Ecstasy

Her

"I'm your biggest fan

I'll follow you until you love me

Papa-Paparazzi" 

- Excerpt from Paparazzi by Lady Gaga

LORENZO ANTONOV

It's silent in the room but inside my head, things are going completely haywire.

My head is fucking pounding.

Not because of a migraine, well it is, but mostly because of stress.

Personally, I want to sleep. I've been up for about 24 hours and I'm on, maybe, my fourth cup of coffee.

Suddenly, my door slams open and shockingly, it doesn't scare me. Not one bit.

In fact, I react quite late because I'm, you know, sleep-deprived.

In comes my two friends, who might as well be classified as best, are smiling at me with their pearly whites.

I raise a brow in confusion. Why are they bothering me?

"We should all go out. Tonight," Cai tells me.

Cai is probably the one person I know the most in this room. Cai and I met when I was 16. Mama is friends with Cai's parents and because Cai was in desperate need of money due to his parents' health, he became my personal bodyguard.

He's also the most promiscuous out of all of us.

Next to him is Elijah. Eli and I met around when I was 21. He's freshly new.

I was looking for someone to be a person behind the computer... the big brains of the operation 'cause even though I can... I don't want to... I'm not a fan of big numbers.

This was really because our old one wanted to settle down and start his own family, which is perfectly fine by the way, I could honestly care less.

Just tedious to find someone else.

Well, I was lucky. Eli was known to be a hacker around the underground area and small gangs. I hunted him down and hired him. At first, he was reluctant because he was afraid he was going to be in harm's way but I promised him he wouldn't.

So far, nothing has happened and I will continue to keep that promise.

"We talked about it and I'm down with it," Eli replies to Cai's previous statement.

I shrug, "Okay, then go. I'm not stopping you."

Cai rolls his eyes and comes closer to my desk, clapping excitedly to gain my attention. 

 "Including you, man," he clarifies, pointing at me. I chuckle and then my face drops, going back to serious, and continuing on with my boring and very tedious work.

He must be joking.

"I'm not joking," he says, clearly reading my mind, "We all should. You're probably stressed out to the extreme."

He's not wrong.

I am.

However, I don't have the chance to not be stressed out. People in this group, sometimes even out of the group, like being fucking idiots and causing issues.

That's when me, the boss, steps in. People make mistakes, I know that I do too, but it happens all the fucking time.

It doesn't help that it's not just one person, if it was they would be out of the group and would be labeled, probably, as a traitor or potentially sabotaging the group.