F*ck Love

by Tarryn Fisher

  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.

  His words scare me. I don’t want to have to ask. This is all wrong. Coming here was wrong. I shake my head. “No, Kit. I won’t ask you that. If you want to leave, it needs to come from you. It’s not fair of you to ask me to drag you out of your relationship.”

  “Helena, I came to you once; I followed you to Port Townsend. No one dragged me there.”

  That part is sort of true. I lift my hand to my mouth and lick one of the wires. I want to chew on it, but I’m scared I’ll get in trouble. Greer was probably eating dinner right at this moment. Maybe salmon and some risotto…

  “Helena! I see what you’re doing. Focus.”

  “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod!” I rub my temples. “Where are the nurses? Shouldn’t they check on me?”

  He touches my face. Five fingertips. It pulls me back.

  I can’t stop the tears when I look at him.

  “You’re convincing yourself that I haven’t done enough, because then you get to walk away from this and be the good guy.”

  “No,” I say. But it’s limp.

  “Helena, don’t lick those—” He pulls my hand away from my mouth and grabs my chin, forcing me to look at him.

  “Tell me about your heart right now.”

  I yank away from him. “No!” And this time it is forceful.

  He leans in and rests his forehead against mine, closing his eyes.

  “Helena … please.”

  I’m weak. I am.

  “I was supposed to be a coloring book artist,” I say softly. “And your wife. And we were supposed to go on that goddamn Blue Train! I never woke up from that goddamn dream, Kit. Do you hear me?” I’m sobbing like a pathetic little shit. He rubs his forehead back and forth on mine.

  “So, why are you trying to wake up now?”

  What can I say to that?

  “I met someone,” I say. I feel him stiffen. He doesn’t look at me when he pulls away.

  “Who?”

  “Someone who’s not getting married to my ex-best friend tomorrow.”

  He sits with his hands between his knees and looks at the wall.

  “Who?”

  “What does it matter, Kit?”

  “It matters to me. You know it does.”

  “He just made me see things more clearly. I don’t have to convince him, like I came here to do with you. I don’t want to have to convince someone to be with me.”

  “You never had to convince me of anything. It was a matter of timing. Our timing was off.”

  He nods slowly. “So, you don’t want to be with me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I want him.”

  I can’t even believe I get those words out. I was wrong to come. There’s Annie, and Della, and Della’s family. I wouldn’t just be hurting one person.

  “Who’s the coward now, Helena?”

  He stands up, and I cringe. I want my mom. Is that weird? I don’t even like her.

  Kit walks out the door, and two seconds later June walks in, wide-eyed, mouth open.

  “He—” she says, looking back over her shoulder. “Helena…?”

  I shake my head. “It’s nothing. It was all nothing. He needs to go live his life. With his family. I told him to go. I was so wrong to do this. I feel like a fool.”

  June puts her hand on my arm. “You feel like a fool?”

  “Yes … June. God. I came all the way here…”

  June is shaking her head. “Shit, Helena … shit.”

  “What?”

  She puts her head into her hands and sits on the edge of the bed.

  “You slept for so long. The wedding was … should have been yesterday. He called it off. They never got married. He called it off because of you.”

  I rip the needles from my hand and swing my legs over the side of the bed. This is when the nurse chooses to walk in. I don’t even make it a foot before she’s Eh, eh, eh-ing, and pushing me back onto the bed. What type of from-hell timing is this?

  “I needed you ten minutes ago, you know?” I say to her. “Find him, June. Please!”

  June looks like a deer caught in the headlights. She is nodding, even as she backs out of the room.

  “What do I say?” she asks me.

  I flinch as the needle pierces my skin.

  “Remind him about the dream. Tell him our daughter's name was Brandi. Tell him I'm so sorry and that I love him.”

  This is something I’ve learned. You can’t run away to find yourself. Yourself is there no matter where you go. The difference is, if you’re running, you’ll be too busy to pick up the sword and face your enemies. Sometimes your enemy will be you; sometimes it will be those with the power to hurt you. Take off your shoes and stop running. Live barefoot and fucking fight. I ran from my feelings—the ones I felt for Kit, the guilt of feeling them. I thought that if I put enough distance between us, my feelings would go away. I should have faced myself back then.

  June doesn’t find Kit. No one can. He’s turned off his phone and vanished. Della calls me in hysterics as I’m leaving the hospital a day later, demanding to know what I did to him. To him. Like he couldn’t possibly have chosen me of his own accord. I had to use magic or something.

  “I didn’t do anything, Della. I’m not even as pretty as you.” And then I hang up.

  “I think it’s time to get over that,” June tells me. “He obviously made a clear choice between the two of you.”

  “Shit,” I say. “Should I call back and apologize?”

  “Absolutely not,” she says. “She should suffer a little bit.” She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “She said it again. When he called off the wedding.”

  “Of course she did.”

  “You know,” June says, “she’s so insecure, it almost makes her ugly. Like, she’s so unsure of herself, you become unsure of her too.”

  I make a face. It doesn’t matter. All I care about right now is Kit, not Della’s perfect cheekbones. I don’t know where he is. It’s killing me that he doesn’t know how sorry I am. He can’t hide for long. He won’t stay away from Annie.

  “He’s cooling off,” I tell June. “He disappears when he writ
es, and when he thinks.”

  “So how are you going to lure him out?”

  “I have to go home,” I say. “I think he’s there.”

  When I land in Seattle, I rent a car from the first place I see. All they have is a white Ford Focus with Oregon plates and a fist-sized dent in the bumper. No Range Rover this time. I crawl into the driver’s seat, exhausted, and take a selfie. I call it, Gut Feeling. I didn’t sleep at all on the plane, I read Kit’s manuscript. When I was finished I ordered a vodka straight up. He was speaking to me. And I didn’t have the guts to read it. When I drive onto the ferry I stay in the car, tapping my finger impatiently on my knee. The ferry has always felt like freedom, but right now I couldn’t feel more trapped. I need to find him. That’s all I know. There is nothing to even confirm that he’s in PT. When I called Greer, she hadn’t heard anything. I’m going on a gut feeling. How long has he been in PT ahead of me? Two days? Three?

  I have just driven off the ferry into Kingston when my phone rings. It’s Greer.

  “You have to turn back,” she says. She sounds out of breath, like she’s been running. “He’s getting on the ferry you just got off.”

  “What?” I slam on my brakes, and someone honks at me. “How do you know?”

  “His mom. She just got back from the almost-wedding. He spent two days in his condo, now he’s going back to talk to Della and see Annie.”

  I swing a U-turn, hopping a curb and almost hit a pedestrian.