Freebie Mondays: The Responsible Choice (Prompt Novel Chapter 17)

For 2024, I decided to devote my prompt writing time to a novel. The twist is that the novel plot will be generated entirely by the writing prompts I chose to use for the project – which were rolled randomly using my trusty dice and a few online prompt lists. You can find the Table of Contents here.

For Chapter 17, the prompt was: “if I knew then what I know now.”

This was one of the initial prompts I rolled at the start of the project. I wasn’t worried about fitting this prompt in because it’s so broad that it could relate to just about anything, but I chose to use it now because one half of the plot in this novel has gotten a lot of development and the other has lagged behind. This seemed like the perfect prompt to bring the secondary plot screaming into mad trajectory toward all the other problems my characters are dealing with.

I’ve almost reached the point where I need to decide what the ultimate outcome of all this swirling drama is. But we have a few more buttons to push before then!

If you’d like to see this chapter come together, you can watch the VoD on Youtube!
. . .

Nala didn’t like to make mistakes. They may have been part of the natural progression toward success, the lessons that paved the way forward, but they had always struck her more as setbacks. If she could only do everything right the first time, she would be much farther along than she was now.

In her dreams, she saw herself vividly and clearly occupying the corner office of a massive skyscraper located somewhere in the heart of Silicon Valley. It was the kind of plushly decorated office that could have doubled as a studio apartment – if she really wanted it to. It had the large, polished oak desk set with high-tech computer equipment and a series of shelves that housed books, reports and knickknacks. It had the floor-to ceiling windows with the tinting that changed automatically based on the time of day and the strength of the sun. There were a series of filing cabinets pushed along one wall, but then the center of the space was dominated by a couch and a series of leather chairs set around a coffee table always laden with snacks and tiny booze bottles.

The marks of prestige and success, all within easy reach of her fingertips should she deign to rise from her cushy leather chair.

But that was only the tip of the ice berg, the very surface of the fantasy her mind wove for her to visit during the peaceful hours of her slumber. Because when she left that office, she flitted home to a huge house perched high on a mountain side which allowed her to overlook the city below – what she liked to think of as her domain.

Like the office, this house was richly appointed with dark stained walls, deeply cushioned furniture and expensive paintings on the walls. It had many rooms. She didn’t know how many; she’d never tried to count. But the number was high, and that was important. Out back there was a pool, always well maintained though never by her hand. In one room was a fully stocked bar and, in another, was an office not unlike the one she had just come from, though slightly more compact.

There was a sitting room, a lounge, and a study – which was where she kept her books, massive stacks of leather-bound tomes with fancy titles by famous authors, none of which she had actually read. The kitchen was massive, as was the master bedroom suite.

And down the hall from her office was a second of equal size which was used by her husband.

Success was a heady draught from which Nala longed to drink in the waking world, if only so she could make a fraction of this fantasy reality. But it was this second part of the dream that actually appealed to her most. Because when she waltzed down the hallway and into the room where her husband was just finishing the last of his files for the day, a familiar face grinned back at her.

Soft and warm, he was still the man from her childhood. Still the doofus who took her to prom and who she had to walk home with along the side of the road because their car broke down and they couldn’t manage to get signals on their cell phones.

He was the boy who got down on one knee for her and presented the smallest possible token of love so that they could save money for the big stuff later. But he had grown fully into adulthood and so bore the face she had seen the last time they sat down to dinner together.

Delmar always had a wide grin to offer her, even if she burst in on the middle of a task. The greeting played out like a scene from an old sitcom. She shuffled to his desk and leaned over it while he sat up in his chair to kiss her cheek. Then he would say, “How was your day dear?”

To which she would reply, “Wonderful!” and list all of the deals she had sealed for her patented technology. Then she would ask him the same question, to which he would add his rather dull list. And when all the formalities were done, he would toss aside whatever stapled packet he held and they would flit down the hall to the room with the bar to mix drinks and chatter about recent events, rumors and gossip about their friends.

It was a divine dream, one that Nala greatly wished she could linger within long after her alarm shattered each visit, demanding she return to the waking world and actually work for what, in her dreams, had already been handed her on a silver platter.

Looking back over her life and the contracts she had worked, Nala wondered which ones had led her down this path to mediocrity. Which of the projects she turned down would have led in the direction of the big office and the easy life? And why couldn’t she seem to turn this one – her dream project – into the reality it should be?

The questions plagued her while she brushed her teeth, showered and dressed. They haunted her as she trudged to her car and drove to the office. Day in and day out, always the same, just waiting for the moment when she could curl beneath her covers and return to the dream where she had married Delmar and everything had gone exactly according to her plans.

