Alone

by E. J. Noyes

  In the first three we’re smiling stupidly or pulling faces, then for the last one she slung her arm around my neck, pulled me close and whispered Love you in my ear. The photo was taken right as her mouth formed the ‘L’ sound for love, and I’ve got the beginnings of a smile lifting the edges of my mouth.

  Olivia runs a forefinger along the edge of that frame. “This is Riley?”

  “Yes.”

  “You two have the same eyes.”

  “Yes.”

  “She looks like she loved you very much.” It’s all Olivia says before she opens the front door and steps outside.

  The rain stopped sometime during our conversation and now it’s gray and dreary to match my mood. It’s getting dark, and I worry about her driving on slippery roads through a town she doesn’t know. I almost tell her to be careful, but it’s not my place to worry about her now, if it ever was my place. There’s a moment as she’s fastening the strap around her umbrella when she looks at me and all her emotion is bare. She’s stripped herself naked and laid herself out as though she’s asking something from me.

  I wait for her to speak but she doesn’t and neither do I. Olivia nods quickly, as though my silence has strengthened her resolve, and then she walks away. When she’s halfway to her rental car, some part of my brain realizes this could be the last time I see her. Words spill from my lips, all in a rushed breath. “I heard you, you know. After you left.”

  Olivia pauses on the path, still facing the road. After a long moment, she turns and strides back, stopping a foot away from me. Her eyes beg me to tell her the truth. “What do you mean?”

  I close the front door to keep the cats inside and push my hands deep into my back pockets to stop them shaking. “I didn’t tell them, but once your body left everyone else did too. Nobody would talk to me. But you did. Constantly.”

  She covers her mouth with one of her delicate hands but it doesn’t stop the sound of her shocked sob. After a shaky breath, she lowers her hand. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  I really don’t know the exact combination of reasons, but I do know one. “Because I didn’t want you to have the power to hurt me more than you already had. I’d already given you so much, Olivia, and I didn’t want you to have all of me. There wouldn’t have been anything left to keep me together.”

  Her hand drops to her side. The umbrella falls to the ground.

  I lift my chin, look into her caramel eyes and tell her, “I lasted all that time by myself in that place and I never broke. Not once. Not through every hateful thing Mother kept saying. Not with all the guilt from my sister and my friends looping in my head. But you made me break in less than a month, Olivia. After you left, I couldn’t stand being there. You broke me,” I repeat tearfully.

  Olivia sucks in a breath, her eyes wide. Her expression is a strange mix of fear, worry, and relief. She closes the gap between us and light fingers trace along my jaw to my chin. “Funny,” she murmurs, her eyes on my lips. “I think you put me back together again.”

  My skin burns under her touch, and I feel the shudder at the back of my neck run down my spine. Before I can think, Olivia’s hands are on my waist and she’s pulling me to her for a kiss. When I realize what she’s about to do, I know I’ll push her away the moment she does it. But when her lips touch mine, my conviction flees. In that single instant, everything slots into place and I feel like I can finally breathe again. Instead of drawing back, I pull her closer. I clutch her hips, my fingers clenched around her suit jacket to hold her in place.

  She fits against me the way she always did. Her hands wind through my hair and when her tongue parts my lips, my blood hums. Time slows again and then again as we kiss. It’s hours and minutes and years. It’s past and present and future. It’s everything.

  It’s everything, until without warning Olivia wrenches herself away, snatches up her umbrella from the path and rushes to her car. I stand on faltering legs, a clump of my shirt gripped in one hand and the other against my lips as though I could hold on to the lingering touch of her kiss.

  She drives away without a backward glance.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The folder she left is like a lighthouse in the fog—a beam that hits me in the face and demands my attention. No matter what I do, how I try to distract myself, I keep finding my eyes drawn back. A few times during the evening, I get as far as brushing my fingers over the thin cream cardboard, determined that I’m going to open it and delve into Olivia’s secrets. Then my fingers retract and hover above the folder, as though they are sentient and know better than I do that it’s not a good idea.

