Seduced by Lies

by Stacey Quinn

  Her mouse hand trembled as she led the cursor towards the offending red icon, dreading what she might find behind it, and repeating -

  “Leave me alone. Just leave me alone!” In a groaning whisper. Her laptop, still not fully warmed up, took a few long moments to reveal the message.

  The page finally loaded and Sienna was instantly assaulted by a tidal wave of relief, followed by a sharp slap of confusion. Her eyes rolled over the unfamiliar name ‘Lewis Stowell’, trawling through her mind but finding no recognition - this wasn’t anyone she knew, and certainly wasn’t one of the few names to be found in her meager ‘friends’ list. But at least it wasn’t Sam.

  Sienna shook her confused, muggy head, attempting to stretch her puffy, slit eyes wider and cast the morning fogginess aside in preparation of this unanticipated and intriguing message. The message was only a few brief lines at the top of her screen, which Sienna read and read again a few times over, making sure she hadn’t missed anything out -

  “Dear Sienna,

  You do not know me, and I do not wish to appear overly bold, but I simply had to message you. I saw the comment you left of the British Poetry Centre page the other day - the Rainer Maria Rilke quote - and was moved to let you know that I admire and share your tastes. Rilke is far too underappreciated in today’s society (the youth don’t know what they’re missing out on!), and it was truly a refreshing joy to see his wonderful work being shared and appreciated - a joy I have you to thank for.

  Have you read Rilke’s ‘Letters To A Young Poet’? It is a truly remarkable and moving read, and if you haven’t indulged in its pages so far, then I definitely recommend you do.

  Thank you for brightening up my day. I hope this message will be well received.

  Regards

  Lewis Stowell.”

  Sienna was filled with a mixture of increasing smugness and growing bewilderment. In a half-dazed state she clicked the link to this ‘Lewis Stowell’s’ facebook page, keen to learn more about this admirer of her literary inclinations. The warm bubble of pride and imperiousness in her chest grew twice the size as she learnt that her mystery messenger was in fact a nearly middle-aged, proficient, savvy and well-educated English Professor (with a PHD to top it all off). His profile indicated that he taught at a university some hundred miles across the country, specializing in Creative Writing and 18th and 19th century literature. And he was complimenting her on her tastes.

  Sienna’s interest was more than peaked, and her skin was almost literally tingling with intrigue. She didn’t want to get too ahead of herself, but if her initial (yet somewhat hastily created) impression was accurate, then she hadn’t met anyone of a similar caliber as this since...well, since Jack. “Not that anyone could ever actually hope of exceeding him, or even coming close for that matter.” Sienna hastily corrected herself, not wanting for one second for it to even seem like she could possibly consider anyone else better than Jack had been. That was part of her whole problem - the fact that nobody actually ever could match up to her lost love.

  Ignoring the alluring pull of painful yet cherished memories just this once, Sienna focused her eyes back to the screen in front of her. She toyed with the idea of replying to the message, but decided that was a moment better suited for another time, when she was more composed and had had time to think her words through. Instead, she glanced quickly around herself to make sure that nobody was within eye-shot (not that she needed to - the library was entirely Sienna’s, and she was even fairly sure that the librarian herself was beginning to doze off at her post), before trawling through Lewis Stowell's photos, keen to put a face to the name. But his profile was very similar to her own - minimal people on his ‘friends’ list and as little personal information as possible. Just like her profile, there were no pictures of Lewis himself, like her he had chosen to represent himself through artistic, cultural photos and images (many of which were so majestically framed and beautifully composed, and held such a deep longing and meaning, that Sienna literally found herself breathless with awe) and the phrenic, highbrow groups and pages that he had joined - many of which, Sienna was delighted to find, were groups that she too was a member of.

