Not the Best Start Chapter 21

That night, neither Blake Pang nor Ethan Shen could sleep. They lay in different rooms, tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling.

Normally, if Ethan Shen had recently "seen" a client, Blake Pang would sleep on a recliner in Ethan Shen's room and watch over him all night to prevent the person he was "seeing" from suffering the fate of being unable to speak, such as suffocation or an overdose of sleeping pills.

When Ethan Shen was safe, Blake Pang would usually sleep in a nearby room half of the time. The walls of the room were not very thick, so Blake Pang liked to leave the door open so that he could hear Ethan Shen's calls if he had a nightmare. But Ethan Shen did not like to leave the door open. Blake Pang would wait until he fell asleep and quietly open the door a little. He had been in the army for so long and had been undercover many times, so he was no problem using some tricks. Ethan Shen had never discovered them.

All of this was a habit that Blake Pang had developed inadvertently. When he was lying on the bed, he subconsciously got up to open Ethan Shen's door, but heard the sound of Ethan Shen turning over outside the door. He realized what a terrible habit he had developed. He didn't know how many such habits there were. The terrible thing about these habits was that if he left Ethan Shen, Blake Pang didn't know what he would do.

Should he take over the next tasker like a shadow? Would he no longer violate the professional terms of his line of work and become a true monitor? Or should he accept the ridicule and mockery of his peers again and get involved in the life of another tasker, mortgaging his military and party membership for him?