by Gabi Moore
“Just stay the hell away from me, Felix. I’ve moved on from all of that,” she said, and in a second she had raced out the supermarket, nothing to suggest she’d ever been there but the gust of cool wind from the doors and a basket weirdly filled with carrots. I stood blankly for a second, wondering what the hell just happened. I flung down my own basket and went running after her, but she was gone.
My mood went from dark to something resembling a black hole. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I know I was an asshole to her back then. I know that I should have been there for her when her father died, should have handled it all better. But how could she just move on? How could she still be so mad at me for that? I know I was a meathead back then, but had I really insulted her?
On the walk back to Claire’s, my mind was racing so fast I barely noticed the pain welling up in my knee.
“Oh, Felix, hey, we were wondering where you--” she said as she opened the front door for me, but stopped short when she took one look at my face.
“Oh my god …Felix, what happened?”
I walked inside silently, tossed off my jacket and slammed the door behind me.
“It’s …it’s nothing. I’m gonna just chill for a bit on my own, OK?” I said, and hastened towards the spare room, praying that just this one time, my sister would take a hint and not push me.
“Felix, you’re all pale. Is it the counsellor? Did you have a really traumatic session?” she mumbled, following after me down the hallway to the guest room. I said nothing.
“Hey, don’t worry if you don’t want to tell me, I completely get it, we haven’t seen each other in ages, I know that, and you might not feel perfectly comfortable with sharing that stuff with me yet, that’s completely understandable, but I want you to know that if you do want to talk about anything, just get some stuff of your chest.”
“Claire?”
“Yeah?”
“I need to just chill out on my own for a second.”
As a kid, my sister once accidentally killed her first pet – a goldfish – because she insisted on taking it out the water on the hour to give it a ‘kiss’ on its head and then put it back in the water again. That right there told you everything you needed to know about her.
“Oh! Sure, got it!” she said and gave a little pretend salute. “You need your down time. You need your privacy. You’ve been through so much, I’m probably just cramping your style.”
I grabbed her by the shoulders, gave her a firm hug and looked longingly at the door.
“Right! Ok, yeah, you want me to go now. Of course. Makes sense. Off I go then!” she said and left, but not before peeking her head back around the corner to make sure that I knew to call her if I needed a snack or anything.
I collapsed down onto the bed like someone had deflated every last breath of air out of me. My knee, suddenly catching my attention after being ignored for so long, came screeching into awareness. Fuck that hurt. I winced and tried to haul myself back up on my elbows again, scratched around for some painkillers on the bedside table, swallowed some straight and flopped back down again.
Emily Warren.
My first, my only, my secret goddess that I kept tucked in my shirt all those long years, the woman who had played through endless future pretend scenarios: Emily my lover. Emily my wife. Emily the mother of my children. Then back again. Emily my girlfriend. Emily my everything. Perfect, haunting Emily, my Emily, in an open-all-hours supermarket in the same shitty town I had abandoned her in all those years ago.
In my fantasies, her hair was somehow redder. I had forgotten how slight her body was. I guess being up there with all the other meatheads for so long makes you forget just how small a woman can really be. But she was still Emily. Still beautiful. Still fucking hot.
I got off the bed and dashed to the mirror. Examined my face. No wrinkles or anything, but I for sure wasn’t the baby face I used to be. I lifted my shirt and examined my abdomen. I was thicker than I used to be, back then. Bigger, heavier. But the skin seemed stronger somehow.
I took a step back and examined my reflection in full. I was a bit dinged up, sure, but I wasn’t …ugly, right? In fact, more women had paid attention to me since I was put in uniform and sent to fly airships around Mars than I ever had in my entire life. So what was so bad about me that had her dropping everything and running off like that? Why did she tell me to leave her alone? I wanted to cry. Or punch something.
