by Lee, Corri
And that was exactly how it had played out with Blaze. I would wait and hope, counting down the days until I fell back into his good graces. And if it never came, I might still hold on, convincing myself to believe my own lies.
There was no way back once I'd put an emotional investment into a man, no matter how involuntarily. I needed them both like water and air. Not one without the other. All or nothing. Double or bust.
THE DAYS I felt like I was living on the periphery were always the hardest to get through. My lips would chap, stomach cramp, and I'd always end up run down and nursing a common cold because my immune system gave up before my brain did. My leukocytes were quitters. My appetite suffered and my body buckled under the strain of being sick and hungry. I was always cold, even in the sun, and walked hugging myself to keep warm. I'd been told that I'd been lucky to avoid any permanent damage from my eating disorder but I couldn't possibly see how these moments in my life were part of the best case scenario.
But whatever was going on inside, I didn't feel it. Just the vague sense of plodding on for everyone else's benefit when I wanted to do nothing more than curl up in bed and hibernate. I was in a bad place, but it wasn't that place. My bungee cord still had some spring in it but was granting me a reprieve before it yanked me back into the real world. This was just the eye of the storm, a place where I could wistfully sigh for no reason and nobody would pester me with questions about what was wrong.
MONDAY was the worst. Unable to sleep, I spent the early hours of the morning clearing the clothes and toiletries Blaze had left behind into a box. I'd get it all back to him Somehow. Someday. Washing my sheets would have come up on my list too if the flat hadn't been inexplicably tidied when I staggered back home from Esme's. If he'd snuck back in to clear my bedroom of his blood stains as a consolation prize, I'd hate to be trading gifts with him at Christmas.
I went to work exhausted, keeping one hopelessly optimistic eye on my phone, but still dragged myself to Esme's that night, chasing a higher level of numbness through intoxication and my usual meaningless fling. The minute I started breaking my routine was the minute I'd be beyond recovery.
The fatigue of Monday was the start of the nosedive. On Tuesday I woke in a cold sweat, racked with shivers as a fever set in. The four ulcers that popped up in my mouth overnight chased away any lasting inclination to eat. My body felt like lead, aching too much to move, but I still dragged myself through the usual day, taking Esme home with me that night. I wanted my daily orgasm, but I didn't want it at the hands of anyone else if Blaze wasn't there. The unproductive string of casual fucks I left in my wake had always felt like a betrayal to Hunter when I crept away from them, but I needed them to feel like I wasn't somehow faulty or deformed. The more I did it, the more I felt like he wouldn't want a woman so 'well travelled', but every man— or woman— I laid became a faceless vessel for a fantasy that I was sleeping with him.
Now, I couldn't act on it like I used to because I didn't want to be wanted by anyone else. Nobody else fit me or knew my body like Blaze. Nobody appreciated the way my back arched more and more as I crept higher towards the climax he pushed me halfway to with a smile.
On Thursday, I woke up after apparently seeing in Wednesday disorientated and incoherent. I slept like a corpse and couldn't be roused, setting off a mass paranoia over the state of my physical and emotional well-being. My doctor told Esme that my body just needed the rest, so my friends sat in on a bedside vigil watching over me like I was already dead. They sat around me on my bed playing cards over my unconscious body, occasionally disturbed by my conversational but wordless rambles and aimless stumbles to the bathroom.
I don't remember any of that. A seething Esme ordered me back to bed on Thursday morning, but I ignored her, red nosed and hoarse. I needed the normality of menial employment in my life and my job was hardly strenuous.
"You're over-reacting." She shot me a look that would have melted lead paint. Honestly, I didn't feel too bad now the fever had settled, at least I didn't until I picked up my phone and remembered what had made me ill in the first place.
The picture of Blaze and I still stood prize of place as my wallpaper, his eyes much brighter and greener than I remembered. Sunday morning replayed in my mind; a montage of still images pasted into my memory like some perversely masochistic scrapbook of regret and 'if only's. How had my life flipped so quickly?
"Call him." Esme pushed me down onto the couch to brush my hair, knowing that she wouldn't win the argument of me missing work again. Being largely unconscious and oblivious to breaking so many of my firmly set habits the day before stopped me from getting crazy about it, but I wouldn't give myself a reason to crack now I was lucid.
"Don't be ridiculous. Even if I was the type of woman to chase men, wouldn't he have called already if he'd meant it?"
"Maybe he's waiting for you to call him?"
I surprised her by laughing through gritted teeth. My scalp hurt enough to touch without the added insult of the knots that tangled my hair from root to tip. My whole body felt bruised. "I thought I was supposed to be the naive one. I may not be a seasoned pro at interacting with men beyond the bedroom, but I'm pretty sure thinking a woman has another man on her mind when you screw is a major turn off." Not that I wasn't guilty of inflicting that insult on four years worth of men.
"Was Hunter on your mind?"
