F*ck Love (30 page)

“How are you going to do this?” Greer asks. She has a notepad and a stack of purple permanent markers. Her hand is poised over the paper as she waits. I glance at her as I wash dishes. The minute I told her my thoughts on telling Kit how I felt, she was on board.

“I sort of thought honesty was the best approach.”

Greer writes HONESTY on her notepad, and then looks up at me expectantly.

“I don’t have a plan.”

She tears out the page and hands it to me. “Don’t deviate from the plan,” she says, patting me on the head. After that, she retreats to her bedroom. I still haven’t seen her damn bedroom. I’m suddenly upset about this. What is she hiding in there anyway? I march over to her door and knock. Probably harder than I should. When she answers, she’s wearing a towel like she was just about to get in the shower.

“Sorry,” I say, embarrassed. “I … just … I—”

Greer stands aside, and I reluctantly look into her bedroom.

“Whoa,” I say.

“Yeah…”

I blink at the nothingness. An empty white room, with scratched wood floors, and a couple of blankets piled in the corner.

“What the hell?” I say. Greer is looking at the floor.

“I just haven’t gotten around to doing anything with it yet.”

“Okay, no. You don’t even have a bed.”

I look around, hoping to see something that can explain Greer’s lack of … anything.

“The furniture in your room,” she says, “belonged to Kit and me. I didn’t want to use it. I couldn’t. And then I just never got around to replacing it.”

“Okay,” I say. “But you’re sleeping on the floor.”

Her face screws up like she doesn’t know what to say.

“You want me to fight to be with him, but you aren’t over him,” I say.

“I am over him,” she says quickly. “It was just such a hard time, it all still affects me. It was a really messy break up, Helena.”

I nod. I don’t remember Kit telling me it was messy. He played it off like it wasn’t a big deal. He played off a lot of stuff like it wasn’t a big deal.

“Okay. I have to go,” I tell her. “But let’s order a bed tonight, okay?”

She nods. I can feel her watching me as I walk away. Also, I am sleeping in their former bed. I make a face. I’ll be ordering a new bed too.

Della has a wedding date. She knows I’m watching her Instagram. She wants me to see it. June sends me a screenshot after the first wedding countdown post.

J: Are you seeing this?

Yup.

J: She asked me to be a bridesmaid.

I’m not surprised. Della has like three girlfriends, two of them borrowed from me, and my attempt at being social in college. I wonder who Kit’s groomsmen will be—if I see them here around town?

J: You should come. Do something about this.

I’m surprised; it doesn’t feel like June to say something like that. I think about telling her that I plan on doing just that, but in the end, I put my phone away, try not to think about it. But, I do. I think about it plenty. I think about the way he looked with the collar of his coat pulled up around his neck, his shoulders dusted with raindrops as he waited for me with a bottle of wine. I think about the way he smiled when he saw me walking toward him, the corners of his lips tugging up into a smirk. I think about the way we lingered for a few minutes longer after saying goodbye to each other, neither of us wanting to leave. I think about the way his lips yielded against mine, the rhythm of our kissing. The way I would have to wrap my hand around the back of his head, and lean against him to keep from toppling over. I’m at work, and I have to go to the bathroom to splash water on my face.

He felt it too. He came back here, to Port Townsend, to feel it. Now it’s up to him, because I’m game.

A clock begins to tick, tick, tick. I have a plane ticket. Not a plan. Just words that I need to give him. And that’s all I can really do, isn’t it? I’ll be on my way after that, and the rest is up to Kit Isley. I can’t remind him of a dream he never had, but I can remind him of a feeling we shared.

