Chapter Five
FEbrUARY 5, AGE 23
I drummed my fingers against my table with manic excitement. I’d passed the time to go to sleep and caught a second wind fueled by giddy adrenaline. Three days of empty takeout boxes surrounded my laptop like tiny tombstones, sentinels overwatching my slipping sanity. I polished off the remnants of a coconut rum and water, then grabbed one bottle after the other and refilled my glass with the lazy drink.
“You need to sleep,” Caliban said, heavy hands resting on my shoulders as his fingers began to knead my tightly woven muscles. Under different circumstances, he may have succeeded in relaxing me.
“You love when I stay up late!” I said, glancing at the clock. It was nearly three in the morning. The bright white glow of the computer burned into my retinas in the otherwise-dark apartment. “Besides, I’m celebrating.”
“I love when you stay up late so that we can spend time together,” he countered. “Not so you can drive yourself mad.”
“That ship has sailed, my friend.” I sipped at my rum drink as I spoke.
He chuckled, brushing his lips against my temple. I closed my eyes to appreciate it only briefly before enthusiasm over my project consumed me once more. “I’m proud of you,” he said, “but not surprised. You’ve been working on this for a long time, and you’re immensely talented. It was time someone else saw that, too.”
“There had just been so many years of rejections…”
“They weren’t the right fit,” he said, voice matter-of-fact. “It took a while to get you in front of the proper eyes. And I’ve been more distracted than I like. Things have been…” He made a dismissive sound and then pressed a kiss into my temple. “I’m sorry, Love.”
I waved away his words and stared at the email anchoring me to the planet.
I’d been writing since I could hold a pen.
My first exercise in creative fiction had been my journal. I’d known from the day I asked my mom to buy me a diary that she’d be reading it. So with poetic imagination, I began to spill my life’s fabricated details onto the speckled black-and-white notebook. I wrote for the church newsletter. I rewrote biblical parables in a modern setting. I wrote for class. And then when I started college, I’d begun working on a novel. I was a junior when I sent out my first query letter, and a junior when I received my first rejection. I knew my odds of getting struck by lightning were higher than my chances of being published, but I continued writing anyway, launching into the second novel in a series that would never see the light of day.
My first six months in Colombia were peppered with rejection letters, but Caliban had encouraged me to keep trying. He’d said the agents, editors, and publishers who passed on it weren’t a good enough fit, which felt like a painful mockery from my own ego. He told me he was certain something great was right around the corner. That if I just held on…
Now here I was, rum-drunk in the dead of winter, staring at the same email that had sent me into a tailspin hours earlier. An agent wanted to represent me. Not just any agent. Julian Asher. The woman with a list of blockbuster authors and number one bestsellers longer than my phone number. She’d loved the first book so much that she immediately asked if there was more and was thrilled to learn that I was already sitting on an unpolished draft of the second book.
“We need to do something,” I said. “We need music. I’ll make cocktails. I’ll get us dinner. Or whatever meal happens after midnight.”
I may have continued rambling, talking a mile a minute before he said, “You know precisely what I like to eat.”
My face heated.
We used to make each other laugh. He’d been terribly funny, wise, patient, and clever. But every time I cracked up at a joke alone in my home, it would take only a second for the mood to turn, my face to fall, my heart to cool. He’d said time and time again that it made him sad to make me sad, so our bouts of laughter became fewer and further between as we walked a tight rope of conversation that wouldn’t set me off.
I closed my laptop and turned toward the thick shadow, always regretting when I did. It was easier to stay pointed away from the empty space. I closed my eyes, resting my elbow on the counter and propping up my chin. I allowed the silence to stretch between us, and he didn’t prod.
He knew when my mind was working.
What a sensation to know someone well enough to hear the cadence of their silence. I knew his mouth turned down in a gentle frown simply from the shift in energy. Though he didn’t rush me to speak, I sensed he knew he wouldn’t like what I was about to say.
“I think I started writing this book because I was so sure using my imagination would stop this,” I said at last. “That I could channel all of this excess creativity and get it out of my system. But you didn’t go away. And then I thought maybe I was still holding on to you because I needed the rock while escorting, or the reassurance while querying. That you’d go away if this day ever came.”
The smile returned. I sensed it from his inhalation before I felt him. I stopped speaking the moment cool hands slid up my thighs. The contact was as much for me as it was for him, I supposed. If I couldn’t see him, at least I could feel him. “Do you want to talk about your books?”
I gave a short, dry laugh. “Is there anything you don’t already know?”
His voice contained a playful lilt as he said, “You don’t know the half of what I know.”
“So, tell me,” I said.
