Twenty Over Thirty || manxman

I - Chinese Food & Fallen Angels

It was another late night.

Everyone else besides the overnight custodian was gone, leaving James alone in the massive office building with just the sound of a distant vacuum cleaner. He was finishing up the paperwork he needed to have ready for a client in the morning, and once the last page slowly emerged from the printer, he stapled the small stack together and put it all in a folder marked Templeton & Parker. He worked for an architectural and engineering company that built other company buildings around the entire United States. James himself wasn't an architect, but he was hired during his years in college as an intern, and has been a full-time employee ever since graduating.

Sure it wasn't the most glamorous job in the world. He got back aches from sitting too long, the conversations he had with co-workers were fairly pointless and brief, and the twelve years he's spent with the company went slowly, but the promotions were good and this gig kept all of his bills paid without him having to worry about anything being cut off.

At the end of the day, James was comfortable, and that's all he thought truly mattered.

After everything in his personal cubicle was turned off, James filed his paperwork away and made his way out. He said goodbye to Brett, the custodian, and left the building entirely after taking the elevator five floors down. And just like every other late night, he went on a debate about what he was going to have for dinner tonight. His footsteps were like surround sound echoes all around him in the parking garage, and once he reached his silver Mercedes halted lonesome in the four leveled open space, James gave life to the engine and started home.

Chinese food.

That'd be nice.

As James drove, he planned out the rest of his night while the radio played his selected classic rock station out around him. Would it be his DVR recordings of Ironman for the thousandth time, or perhaps he would binge watch all of the Investigation Discovery reruns that were bound to be on by the time he got home? Either sounded just as good as the other, and probably made him also sound more like a mother of three after all the kiddies have gone off to bed, but with no one around to judge him, thankfully, James could enjoy his shows without having to hear about it.

So, Chinese food and reruns, it is!

By the time he picked up an order of steamed white rice and Kung Pao chicken, James drove home through the lively city of Anavrin, Texas. It was a large city located a couple hundred miles from Corpus Christi, and compared to the other major cities in Texas, Anavrin was the most active of them all. It was a place that could be compared to no other.

With its wild and mad party weekends, high business and educational success rates, and affordable cost of living, Anavrin was more of a contradicting city than anything else. From the antics that took place day in and day out, someone from any other part of the world would be surprised to hear this place actually knew how to function...but oddly enough, it did, and that's something that kept James from leaving.

Most kids when growing up have aspirations to leave where they'd been brought up, but not James, he loved Anavrin, even though the dull life he lived here could probably say otherwise.

By the time he arrived home on this Thursday night at 10:45pm, James pulled up outside in the lot of his apartment complex. He lived in the Shallow Springs complex along the freeway. It was a moderate sized community housing singles, couples, and whole families of all kinds. With a quiet atmosphere and a population of people that mainly stuck to themselves, James enjoyed how relaxed and discreet everything always was.

Little did he know that his life was about to take a mighty hard turn in the opposite direction.

Pulling up to the dark brown brick building, James stepped on his brakes when he noticed an unfamiliar car parked in his personal space. People who've lived in this place for longer than seven years were always given a parking space all to themselves, and it seemed the owner of this black Volkswagen had either forgotten or didn't know. Hell, there was even a sign in front of it that read: Private Resident Parking. What more of a warning could anyone need?