Which left me thinking—what did he think of the adult I’d become?
Chapter Ten
Jackson
If I was honest, some of what I was studying haunted me, and it took my brain a while to embrace the ‘mind over matter’ mentality.
Forensic science was a complex subject, and knowing that in the future I’d be using it for real life situations, and the weight of getting it wrong or right, was a tremendous amount of pressure.
But I wanted to do it. I wasn’t sure which department of forensics I wanted to go into.
I also needed to consider getting my master's in it after this, and where I’d go to do it. I still had time to figure it out, but the time for me to make the decision was coming up fast.
Over dinner, we discussed it some more, obviously without any gore so that we could eat.
I found myself telling Sasha things I hadn’t even told my brothers about, like the weight of a proper investigation, the importance of not fucking it up entirely, and letting a killer go free. I explained about needing to remove myself and build a wall that separated the association between some evidence samples and the fact they belonged to a human victim.
There were so many things that I could list, and Sasha seemed to understand what I meant each time.
She had her own worries like that, too. I hadn’t ever thought about environmental science past what was obvious, but when she laid out how politicized it was, how companies had governments behind them, how dangerous it could be criticizing or releasing damning information on them… holy shit.
I know not everyone agreed climate change was happening—although a vast majority of the world’s population did—and I also knew it’d made its way into how different governments approached specific industries that impacted it. So depending on what part of the environmental science field she went into, she could be up against formidable people.
Like she’d said about one of the cases I’d discussed with her, greedy people don’t like when their wealth’s in jeopardy, and they’ll do whatever they can to stop it from happening.
My worry about her future career was: would I ever have to examine evidence from a crime scene where she was the victim?
Fuck no. That wasn’t happening.
Sensing my mood darkening, she’d immediately changed the subject onto something else, and that’d led to us turning on a movie I’d never watched before when we got home.
Right now, I was lying in bed with her beside me, watching Event Horizon.
“How the fuck do you watch this and not shit yourself?” I mumbled, my body tensing at what was happening on the screen at that moment and forgetting I was talking to her and not one of my brothers.
“I don’t know. The first couple of times I watched it, I had nightmares for months. After that, I got a hold on them, and now I can watch it without worrying about losing control of my bodily functions.”
As the actors walked along the dark metal hallway on the screen, I felt the muscles in my stomach start to knot. The problem with the movie was, so far, it’d all been primarily psychological. Gore I could handle, but when it played with your mind? It fucked me up.
“You know,” Sasha said conversationally, like the darkness and sinister music weren’t scaring the hell out of her. “The initial cut was more graphically violent than this.”
I stared at her, wondering if she was watching the same thing I was. How could she think of trivia at a time like this?
“The studio was so grossed out by it, they made them cut it by thirty minutes and get rid of some of the violence.”
Glancing back at the screen, I groaned at what happened at that moment, and without thinking, I plugged my ears with my fingers, so I didn’t hear anything. We all act impulsively, and when you’re desperate to maintain whatever hold you’ve got left on your fragile psyche thanks to a freaky as fuck movie, you act without thinking—even when a hot girl is sitting beside you.
A nudge to my side had my eyes flying to look at Sasha, seeing her smiling with her thumb up, telling me it was okay now.
“The director also wanted the Gateway Machine to look like one out of Hellraiser, so that’s why it’s designed like that.”
“So,” I croaked, licking my lips. “You’re telling me, this is kind of a space version of Hellraiser?”
Her eyes moved to the side for a moment while she thought about it, but then her shoulder raised so high it almost touched her ear, making her look adorable.
“I guess? It also reminds me of The Shining.”
“Fuck me,” I moaned. “It took me months to get over that fucking movie.”
“Oops! We can switch it off if you want?”