His lips drew a chilled, electric line from my ear down my jaw. His mouth ended on my throat as he murmured, “I thought I was just your imagination? If that’s the case, shouldn’t you know everything I know?” His hands stilled as he said, “I want you for so much more than sex, Love.”
Though my eyes remained closed, I tilted my face away from him.
“I want it all,” he said. “You’ve corralled me into the smallest corner of yourself. I need you to hear it from me when I say: I’d give you the world. Instead, I’m giving you everything you’re allowing me to offer.”
I smiled, though it wasn’t entirely joyous. Appreciating the support of my subconscious genie, I asked, “While you’re granting wishes, can you make sure this book sells? If Asher’s representing me, then I have a shot with one of the Big Five publishers. It’s a pipe dream. But then again, so is getting an agent in the first place. Even making this much money…well…it’s been a dream for a while. I may as well continue dreaming.”
The vibration of his low chuckle tingled against my throat as he said, “I think I can pull a few strings.”
SEPTEMBER 8, AGE 24
“Caliban?” I asked into the gloom. I thought I’d heard a noise. A pop somewhere. A shift of weight. The squeak of a shoe. A breath, maybe.
I hated the silence that answered, even though I insisted it was what I wanted. Maybe my inability to make up my mind was why I couldn’t get him to leave. Because he was right. I didn’t want him gone. And yet…
Maybe my cocktail of drugs was finally working. Maybe my therapist had a breakthrough. Maybe paying off my debts, my student loans, my car, and taking up permanent residence for months as the number one New York Times bestseller had satiated the long-needed urge for success. Maybe the new apartment, the nice clothes, the relaxed schedule, the validation from the only two friends in my life, and the fully remote lifestyle of a writer had chipped away at whatever had remained of the trauma that had forced me into manifesting a walking fiction. Maybe sending the polished version of the second novel to EG only to have her send me a four-minute voice message crying about the heartbreaking plot twist and the gorgeous lore had filled my long-empty cup that craved validation. Maybe seeing my face, my pen name, the Pantheon novels on pop-up ads and social media posts and banners on every web page had fixed the part of me that had needed him.
Maybe I’d healed from whatever had cracked within me when I was so young that I’d needed to create an imaginary friend in order to survive.
Maybe the neglected part of me that had wandered away from my family toward the woods, that was scooped up by strong arms and urged back into the sanctuary of inattentive parents, no longer needed to conjure an unseen presence. Maybe my first memory of a smiling face and comforting friend had covered a darker, harder memory that I was unwilling to face, no matter how hard I dug for what might have really happened that day.
Maybe the white fox that had accompanied me for years was the product of a lonely child in a trailer park, a heartbroken failure in a religious home, the coping mechanism of a girl who had been denied a pet and had to invent one. Maybe the one I saw as I took silent trips into the woods in my teens, the lithe fox made of little more than starlight and dreams that would walk beside me, was a product of wishing I hadn’t been so deeply and profoundly abandoned.
Maybe I’d fabricated a face when I’d needed a friend and used the only vocabulary that my deeply evangelical parents had understood when I described my guardian angel.
Maybe I’d imagined the way my mother’s face had flicked from joy to concern to panic as I went on to describe my interaction with my guardian throughout the years, explaining his omnipresence, describing the sideways tilt of his smile, the strength of his hugs, the joy of his friendship, his beautiful animal form, and the way I’d prayed for God to protect and bless him, just as I prayed for myself or my parents. Maybe I’d been reading too much into her response when she’d called our pastor in tears and begged him to pray over me, to bring the church elders to cleanse our home.
Maybe I’d stopped talking about him the day I’d been dragged to therapy because I knew nothing good could come from speaking his name. Maybe I’d worked through my issues regarding the church, my family, my life, my studies, and had felt complete, healed, and fine. Maybe I’d moved overseas the week of graduation to use my literary degree for English and to seek a new start, leaving behind my very specific, consistent brand of psychosis as if it had geographical ties. Maybe my breath had caught in the ten-hour flight between North America and Colombia when a hand had slipped over mine in the darkened cabin, filling the empty seat that had remained vacant between me and a sleeping passenger, when lips pressed against my temple, and I knew my problems would follow me wherever I went.
Maybe after returning to the U.S., after the escorting, after the novels, after the luxury apartments and bank accounts filling to the brim and the golden designer ring that glimmered on my finger as if I were a married woman, I’d stop thinking about who I was or why I was here.
Maybe if his visits stopped altogether, I could let him go. Maybe if they continued every night, I could believe in them. Maybe if I didn’t wait on bated breath to see if a day, or a week, or a month would go by before I’d feel his presence again. Maybe I wouldn’t close my mouth, breathing through my nose, praying for the distant, mossy scents of cypress and gin.
Maybe.