My new daily routine now included a special kind of self-inflicted torture I liked to call ‘Emotional Flogging for Fun and Profit,’ or as the ancient masters more boringly named it, ‘Daoist Tai Chi.’
It was a weird, esoteric offshoot of the traditional energy-moving stuff I’d been doing, designed less for circulating power and more for getting in touch with your feelings. For me, that was like asking a wolverine to perform ballet—messy, loud, and guaranteed to end with someone getting mauled.
My emotional state, a finely-tuned instrument of cynicism and paranoia held together by duct tape and spite, was fraying at the edges after the… incident. Let’s call it ‘The Great Arena Nakedness Debacle of [Current Semester].’
It’s hard to maintain a healthy level of misanthropy when your soul has just done an involuntary, deeply invasive tango with someone else's and left your dignity in a glittering, metallic puddle on the arena floor for everyone to see.
Mostly because when my brain finally rebooted from its system-wide crash, I found myself locked in a passionate, full-body, and very public make-out session with one Katie “Frost Phoenix” Not-My-Girlfriend. A session I had zero memory of initiating, which is generally a bad sign. And we were both spectacularly, heroically naked.
My armor had mostly disintegrated into a fine, carcinogenic dust that probably gave the janitorial crew super-cancer, and her costume had been vaporized by our little energy exchange. So there we were, the center of a horrified and undoubtedly titillated audience of my peers, professors, and future employers.
Me, looking like a freshly plucked chicken who’d lost a fight with a belt sander. Her, looking like a Norse goddess who’d just won the superpower lottery and was celebrating by molesting a street urchin. My reputation, already a complex tapestry of ‘rent-a-villain,’ ‘emergency medic,’ and ‘weird tinker,’ had just acquired a bold new thread: ‘public nudist and opportunistic make-out artist.’
Let me be perfectly, painfully clear: we weren't doing anything. But the raw, unfiltered, metaphysical want radiating off both of us was a tangible force, thick enough to cut with a knife and serve on toast. My lizard brain, which apparently hadn’t gotten the memo about my catastrophic failure of a love life, was screaming at me to teleport us somewhere private and see what happened next.
And based on the way she was clinging to me, her own higher functions seemingly offline, she probably wouldn’t have objected. It was a terrifyingly attractive option, which is how I knew it was a catastrophically bad one. My life operates on a simple principle: if it looks like fun, it’s probably a trap baited with explosives.
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That wasn't me. I’m not some saint who asks for signed consent forms between kisses—though, given my track record, maybe I should start—but I have a hard rule against taking advantage of someone who’s mentally scrambled, emotionally vulnerable, or physically compromised. Unless, of course, the compromising was pre-negotiated and involved safe words and a notary public. The high, paranoid wall I’d built after the Christine debacle was supposed to be impregnable.
But lately, it felt like everyone was showing up with tactical nukes and a grudge. First the mind-melting energy synergy, now this primal urge. My defenses were being bypassed on a metaphysical level, and my heart was the poorly defended server farm everyone wanted to hack.
I think I finally figured out the core of my romantic problem, the rotten root feeding this whole pathetic tree. Every single woman I got involved with was, in every measurable way, more of a man than I was. And by ‘man,’ I don’t mean testosterone levels; I mean agency, power, and the sheer, unadulterated competence to actually be the protagonist of their own story.
I know, I know. Cry me a river, right? It sounds like shallow, insecure whining from a guy who just got a massive power boost and a supermodel-grade woman trying to climb him like a tree. And it is.
But self-awareness doesn’t magically cure the disease; it just makes you a more informed, miserable patient on your deathbed. Christine was a Class 4 shifter with ambition that could power a small city and the moral flexibility of a contortionist.
Mindy was a Class 5 hydrokinetic from a solid, middle-class family who actually had a future that didn’t involve hiding in radioactive tunnels. Even Candace, for all her crude charm and vocabulary that would make a dockworker blush, was a combat Alpha who could probably bench-press a truck and then use it to beat another truck to death.
And what was I? A washed-up rent-a-villain with a broken power, a mountain of debt, and a future that mostly involved staying one step ahead of the BSA or the various factions who wanted to peel me open to see how I worked. I was the comic relief sidekick in my own damn tragicomedy.
My paranoia wasn't just justified; it was a survival instinct honed by experience. From a certain cold, logical point of view, Christine’s betrayal made perfect sense. I was a dead-end boyfriend with a company I was utterly unqualified to run, a useful idiot with a useful patent.
My cousin James was a charismatic shark who knew what he wanted and had the teeth to get it. Him turning his magnetism on her was like using a particle accelerator to crack a nut. It was overkill, but effective.
It didn’t excuse what they did, but it sure as hell made it more complicated than ‘evil ex steals company.’ It was a brutal lesson in social dynamics: if you project the image of a glorified stevedore, a fence-sitting middle manager, and a convenient tool, that’s exactly what people will use you as. I’d played the part of the useful idiot perfectly, and I’d won a starring role in my own financial and emotional ruin.
