Thirty Years of My Life Means Absolute Shit To the Professional Assholes

The concrete stairs down to the basement feel like they're carved from my own goddamn bones tonight. Each step sends a shock through my knees—pain that started when I was pounding pavement for eight hours straight, chasing down leads that evaporated the moment I walked into some sterile office building and they saw exactly what I am. Aubrey's hand finds mine in the stairwell darkness, her fingers interlacing with mine like she's anchoring me to something real before I float away on a tide of corporate horseshit.

The smell hits me before I even open the door—that same beautiful cocktail of salvation: stale beer, cheap weed, and the metallic tang of righteous anger that seems to seep from the walls themselves. But tonight it smells different. Tonight it smells like the last fucking sanctuary on earth, like the only place where we don't have to explain why we're both walking wounded from a world that wants us to apologize for existing.

"Jesus fucking Christ, Wendy," Ezra calls out from his…