She didn’t dream the dream every night. Sometimes she was too exhausted or frustrated to settle her mind enough for the images to form. And though she had read about the art of lucid dreaming, she had never been able to take it seriously enough to achieve the state herself.

Yet it felt like salt rubbed in the most severe of her wounds when she pulled up to a drugstore on the way home from work one grueling afternoon with the dream still vivid in her mind from the night before and nearly plowed straight through Delmar.

His hand shot outward after the impact to steady her – even before he realized who she was. And when their eyes met, the wide grin from her dream dominated his features. “Nala!” he breathed in the way only a good friend can when running into another unexpectedly.

“Del!” she exclaimed, still trying to process his presence and the fact that he was both real and solid – not her husband and not bound to return to the same shared dwelling. “I thought you and your wife were out of town. Doesn’t she have some kind of family emergency going on?”

Nala couldn’t remember the details. Perhaps she should. Perhaps it would look bad that she didn’t. But there were too many issues with her current project for her to retain much else.

Delmar squeezed her arm before he let her go, a familiar gesture that made her heart constrict in her chest.

Did he miss her the way she missed him? Did he long for her the way she longed to throw herself into his arms?

Or did he think only of Ira, the strange woman he had taken for his wife?

“The crisis has mostly been sorted, thankfully,” Delmar said, and Nala realized she might have missed the first part of his answer. Luckily she had focused on his words quickly enough to keep things from becoming awkward. “She’s still dealing with a few things in the wake of the crisis, but there’s not much I can do to help, and work needed me back.”

Nala was strangely pleased by this turn of events. Why it should please her that Delmar was close and Ira was far away was beyond her, but she allowed the smile she wore to become warmer and more genuine.

“I’m glad to hear that the danger has passed,” she replied. “I’m sorry that the two of you have to spend so much time apart, but I’m actually glad I ran into you. This might be a bad time but… I was hoping we could get together for another dinner. So I could thank you properly for the assistance you rendered to my project.”

Confusion momentarily dominated Delmar’s features making his handsome brow fold. But he recovered quickly and shook his head. “Isn’t it Ira you should thank?” he protested. “I didn’t do much.”

“You introduced me to her,” Nala insisted. “And she was exactly what we needed, just like you predicted. I’ll happily thank her when she gets back of course, but I don’t know her very well. And I do know you.”

As well as it was possible to know a person, she knew Delmar – and yet she wished she knew him better, that his time could be her time rather than stealing little snippets of each other’s lives when convenience or the stars aligned.

“Come over to my place tomorrow,” Delmar suggested. “I’ve got tons of catering leftovers in the fridge I’d be happy to have someone to help me work through, and we can talk.”

Nala hesitated. She was walking a dangerous road and there was no possible way it led to the destination she desired. But the tug of his presence was too strong for her to ignore. “Actually, I’ve got a big meeting tomorrow. I’m not sure if I could get away in time to do dinner.” She tried not to let the falling of his face twist her heart even more, especially since she hurried to add, “But I’m not doing anything now.”

She pitched her voice upward at the end to make it a question and was pleased when he grinned again. “Just give me about twenty minutes to finish my errands. Do you know the address?”

“I’ll just follow you, if you don’t mind waiting an extra minute to leave.”

The arrangements made, Nala quickly grabbed what she had come for off the shelves, paid and darted back to her car where she promptly threw her purchases into the passenger seat. It was difficult to directly follow a car in a city like this at rush hour. But once they turned onto the rural road that hosted Del’s house, the rest of the drive was easy.

Nala sailed out of her car on cloud nine and followed Delmar inside, realizing only after she crossed the threshold that she had never actually been to his house before. Not this one, anyway. She had been too busy since moving here to make such an arrangement.

It was almost like the house from her dream. It wasn’t quite as large, and it was located in a dip of verdant green rather than along a high perch. But even without the pool and all of the extraneous rooms, it hit so close to her dream that her stomach twisted in a series of ever more violent knots.

The walls were dark-stained wood. The furniture wasn’t rich but it was homey, which gave the whole house a cozy feeling. A fuzzy blanket had been left in a pile on one side of the couch and there were a series of papers recently pulled from the mail scattered across one side of the dining room table, clearly awaiting attention.

Delmar didn’t give her a grand tour, but she imagined there was a comfortable master suite and at least one home office lurking deeper within the house. Maybe later, she would duck into the bathroom and sneak a peek.

Everywhere she looked, there were little accents she knew had come from her old high school sweetheart. She could see his hand in the color choices and the mantle decorations above the fireplace. She guessed that he had chosen the dishes he set in front of her as he pulled Tupperware containers out of the fridge and arrayed them for her to choose from.

