Lips twitching as if he was trying not to laugh, he said, “Yeah, you always get really incoherent afterwards and sort of start to beg me for it.”
“Stop, that’s so embarrassing!” I squealed, squirming out of his arms only for him to grab me around the waist and pull me back to him.
“Nothing we do is embarrassing,” he reassured me, pressing a soft kiss to my temple. “Except for when you get on top of me and I come within minutes.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I guess you feel a bit bolder and talk a lot more during it. I’m not sure how to describe the feeling I get when I hear you say how much you like the things we do.”
“Yeah, I get what you mean,” I murmured, and we kissed for a while, slowly, baring all the tenderest parts of ourselves.
Afterwards, he would always get me into the shower and wash my hair because I’d be too tired to do it, and then we’d return to the living room to rekindle the fire and have a cup or two of hot chocolate.
We had started reading that collection of short stories together. One night he would read aloud, and the other I would. Needless to say, I liked the nights he read the best.
“You’re so much more expressive than I am,” I told him one time as we were settling down.
“You’re just too nervous,” he argued.
“Well, I don’t want to disappoint you.”
He looked at me, serious then, his handsome face silhouetted against the orange luminescence of the fire. “You could do a lot of things to me, Anya. Disappointing me isn’t one of them.”
And then, back in our bed, in the faint lamplight and the cool sheets, talking until it was really late and all we had the energy to do was lie half-awake in each other’s arms.
“We should get some rest,” he would murmur.
“We should,” I would agree, eyes closed already.
But we wouldn’t. Not for another hour at least. Life together was too precious to waste it on sleep.
???
The last day at the cottage, I woke up with this terrible, oppressive feeling in my chest, as though my heart was being pressed down by a giant tombstone.
I could sense every hour, minute, second slipping by me really fast while I was unable to do anything to stop them. And no matter how much I tried to distract myself with sweet recollections of my time here with Kai, my mind could not help but return to that one ever-hovering question: How do I keep living like this? How do I accept a personhood that I deep down believe to be broken? Factory-new, yes, but faulty. Should I simply surrender myself to love, his love and affection, and have faith that it would one day heal me? And what about the love I owed to myself? Did I owe myself anything at all, or was it some kind of universal law that love was meant to be shared and not kept internal and individualized? The thing humans owed to each other.
Now, the house stood candlelit and delicious-smelling because Kai had cooked once again, and I was transferring the plates to the table while he was messing with the radio.
“I can’t believe this is our last dinner here,” I told him as I filled our glasses with wine. Because we could drink wine now. Because now we trusted each other with everything.
Kai came up behind me, wound his arms around my waist, and, without speaking, kissed the back of my neck. Leaning on him with eyes shut, I allowed myself to feel the full, wrenching spectrum of my emotions. My desire and love for him. My fear of the future. My perhaps childish hope to create new memories instead of regaining my old ones. All while the trapped girl inside my head thrashed and screamed that this life would never be enough, that it was nothing short of delusional to believe that I could go on like this forever.
“We’ll come back,” I heard Kai say over the abrading rushing of my thoughts. “Won’t we?”
“Kai,” I croaked, shaking all over.
Quickly, realizing my distress, he spun me around, his hands squeezing my shoulders. “Hey, what is it?”
Looking up at him, feeling tears I could no longer hold streaming down my face, I confessed, “I don’t want to go back.”
Kai used the sleeve of his sweater to wipe the corners of my eyes, his expression wavering between confusion and concern. “What do you mean?”
My breath stuttered, my heart pounded, my eye sockets burned, and before I could stop myself, everything I’d had trouble articulating for so long spilled out of me all at once. “I mean, what is even the point of returning to that life? The Inside. Pretending all is perfect, smiling when we’re not feeling like it, being friends with people we hardly even know, getting our brains wiped clean at every inconvenience, feeling nothing,knowingnothing. Missing words, while the world Outside burns. Or maybe it doesn’t. How should we know? We’re treated like children, sheltered from everything, only that no one ever tells us what we need sheltering from.”
Taking a step back, careful, he asked again, “What are you saying, Anya?”
“I’m saying I want out.”