  She couldn’t help but go back and read over his message a few more times, feeling like an excited, blushing schoolgirl as she drank in the resounding passion and deep, soft intelligence behind his complementing words. It was at the point that Sienna caught herself halfway through a girlish giggle that she actually realized what she was doing. Her smile turned instantly into a loose-jawed, gaping ‘o’ of surprise laced with horror. Where had those long dead and somewhat unwanted emotions come from? This was too much, especially for so early on such a blurry morning. She hadn’t felt that warm flush in her cheeks or that excited dance of butterflies in her stomach since...

  Sienna slammed her laptop shut, the blush rushing from her suddenly snow-white face and the previously pleasant butterflies now turned to cold sludge at the pit of her stomach. She needed a cigarette, and fast. Not caring whether the librarian heard her or not, Sienna flung open the back window and clambered over the threshold, her shocked limbs so jelly like that she slipped and almost landed in a sprawled mess on the narrow pathway that marked the gap between the library and the edge of the football field. Her violently trembling hands dropped the lighter twice before she finally managed to spark it to life and shakily light the end of her Richmond, almost setting her fringe ablaze in the process.

  Half the cigarette was gone within a few drags, the raw scrape of the harsh smoke down Sienna’s throat giving her something other than her wildly swinging emotions to focus on, which along with the instant mellowness of the nicotine hit helped bring her back down to reality. After a few more slow drags, her heart began to calm its racing beat, and Sienna was once again able to hear her own thoughts over the howling rush of blood through her veins.

  She felt as if she’d been unfaithful to Jack somehow, that by simply blushing at another man's words she had in some way mentally betrayed him. Not that you really can betray someone who is no longer yours, someone who has left you.

  He’d had to leave, Sienna had understood that, but that didn’t make it the slightest ounce easier - that didn’t make her stop loving him. And so now she was trapped, mourning a lost love that she continued to blindly stay faithful to, and punishing herself every time she felt good. She flicked the burned out stump of her cigarette towards the drain beside her, and with slightly less shaky hands sparked up another, needing more time to centre herself and collect her hectic, rambling thoughts.

  She was angry, but she wasn’t sure where to place it - whether she was angry at herself, Jack, Lewis Stowell or a mixture of all three, she wasn’t sure. After another half of a Richmond, she came to the conclusion that perhaps she had overreacted a little, both in her reaction to Lewis’s message, and in her reaction to that reaction. And by the time her second cigarette had burned out, she’d manage to assemble her thoughts into a rough kind of sensible order.

  She realized that what had so intrigued and excited her about the unexpected message and about Lewis himself, was the attributes he shared with Jack - his high level of taste, his intelligence, even his profession! The two of them, at first glance, shared several similar qualities, and so how could Sienna not be impressed by this mysterious messenger? Jack would even probably approve of this man - after all, they were all adults, and Sienna’s almost hysterical overreaction hadn’t exactly been an adult way to approach the situation, she realized that now. She could practically hear Jack’s voice in her head, telling her to embrace this intellectual interaction, and all of a sudden, she once again found herself beginning to blush girlishly again, and started to feel positive about the whole, unforeseen situation. “Live for the moment.” She whispered with a smile, hoping that the gentle breeze would carry her whispered words to wherever her lost love may be.

  CHAPTER 6 - RELIVING THE PAST

  Sienna, armed with her new determination to approach the situation
with a cool-head, didn’t open her laptop again until after she arrived home that afternoon. In fact, she climbed back in through the library window, packed her things back up into her bag, and promptly left the room, making her way back through the winding halls with a much clearer head than she had had walking down them just half an hour ago. She’d decided to actually attend her lectures that day (“Though maybe just the morning one.” She added to herself as a quiet afterthought, not wanting to get too ahead of herself), figuring that the time away from her laptop would be time well spent in further assessing this new situation and figuring out her response.

  Sienna actually managed to last all the way through the morning lecture and half way through the mid-morning class, before her ice thin patience of the dumb blonde tutor and her waning tolerance of generally being in close proximity to her fellow students finally snapped. She barely heard the mumbled excuse she gave as she left the classroom, and the tutor (as usual) barely noticed her leave. Her unusually positive attitude and feelings of pride at her mature mindset had done nothing but grow over the morning, and Sienna was feeling refreshed, mind body and soul, in a way that she had not done in a long time.

