Portal to Passion: Science Fiction Romance

by Amber Stuart

  “Figured you must have been sleeping.” And she threw her arms around me, kissing me, and Christ, it would be so easy, so effortless, to slip into this belief that it was only Lottie here, just my Lottie, home from work, kissing me, giggling as she dripped water all over me, but not loosening her arms from around my neck or letting her lips move off of mine.

  I am not proud of it, but I kissed her back; I wrapped my arms around her waist and lifted her into the living room, closing the door with one foot, and as Lottie’s hands started twisting under my shirt where she opened her hands and lay her palms flat, moving them slowly up my stomach to my chest, pulling my shirt upward with her arms, I knew I had to stop this, I had to stop us from making the same mistake over and over again. I had been unwanted once; Kyrieana wouldn’t suffer my fate.

  “Lottie,” I breathed. God, it was so hard to force myself away from her lips, from her hands. “We need to talk.”

  Why those words? Nothing good ever comes after those words. She knew that as well as I did.

  Lottie pulled away from me, a mixture of worry and fear all over her face. I took her hand, wanting to reassure her that I still loved her, I would always love her, I would always be around to protect her, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Not now.

  There were so many things I should have been able to see then, but I was so overwhelmed by my own guilt, by my own past, that I could only think of trying to restore some status quo, some normal that had never even existed between us. And I was going to make certain she never thought it was her fault.

  “Lottie, about the other night… I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have even stayed.”

  “What? Why not?” Her concern had transformed into confusion.

  “Because it’s so complicated now. I don’t think I’m being fair to you, and…”

  “Dietrich, I told you. It doesn’t have to be. We can make this work, I know I can.”

  I pulled her a little closer to me, but not too close – I couldn’t tempt myself like that again. I was going to save her. I was going to save them both. I had to.

  “Lottie, you can’t pretend to be half a person.”

  “I’m not! I don’t even know what that means!”

  I didn’t either, actually.

  “Look, I think we should just, for now anyway, be friends.”

  She was becoming frantic now, angry. I was angry at myself.

  “No! You wanted her. You can’t just change your mind! Not now. I won’t fuck this up, I promise!”

  I had never hated myself more than I did right then. I was trying to protect her from so many forces I didn’t even understand, and the only one that had actually ever harmed her was me.

  “Kyrieana, I don’t want you to die for me!”

  She backed away from me and pulled her hand out of mine, eyes full of a rage that had never belonged to Lottie.

  “Don’t,” she hissed, “ever call me that again.”

  I was so hopelessly lost.

  “Why?” My own anger and self-pity evaporated; I was emptied, turned inside out, eviscerated.

  Her cheeks flushed, her fists held tightly by her side, and she spit the words out at me, “You don’t get to decide who I am. Nobody gets to decide who I am except me. I am tired of you men thinking you can control me! You don’t get to control me!” By the end, she was shouting at me and had closed the space between us.

  I inhaled sharply, sensing this was far more about her past than about us, but as usual, I spoke too quickly, too obstinate and reckless.

  “I’m not trying to control you, but you don’t get to control me either, and this is manipulative and coercive. You can’t just…”

  But Lottie cut me off when she walked past me and out my door, slamming it behind her so that the crooked picture of Death Valley fell from the wall and crashed to the floor. I couldn’t hear her footsteps over the rain that still fell in torrents outside, as if Heaven itself, in all of its twisted sense of irony, had finally decided to mourn the loss of the only woman I would ever love for the second time in my life.

  I stared at the door numbly for a while, thinking surely she would come back through it, this was all a nightmare, because Lottie – my Lottie – would have never done something like this. That little voice that so often tickled the back of my mind about the differences between Lottie before and now reminded me, this isn’t your Lottie but I didn’t want to listen.

  Even if she had come back, what would I have told her? Nothing had changed. For whomever she was and wasn’t, she was an extraordinary woman, and I had hurt her and I was certain now that I was the biggest fucking asshole on the planet.

  I very rarely drank so much that I got drunk; that night, I was absolutely, completely, totally shit-faced. Eric and Mark had come home – apparently, they had gone to see a movie and had sent me a text message I had never bothered to read – and found me halfway through a bottle of Danzka vodka. I don’t even like vodka but it had been in the apartment. Accessibility beat out preference. After the first few drinks, though, I couldn’t taste it anymore anyway.

  One of them took the bottle away from me – I’m sure I tried to stop them – and I’m a little more sure it was Eric who led me to my bed that night, putting an empty waste basket on the floor knowing I would need it later. I don’t know how long he stayed, but at some point, I fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night, ready to make good use of the trashcan Eric had placed by my bed. He must have been awake still, because he heard me, stood silently in my doorway, took the trashcan away when I was finished, and came back a few minutes later with a clean bag in it. Not only was I the world’s shittiest boyfriend, I was the world’s shittiest friend. I wouldn’t have thought to do that for him.

  He sat on the edge of my bed, careful not to move the mattress too much, and set a glass of water on the nightstand. How had they gotten so much furniture in here so quickly?

  “Something happen in Waco?” he finally asked.