I board the plane with a terrible head cold. I’m shivering and then burning up. I’ve started thinking about Annie. Wondering if there’s a way to see her. I’ve tried so hard not to think about her these past months, but I have the sound of her breathing memorized. It’s just not that simple. And that’s what stops me dead in my tracks. Annie. Annie’s mom and dad. What the fuck am I doing? I want to get off the plane, but it’s too late, and we’re taking off.
It’s so convenient, Helena, that you just blocked out that part of situation
,
I tell myself. I take the pills Greer handed to me when we parted ways at the security line. Then I lower my head to my knees and cover my face. The lady in the seat next to me asks if I’m okay. I mumble something about motion sickness and squeeze my eyes closed. When I wake up, my neck is terribly stiff, and we are landing. NyQuil. Greer drugged me so I couldn’t panic. I am the last person off the plane.

June is waiting at baggage claim. She’s wearing a dark green cape over a neon pink sundress—sunglasses on even though she’s inside. Her strange awkwardness gives me comfort, and I run to embrace her.

“You’re so weird,” I tell her. “I love you so much.”

She pulls away from me and holds me by the shoulders while looking me up and down.

“You still wear beige.”

“I fucking like beige,” I tell her, smiling. “Long live the beige bitch.”

June nods. “You’re different,” she says. “I like it. Now let’s go stop this wedding.”

The wedding is in four days. I don’t want to stop it. I just want to say my piece and unload this burden from where it presses against my chest. I stay with June in her small cottage. She rents from an elderly couple who rescue parakeets. I’m not entirely sure from what these parakeets need rescuing, but I can hear their chirping coming all the way from the main house. It makes me jittery and anxious. June gives me pink earplugs, but all I do is squeeze them obsessively between my pointer finger and thumb, thinking about Kit and Annie.

“Those aren’t stress balls,” she tells me. She puts them in my ears, and the parakeets can’t reach me anymore.

She feeds me soup, and I take a nap because I’m still sort of sick. Actually, I’m very sick. When I wake up, June has left me a note to say that she’s gone to work. I try to take a walk, thinking the fresh air will be good for me, but don’t make it half a block before I have to go back. I’m shivering in eighty-degree weather, shamed underneath the palm trees and blue sky. I make it to June’s floral print sofa and pull a blanket over myself. Then I have one more fever-induced dream. One more dream to change my life.

The house is different. I walk around, looking for the navy Pottery Barn sofa. For the children. But there are no children, and nothing is blue. Everything is black. Black, black, black, black. I try a light switch, and the room I’m in floods with red light. I look at the skin on my arms, glowing soft pink under the raunchy red lights. They are covered in ink—swirls of greenish black. Pictures, and words, and patterns. I laugh out loud. What dream is this that I’ve tattooed my body?

I walk through the rooms, searching. Kitchens, and bathrooms, and unfurnished bedrooms. I find him outside, French doors swung open—him framed between them.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hello.”

He doesn’t turn around, just continues to look out at … nothing. He’s gazing into the darkness. I put my arms around him, because I don’t want him to be sucked in.

“Go back in the house,” he says.

“No,” I tell him. “That’s not my house anymore.”

“Was it ever?”

“No.”

I bury my face in his back, between his shoulder blades, and breathe him in.

“Will you leave me?” he asks.

“No. Never.”

“If you do not face the enemy in all his dark power, one day he will come from behind, while you face away, and he will destroy you.”

I don’t know what to say to this, so I hug him tighter.

He turns to face me, and my breath is caught between his beauty and his words. Muslim.

“Come with me,” he says.

“What about Kit?” Kit is leaking into this dream, already the red lights are turning yellow. I can hear a voice calling me from somewhere in the distance.

“You already tried that dream.”

I laugh, because I have. In my waking life, I have spent the last year fighting to understand that dream. To obtain parts of it. Maybe I’m tired of trying to fit into that dream. I’m not an artist. I’m not a wife and mother. I’m not anything. Just Helena.

“Then let me wake up,” I tell him. “So I can find you instead.”

And I wake up.

By the following day, my fever has spiked to 102, and June is threatening me with the emergency room. She looms over me in the most normal clothes I’ve ever seen her in.

