Broken Dreams

He stood six feet two. As he walked into the training room to introduce himself to the latest recruits Alexandria thought she would faint. He was absolutely the most handsome man she had ever seen. She dared not look at him too hard for she knew he may hear her very heartbeat. Not to mention she could feel a few sprinkles of sweat drip down inside her bra.

As he made his entrance she recalled all the nasty rumors she heard of him during her 6-week sales training course.

He was driven.

He was also a driver.

The minute you quit allowing him to drive you to double over time he would personally show up to fire you as well. But still, her heart was taking her mind to a fantasy. But she knew in her mind, he was unattainable. He was just another one of her silly broken dreams.

Lockett Consultant firm had a reputation all its own. The company was not one of those companies that had been around for centuries and passed down the family tree. It was a new company that had started from the ground up by a handsome young aggressive man and quickly stuck its claim. It was known all over DC for being the go-to company if you had a product you were trying to sell or a business that you were trying to advertise.

The company started out in a small cheap office space near downtown. Now, it was a ten-story building with various sales departments on every floor. They had a whole floor dedicated to just customer service alone. There was another department that just sat in groups twice a day and came up with new sales techniques and rebuttals for complaining parties. No matter how great your sales company is there is always going to be complaining parties. You can fulfill people’s innermost dreams and still, they will find a way to create a broken dream.

The ten-story building had glass windows that seem to reflect success in the blue tint that was used to tame the sun. With just enough shadow to allow you to focus on the height, you were at by the time you reached the tenth floor, you often saw sales people standing at the windows staring down on the city. The marble floors were always waxed to perfection and gave you the sense of lacquer candy with all the specks that were sprinkled over them. Henry Lockett wanted all his salespeople to feel as though they had left the world as they knew it every day when they came to work. Unlike most large corporate companies, he ran his business just the opposite.

While most companies kept their top sellers and executives on the top floor. Mr. Lockett put the new employees on the top floor and in bull pins with the best view. He figured it was the new salesman who needed the most inspiration. By the time the salesman worked their way up the ladder of success and downstairs to the first floor they were making well over six figures a year and putting in tons of hours a week and preferred to be closer to the exit. The building was simply breathtaking. And so was the owner Alexandria thought to herself as she took in its massive structure. The building gave the euphoria of an oversize dream broken down into massive ones. Yes, a broken dream.

Henry Lockett walked into the training room as he did every six months when they brought in the new recruits. It was always a process of elimination for him. After owning the company for over seven years, fourteen training classes and literally hundreds of recruits he could spot a good salesman a mile away, or at least in the first fifteen minutes of seeing them. He wore his Armani suit and Ralph Lauren loafer. Before he walked into the room he always sprayed himself with Channel for men. He wanted to make sure he came in with the look and smell of money. What he didn’t expect was to see his future wife in the group.

Henry locked eyes with her the moment he entered the room. He knew he wanted to stay professional but it was something about her exotic eyes that kept drawing him in. Three weeks later they were sitting across the table from each other at his favorite restaurant every day. Every weekend he just could not wait until the sun rose on Saturday morning. This Saturday morning would be the best of all. He was proposing to Alexandria. It wouldn’t be your normal long engagement. He just didn’t think he could wait very long. They had both withheld their intimate love from each other until they had time to think about whether they wanted a future together. Well, he had thought and was quite sure. This was no longer a dream he had to break up into tiny pieces. He had thrown away the broken dream and created a new one that had her in it.

The engagement lasted all of thirty days. They had already been dating for months now and love was steaming in the air every night that he kissed her goodbye. Alexandria laid in the bed sometimes for hours thinking of how tantalizing he would feel on her inner thighs. She knew the touch of his lips were gentle and kind. The way he placed his hand on her back ever so lightly whenever they danced let her know that his groove would be warm and welcoming. She loved to just lay in the bed at night and stare at the ceiling waiting for him to call. She dreamt sometimes for hours of their love and his laugh and everything about him that made her walk around inside of this dream. The only thing that would snap her out of it was the phone ringing to break her out of her dream.

It was the journey to the love that they both liked the most. And love was a journey. She still remembered the first day she laid eyes on him. He remembered their first conversation about love, life and oh, pre-marital sex. Although he was rich and owned a large company he never wanted her to feel challenged with her self-esteem. She was beautiful and he wanted to honor her beauty by preserving her virtue till the night of the wedding. She was a beautiful dream to him that he had recreated in his heart for the future. They had a lifetime to sleep together, make love and create a family. This was both of their dreams and neither one of them wanted to break the dream.

During the ceremony, they both said their hand-written vows. They vowed to commit to the dream and never allow it to be broken. She threw her bouquet into the crowd of single women. A beautiful young sales lady that was new to the company caught it and started a dream of her own. There were hundreds of employees that had come out for the gala event where two people were joining their lives and their dreams.

The shots that rang out came from one of those employees. He was living or dying though his own dream. The dream of killing the man who personally fired him from the company in front of several people. Henry’s body fell to the ground like a scene out of a horror flick. Slow and defined. The ambulance was there in a matter of minutes along with the police who quickly subdued the cooperative suspect. As Alexandria held his hand in the ambulance she recited all the prayers she knew by heart. She refused to cry because tears of pain were not part of her dream for that day and she wanted to keep her dreams from being broken. Twelve hours later when the surgeons emerged from the operating room to tell her of his paralysis, she was still wearing her wedding dress. Henry had been moved to the recovery room. Although she prayed for his life she knew in that moment that all other dreams of their future had been broken. Nowhere inside their dreams had they prepared for him to be broken. All hopes of ever having a family, making love or just rubbing the small in her back were gone in a matter of seconds. Their dreams were in danger of being broken.

On the second day of a honeymoon that never happened Alexandria and her husband, Henry laid on his hospital bed together and went over their vows. They split the pain medication that he had been saving, added the overdose of Oxy cotton she had bought on the streets that day and kissed each other and kept their vows of till death do us part and may our dreams never be broken.

They refused to live with broken dreams.

Henry and Alexandria Lockett dreams were never write for the kill.