I squared my shoulders and glowered at the pansy ass I saw in the mirror. I had to face facts. I had lost Em a long, long time ago. My father, much as I hate to admit it, had been right all along. I had made a mistake. Thrown away the best thing in my life for a flimsy enamel badge and a fourteen second clip on the regional news station. And now I had nothing.
I pulled back my fist and then, in one swift, brutal I arc I brought it crashing down again onto the bed, silently slamming the pillows. I punched down again, then again, face contorted. Hot tears burnt the bottom of my lashes but I brushed them away with the back of my hand.
You’re already down one leg you stupid motherfucker, don’t make it worse by feeling sorry for yourself.
Angry as hell, I tore my clothes off and threw them aside. A hot, hot shower always got me out of these moods. So hot it burnt. So hot that each pummeling drop became a needle raining down into my skin.
I should have just died out there. But since I didn’t, at least I could fucking be clean. At least, in the white, faceless steam I could forget everything for a while, just wash it all away and come out pink and buff and born again, or as close to it as you can get when you’ve ruined your life as hard as I have.
I went into the bathroom, turned on the tap and let the steam fill the air around my head. I sat on the edge of the bath and tried to think. I had a long road ahead of me. I had to work. I had to get back to gym. Maybe go back to school, I don’t know. Learn something. Make friends again.
But as I sat there, naked on the clammy white porcelain, all I could think of was her. Like I had done almost daily for the last five years, my mind couldn’t help running through those same, delicious pathways I was well familiar with. The memories of her, before I broke her heart. The strange and thrilling new things we had discovered with one another, the things we did to one another, the ways our bodies met all tentative at first, and then with complete trusting enthusiasm. We were fellow explorers mapping out new, hidden sexual galaxies, just her and I, each new horizon better than the last…
Absentmindedly, my hand found its way to my cock. It felt wrong to think of those things now. Back on earth, while I knew that real flesh and blood Emily hated my guts. No matter how indulgent my fantasies up there were, they were always tinged with a faint hope that she might reciprocate, that it was still possible, one day, for them to be real… but the only image I could call back into my mind now was the look of sadness and anger on her face in those harsh supermarket lights, both of us five years older and a lot more cynical than we were in our explorer days.
The shower rained down and the steam filled the room. With a steady hand I stroked and caressed myself, pausing at the sensitive tip, hips leaning into the sensation with one arm balancing against the tiles and eyes shut tight. My cock stiffened quickly, unaffected by the weird torment going on in my mind. But as my hand slid over the shaft again and again, my mind began to clear. I had to get a grip. Stop feeling sorry for myself.
Long ago, I had sworn that I loved her, that making her happy was all I wanted. And fuck, didn’t I still mean it? I stepped into the shower, flinching at the pain radiating out from my knee, but groaning quietly as the warm water poured down onto me, making quick rivers down my thighs. I didn’t even know what it felt like to jack off unless it meant thinking of her. Emily was bound up forever in my brain sex circuitry. What was hot was Emily, what was Emily was hot, end of story.
Soon the hot water had soothed my muscles and my cock jerked in my hand, spurting a few thick ropes of cum onto my hand which then blurred aw
ay into the water. My knuckles went white against the tiles; my muscles clenched over my shoulders. I moaned and shuddered silently, alone in that hot cloud of steam.
I knew what I had to do.
If it took me the rest of my life, I would make it up to her. My body missed hers. My body missed fucking hers. But more than that, something deep inside me ached for her. Something that even I wasn’t willing to give up on just yet.
Chapter 7 - Emily
Jesus, is that like the fifth message from him just this morning?” Becky said and eyeballed my phone.
“Seventh. It’s the seventh one,” I mumbled, and tossed the phone back in my apron pocket.
“You not going to answer him?”
I sighed. If I answered him, he might take that as a sign I was interested. And I sure as hell was not interested.
“Um, Emily, I’m not trying to be weird here, but don’t you think …you should? I just mean, I thought the bakery really needed the loan.”
I shot her a hard look.
