The Unfair Expectations E-Book

Angel Rupert

• Herausgeber: Bentockiz
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

This embrace had been all he’d thought about, when he’d had time to let his mind drift, for the ten days since he’d seen her last. Now claimed, he didn’t want to let it go. He would protect her forever, but thought he needed to know what he was protecting her from, having forgot, just that fast, he already had his answer.

Leseprobe

Title Page

The Unfair Expectations

Without Consolation

Angel Rupert

The Unfair Expectations / 7th of series: Without Consolation / By Angel Rupert

Published 2023 by Bentockiz

e-book Imprint: Uniochlors

e-book Registration: Stockholm, Sweden

e-book ISBN: 9789198847161

e-book editing: Athens, Greece

Cover Images created via AI art generators

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Introduction

Through books we come into contact with everything important that has happened in the past, analyzing also current events and putting our thoughts together to predict the future. The book is a window to the world, acquiring valuable knowledge and sparking our vivid imagination. It is a means of entertainment and is generally seen as a best friend, or as a slave that carries together all valuable information for us. The book is a friend who stays together without demands, a friend you call upon at every moment and abandon when you want.

It accompanies us in the hours of boredom and loneliness, while at the same time it entertains us. In general, a book does not ask anything from us, while it waits patiently on a dusty shelf to give us its information, to get us out of dead ends and to travel us to magical worlds.

This may be the travel mission of our books. Abstract narration, weird or unconscious thoughts difficult to be understood, but always genuine and full of life experiences, these are stories of life that can’t be overlooked easily.

This may be the start of something amazing.

Chapter One

The white taxi that seemed little more than a shoebox on wheels zoomed alongside the lofty and forbidding stone walls of Vatican City before merging into heavy traffic on a broad boulevard. The driver weaved his way around and through (and under?) the stalled traffic all the while maintaining an animated conversation with Barton in the back seat, constantly gesturing, sometimes with both hands at once. Barton clearly loved it; and though Zach couldn’t understand what the two were saying, he knew Barton well enough to realize he was gently egging the driver on. He only hoped Barton was discreet enough not to prod the effusive driver to the point where he looked away from the jammed road and their shoebox ended up flattened beneath a truck or against the old stone buildings that were startlingly close by.

They’d landed at Da Vinci International Airport an hour earlier, about twenty hours after leaving Barton’s house the day before. The flights over had gone smoothly, with only minor delays and little turbulence or discomfort. Zach had especially loved seeing the sun rise over the endless deep blue of the Atlantic, and later passing over the snow-covered Alps with their quaint villages tucked into the valleys looking all the world like the make-believe villages of snow-globe dioramas. Their luggage was slow in reaching the baggage carousel, but they were waved through customs without any inspection or even a stamp on his brand-new passport. When he saw all the carabinieri patrolling the airport with their conspicuously displayed machine guns, he figured incoming customs must be a minor concern compared with the ever present threat of the Red Guard. He’d never seen a machine gun displayed in public, not even by soldiers marching in Dover’s annual Memorial Day parade. He wondered if the sight made him feel safer or more vulnerable.

Barton had hailed the cab outside the Arrivals platform; and the short and round cabbie shoe-horned their bags into a kind of vertical trunk at the back of the Fiat, shoe-horned his two passengers into the baby-carriage sized back seat, and off they’d gone for the half-hour ride from the airport to downtown Rome. At first Zach tried to define his space in the back of the cab, but finally gave up and leaned lightly against Barton as he carried on his lively conversation with the cabbie. Despite the swerving car and honking horns and unbroken babble of the two men, Zach drifted into a daze, feeling simultaneously profoundly secure (in Barton’s sure hands) and profoundly vulnerable, and finally not letting either concern affect him, letting both his body and mind surrender themselves to fate—safe delivery to the hotel or maiming on this crowded roadway: it didn’t matter which.

Fate decided on the former, though not before they’d bounced up onto the sidewalk and brushed back a pedestrian as the cabbie squeezed off the busy boulevard onto the one-way side street leading to the Hotel Cassiodora, their home for the next week. Zach pulled himself out of his daze, then pulled himself out of that sardine can and grabbed the two biggest bags while Barton settled with the cabbie. Though they’d landed in bright sun, the afternoon had clouded up on the drive from the airport and now there was a light drizzle as they scurried under the hotel awning and relinquished their bags to a grinning young bellhop. Barton checked them in and they were guided to a spacious and elegantly appointed third-floor room. The bellhop drew back the curtains in front of the large window to show the building across the street, then shrugged and closed the blinds. They’d not come all this way to sit and stare out a window anyway.

As if to prove that point, Barton took two minutes to pee and splash some water on his face, then came out of the bathroom and said, “Where to?”

Zach laughed through his weariness. “I suspect you have an answer to your question.”

Barton pulled out his pocket guide. “Piazza Navona is a ten-minute walk.”

Zach shrugged (and in so doing adopted a popular Italian gesture, aptly demonstrated by the bellhop a few minutes earlier). “When in Rome—”

“—do as Barton says.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

And out the door they went, leaving their bags unopened on the floor where the bellhop had left them.