I sat watching Spencer thumb through the vast quantity of pages that we were working hard to cut down into a neat presentation.  Her hands were lean, nimble; her fingers worked quickly.  I watched her eyes scan over the lines before her, and her lips quiver slightly as she silently mouthed the words she was perusing.  She had a calming presence that captivated my attention and made the stresses of the world fade away.  I didn’t care about the volumes of work in front of us; I only cared that she were there by my side as we stumbled through it all.

It was reflective of how I felt in general.  So long as Spencer was by my side, I was happy, and the time I’d shared with her at my father’s company had proven to me just how precious our moments together were and would always be.  If we could get through 5 difficult years without each other, and then find each other again and find our feelings to be exactly the same, then we could get through anything together.  Even that stupid PNG bet.  PNG was nothing compared to what I’d been through in my time without Spencer, and I felt that if I could just show her how much she meant to me, then the truth about the dark side of DJC could never touch us.

Love had always been a weird issue for me.  I’d never actively looked for it, and had never really understood it or known how I’d recognise it when it finally did come along.  I just stumbled from one meaningless affair to another while trying to figure out what it was that I wanted from life.  Only I’d gotten it wrong.  What I wanted from life was easy – it was sex, and I got it easily – but what I needed was a completely different matter altogether, and one that was stopping me from moving forward and instead kept me continually stuck in the same rut.  I felt a void in me, and not a clichéd “void that needs to be filled with the love of another”.  This void was one that numbed me to everything, every experience, every touch from another person.  It seemed as though I went through life trying to feel, but in doing so managed to only shut myself off more and more from experiencing anything that was even remotely real.  I would see couples together and wonder how they made it look so easy.  I wondered how it could be that one person could make you so happy that you’d gladly choose to never be involved with anyone else ever again.  I wondered what the stolen glances meant, what it meant when people talked about how ‘electric’ things were with their partner.  I thought that, if I found someone, then maybe their love would complete me and I would no longer be the shell of a human being that I was.  So I tried to find it through sex – connecting through hands and mouths rather than through eyes and hearts.