“This has nothing to do with the loan,” I snapped.
She looked away and blushed.
“I know. It’s just …well, it’s getting really difficult for me to keep buying at the rate we do without knowing if we have anything coming in soon.”
“I told you to just use the credit card to float us for now.”
She blushed even harder.
“We maxed it out yesterday,” she said quietly.
I bit down on my jaw. Of course we had. It was only a matter of time. In fact, it was a wonder some days that we still had anything to go into the ovens at all. My face softened towards her. It wasn’t her fault, naturally. This wasn’t the wild west and Buck Fuckface wasn’t singlehandedly responsible for getting me out of my financial trouble. I wanted to tell Becky that no, I certainly didn’t need to screw the loan manager for the pleasure of a loan from the bank. At least, not yet. In the meantime, I wouldn’t exactly turn Buck down. But it felt easy enough to ignore these stupid day time texts for now.
One of the servers cracked open the door and poked her head inside.
“Emily? There’s a patron out here who says he wants to see the manager.”
I sighed, gave Becky one more apologetic look and then got up to go and see what the problem was. Some douche who wanted a refund on a drink he ordered wrong, most probably. I patted the flour dust off my apron and elbowed through the swing doors to see a man standing at the register, with his back turned to me. A man in a suit. Oh shit. Buck. I took a deep breath and tried to tell myself that I could deal with it. I’d just politely tell him to fuck right off.
But as I approached, the man turned around. It was Felix. Oh shit.
He turned to look at me and the instant our eyes met his face lit up with something half like excitement, half like apprehension.
“Felix,” I said quietly, which is just about the only thing that I could think of.
He smiled broadly. I had never seen him like this – clean shaven, polished up and in a fancy suit that fit him so well it looked like it had been painted onto him.
“Uh, please, do you want to …?” I said absentmindedly, gesturing for us to walk into the back room. He nodded and followed me back through the swing doors. Becky took one look at him, smiled strangely and eyed me on her way out.
I ran a cloth over a flour dusted chair and invited him to sit. He cleared his throat a few times but said nothing.
“How did you find me?’ I said at last. I had meant it to sound like an accusation but it had come out as a sincere question. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
“I know how to do all sorts of things,” he said teasingly. “Just kidding. It didn’t take very long to figure out that you’d be here. I see you went into the family business after all.”
After my father died, I mentally put Felix into the same ‘dead to me’ box and now had to shake the weird feeling that he had nevertheless been following the details of my life from the grave.
“Yes, well, thank god I had the option,” I said curtly.
“The …option? Huh. I guess I just always pictured you as kind of running the world by now or something, teaching everyone how to save the planet and all that,” he said and gave me a crooked smile.
“Yes, well, I never pictured you as some space cowboy who’d run off to get involved in all the Mars drama, either.”
He looked a little deflated.
Once, I had been teased a lot for being a hopeless idealist. But for one, people like him didn’t get to mock me anymore, about anything, and for two, I wasn’t even an idealist anymore. I hadn’t been hopeful about anything for a long, long time.
“I guess our paths took us in quite different directions,” he said. “I’m sure you’re still into that work, though, right? Your zero-input farming and stuff?”
“No I’m not, actually. What would be the point? While people are busy trying to save one ruined planet, other people are already getting a head start on ruining the next one,” I said, and gave him a thin smile.
This seemed to genuinely shock him.
“Ruining Mars? Is that what you think? Don’t tell me you’re one of those conspiracy theorists,” he started to say.
“Conspiracy theorists? Oh, that’s nice. Really nice. Did you just come down here to insult me again?”
I hated the idea that he of all people might have seen the video. The whole shitshow with Buck happened well after he had left, and I didn’t know how long he had had been back now. But the way he was wisecracking about craving carrots was more or less proof that not only had he seen it, he had decided to react like everyone else had. Endless, merciless judgment. Heaps of shame and contempt and ridicule. I had been surprised that people had been so willing to turn on me and start jumping in to revel in my humiliation, but Felix? I was surprised and genuinely sad.