"No, are you crazy? In case you hadn't noticed, Blaze has a way of paralysing neurons and synapses with a look. It's easy to forget to breathe around him." Just thinking about him made me feel tired and bone weary. I didn't think we could really be classed as 'broken up' when we'd never really been together, but I suddenly understood why women were rendered whiny and insufferable even when they'd been the one to call it quits. I just wanted to talk about him, like recalling all his traits out loud would keep him alive, but I was sure that doing it was just as bad as my already unhealthy tendency to self-harm. If anything, my unwillingness to be that fucked up over a man again drove my motivation to not fall victim to old vices. To be that pathetic once in a lifetime was enough. Twice, and people would probably leave me to die shamefully. " 'We' didn't exist outside the bedroom. He hung around to stop himself being demoted to the same level as the guys I pick up every night. All we had was our wild animal sex and now that's tainted. What would bring him back? He's a hot guy, he only needs to blink to summon a bevy of fangirls ready to service him." Just thinking about how replaceable I was depressed me.
Esme sighed behind me and began to part my hair into sections. I thought that she might secretly be glad that to dress and preen me the way she hadn't been able to for weeks. Something about braiding and curling my hair relaxed her and made her feel like she had some use beyond reading scripts— a purpose to me beyond being decorative. "It's not just sex between you, Emmy. Any fool could see that. It's just the only way you two can be on the same wavelength without scaring yourselves with words. You're both more scared of saying it than you are of hearing it and that's fair enough. You've fallen for the wrong guy once before and now you've done it again. But don't belittle him or yourself off by thinking this is just about being an available orifice when he has a spare evening. To use terminology you're comfortable with, you're on the same page in the same confusing book full of continuity errors and plot holes, but you're sure as hell not characters in a horror story. I have a good feeling about which three words your tale ends with."
I winced at a particularly sharp yank at my hair. " 'They all died'?"
"No! Happily ever after!" When were you lobotomised? It wasn't like her to churn out rose-tinted romantic clichés. Not even a little bit.
"Ugh, Jesus. I'll be sat right here waiting when you, strange alien imposter, return my dear unromantic, cynical Esme."
"Keep saying that. I'll be waiting to hit you back with my 'I told you so'."
MRS REYNOLDS ONLY had to have her offer of another day off sick with full pay refused once before she let it drop. Maybe it was a wisdom that
came with age, but she knew the points of my personality that were negotiable and altering my routine was not one of them. Instead, she showed me the fridge full of orange juice she'd stockpiled to give me a vitamin C kick and relegated me to paperwork duties to keep me off my feet.
The tedious process of cross-referencing the stock information she'd complied over the week and the information we had on our system was just monotonous enough for me to get lost in it's rhythm. My head bobbed to the sound of Portishead I picked out from my MP3 player and soothed me to a state of near-hypnotism, moving almost automatically without thought. She always had me do something slow paced like this when she knew I was going through a rough patch, offering me an opportunity to shut down and recover when others wouldn't let me. The typical tactic was to distract me, wearing me out so I couldn't brood over my problems, when peace was what I really needed. How else would my body catch up?
I had heartburn to rival a nuclear holocaust when I got home that night. Racked with dry heaves and draped over porcelain, Esme held my hair and traced shapes on my back while I panted through the spasms that tore through my stomach.
We had sat that way too many times before— naked and mutually post-orgasmically exhausted. What good had ever come from living my life that way until Blaze came, a man who took me out of that pattern whilst simultaneously satisfying all the criterion I set for a 'normal' night? Why was I so scared to go home alone just once rather than add notches to my bed post, leaving me feeling dirty and devalued?
"Am I wasting my life?" I looked over my shoulder at Esme, resting my cheek against the toilet seat. "Is this work- drink-fuck-sleep cycle doing as much damage as I think it is?"
"I can't answer that definitively for you, Emmy, but it's not great." My eyes closed, acknowledging the confirmation of my thoughts. "I love to hear you purr and watch you drift off when you're satisfied, but it's sobering to hear what you say to yourself when you're asleep." I flushed, unaware that I'd ever spoken in my sleep. "We've all learned to accept that this is who you are— you and your pernicious hallucination who tells you to hate yourself— but it's hard being your friends, for no reason other than the fact we're so useless to help you and doomed to watch you spiral out of control."
Her honesty was hard to hear but I took note and considered it carefully as she slept next to me that night. I don't know that if she'd told me how they felt sooner it might have changed my perspective, but in that moment I was ready to reconsider a way of living I thought was working for me.
I WOKE UP on Friday morning bloody minded and determined, sporting a mentality I could only liken to the force of will I'd adopted when I first sat down to draw Syncretic Sciences. My aim was simple; to act like the entitled young woman I was without sacrificing the simpler life I'd fought for by shunning high society. Esme helped me pack the ill-fitting, unbecoming clothes I'd lived in not so long ago into bags, destined for the charity shop next to Double Booked to be exiled from my wardrobe indefinitely. For the first time in years I had surplus income thanks to Blaze's gentlemanly tendency to cover the bill whenever we went out, so I spent it on a new bed I had no intention of sharing with strangers. My second chance bed. If I couldn't be someone Hunter and Blaze wanted to love, I'd become someone they wanted to miss.
The bags of unwanted clothes sat along side the box of Blaze's belongings on the coffee table when I left for work, just a pile of dead weight I'd been insisting on carrying around. It all looked fairly innocuous when it sat there so innocently, but I knew how damaging it could be to keep it. The time to dwell was over. The ghosts residing in those objects would be laid to rest, or so I hoped.
