by Gabi Moore
On a whim I walked on towards it. Screw my knee. I walked inside as a woman left, and as she lifted her gaze to mine I wondered if she recognized me. But she hurried off, not saying anything, just casting a glance at my leg. Or did I imagine all of that? It didn’t matter. Inside, the supermarket was basically empty. It hadn’t changed much, either. I grabbed a basket and walked idly up and down the aisles. Before I knew it, I was idly throwing in a few cans of Pringles, some jelly sweets, a bag of peanuts, some beer. Up on Mars I had chiseled myself to perfection, one perfectly balanced and pre-packaged, government approved ready meal at a time. But, I wasn’t on Mars anymore. And fuck it, maybe I wanted some cookies.
I ambled into the veggie section and saw a timid looking woman hovering over the fridges. I threw in a bag of apples and went to stand a few feet beside her. Her massive hair was shielding her face, but I could clearly see her basket filled almost completely with bunches of carrots.
“Woah! You got a craving too? The heart wants what it wants,” I said and laughed and gestured to her basket. Her hand froze in the air, just as she was reaching for yet another bunch. She didn’t turn to look at me, but I could tell she was side-eyeing the junk food contents of my own basket. She looked pissed.
“Anyway, looks like you’ve made the healthier choice, right? I don’t know why I’m eating all this crap, your stuff looks a lot better …and more filling too,” I said, trying to sound friendly. She snapped her hand away from the produce and dropped the basket at her feet with a clatter.
“Oh my god,” she muttered under her breath, and spun around to yell at me, but when she did, my heart nearly stopped.
“Em?” I said.
I suddenly felt a wave of hot prickles rush over my face. Would she recognize me? Had she seen all the scarring on my face? My leg? Fuck, if I had known there was a chance of bumping into her…
“Felix?”
She didn’t sound happy about it.
“Holy shit is that really you?”
I broke out into a huge, stupid grin. I couldn’t believe it. She was still the same. The same big, fluffy hair, the same amber-colored eyes …the same everything.
“In the flesh. How …how are you?” I said, struggling for words. I had a million things I wanted to say, but none of them sprung to mind. But the surprise on her face was turning sour. She looked down at my basket, then up at my face again, then scowled.
“So you came all the way back from Mars just to insult me?” she blurted.
“What?”
“Just …just forget it,” she said and spun on her heel and went for the door, leaving her basket behind.
“Em? Wait, where are you going? What’s wrong? Can we talk?”
Insult? How could I ever insult her? She spun around and gave me another poisonous glare.
“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 of
f 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 away 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.