  Jekyll starts to gnaw on the edge of the cardboard. I snatch him up, kiss between his ears and rescue Olivia’s notes. Now both hands are on the folder and I can’t help myself. My fingers move with a casualness that I don’t feel as I flick through the pages. The notes are filed chronologically and look like screenshot printouts from the reporting system I used every day. Each one has a date and a time—always between one and three a.m. I close the folder again, set it up high where the cats can’t get at it, and walk away.

  I put up some shelves in the guest room as I’d planned earlier in the week. Luckily there are no neighbors nearby to complain about the noise of power tools at this time of night. Her words still break through the noise.

  I miss you so much.

  You put me back together again.

  I last for maybe an hour more before I slink back downstairs to the folder, my resolve shattered. A glass of wine would make what I’m about to do easier, but at the same time I don’t want to dull any of this experience. I owe it to myself, and to her, to see what she wanted me to see without being impaired.

  I set a glass of iced tea on the coffee table, curl my legs underneath myself and rest the folder on my lap. The thin cardboard strains around the stack of papers that are bound to the seam. I suppose if I’d written down every thought I’d had about her, my folder would be just as thick. Possibly thicker. I’m surprised by the slight tremble in my hands as I begin to read the material Olivia left for me. Things about me. Things about her. About us.

  She spared no detail, and in some instances that detail makes me uncomfortable. Seeing myself laid out this way is strange. Some events in her logs stand out in stark relief while others seem like nothing more than fleeting glimpses in my memories. Sometimes I see myself in her words, other times I feel like I’m reading a private investigator’s notes about a stranger.

  In most cases the wording is formal and clinical—Olivia’s professional detachment. Perhaps that detachment is the only way she could do what she had to do.

  She’s incredibly squeamish but still treated my leg. I didn’t realize how badly being shot hurts, and it wasn’t even a penetrating wound. It was lucky that it wasn’t more serious or my insertion would have been completely invalidated, and I don’t know what I would have done then. Or rather, what my team would have done.

  Her voice gives me shivers. In person it’s even more gorgeous than the video recordings and raspier than I remembered from her interview too. She’s jumpy around me, likely because she doesn’t trust me yet. This disconnect between what I know and what she knows is maddening.

  Her eyelashes are the longest I’ve ever seen. Beautiful. Her eyes are so blue, so bright they seem unreal. Whenever she looks at me, her gaze is so intense that I feel naked.

  Celeste has a great sense of humor. I don’t think I realized it before but now, actually being with her, it’s obvious. She talks a hundred miles a minute, like her brain is ten steps ahead of her mouth and she’s constantly trying to catch up.

  She sleeps so soundly that it’s easy to sneak out to fill in my reports and logs. I’m glad, because I don’t want to have to medicate her to keep her asleep for that time. It wouldn’t be right, nor would it be fair. I just don’t want to do that to her, to secretly break her trust more than I already have to.

  Celeste is not a good patient, she doesn’t seem to know what to d
o with kindnesses and I can tell she’s discomforted by sharing her bed with me. My feelings aside, she needs to rest so she can eliminate the virus. It doesn’t seem to have affected her greatly, which is a relief. It feels good to care for her, even if it’s tricky, still hobbling as I am with this leg injury.

  When she concentrates, she nibbles on her upper lip and suddenly seems like an innocent child. Her concentration is fierce and hard to break, and it makes me wonder what exactly she’s thinking. Sometimes she says something and it’s nothing like what I thought she’d say. She constantly surprises me.

  I initiated physical contact in the form of a hug. She accepted. She’s about three-quarters of an inch taller than me, but I fit perfectly. Close up that way, she smells even better. It’s more than the soap and shampoo and skin lotion I choose for her. It’s something more. It’s Celeste. She felt so good in my arms that it was hard to make myself let go.

