the next generation of brainwashed zealots. No one, not a single defector, had come forward to utter a word about the practices Wright used to cleanse the souls of all those smiling, happy faces that descended on the streets of New York like a plague of locusts. But‌ with enough cash, Wright would let you buy your way into salvation.

And that was exactly what I intended to do.

“So they’ll try to convert me. Shouldn’t suffering for my art make it better?” I countered. “It’s what writers do, Bash. You need to live life to write about it.”

“That is the single most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” he muttered."This will ruin you,” he said firmly. “I love you, Mason. I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you.”

The words hit me hard, always did. It damn near took the fight out of me. It was damned near enough to have my mind backtracking, reconsidering my decisions, wrestling with self doubt that was always a breath away from pulling me beneath the undertow of my own bruised ego.

“I forbid it,” he added, his face hardening into an expression I didn’t recognize.

Excuse me, but you fucking what?

“You...forbid it,” I echoed.“Bash,” I chuckled, “That is the most alpha male asshole thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You forbid it? You can’t forbid me to do anything.”

“Yeah, I can. It’s not a good idea, Mason. In fact, it is the stupidest goddamned thing I have ever heard. Christ, you have no sense of self preservation whatsoever. I can forbid you to do something if it’s a stupid fucking dangerous idea.”

Sebastian Reed actually believed that he could forbid me.

How fucking dare he have the audacity to presume that he can tell me what to do?

“It just isn’t happening, babe. I’m sorry. I’ll talk to Leo and...”

"NO!” The word erupted from me before I could cage it, my hands balled into fists. The extraction had cost me. I’d sold the rights to one of my books to a network that pedaled nothing but salacious grief tourism in the form of overly dramatized documentaries. It had cost me cash, yes, but also a chunk of my fucking integrity. Who knew what they were going to do with my work? How they were going to exploit for viewership a story, a victim, I had taken great pains to frame with compassion. “You won’t talk to Leo. You’ll leave the contract in place. I paid for it and I am going to need it.”

But Bash was unmovable.

“No fucking way. Period. Done. End of discussion. Throw your little temper tantrum for a couple of days and we’ll move on.”

My little temper tantrum?

Move on?

Sebastian had always been condescending about my career, and that was fine to an extent. I could let myself empathize with where he was coming from, the things he had seen, endured that made the horror I wrote about look mild compared to all the atrocities he had borne witness to during his career.

But this?

This was not just some trivial lovers’ spat that he could smooth over with a kiss and a ‘sorry’ before we crawled into bed for the night. Anger that boiled inside me was toxic, a venomous cloud nearly choking out every rational thought. My disappointment was even more potent. I wasn't disappointed in Bash. I was disappointment in myself for setting a precedent in our relationship, allowing him to think that he could simply dictate my life choices. The room seemed to close in on me, squeezing the air from my lungs. My decision loomed over us. It was a long shadow that was quickly swallowing the warmth we’d found together.

You always knew this was going to happen, Mason.

“Move on,” I repeated as I stared at Bash, wishing I could hate him for carelessly wielding the word ‘forbid’ like it was his to command. But all I saw was the man I loved, the man whose fear for me was so visceral it made him forget who I was. I was an author, a storyteller, an advocate for the voiceless. I would walk through hell with a pen just to document the heat of the flames. And nothing, not even Sebastian Reed’s well-intentioned tyranny, would ever change that.

He couldn’t change me.

And God knows how he had tried.

“....no, Bash,” my voice came out in a strangled whisper,“We...aren’t going to move on from this one.”

Bash’s face creased with worry, his brows knotting together like they did when he’s wrestling with a problem he couldn’t solve through sheer physical force or will.

"Baby, I mean, come on...even you have to realize it is ludicrous...”

And now I was ludicrous.

I shook my head and the room spun. I was lightheaded in the wake of my decision.

"Bash we are done."

The words hollowed out my chest, leaving a cold, sinking pit in their wake. I love him. I loved Sebastian from the first time I attempted to pin him down for an interview. He towered over me by half a foot, god only knew how much weight he had on me in solid gristle, leaning on the scarred bar at The Seventeen. I lost myself the second he turned on that disarming crooked smile.

But my love for him wasn’t enough to smother the fire of my ambition.