  I moved my head as little as I possibly could to tell him no.

  He was quiet again and I was starting to drift back toward sleep when he spoke. “Lottie?”

  I opened my eyes. My mouth felt stuffed with cotton. “One week.” My throat was raw and sore but I wanted him to know. He had to know his best friend was the biggest fuck-up in the universe. “I lost her in one week.”

  Eric didn’t respond right away. When he did, it wasn’t the best-friend-pep-talk I had been expecting. Or maybe that was just the vodka making me think I deserved some best-friend-pep-talk. “Get some sleep. We’ve got a judge coming to town soon.”

  If I had been sober, that probably would have alarmed me, or at least registered with me, but instead, I really just wanted my fucking room to stay still and my stomach to stop heaving.

  In the morning, I pulled a pillow over my head and started wondering if it were possible to convince Mark to suffocate me. I knew Eric wouldn’t do it. Mark could maybe be bribed. I lay as still as I could, every movement sending shockwaves of pain through my skull, but my bladder was a turncoat.

  “Goddamn traitor,” I mumbled into the pillow.

  “I’m guessing that wasn’t directed at me,” Eric quipped.

  I was so fucking hungover, I hadn’t even known someone else was in the room with me. That was the kind of mistake that got people like us killed.

  I groaned and moved the pillow away from my face. “If you’re really my friend, you wouldn’t let me suffer like this.”

  “It’ll pass. You’ll be fine.”

  I snorted. Fine? I would be a lot of things, but I would never be fine again.

  “So who’s the traitor?” Eric asked.

  I sighed. “My bladder.”

  “Ah.” Eric walked into my line of sight since I still hadn’t moved. “I have my limits, Dietrich. I’m not helping you with that.”

  I don’t know why, maybe I was still drunk, but I heard myself asking, “What if I were p
aralyzed?”

  “I’d hire you a nurse. A hot one. Now go pee; we need to talk.”

  I heard him leaving my room, and I groaned again as I sat up, that throbbing stabbing in my head intensifying, and I had to wait for the room to stop spinning before I could stand. I thought about peeing in the trashcan and just going back to sleep, but Eric’s “we need to talk” echoed in my head, and I forced myself to get up.

  Eric and Mark sat in the living room, the picture of Death Valley had been hung back on the wall – it was straight this time – and as I glanced in the kitchen, the clock on the stove told me it was nearly noon.

  The living room was still lacking in furniture so they were sitting on the floor; my brain was all muddled. I couldn’t even decide if it would be less painful to sit or stand so I just collapsed against a wall. I figured if I fell down, I would just stay down.

  “You sure he’s gonna live?” Mark asked.

  “I dunno. I’ve never actually seen him drunk, let alone hungover. But he’s pretty resilient.”

  “Would you two shut the fuck up?” Why did everything have to be so loud?

  “Dietrich,” Eric was trying to keep his voice low, “Lottie got a phone call while you were in Waco. Said someone was going to be here next week for this evaluation.”

  I had to think about all of those words very carefully. I tried translating them into German in my head to see if they made more sense to me that way before finally deciding I was still a little drunk. I slumped down to the floor and rested my head back against the wall. At least they had kept the lights off for me.

  “I guess you need to hear what I learned from Jackson.”

  “That’d be helpful,” Mark muttered.

  Eric shot him a warning look, but I was in too much agony to care about Mark being a smartass. I replayed the entire encounter, as well as I could, pausing occasionally to wince as a new bolt of pain rushed through my head. When I got to the end, I fumbled to my feet, told them not to interfere if I actually did start dying, and went back to bed.

  I woke up seven hours later. My head had finally stopped pounding and my stomach just felt empty; every muscle in my body was sore like I had been thrown from a building, but when I sat up, the room stayed in place. It was starting to get dark outside. I could still smell the faint scent of vomit and sweat and desperately wanted a shower. I couldn’t fathom why people ever did this repeatedly. When I stood up, I realized even the soles of my feet hurt. How the hell does something like that even happen? I was never touching vodka again.

  I stumbled out to the kitchen, unsure if I was hungry or still nauseated, and almost walked into Lottie, who was pouring some red drink that looked suspiciously like vegetable juice. I hated vegetable juice.

  “Here,” Lottie said, pushing the drink toward me, “sip on this. It’s good for you. It’ll help you feel better.”

  I smelled it. It was definitely vegetable juice. I grimaced but sipped from it anyway. Lottie had come back. If she had told me to drink rat poison, I would have.

  “You’re here.” Jesus, I had such a talent for stating the obvious.

  My brain felt like it had been put through a mulcher, and I suspected I was staring at her stupidly, but I couldn’t stop. I had been so sure when she left last night that she was done with me; that I had hurt her so deeply she could never forgive me. And yet, she was here. And she didn’t even look like she wanted to kill me. I mean, she wanted me to drink vegetable juice, but I didn’t think that would kill me.

  Lottie took my free hand and led me into the living room. Someone had brought a futon in while I was asleep. I swear to God, it was like living with furniture ninjas.

  “Eric told me you were in pretty bad shape. I don’t think you’ve ever had a hangover. Maybe before we met, but not since.”