  Being able to put my own feelings into physical form brought such relief. I didn’t know I’d been holding so tightly to my want of her. Love, lust, infatuation…I’m not even sure what I would call it. But it’s been there for so long, that I’m scared I might not be able to hold it in for much longer.

  Papà warned me about this, the possibility that my personal bias might compromise the results. Privately I agree, but for the first time in my life, I can say honestly that I don’t even care. She’s passed the minimum threshold and anything from here on is just extra product testing and data. I hate that word. She’s not data and she shouldn’t be in here. She should be out in the world, seeing and touching and tasting. She should be living. And I would so love to be witnessing her doing just that.

  She asked questions and I had to answer. Actually, I didn’t have to answer but I wanted to. I told her about Camilla’s death, and my failures with Tracy and Lindsey before that. Told her the awful truths about why I’m alone. And she kept saying she couldn’t see it, how it would be my shortcomings that caused my relationships to fail. Probably because what she sees in here is the woman she wants to see. A fantasy. Fantasy sums it up fairly well—my thoughts about her, about what comes after this, are nothing more than fantasy because when I leave, even if by some miracle we met up again, I would be the same person. I would still have to keep my work a secret from her and I don’t want that. Celeste is the first woman I’ve ever wanted to share everything with, the first woman I’ve ever wanted to fully give myself to. Knowing that and knowing it’ll probably never happen makes me want to weep.

  I offered a kiss and she accepted. She was nervous but I could tell she wanted to be intimate. I was nervous too but more than that, I’m afraid of how badly I wanted it. When we made love, it was unbelievably incredible. I can’t find any clinical sort of breakdown or way to explain how I feel, other than whole. I feel whole. I need to stop being so emotionally involved with her but I can’t. Not when she touches me and looks at me that way.

  We debated our points of view on different topics. Politics, religion, science, movies. She’s not pushy about her ideals — she seemed to just want to talk rationally, to be heard by someone. And she listens like a person absorbing new ideas and trying to see how she could fit them alongside her own viewpoint. I expected to have to push back at her in order to get her to see my side. I could picture us, years from now arguing about small things and then making up. Falling into bed to reaffirm our bond. I want that. I want her.

  She talks in her sleep, frightened murmurs about nothing that makes sense but when I hold her, she settles and goes quiet again. I want to talk to her about her childhood, to soothe her but I don’t know how to bring it up. What I knew before was awful. What she’s told me in here is even more awful. I don’t know how she’s such an incredibly compassionate, gentle person after all that. And I’m certain there’s so much more that I’ll never know about her past…

  So beautiful. She makes me want to write poetry, which is ridiculous and emotional, but I still feel it — the beauty in our shared existence. It’s not even about the sex, though the sex is incredible. It’s everything else, all the small ways she makes me feel needed and vice-versa.

  She told me the voices are gone. Scientifically, I can postulate that it’s because she now has company and the stimulus to fill that deep need for connection. Emotionally, I want to believe I chased them away. That I’m enough for her and that I can make her feel safe. My emotions are getting in the way of the study. I need to find a way to separate myself.

  I don’t think I can.

  She told me she loves me, but I could tell she’s embarrassed at how quickly she found these feelings. She thinks it’s because of what I represent rather than what we share. I can’t soothe her by telling her that I felt something for her the moment I saw her. Or that I fell in love with her when I watched her talking about playing an imaginary tennis match with herself the 46th day she video logged. She told me she won 6-4, 6-3 and I laughed so much I was nearly crying. I’m not sure how many more times I can push back my extraction.

  N.B. Log abandoned as ‘interrupted by subject,’ marked as incomplete entry. OMS authorization.

  She knows. I don’t know what to do. I told her the truth, kept to the facts. The hardest thing I’ve ever done was to act as though I don’t care and it was all about the science. It’s so much more for me. It always was. I shouldn’t have come. I knew I’d become too involved but I thought I could compartmentalize it all. I couldn’t. I can’t. I will never be able to.