I wasn't Emmeline Tudor, but I wasn't the same Emmeline White who'd cut herself over a catty remark when she was seventeen. I was new, improved, and damned if I'd let my past catch up with me again.
THE latter part of July saw a minor influx of custom, enough for there to always be at least one person browsing the shelves at all times. As dire as that might have seemed, these were the beginnings of our prime days before another minor improvement around late August. The rare occasions when customers tried to spark a conversation were the times I tried the hardest to force my new outlook, smiling politely and chatting back when I might have usually grunted a dismissive, monosyllabic response and wished them away.
It stung when people recognised me from the pictures at The Roses despite my drastic image change, and asked me some fairly intrusive questions about my fabricated relationship with the ever pre-eminent Blaze. Women mostly wanted to know if he was well hung while the men wanted to shower me with compliments and insist that they'd make a better bedfellow. As complimentary as it may have been, and as familiar I was with that kind of attention, I felt ill at ease and out of my element, almost lost in a place I knew so well. The more small talk I forced, the more claustrophobic I felt until my earlier positivity was almost completely sapped.
I took a late lunch and opted to escape the confines of the shop to roam the side streets I knew would be quiet. My Thursday vitamin boost had done wonders and the only remaining evidence that I'd been ill was a slightly runny nose and the lethargy I could no longer fend off. It helped that I'd been pounding decongestants as much as the dosage recommendations would allow.
The distant throb of traffic in the distance played as a soundtrack alongside the steady click-clack of my kitten heels through the thoroughfares that stemmed off the main streets into smaller, more intimate areas of the city. In my mind I was searching, though I didn't know what for. I'd already seen most of the shops and townhouses that filled the streets during aimless wanders with Blaze, who had an innate ability to seek out jewels in a huge coal mine of conurbation.
I took the time to sit at an abandoned children's playground hidden between a splash of poorly kept greenery and a vein of largely boarded up retail units. All but one swing hung uselessly from their chains— a perfect epitome of how I felt inside. Change wasn't as easy as I hoped and the optimism was hard to hold on to. If I could have bottled it I would have and shared it freely with anyone else as forlorn and demoralised as me.
But the single swing that still stood functional felt like a reminder that even in the most dilapidated spaces there were survivors, something that refused to go down with the rest of the pitiful wreckage. No matter how poorly managed it was, there was always something fighting against fate, a spark of hope in perpetual darkness.
What was stopping me from being that something— if not for myself then for the friends who took my crap on a daily basis?
MRS Reynolds had a look of roguery about her when I got back to the shop, suppressing a smile given away by the deep dimples in her cheeks. Her hands rested on a brown paper package bound up in parcel string. Unremarkable, yet strangely the most out of place item in sight.
"You've had a delivery," she spoke with tethered laughter, "of the utmost importance, I'm assured."
The sparkle in her eyes unnerved me but told me that there was no option to open the parcel in private. I pulled at the string and sucked in a shaky breath when the paper fell open.
The world wanted to play games with me and I was in no mood to take my turn.
Eleven
THE BROWN PAPER package contained a red gingham swing dress, a pair of white sandals and a small white card tucked into a ribbon around the base of a floppy straw hat much like the one I'd worn to lunch with Ivy. I recognised every item from my own wardrobe apart from the hat and my chest tightened with my knowing who must have been in the flat to find them. The card bore nothing but the words 'I'm sorry' in lavish calligraphy and detailed directions to an unnamed location on the reverse.
"Go on then." Mrs Reynolds peered over my shoulder and shoved me playfully. "You have somewhere to be. It would be rude to keep them waiting." Instantly, I suspected she knew precisely who was waiting and that the package had been hand delivered by the same person. It made too much sense that it would have arrived at a time I would have usually been working rather than during my
usual lunch hour. He must have been watching or had her in cahoots— this was just his style.
But I was past the point of incitement. "I still have three hours left of my shift."
"It's hardly a rave in here. I think I have the place under control." Groaning indecisively, I pulled one sandal up from the paper with a fingertip and sighed at it. My mind played through all the scenarios possible. I didn't have a good enough sense of direction to figure out where I was being led to— that alone triggered alarm bells. It didn't necessarily have to be Blaze who sent the package when enough people knew where I kept my spare key.
But what it all really boiled down to was that I'd been focusing so hard on wanting him to turn up that I'd been blocking out how nervous I was to see him again. I'd been dreading a chance encounter in the street, nightmare visions of seeing him wrapped around another woman making the deepest pits of my stomach cartwheel and backflip. It was too likely that I'd snap and act foolishly, either breaking down into tears or throwing myself at him just for him to push me away and tell me that he didn't want me that way anymore. A worst prospect was the disappointment and self-pity if I got myself worked up to see him and it wasn't him waiting for me.
"What do you have to lose?" Mrs Reynolds' question niggled at a point that I also had to consider. I had nothing left to lose. I'd lost everything already. My two men were gone, my family barely present in my life and my friends were feeling dejected. Was I really going to torture myself by seeking him out?