  “No, not before either. Not like this.”

  I sat down on the futon and Lottie sat next to me, eyeing the vegetable juice carefully to make sure I didn’t spill it.

  “Well, what the hell, Dietrich, were you trying to kill yourself?”

  I should have immediately told her no, of course not, but I took too long to answer.

  “Dietrich,” Lottie said softly, “if you leave me, I will never forgive you.”

  I looked at her, those big hazel eyes so full of love and concern, all of that anger and fury from last night gone.

  “You left me,” I said.

  Tears pooled in her eyes. “Not by choice. I would never choose to leave you.”

  “But what about last night?”

  Lottie wrinkled her brow and if she hadn’t been so worried about me, she probably would have rolled her eyes, told me I was being silly, kissed me, smelled me, then ordered me to go take a shower.

  “Last night was a fight. I guess you’re right about some of this. Things are different now. I still don’t think you should have tried to push me away like that, but I forget how new this is for you still, how unbelievably confused you must be. So last night, I lost my temper and I’m sorry.”

  To appease her, I took another sip of the vegetable juice and tried not to make a face. Why couldn’t she have brought me a sports drink? She had probably just grabbed what she had in her apartment; Lottie actually liked this shit.

  I turned her words over and over in my mind; what did she mean that I was right? Was she giving up on this idea that she could be just my dead fiancée? I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t want to fight with her again. I didn’t want to fight with her like that ever again. Things are different now.

  But there was also something in that argument last night about her past, about her life before she became Lottie, about the life she rarely talked about and even when she did, I suspected she was hiding so much more than she was telling me.

  “What happened to you? Before coming here.” I didn’t know if she was serious about me never saying her name again. If so, this was going to make future conversations extremely challenging.

  I half-expected her to get defensive or to try to change the subject or to tell me it was none of my business or it was all in the past, a different past so we shouldn’t worry about it anymore, but she never looked away from me or indicated she was going to do any of those things.

  “Dietrich, promise me something first.”

  She should have known I would have promised her anything. “Ok.”

  “Don’t do anything like this again. I can’t lose you. Not again.”

  “Lottie,” I whispered.

  A stinging sensation behind my eyes threatened to make them brim with tears, but I did not cry. I never cried.

  I set the vegetable juice down and took her hand, kissing each of her fingers, and promising her, over and over, I would never leave her. I would always be hers. She ran a hand through my messy hair, smoothing it down, and smiled at me, but it was a sad smile, a smile bearing the grief of unshared memories.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  She was still trying to get a patch of particularly unruly hair to stay down. Lottie would often do that on those lazy mornings when neither of us had to go to work and we would stay in bed as late as we wanted, having absolutely no plans and never feeling the need to make any. There were days we never left our apartment, and those were some of the best days.

  “Why did you really come here? It wasn’t curiosity.”

  “No,” she said sadly, “I made a deal to get Lydia and me out of there. I came from a very wealthy family, and when we reach adulthood, each child gets a percentage of the family’s wealth. I used my share to get us here. To get me out of a potential marriage I didn’t want to be in, and to get Lydia out of a horrible situation.”

  Lottie took a deep breath and rested her forehead against my shoulder. “Lydia’s family worked as servants for mine. We have known each other our entire lives because we would play together even though we weren’t supposed to. As she got older, she was put to work in our house, but as my brothers and sis
ters married and moved out, we needed fewer and fewer staff, and Lydia’s family was poor and desperate. Even though I had promised them I would take her with me when I married, once she was let go, she was dispensable and her parents decided to sell her into a marriage of her own.”

  “Holy shit,” I muttered. “How can you guys figure out how to travel across space and be so fucking backwards?”

  Lottie just shrugged. “Y’all beat us there. So this was our escape. Except everything’s gone wrong and I’ve been so scared about something happening to Lydia, but I know you can protect us, Dietrich, I know you can. I shouldn’t have made you worry so much that night.”

  “Hey,” I stopped her, “you can worry. I know you, Lottie. You worry about everything, like the difference between ivory and creamy ivory.”

  She laughed against my chest, and the warm scent of pears and honey surrounded me. I wrapped my arms around her.

  “For the record,” she said, “I had decided on sage and creamy ivory.”

  Creamy ivory. I knew it.

  I kissed the top of her head, and she lifted her face toward me to kiss me, then smiling, told me, “Now go take a shower. You stink.”

  The next morning, the physical exhaustion of trying to recuperate from alcohol poisoning had finally worn off. Mark and Eric, the furniture ninjas, had somehow procured a table and chairs for the dining area overnight. My iPad was on the table in front of us with a map of Abram Mirowski’s neighborhood locked on the screen. My plan was fairly simple: Mark and Eric were going to go to New York, kidnap Abram, and bring him here so that we could keep him alive as long as needed and so we could be in the same city as Lottie and Lydia.

  But after last night, I started wondering if Lottie would want to get answers for herself. She had given up so much to purchase this freedom, this future for them both and she was standing on the precipice of losing everything she had risked her life for. She had more of a stake in this than anyone else.