  I wonder if deep down, I wanted her to catch me so I could let the truth out.

  I’m not sure what I expected would happen when she found out. She can’t understand my reasoning because she feels like she’s only known me, really known me for a month where I’ve been watching her, wanting her for years. We’re in different stages of this and can’t find somewhere in the middle to meet. I’ve been so selfish. Greedy. And it’s hurt her. I wish it hadn’t. Wish I hadn’t. But I couldn’t help myself.

  Then there are just pages and pages of text with manually entered dates and times. The first date is the day she left, and the last one is yesterday’s. There’s an entry most days, sometimes every few days. I flip through the pages, reading snippets of her life and thoughts. With every new line I skim, a feeling builds inside of me. It’s like I’m standing at the bottom of a well, and a person up top is slowly inching a ladder down to me. That dangerous feeling again. Hope.

  I can’t sleep. I’m inappetant. I can’t stop watching all those years’ worth of her video logs.

  This afternoon I saw a woman who looked like her and I felt my heart racing, my palms growing sweaty. I’m still not sure what I thought would ever come of me being there. That fantasy again. Did I really think we’d have a romantic relationship once she left, even if she never found out? How would I have ever hidden that part of myself from her? I could not have a relationship built on half-truths, especially when I already lied to her when I arrived.

  I need to know, I have to make sure she’s fine. Edward assures me she’s okay. I’ve listened to the interview recording so many times, hoping to hear something that tells me she’s not completely forgotten me. Then I just end up listening to her voice, ignoring all the words, closing my eyes and remembering her.

  She called the old department, asking for me but didn’t leave a message. She wanted to talk to me, but then she didn’t? I choose to take the first part of that, to believe that maybe she doesn’t hate me.

  Siobhan says Celeste looks well, and that she has a house, a small farm with some animals. I’m pleased, imagining her in this space, living freely. I listened to this interview as well, hoping again that Celeste might have said something about me. Something more than a quick answer brushing me aside. She didn’t.

  With every line, my suspicion as to why she gave me these log entries is strengthened. Olivia wants to show me that I mean something to her, that our relationship—whatever it was—means something. She wants me to see it was real. And I do see it. I see it in t
hese pages of notes, confirming what I’d hoped all along. She’s taken off her armor and put herself out there for me to see. Now it’s up to me what I do with her trust.

  I miss our conversations, the ones where we talked about everything and nothing at all. Our few precious weeks weren’t long enough. I just…miss her. The absence of her feels physical, like there’s an emptiness inside of me, which I know sounds ridiculous. Those few dates with Nicola were nothing more than pointless and hollow experiences, and I had to tell her honestly that I’m just not available emotionally for a relationship or even meaningless dating. I wonder if I ever will be…I wonder if I even want to be. Some part of me feels like it’s a penance of sorts for what I did. I shouldn’t have lied to Celeste, used the experiment to put myself in front of her that way, knowing that she would likely comply because of the circumstances. But I was scared. Scared she might choose someone else, or worse…that she wouldn’t even want me without the desperation born of being alone.

  Another dream about her. Sweet and soft and turned erotic. I woke up aroused but couldn’t do anything about it. When I touch myself there’s nothing. That part of myself is empty as well. I want to regret what I did but I can’t, not all of it. I regret hurting her but I don’t regret being with her. How could I? Not when it made me feel.

  I’ve been selfish, and even as I did it I knew I was being selfish and that selfishness hurt her. Hurts me. And here I am, about to put myself in front of her again. I’m so scared. Scared she’ll send me away when I turn up on her doorstep. Scared she might not feel the same way. Scared of how I deeply I feel, and mostly I think I’m scared that I’ll never be able to move past this without her. I don’t know how to let go of how I feel so I can live my life again. But I don’t think I want to let this feeling go.