Egg Benedict (Novel)

3. Wake, Awake, for night is flying pt.1

Sometimes, certain emotions are endowed with eternal life. Such is Kyle Frost's love for Nicholas White. Kyle loves everything about Nick. A strong jaw that stiffens when he's deep in thought, green eyes looking down at Kyle, his beautiful sweaty back, and even the fact that he doesn't like people. Everything that makes up Nick is so adorable that I can't resist it.

It is said that the primary emotions fade with time, but Kyle's love did not. It accumulated, eroded and hardened like stone. It has become such a hard mineral that even a blade cannot break it. Kyle's heart only responds to Nick. That's why it's impossible for him to love anyone else.

But sometimes, very occasionally, when I was under the impression that Nick would never love me as much as I loved him, I thought: Perhaps this feeling is the most beautiful curse in the world.

I first met Nick in an abandoned building on the outskirts of Coventry. A combination of dozens of coincidences brought Kyle and Nick together. That day, Nick was accompanying his father to his uncle's house.

Kyle wouldn't be living his life the way he is right now, if Nick hadn't walked into a nearby vacant lot to play with his young cousin, three-year-old Tull. At best, he would have been found dead the third Sunday of November, or he would have died at some other time.

But in a twist of fate, Nick was there. Later I heard that a baseball thrown by Nick's cousin had blown away and landed there. Nick noticed a suspicious building and went inside to look for the ball. It was more than a week after the investigation into Kyle's abduction started.

The ten-day period is open to interpretation. While the period in question is relatively brief, there is potential for it to presage an incident with the capacity to exert a long-term negative effect on an individual's life. Kyle was unfortunate to find this to be the case.

Over a decade later, Kyle still frequently finds himself reflecting on that period. The winter of his thirteenth year was marked by a series of traumatic experiences, including being bound by ropes around his hands and feet and being confined in a damp, mouldy environment. The dream began with a jumble of memories, including an argument about not devaluing the goods, the eyes of a strange boy staring at him from behind a rusty window, and his family not coming to look for him. These memories came to an end with the appearance of Nick. Nick, the fair-haired individual, was caught in the act of breaking through the locked fence. This action caused time, which had seemed to stand still, to begin moving again.

Nick is the first and last source of salvation for Kyle. He is the only person in Kyle's life who can offer a sense of hope and purpose, providing a much-needed beacon of light in Kyle's otherwise dark existence. Prior to this, Kyle had been trapped and held hostage, lacking the resilience to break free. It was only with the help of Nick that Kyle managed to grasp hold of the lifeline offered to him, finally allowing his life to regain some semblance of value and meaning.

It was Nick who provided him with the motivation to continue living, despite the absence of any practical purpose other than breeding and maintaining the purity of the breed. At that moment, Kyle became aware that a complete stranger could provide solace and comfort to a greater extent than a blood relative. And he felt a sense of gratitude. The information he gained was likely to remain unknown to him had it not been for Nick.

Kyle was therefore obliged to refrain from any act of greed, no matter how insignificant, directed towards Nick. Kyle was acutely aware that he was the sole stain in Nick's life, akin to an indelible black stain on a white cloth. Kyle's father died while attempting to rescue him.

In contrast to Kyle's family, Nick's family, who was a normal, close-knit community, had been shattered to pieces. And all because of a boy who had no value beyond the reproductive advantage of producing another dominant Alpha, Nick and those around him had to lose someone very important to them.