Page 31 of Fate Fiction

I’d forgotten how to speak. How to think.

I sacrificed myself to the icy waters again. Baptizing myself to be freed of every single thought that crossed my mind when I saw him.

“How is it?” Evan cheerily asked with a tentative thumbs up when I resurfaced. He hadn’t magically disappeared back into the woods, and my conflicting feelings also hadn’t disappeared.

I looked down at my body treading the water and the goosebumps that had begun to form on my skin. “It’s cold as shit, but you get used to⁠—”

He dove in before I finished speaking. Seconds later he flew out of the water, beefy arms flailing, shouting, “bloody hell!”

I laughed, hard, and genuinely. The scene was so absurd it could be fiction, this built professional actor was squealing like a kid on their rollercoaster.

A jet of water sprayed across the surface, the droplets hitting my face as Evan playfully splashed at me. I raised my arms in front of me in defense, my laughing interspersing my pleas for him to stop. I splashed him back in return, and he dove beneath the water and resurfaced right next to me with one final, massive splash.

“You’ll adjust, I promise!” I declared, then swam away from him over to an underwater ledge. I let my legs dangle freely in the deeper water as I caught my breath from laughing while simultaneously treading water. It was a few, blissful moments that I’d forgotten who I was with.

Evan paddled around on his back, a lazy carefree expression softening his features. Suddenly, he jerked up and stared at me, his brows knit together in concern. “Wait, there’s nothing that can kill me in here, right?”

“Shouldn’t you have asked that before you dove in headfirst?”

Evan splashed at me again.

“I think you’ll be okay unless you’re made of algae, bugs, or worms.”

“Who’s to say I’m not made of all three?” He swam up and placed himself beside me on the ledge.

His body heat was frighteningly close. I could sense him. I could smell him, a mix now of freshwater, musk, and the lingering notes of his shampoo. I held my breath.

Evan began lazily swirling his hand across the surface of the water. “This is unlike anywhere I’ve been. Just nature fully existing as itself.” His tone was wistful as he spoke. “Thank you, genuinely, for taking me here.”

He sounded truly grateful, not like how someone thanks an Uber driver or their grandmother for an ugly sweater. So many of his words had a weight to them. I nodded and stared at the water, my own distorted reflection staring back.

The sun was evaporating the water off our shoulders. We were two strangers who were more interconnected than he could ever know.

A piece of Sir Erwyn chipped away and disappeared into the water below. The real Evan was becoming more and more tangible. Frighteningly so.

In this instance he wasn’t Evan McLeod the actor, or Evan McLeod the VIP camp guest, he was Evan. He was a guy who may have gotten nothing more than a quick double take if he walked into the same bar as me. He was a guy who a year ago—when I was still in love with Nick—wouldn’t have even been remotely on my radar had he not had the name and fame attached. Of course he was handsome, but handsome guys existed in my social sphere already, and in the words of Shania Twain, “that don’t impress me much.”

I had always tried to not get too parasocial with Evan, or any celebrity for that matter. I knew there was a clear delineation between the characters they played and their public persona versus who they actually were. I didn’t claim to know him in any way, even now. But now I felt like I understood him a little bit more.

For starters, he couldn’t be more different from Sir Erwyn. The character was brooding, cerebral, and closed off, while Evan seemed to be affable and jovial in a way. If Sir Erwyn was the moon, Evan was the sun.

In my life I’ve read over a million words of fanfiction and have written nearly as many. I can recite tags and ships for the Thorndown fandom like the alphabet.

What I love about fanfiction is that it is fiction. I can craft my cinematic moments and risky romances without the real life repercussions.

You can’t get your heart torn open by a fifteen hundred word one-shot. One bed tropes don’t turn into messy breakups that haunt you for months. Fiction doesn’t wreck you in the same way real life does.

But I wasn’t a character in a story, which meant that whatever happened from here on out would be solely my problem to handle. Sue had inadvertently sent me down a strange path. What’s worse is that she more or less gave me exactly what I asked for when I begged for an escape, Nick was becoming a distant, fading memory.

Realistically, what could happen between Evan and I right now?

He could easily lean towards me and cup my chin before turning my head towards his. We could lock eyes and he’d pull me in closer. Then, our lips could meet. We could hold each other on the ledge, absorbing every inch of the other’s skin.

We could do a lot of things. There could be a fictionalized version of this instance where this all happened. Because it all could so easily happen.

Reality settled back in with a garish bright light, the rush of the falls filling my head.

Oh my god. How had my mind jumped that quickly?