LOVE BUG

CHAPTER 36: COVERT

A tiny smile instantly tickles Nate's lips at the sight of the dark-gray cardboard cup, calling back memories of a cute frown and a crystalline laugh in his mind. They've barely met at the time... It feels like yesterday, yet also as if it's been millions of years ago from where they are now...

He takes a sip of the cold and bitter taste, the exact opposite of Anastasia.

No matter what he does or where he is, everything leads him back to her.

Here, it's a strange feeling. Just her images playing over and over again in his mind make him light as a feather, the sensation of flying freely expanding inside, yet in this familiar, restricted environment, the heavy reality and concrete weight of the risks they're taking are crushing his lungs.

"Oh, we have two arrivals!" Darrell pulls him out of his ambivalent thoughts, and Nate is quick to shake off the first images coming to his mind with these words and focus on the screen before his eyes.

A man and a woman, blond short mohawk and curly black hair, average sizes. He's learned to process these details like an automaton, typing on the keyboard, but never letting the human aspect pass the shield he's built over the years.

"They're already on the Shady list." Nate eyes the ID photos popping on the screen, swallowing hard. 

The next list is not a good one, and the pictures seem to stare accusingly at him, piercing through his iron shield.

"And this one? Still on the Shady list too?" Darrell nods towards the guy covered in tattoos opening them the door. "I swear I see him every time I'm in covert!" He laughs under his breath as the cameras are zooming on the scene, and it almost looks like the man's gaze is staring straight at them for a second. "I'm impressed by this dude's nerve and luck!"

"Maybe he isn't guilty?" Nate tries to justify, and it passes as playful even if he isn't really.

"Yeah, and he's guarding the Photography club like Cerberus?!" Darrell lifts an eyebrow, and although Nate is always appreciative of his best friend's joker remarks lightening even the heaviest situations, today, it barely pulls him a faint, tired chuckle as he watches absent-mindedly the silhouettes disappearing from the screen, and like his gaze, the motion sensor cameras losing focus.

The tattooed man hasn't entered the building; that is sure, yet the cameras have lost his track. He seems as sly as a fox, defeating the merciless motion-following cameras. He knows what he is doing, and his nerve has got him the luck to not pass on the following list. 

Nate looks at the only moving thing on the screen: the time. Though the more he stares at it, the less it seems to be moving.

"How long have we been here?" He sighs.

"One hour and ten minutes, but who counts?" Darrell gives him a wry grin, his eyebrows lifting as Nate returns the half-smile before throwing his head back with another heavy sigh.

"Come on! I don't like it either, but the promotions are around the corner..."

Nate wonders which one of them Darrell is trying to convince, but at least, for him, it doesn't work.

"And it's not like going back to hell," he adds, and even his typical humor sinks under the seriousness falling with his words. "We're just..."

"Just searching to send people there..." Nate finishes, his tone deadly, yet there is no other way to say it.

He feels the dark memories crawling under his skin. They have found their way into his thick shield long ago, so he can never really escape them, and now, they are swirling with forbidden pages he's read and luminous memories of his angel.