Free Dangerously Happy by Varian Krylov

I also felt lucky that he was my friend—or whatever he was to me—now.
     
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
     
     
    During the eternal commute to work, through a typically long and dull day of talking to clients on the phone and listening to the banal repetitions of complaints about the work, the customers, the lower-level employees, and the upper management from my fellow project managers, I felt happier than I think I’d felt in years. Everything seemed to be charged, humming with an elation I hadn’t felt since my first two or three hard-core crushes in high school. I hadn’t felt anything close with Avalyn, and flowing between the flashes of vivid imagery of my night and morning with Dario, little doubts about why I’d pursued her so intently in the first place, along with an unsettling realization that I felt like I’d just woken up from a sedated stupor that, looking back and really thinking about it, I’d been in for probably three or four years. Like I’d just kind of accepted all the safe but profoundly unsatisfying components that made up my existence. My apathetic live-in girlfriend (who I probably would have married if she hadn’t left me). My tedious and frankly purposeless job. A social life based on friendships sustained by little more than common memories of high school or college, or the convenient happenstance of working together. And now, Morpheus had just shown up in my sad little office that wasn’t much better than the cubicles doled out to the twelve guys and women working under me, and I’d chosen the red pill. I’d been passively, willingly yielding up my life force—all my time, my energy, my whole existence—to a soul-sucking hive organism that was draining whatever potential was inside of me, whatever years were left to me on this earth.
    When had I stopped trying to thrive, rather than exist day to day in a state of deaf, dumb, blind numbness? A dozen memories, moments, choices came bobbing to the surface of that stream of doubts winding around all the belly-tickling images of those recent hours with Dario. Giving up the dream of attending a fine arts college and getting a degree in music because I’d caved in to my dad’s pressure to get a BA in software development. Letting my college girlfriend talk me out of joining the Peace Corps after graduation because she was dying for us to move in together. Almost completely abandoning my efforts to write and perform the music I really cared about, in favor of joining mediocre bands because somewhere along the line I’d accepted hanging out and drinking beer as the pinnacle of social bliss.
    By the time I was back on the freeway, heading toward Dario’s for rehearsal, I was high on the certainty that I was awake and aware for the first time in years, and that starting that night I’d stop drifting through my own life like a leaf in a stream, passive and powerless. I didn’t know what different choices I wanted to make. The important thing was that starting right then I wasn’t going to let my dad’s ideas about what a “real job” was, or guilt about abandoning a relationship that had already limped along months after its expiration date, or fear of being left out of a band that sounded like an inferior copy of a hundred other LA bands dictate my fate ever again.
    For once, I’d rushed out of the office the minute the weekly status meeting ended, and gotten right on the freeway, hoping to get to Dario’s before the other guys. But of course at that hour the freeway was a parking lot, so in the end I only got there fifteen minutes earlier than usual, and like always, I was the last to arrive. True to his word, Dario acted completely normal. As if we hadn’t been upstairs touching and kissing and licking and fucking each other ten hours earlier, he gave me the old, polite smile and casual, “hello,” and without getting up, told me there was beer in the fridge and to help myself. I tried to act normal, but just seeing him sitting