I saw his broad chest rise and fall as he took a deep breath and looked like he was gearing up to lay a speech on me. He was bigger than I remembered. And, it made me feel strange to admit, but hotter, too. More damaged, yet …stronger looking. They must have worked them hard out there. He lifted timid eyes to me and tried to smile again.
“No, not insult. I’ve never insulted you. I came here to apologize,” he said and then stood and took a step closer to me.
What did he think, when he had seen that video? Seen me, the woman who had told him that he was her first everything, with her eyes rolling back in her head and a grotesque smile on her face as she let strange boys do whatever they wanted with her? I had already died a million times over in my life so far. Nobody can ever understand how it feels to carry that burning shame with you, and feel it refresh itself with each sideways look someone gives you in the street, or every time you see your naked body in the mirror, or at the mere sight of a fucking carrot. But the humiliation came rushing back again. Like I hadn’t spent hours in therapy, trying to get over it all. Like I was back in college all over again. And now Felix was here, and even he was a part of my crushing shame, and I didn’t know if I wanted to ignore it and pretend I was still the same old girl he knew, or rub it in his face and make him understand that yes, I did it all because he left me, but it’s too late for apologies now because actually, maybe I liked it all along.
But I said nothing. I had the sneaking suspicion that if I opened my mouth I’d choke up and make a fool of myself and say something I regretted. So I kept quiet.
He spoke slowly and deliberately, like he was wading through a prepared confession. His eyes were downcast, giving me a good look at his face. There were new things in his expression that I didn’t recognize. He seemed more grown up. A little more cautious. When he spoke I could make out tiny scars on the left side of his face, and I was mesmerized for a moment by the way they shifted and moved fluidly over the hard surface of his cheekbones.
“Everyday I was up there I thought about you, Emily. Some days, you were the only thing that kept me sane. I thought about all the good times we spent together. I kep
t a picture of you, and man, I looked that picture every spare moment I had. Being in the program was nothing like I imagined it. Actually, every day I would tell you all about it, you know? I would write you letters. Ok, maybe you’re thinking this sounds a little sappy…” he said and smiled secretly to himself. “But you were all that kept me going.”
I could do nothing but return a stony gaze at him. He carried on. He told me about how the program had so many glitches to start with, how the political pressures situation up there was actually a lot more complicated than the media was portraying it, that he had caught a virus up there and narrowly avoided losing his eyesight. He told me about what they were trying to grow, about the immense funding they had received, some of it from surprising and top secret sources. He told me about their tiny, lonely bunks. About how some of the female cadets had started prostituting themselves. I sensed he was getting further and further from his pre-planned speech. Then he raised his eyes to me again, as though just remembering that I was there at all.
“But what I really wanted to come here to say is that …Emily, I’ve missed you. More than you can imagine.”
I could hear him breathing. Though the bakery outside those swing doors was bustling and busy, inside this room it felt like a little bubble separate from the rest of the world. A little bubble where the past and the present were hard to tell apart. Being with him in this room felt so easy. And yet the weight of the past still wedged itself between us. He had a whole separate life he had lived for five years. And I had a whole three-minute sex video that I would never live down.
“I wanted to say that leaving you was a mistake. I regretted it every day, Emily. And I’m so sorry about leaving you. I was stupid. I thought it was what I wanted and …but you don’t want to hear my whole sob story I guess. I just …I loved you Emily. I still love you,” he said, his voice getting quieter and quieter until it was nothing more than a whisper, pausing on those familiar three words that he had uttered to me so many times before, secretly under the warm comforter in my dorm room, secretly in my ear when he held me close and nuzzled his head into my neck, secretly when he would collapse down on top of me and catch his breath, both sweaty, our bodies still knotted together and our hearts still beating madly at one another through the walls of our chests.