She could see hints of Ira as well, mostly because she recognized things Del was unlikely to ever do or chose, and she simply assumed those aspects of his home must have come from his wife.

It was a nice place, far grander than the tiny apartment Nala called home at the moment. And while she considered herself a mere visitor to this area at the moment rather than someone trying to set down roots, it still stung.

She tried to focus on the conversation that followed, because she was greatly interested in what Delmar had been up to since last they shared a meal. But she constantly found her mind wandering along with her eyes.

Her denial of Del’s proposal seemed like a responsible choice at the time she made it. There was no way they could both pursue their ambitions and court each other. The world simply didn’t work that way.

Yet glancing around the house she currently occupied, she saw all the signs of two successfully ambitious adults. Ira obviously worked for a large corporation, and she knew Del did too. They might not have had the extravagant lifestyle she dreamed of with the fully stocked bar and the pool out back, but they had clearly made it. A house of this size in an area like this wasn’t cheap, and she saw evidence of custom renovations made in the recent past.

Del had everything she wanted – including happiness – but with the wrong woman.

Losing Delmar had never felt like a mistake before. It was a regret, for certain, a sorrow that stuck ever more frequently in the forefront of her mind as she was forced to interact with his wife. But the conclusion of their relationship had also seemed inevitable, unavoidable.

What if it wasn’t?

Nala knew that questioning the distant past only led to madness. She couldn’t now go back and change her answer to his proposal. And if she confessed the feelings building within her this very moment, all he would say was that he was married now, and happy.

But once the first what if stole into her brain, it was impossible to halt the deluge that followed.

What if we pursued our careers together? Would this be my house? Would we be as happy as he seems today?

What if she had misjudged? What if the responsible choice had been to embrace the amazing offer right in front of her and sort the rest out later?

If she had known then that success was possible with Del on her arm, she wouldn’t have hesitated to take his ring and wear it for the rest of her days. She had no doubt it would have been a rough ride. There would have been times they had to spend apart and jobs that prevented them from sharing details with each other.

But it seemed clear Delmar had the same arrangement with Ira and it made no impact on his contentment.

Nala could feel the warmth of her old love’s life all around her while she occupied the house. It became so cloying, so suffocating that she practically fled when it was time to leave, waiting until she had driven up the street into the darkness to pull to the side of the road so she could slam her hands against the steering wheel and allow a few hot tears of outrage to burn her cheeks.

She had the dream that night, but it wasn’t the same house she had always imagined before. It was Del’s house with her accents scattered throughout it.

It turned out it was Ira’s life she wanted. And she wondered when she woke if she had known that Delmar would turn to someone else if she would have been so cavalier about walking away.

If she had known the path that awaited her, she would almost certainly have changed it – and that was a worm she could not pull from her brain no matter how hard she tried.

*   *   *

“You seem particularly crass today,” Alyial muttered after one of Nala’s particularly sticky outbursts. He meant to say it softly enough that she wouldn’t hear it, but evidently he misjudged the volume of his voice because she glanced up from her keyboard and glared acid at the back of his head.

“Sorry,” he muttered, though he didn’t really feel a hint of regret. He wasn’t the only person who had felt the sting of her tongue today.

“Just get your damn work done,” she retorted. “We might be able to get this project back on track if we all work steadily and keep the reports up to date.”

“What do you think we’re doing?” Alyial retorted. He could feel his coworkers sinking more deeply into their chairs and hiding behind their computer screens so they could cringe, but he was annoyed enough that he simply couldn’t let this one go. “I would think you’d be relieved by the fact that our equipment is finally stable and hard drives are no longer frying left and right.”

It had certainly made a big difference to their work flow.

Nala’s lips twisted, and Alyial could tell she was about to demand to know who’s fault those setbacks had been. But uttering the words would have meant admitting to some form of superstition, so she quickly swallowed them and muttered, “I’m simply trying to make sure we don’t lose this grant. I don’t want this project to be canceled and I don’t want all this hard work to be for nothing.”

“You aren’t the only one,” Alyial replied, stressing each and every one of the words.

Nala wasn’t the team lead. She wasn’t in charge, despite the fact that she had been tearing through the office the last few weeks acting like a queen bee ordering about her drones. They were all tired, they were all stressed – and they would all be equally screwed if they couldn’t get enough results out of this project to move on to the next one.

Alyial was tired of tiptoeing around a member of the team just to keep the peace. Nala needed to know she wasn’t better than the rest of them.

He expected another angry retort that would likely lead to a lecture. But instead, Nala simply sighed. The tension in the room slowly lifted, and the sounds of fingers moving across keyboards filled the space.

