105 Square one

'How do I get close to him?' Regan cocked her head, 'how to reach a level in which he can trust me whole-heartedly.' As Regan spat out the paste in her mouth, the answer came to her but she immediately pushed it away.

She hated the thought of using someone, it reminded her of the one she had wanted to spend her entire life with and the emotion on his face that she couldn't see due to her blurry vision as she laid in that pool of blood. She couldn't dare use someone's emotions, she wouldn't dare lay her hands on someone's feelings just to use them for her own good and ruin them. 

There had to be another way to do it. There had to be another way than to dig into someone emotionally. 

She opened the tap on her sink and rinsed her mouth, then wiped her lips with her hand. Using the smaller towel hanging off the same rod she got her towel from, she wiped her face and placed it back, then walked out of the bathroom and shut the door behind her. 

"Is he even going to come back?" Without knowing, Regan's mind had drifted to Vixen again. "He didn't seem to want anything to do with me, so what makes me think that he'll come back when I ask? Or even spare five minutes to talk to me." 

Regan brushed her hair with her fingers and walked over to the wardrobe and pulled it open, looking at the contents inside. She chuckled to herself when she realized it was the same shirt and pants hung in her wardrobe, the same monotone colors staring back at her. She pulled out an outfit and prepared to put it on when a glimmer of something caught her eyes. She placed the outfit of her arm and began to sift through her clothes to the very bottom corner of her wardrobe where the light came from. 

Finally when she reached the source of light, she paused and stumbled backward a few steps. There at that corner was her red ring, staring back at her with a gleam of seduction. It was calling out to her again, pulling her in to put it on. Regan's finger throbbed, the space where the ring usually sat seemed to want it's owner back.

It was hard to resist. Hard to resist picking it up and placing it on her finger once again, allowing her to feel how it rested on her hand so comfortably, flooding her memory with both good and bad moments. It was hard to resist calling it her ring again. 

She pulled out the box and forced her right hand to help open the box. Making sure her eyes were directly on the box, she opened them at the same moment that she opened the box. There in the middle of the box sat Vixen's ring, sitting comfortably in this impatient position, like it was waiting for her to put it on. So she did. 

Quietly, she slipped on the golden ring on her finger and pulled her hand close to her chest as she stepped away from the closet. Her heart was pounding hard against her chest. She could feel the weight on her finger, lighter than her old ring but not overly heavy for her finger. Her emerald eyes focused and looked down at her hand where the golden ring peered up at her, it's gaze less demanding than the frightening beam of red her old ring held at the bottom of her closet. 

Something in her settled and the churning in her stomach eased. The golden beam gave her warmth. 

Regan turned to the outfit that sat on the bland floor, the red color was blinking off and on, on the shirt. It was still a mystery to her, how she was so petrified at the sight of the ring, yet wanted to put it on her hand so much that it was basically pulling her towards it. She didn't know what to call it, attraction, obsession, whatever it was, it was unhealthy. 

Regan quickly put on her shirt and pants and walked to her bed and snuggled under the covers. 

'Now what?' Regan thought to herself. 'Then what?'

She didn't know what to do next. Should she wait here? Sleep? Make something to do? Pretend that she had something to do? She would wait. But who was she waiting for? More unanswered questions piled onto her mind, but the most frustrating part was that she didn't know how to solve them. She needed someone to give her answers, she needed a blunt mouth that would tell her what was going on in her messed up mind without a second thought. Was that who she was waiting for? No. It wasn't.

And what did she even want when she'd stopped waiting? She wanted to wake up from her mindset but what else? That mindset wasn't all she wanted to wake up from, that wasn't all that she wanted. 'Until I answer those questions, will I not be pathetic? Would I find my purpose? And if I do, what's the point? I'm not going to get out of here until I serve my sentence…' Regan sat in silence for a moment before chuckling, 'I don't even know how long that is.' She shifted her head on her pillow, a slight smile on her face, 'maybe that was the point, that I'm going to spend eternity in here. Lifeless days spent on a bed that would soon have my body's imprint on it. Time… time would be all I'd have.'

Regan chuckled again. She couldn't tell if her deep thinking was improving or spiralling down a dark tunnel. She had never gotten to think of 'time' while she was in the real world. Between her time at the library studying for her tests and her days in her office writing up the designs for another hit game, time had become something she ignored and waited to pass by. She had just been living, existing for no other purpose than to help others. Now that time was all she would have, what was she going to do with it? 

Regan wiggled up the bed and laid her head on her pillow. She laid there waiting, waiting for something she didn't even know. She didn't know what to do now, but she had time to spare, hopefully it was enough to figure out her mind. 

She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. What had she accomplished today in her minutes and hours of thinking? Nothing, for now she would wait for her next entertainment to come along. Like a ticking clock, her time ran backward. Back to square one.