“I’m fine,” I tell her from underneath my pile of blankets. “It’s just a head cold.” But, even as I say it, I know that a head cold has never felt like this. I can’t even stand up let alone walk into the ER. I lie curled up in the damp sheets and remember what it was like to be with Muslim. His icy eyes as he led me not to his hotel room, but to a graveyard.

“Why did you bring me here?” I’d asked.

Lips furled into a smile, he’d touched my neck with his cold fingertips and then my hair. I was learning that sometimes he was hot and sometimes he was cold. Both in temperament and body.

“This is where I want you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re in love with someone else, and I want those feelings to die.”

I’d let him try to kill them. He’d lifted me onto the brick wall of a mausoleum, and I’d wrapped my legs around his waist. Softly, he’d kissed me, and I had been surprised at his gentleness. Everything about him was lion-like. When you pressed your fingertips to his skin you could feel the power rippling beneath your touch. He was not a normal man.

“Talk to me, Helena,” June says. “You’re acting weird, and it’s freaking me out.”

I look at June and nod. Fine. I’ll let her take me to the doctor. I just want it to stop. She runs around the cottage, frantically gathering things, then she loads me into the front seat of her car still wrapped in blankets.

I see the worry on her face right before I fall asleep again.

“Helena? Helena, wake up.”

I slowly open my eyes. I feel like I am a thousand years old. Everything is heavy and stuck together. We are at the hospital. People are walking toward the car. They help me out and put me in a wheelchair. I fight them, try to push their hands away.

“I’m different,” I tell them. But they don’t seem to know what I’m talking about. I feel cold air on my skin, and I think of the graveyard. Muslim’s mouth sucking, his hands gripping the sides of my panties, and pulling them down. It had been so cold that night.

“Helena, we’re moving you to a bed…”

I don’t want to be on a bed. I want to be on the wall. There’s sharp pain in my arm. Is it the brick? Or a needle? It’s a needle. I moan. I don’t think I have a cold. Where is June? Where are my parents? If I’m going to die, shouldn’t they be here? He’s inside of me. He bites my shoulder as I arch in his arms. Need climbs, and then I tumble backwards. An orgasm … sleep … it’s all the same right now.

Kit is in the room when I wake up. I lift a hand to my face and groan.

“What the hell?” I say.

“Walking pneumonia,” he says. “Extreme dehydration.”

“That’s ridiculous. It’s just a cold.”

“Clearly.” He leans forward, hands clasped between his knees.

I want to ask him for a mirror, but that’s probably not what a hospitalized woman should be thinking about.

“Am I sufficiently hydrated?” I ask. God, I haven’t seen him in so long. He’s so beautiful.

“You’re getting there.”

“Why are you being so cold and stiff with me?” I ask. “You’re obviously here by choice, so you could at least be pleasant.”

He smiles.
Finally
. He gets up and sits on my bed.

“Why are you in Florida?” he asks. “And not in your precious Washington?” He says it in a funny way, and I laugh.
My precious Washington.

“Two people I love very much are in Florida,” I tell him. “I came to…”

“To what?” Kit interrupts. “Stop my wedding?”

“That’s very presumptuous of you.” And then, “I thought about it.”

“Oh yeah?”

“But I’m reconsidering.” I don’t like the look on his face. Hopeful maybe? If he doesn’t want to marry Della, he needs to stop the wedding himself. My God, what’s changed in me to make me feel like this?

“Reconsidering me? Or what you feel for me?”

I shake my head. “How do you know I feel anything?”

“I feel it too.”

“Fine,” I say. “I’m reconsidering you. Because you’re a coward. And you’re marrying someone you don’t even like. And now I don’t know if I like you.”

He nods slowly, his eyebrows raised. He’s not smiling at me now.

“But you love me. You don’t have to like someone to love them.”

I frown. He’s right. But not liking someone is enough fuel to walk away from them. Love can only get you to the first fight.

“Ask me to leave her,” he says.