Like the others, Alyial buckled down and focused on his work. It was easier now that technology did not explode in his face every time he touched it. He could only assume this was some gift from Ira, some reversal of whatever odd thing happened the first time they met but didn’t meet.

He would have liked to thank her for setting his life back on course, but she hadn’t answered any of his texts since revealing the fact that she thought she’d cursed him.

They had more pressing matters to discuss, as a matter of fact. Matters that left him biting his lip several times throughout the day, though he tried not to let anyone take notice.

Since the team hadn’t felt particularly united of late – not least due to the fact that Nala had been biting everyone else’s head off at least once a day since Alyial returned to the office, team members cycled in and out for lunch breaks. Eventually, Alyial looked up to realize he and Nala were alone in the room. He glanced at the clock to estimate how long this might continue to be the case, then he cleared his throat and ventured, “You haven’t heard from Ira since she helped us with the computer sim… Have you?”

Nala lifted her head so slowly to orient it in his direction, Alyial wished he could take the question back. He was just about to shrink behind his screen and hope he could pretend he hadn’t said anything when his colleague said, “You have been asking an awful lot of questions about her lately.”

Alyial gulped. He didn’t have a lot of lifelines to Ira. He was keenly aware that if she wanted to cut him out of her life entirely and pretend she was having her husband’s child, there wasn’t much he could do to prevent it. He couldn’t even argue that she was lying since the only relationship the two of them had was virtual, and she still had a hard time believing the child she was carrying had any possibility of belonging to him.

But unless he wanted to believe she was stringing him along for some reason, he had no idea what else to think. And given the strength of the connection that drew them together in the simulation, he had a hard time believing she was the kind of person who would construct this big a lie for any reason.

Especially since it stood to cause her far more harm than it could ever cause him.

“I just want to find a way to thank her,” he stammered when it was clear Nala wasn’t going to let this conversation go. That was his fault; he should have realized he was opening an entire can of worms just by speaking those simple words. “And you’re the closest thing anyone in this office has to a connection to her, since you know her husband.”

“Delmar isn’t in the habit of contacting me to catch up on the daily activities of his wife,” Nala retorted, her eyes still narrowed in his direction. “And since she and I had never met before she arrived to pull your ass out of the fire, and since I have already told you that, there must be some other reason for you to come fishing.”

Alyial couldn’t help it; he squirmed. Nala’s gaze had always been piercing and her temper formidable. But for the first time, Alyial actually felt as if he had something to hide beneath her scrutinizing gaze, and that made it hard to remain calm.

“It’s not a big deal, okay?” he hissed through clenched teeth and glanced significantly toward the door as if to suggest that he’d like to be finished with this conversation before their coworkers returned. “But I can’t help feeling we’d all have been a little more than screwed if she hadn’t helped us out of that sticky situation, so I’d like to find a way to do something nice for her at my earliest possible convenience.”

He hoped his tone insisted that it was simple and there was nothing more to it than that. But he had watched people content with urgency and desperation before, and he knew he was a tad bit hapless when it came to hiding his own emotions.

Nala’s head shifted as if she would turn away, and Alyial started to breathe a soft sigh of relief. But then her gaze snapped back toward him like a rubber band, and he knew he was screwed.

There must have been sweat pouring down the side of his face or some grimace sitting on his lips because the next thing Nala said was, “Something happened between the two of you inside that simulation, didn’t it?”

“No!” he denied far too quickly, and it was all he could do to avoid wincing. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he insisted. “It was just that I thought it was real and we shared some really intense conversation. That’s all.”

The barest hint of a grin curled Nala’s lips, and Alyial knew she wasn’t convinced. She would never be convinced because she would think whatever she wanted to think.

He just wished what she thought didn’t strike so close to the truth.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said after a moment and turned back to her computer. “I’ll just see if I can pull the simulation logs.”

Could she do that? Somewhere inside all of that complex code, was there a record of their conversation? And of their actions?

It seemed absurd. She had to be bluffing.

Yet they had designed this simulation for corporate use and corporations were going to want to be able to monitor and report what people did while inside the simulation.

Suddenly Alyial’s legs felt like jelly and he didn’t think he’d be able to stand up when it was finally his turn to skitter out of the office for lunch.

He even thought he heard Nala mutter, “If I had known yesterday…” under her breath.

But if she had would she have told him? And how could she possibly hope to tell him now? Even Alyial still wasn’t sure he believed it, and he had been there.

Could this be part of the curse?

If only I had known what could have happened because of my speeding that day, I certainly would have driven more carefully!