The Price by Farshad Torkashvand, Part 2

... Continuation 

Suffy and Tatiana exchanged a look, then turned back to Brad. Suffy's expression was comical, as if someone had stuffed her mouth with chicken legs—perhaps too many of them. The shock in her eyes was palpable. Tatiana was also in shock, but Brad wondered why her lip was quivering as if she were about to cry, or as if she were seeing the final moments of her life flash before her eyes.

Brad grabbed the folder he needed, stood up, and started to leave.

"What?" Suffy demanded.

While holding the file, Brad pulled his chair back, stood up, and walked around the table. "I'm going to a conference," he responded nonchalantly.

Tatiana, still looking terrified, as if someone had just asked her to die for a silly prank, looked at Suffy with begging eyes to end the nightmare. She was too shocked to speak. Brad ignored both her and Suffy and started walking toward the door.

"You can't do this," Suffy proclaimed, as if she were a judge who had seen enough of this charade.

Now close to the door, Brad looked at Suffy and said, "I know." Then he looked at Tatiana, whose face was still a mask of fear, and met her eyes. "But I wish I could." A bitter smile drew itself across his face.

He turned the handle and left the office.

During the meeting, he was scolding himself for being so stupid, for being so reckless. In a matter of seconds, in a moment of losing control, he had created an awkward situation that would last for ages. He looked back at all the times he had shaken his head at this kind of stupid behavior from other people. Now, he had officially joined that club.

He was fortunate that no one asked him anything. It was as if he were invisible. He felt like one of the chairs in the office, only there to be ignored, and that thought threw him into another abyss of thoughts. It was as if he were watching or reading this as a third person. He wasn't a character in the story; he only got to understand him. That was it. Just to watch or read about another character and see the story to the end. He couldn't do anything impactful. It was someone else's story, and he wasn't the author either.

Was that all? To be born and die someday? Maybe there were many occasions when he was active in decision-making—like which university to go to, or what to do with people he didn't like to hang out with, and many more—but at that moment, he wondered if he was replaying the same life on a different timeline. Like a lazy author rewriting the same story over and over again with different faces, in different locations, or in different languages.

What was so special about his love compared to others? Like the seasons that come without caring if he wore warm clothes or not. Like the spin of the Earth, which doesn't care if he jumps or not, or where he is, and just keeps spinning. Or the coldness he felt that morning. Even though people feel it differently, they still feel the same sensation. Cold is cold, and hot is hot. What was so revolutionary about that?

And that tang of attraction he felt when he looked at Tatiana—was it so special that he had to say something stupid? What was he thinking? He wanted to die from the shame he felt after saying that last line.

Then he fell into another rabbit hole of thoughts. What was she thinking? What was she feeling in that moment? What would have been better to say instead of those embarrassing things? Did she want Suffy to know about it or not? What were her coworkers thinking? Were they going to ridicule her for someone else's actions? What if she became the butt of the joke among her peers because Brad wasn't good enough? Brad didn't care about those things, but maybe Tatiana did.

These and many other insecure thoughts invaded his brain, like wave after wave of an ocean on a stormy night, crashing on the rocks and drowning out all the noise around him. He heard the chattering, yet it was incoherent against the deafening sound of his thoughts.

That feeling of being a third person stayed with him. It was as if he were reading someone else's thoughts and actions. As if this was what was supposed to happen. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening. This was a guy named Brad, but it could have been anyone else. It could have been Dustin, Joel, Frank, Peter, Joseph, or people with foreign names like Ali, Parsa, Anand, Armando, and on and on. Maybe this was happening to Alex, and Brad was just reading the story.

Brad had no involvement in the shaping of the story, yet here he was, and here he read about it. It was voyeuristic, like he was looking into someone else's thoughts, but for him, it was just entertainment. Who else was reading Brad's story besides Brad? Was it somewhere out there? In a pile of discarded papers? Was it told through the radio? Or just more public, like in a library, in an open book where every passerby sees it and laughs at it, or laughs at him? Or asks the same questions he asked himself: "What the hell was he thinking?" Then they go about their lives until they make the same mistake, perhaps in another variation, and shamefully ask themselves, "What the hell were they thinking at that moment?"

To be continued...