  She could have caught the bus home from the main road just outside the College grounds, but it was still too early yet - her mother wouldn’t be out of the house until 4 pm, and Sienna couldn’t bear to ruin her comparatively good mood by having to deal with the argumentative gripes and whining demands that her mother would undoubtedly throw her way the first chance she got. And so she chose to take an easy stroll down the mile long, tree lined bypass that ran ran in a stretching curve from the College to the centre of town.

  The slight breeze wasn’t quite enough to alleviate the penetrating, sticky heat, and so just a few minutes into her journey, Sienna had to remove her clingy, baking hot leather jacket and tuck it into her backpack, revealing her ghost white arms to the flaming fingers of sunlight and enjoying the tickling breeze that now danced across her bare skin. Another few minutes on and the straggly shrubs and bushes on either side of the road began to give way to luscious, leafy, twelve foot tall hazel trees, whose imposing shadows stretched themselves halfway across the pavement, offering Sienna’s already burning skin a little respite, and her sensitive eyes (used to squinting at screens or books in dark rooms) a little relief from the glare.

  The hazels reaching, leaf laden, finger like branches stretched out above Sienna’s head and drooped slightly in a protective embrace over the pavement, filtering the sun through their blanket of greenery and painting the pavement in a spectacular shimmer show of golds and greens, whose simple beauty enthralled Sienna and lifted her mood even further.

  She chose to take a small, muddy footpath that detoured off from the left hand side of the bypass about two thirds down - foregoing the remainder of the journey in the busy, bustling town centre and opting for the rugged, natural path that ran next to the nearby river in a long, winding path through the trees and undergrowth, Sienna figured she would spend the afternoon reading lazily next to the calming flow of babbling, burbling water.

  Feeling resonantly calm and renewed as she stepped through her front door into her silent, empty house some four and a half hours later, Sienna realized her unpracticed cheeks and jaw were beginning to ache warmly from the slight smile that she’d been uncharacteristically sporting for most of the day.

  She bounded up the clunky, wooden stairs two at a time, this time without the reward of her mother's sleepy shouts, and virtually flung herself into her room. After spending hours sat in the dappled sunlight next to the river that afternoon, Sienna once again found her eyes squinting, this time as they took a few moments to adjust to the muggy gloom of her bedroom, that somehow seemed to absorb and swallow what little light managed to squeeze its way in.

  Tip-toeing carefully around the barely visible mounds of clothes and stacks of detritus that littered her floor, Sienna clambered onto her bed and, for the first time in a long time, opened her bedroom curtains wide. She was almost ready now. The long, fairly relaxing and undemanding day had given her enough time to think it through, enough time left alone in her own head to mentally prepare and figure out some semblance of a response. There was just one, small thing she needed to do before taking the plunge - one little indulgence just to ensure that she was 100% calm and collected.

  The sight of her battered, faithful old shoe box raised Sienna’s aching cheeks into yet another slight grin as she pulled it from its hiding place beneath her unmade bed. “Just a little one will do.” She told herself as she eagerly flicked open the torn, barely functioning lid. But, as with every other bit of joy and good fortune Sienna had experienced in the past, her happy mood was doomed not to last, not even for a day. For the second time that day, her smile of anticipation and girlish excitement dropped almost instantly into a mask of horror, the round circle of her lips opening and closing like a floundering fish, flipping and flopping hopelessly on the dry riverbank, gasping for air that’s just out of reach. As she stared into her stash box, her surprise and horror quickly turned in to the gritted teeth, deeply furrowed brow, and fierce black eyes of pure anger, for laid gently on top of the jumble of smoking paraphernalia in her box, was a carefully hand written note, the crisp, white, rectangle of paper bearing her mother's looping handwriting.