I needed to prove myself.

I could do work that mattered and not just, as Bash so eloquently put it, 'murder porn for bored housewives'. Bash would rather have me home safe and sound, tucked away in the apartment we’d shared for nearly three years. He’d rather I welcome him home with open arms from each contract, expecting nothing more than dinner on the table and a blowjob. But my writing was not just a hobby, something to do to fill the hours between his departures and arrivals. I’d had a fucking career before him, and goddamnit, I was going to have one after him.

My writing was the pulse in my veins, the air that filled my lungs.

Bash had never seen that.

“Baby...Mase...you don’t mean that. You’re just mad…,” his voice broke.

I couldn’t stand that I was the one who put the tremor in the deep baritone of this unshakeable man. I felt like I was going to throw up. Heat flooded my cheeks in a scalding wave of anger. Desperate as I stood up, I pushed away from his reach. I couldn’t bear for him to touch me, to reel me back into the comfort of my complacency in our life together.

“No. You don’t get to ‘forbid’ me. You don’t get to tell me what I do and don’t mean,” I said, my breaths came in sharp gasps. “I meant it. Sebastian, we are done.”

Silence slammed down between us, wrapping its icy fingers around my heart and squeezing. We were frozen in this horrible moment as we both realized at last there is no way around the inevitable. It was always going to be Sebastian or my career. We both knew it, knew we were doomed from the start because I would not abandon who I was, not even for the man I worshiped.

“Mason,” Bash whispered, his voice hoarse, “I’m so sorry.I...”

But apologies were useless now, a Band-Aid over a fatal bullet wound. I blinked rapidly, refusing to let him see the tears threatening to spill. The room felt like one of the crime scenes I wrote, both of us bleeding out in the aftermath of an emotional homicide.

There was blood on both of our hands.

“Sorry doesn’t cut it anymore,” I muttered, turning my back on him. On us. I made the decision. I drew the line, and I stepped over the threshold of what was once ours and into a future where I would stand alone.

I crossed the room to the closet,flicking on the light. With no rhyme or reason, I tore clothes off hangers, shoving the garments haphazardly into my overnight bag.The zipper on the bag snagged. I forced it closed with a sharp tug. My fingers trembled as I slid off the simple white gold band,the engagement ring he had slipped on back at the end of August last year. I placed it reverently on the top of the dresser nearest the closet door.

I wasn’t going to marry Sebastian.

“I’ll be out by the end of the week,” I announced, voice thick with tears I refuse to shed.

I couldn’t afford to break now. If I did, I would never leave.

Nothing would ever change between us. I was caught in the chasm between a life I’ve known and one I’m determined to carve out for myself. The weight of my decision made my whole body tremble. I knew that Bash wouldn’t miss the chink in my armour, the tell that I am half-in-half- out. I didn’t want to leave.I didn’t want to stop loving him.

Then why the fuck did you do that, Mason?

The thought gnawed at me as I clench my jaw, squaring my shoulders against the doubt creeping up my spine. Maybe he would understand in time? That was laughable. Deep down, I knew Bash meant every word. His ‘forbidding’ wasn’t just about concern, it was about his need for control. And I would not allow my career to be controlled. Not anymore.

“Please, don’t do this, Mase...” Bash’s quiet plea came from the bed where he sits, looking lost for perhaps the first time in his life, “We can talk through this.”

“I’m done,” I said, more firmly than I felt. “You either support me or you are in my way.”

“It’s probably best that you aren’t on the extraction team, " I gripped the worn leather handles of my bag, "as a matter of fact, I...I don’t want you there."

Just another nail in the coffin of us.

I turned away before I could witness the full impact of those words and reached for the door.

Every instinct screamed at me to go back, grovel, humble myself and lose the ambition. But this was my chance. I might not just have shot at literary immortality,but I could help people, living people, that needed someone to advocate for them as they rotted away in the bowels of that goddamned cult. I was going to prove the whispers of nepotism wrong, that my career came only from my father’s intercession.

I could do this on my own.

Because I was good at what I do.

“I’ll be at my brother’s if you need me to get out sooner,” I called over my shoulder, the door to our apartment creaking open to mark the end of everything we had built together.

But I would not be forbidden.