But when I swiped to unlock the tablet, I realised from the photo of Pablo as the background that it wasn’t actually mine but Morgan’s. Why was it here? Why was it out of her case? Why didn’t she have a password on it? Now that she was doing work on it, she should really have been paying more attention to that kind of thing.
I knew I should have put it straight back down. But I hadn’t seen any of her art in weeks, and I wanted to see what she’d been drawing. To feel connected to that part of her. So I opened the app she’d taught me to use, and as I scrolled through her projects, my mouth fell open.
The first thing I saw was me, in the outfit I had laid out downstairs. She’d been a bit generous with the cut of my jaw, but it was amazing to see myself through her eyes. I checked the edit history: it had only been a few hours since she’d worked on this one.
When I scrolled through her recent projects, skimming past the freelance work and gala illustrations, I found dozens of illustrations of me from over the last few months: in my suit for the gala, holding the book she’d given me in Hay-on-Wye, paddling a kayak up a river lined with rhododendron and balsam, on the floor in her lounge with my head leaned back against the sofa… I scrolled all the way back to the beginning of the year, and there was even one of me from then, sat at Fatima’s dining table, a D20 die falling from my hand, a huge smile on my face.
I’d known Morgan was in love with me. I never would have had the courage to say it to her otherwise. But seeing all of this – knowing that when she was her best, most creative self, she was thinking of me – I felt that chasm crack open like never before. We were both still literally drawing one another into our lives, so why couldn’t we make it work?
But it wasn’t real life. It was just a drawing. And if Morgan had wanted to work things out with me, she would have done so last night when we’d made love. She would have changed her mind when I’d told her what I’d been doing to try to make things right for myself. And she would be here now.
But she wasn’t. And I supposed that told me everything I needed to know.
* * *
After breakfast,I pulled on my newly mended trousers and my jerkin, relying on Chloe to fix the loose tie on the shoulder and help me angle the crown I’d bought just right. She had to pause in the middle of buzzing Grey’s head; now that they’d worn their Gorlag outfit, they wanted a clean slate of their natural brown for today’s look.
Once we were dressed, we all, sans Morgan, left for the faire. As we went, I looked over my shoulder and could have sworn I saw her standing in the upstairs window, but then the clouds shifted, and it turned out to just be a glare on the window.
We walked over to the festival entrance, admiring again the costumes others had put together. We were all dressed more traditionally “Ren Faire chic” today, as Chloe had called it; she and Fatima wore flowy dresses with corsets over them, Grey wore a lace-up waistcoat over ballooning trousers and shirt, and Phil wore a brocade jerkin not unlike the one the groom had been wearing at the joust yesterday.
At the festival gate, there was a huge group of gender-bent Disney royalty – a bearded hulk of a human dressed as Ariel, paired with a dainty walking ponytail in a Prince Eric costume, and so on – and another group clearly dressed as the Fellowship fromThe Lord of the Rings. I snapped a picture of them to send to Morgan, my thumb hovering over the send button whilst I debated whether or not I should be texting her, before I decided to say “fuck it” and send it anyway. If she didn’t want to hear from me, she wouldn’t respond.
Inside, the place looked identical to the day before, and it felt like déjà vu to hear the same jokes and lewd comments yelled by the callers and performers. It was fun, but my heart wasn’t in it; not without Morgan there. At least yesterday, I’d been able to watch her have fun and know that it was all worth it. But today, everything reminded me of her, and not in a fun way.
After another round of coffee – all iced this time, as it was already warmer than it had been yesterday afternoon – we found some seats at a belly dancing show. I settled down next to Fatima on the end of the row. I hadn’t properly spoken to her since everything that had happened with Jared other than to tell her about my course. She seemed to be in pretty good spirits, so I risked bringing the vibe down if it meant maybe getting to commiserate a bit.
“So how are you doing?” I asked Fatima, trying not to sound like I was starting a therapy session, but she clearly got the gist.
“I’m okay,” she said, putting on a smile one might describe as “brave”. “I mean, better than I thought I’d be. It was a pretty clean break, all things considered.”
“That’s true,” I said, somewhat envious of that. “But you know you don’thaveto be okay, right?”
Fatima caught my eye, and her smile faltered for a moment. “I know,” she said, nodding. “But really, Grey’s hardly left my side, and Morgan and Chloe have been great, too.”
I must have winced slightly at the mention of Morgan, or maybe Fatima’s teacher/DM intuition was at an all-time high, because she narrowed her eyes.
“And how areyou?”
We’d never actually, officially burst the bubble to Fatima and Grey. We’d been about to when Fatima and Jared had broken up, and Morgan insisted it would have been insensitive to bring it up. But they’d found out; of course they had. I suspected Fatima had known since that day she caught me on my way down the stairs. She’d always been able to see right through people.
Today, I didn’t feel like just smiling along, fading into the background. So I decided to be honest.
“Not great,” I said, feeling my voice break. “Which seems really stupid to say, given that we were together for what, less than one percent of the time you and Jared were together?”
She shook her head. “It’s not about how long you were together,” she said, then shrugged as she reconsidered. “Okay, obviously duration plays a part. But with Jared and me, as impossible as it feels, even now, to imagine life without him, we’d at least got to see it through. Our relationship ran its course, apparently. But with you and Morgan…”
“We never got to see what life would be like together,” I finished. And that was the killer, wasn’t it? All the what-ifs. All the unknowns, which had been the thing to threaten our relationship to begin with, and which were haunting us now. Or, haunting me at least. Was it selfish to hope she was at least slightly haunted, too?
“I guess we’ll all have to get used to the unknowns,” I said. “She might not even be here a month from now.”
Fatima’s sympathetic pout sharpened into a confused squint. “Wait, what?”
“She’s been looking at jobs in other parts of the country,” I said, hoping Fatima didn’t find that too triggering. But she didn’t look shocked when I told her. Just more confused.
“I did know that,” she said, “but?—”
Before she could continue, ear-splitting feedback came from the speaker a foot to my left; I actually lifted my hands to my ears in response. A man shouting and whooping came barrelling onto the stage, five elegant belly dancers in a line behind him. The music kicked in, and I could barely hear it through the ringing in my ears. I was almost certain this volume was historically inaccurate.