  S

  You took my vodka so I took your weed (yes I know about it - you’re not exactly subtle). Tit for tat, I’m sure you’ll agree that’s fair. Maybe you’ll finally learn to stop taking things that aren’t yours.

  I’ll be home at the usual time. Don’t do anything stupid.

  M

  Her shocked eyes read over the words a few more times, taking their time over the line ‘Maybe you’ll finally learn to stop taking things that aren’t yours.’ - she was sure she felt some snide subtext to those words that she simply wasn’t getting. After her third time reading that sentence, it clicked - her mother wasn’t only having a dig about her bottle of vodka - her mother had decided to cross the line and had dared to make a dig about Sienna’s beloved Jack. Sienna’s furious fingers crumpled and tore at the paper beneath them, her entire body so numb with rage that she didn’t even notice as the sharp, straight edges of the folded A4 sliced into her fingertips, drawing tiny drops of blood from paper thin cuts that would undoubtedly sting later. She tore the note into a thousand, tiny, confetti like pieces, as if by doing so she could somehow also hurt her bitch of a mother.

  The tiny white scraps of paper danced slowly and daintily down through the sun beam filled air, falling to the bed and floor around Sienna’s rigid, seething form. Her steely eyes followed their graceful descent, before glancing down into the plundered contents of her poor, violated stash shoe box. The crumpled remains of her once almost full baggie rested gently on top of the pile of loose rizlas, grinders, old train tickets (they were perfect to use as roach) and the scraps of remains of tobacco pouches. Her trembling fingers reached slowly into the box and plucked the bag from its perch, shaking it gently to to smooth out the creases and flatten the bag before holding it up shakily at eye level. There were a few pitiful scraps remaining in the bottom of the clear plastic baggie - just enough crumbly dregs for one dismal joint.

  “Bitch.” Sienna said sourly to the empty house, turning her gaze away in disgust and bitterly dropping the miserable sight of the baggie back in to its cardboard home, before roughly slinging it back under her bed.

  As she sat on the edge of her bed, contemplating what to do next, Sienna realized that in spite of the searing hot anger and hatred coursing through every inch of her body, she was actually surprisingly cool headed and centered. Her usual course of action would be to leap up, find the nearest available alcohol, consume it, and then let her inebriated mind make all the revenge related decisions. But it seemed that, while her rare and comparatively glowing mood had been cruelly stolen from her, the new found level of mental maturity and adult decision making that she had gained that morning was still very much presen
t. Through her screaming feelings of rage and betrayal, something in her subconscious was reminding her to take a breath and think things through, and so she closed her eyes and sat completely still for a moment or two, giving the clamoring, enraged voices in her head time to settle down and disperse. After a few minutes, Sienna was glad she had taken the time to calm down a little, rather than giving in to the impulsive whims of her temper, which would usually succeed in seriously pissing her mother off, but which never really fully satisfied Sienna. But now, with this new, clear mind she was equipped with, Sienna was already beginning to plan a much more cunning and effective retaliation.

  At that moment it wasn’t the petty thievery of the last of her green that Sienna wanted restitution for, though she would certainly make her mother pay for that at some point, what took precedence right now was the cheekily subtle yet deeply cruel and scathing meaning her mother had put behind the words - “Maybe you’ll finally learn to stop taking things that aren’t yours.”

  Those seemingly innocent words cloaked a deep knife that dug in between Sienna’s ribs and into her heart. Her mother wasn’t referring to vodka in those words, but rather was hinting at Jack. She had never forgiven Sienna for having an affair with an older, married man. But whether Jack had had a wife or not, what her mother didn’t same able to see, what nobody, not even her so called ‘best friend’ had been able to see, was that Jack was hers, just as she was his. It wasn’t even as if she had been under age - She was 17 years old for Christ's sake! “Love doesn’t submit itself to labels!” She had screamed at her mother the night it had all somehow spilled out. She had screamed her throat red and ragged, but nobody else had seemed to understand. And so Jack had left, and Sienna and her mother were driven out of town not long after.