Page 87 of Fate Fiction

My notebooks.

I hadn’t thought about packing. I figured I’d shove everything into bags tomorrow after Evan left. I didn’t want to waste time when I could savor these dwindling hours with him.

Everything was left out in haphazard piles, my clothes, the remaining bits of food I had left. Those damned notebooks. In the dim glow of the gas lamps they faded into the background, resting beside my laptop on the edge of the table. I hadn’t thought much about them and the weird weight they held over Evan and I.

The notebooks fanned across the floor in a dramatic spill.

My brain finally caught up to what was happening, I came back into myself like I’d been watching everything from outside of my own body. I couldn’t leave them like this.

“Fuck,” I muttered. I immediately crouched down and began to gather them up. If I could hide them away before Evan noticed I could buy myself more time before coming clean about this. I had every intention of telling him about this secret, separate identity—but not right now. He squatted beside me as I was closing them shut as fast as possible, not caring about folds or crinkles in the pages.

Time stopped as he flipped one over.

This wasn’t the moment that was supposed to be frozen. I wanted to rewind it, start everything over. The credits were about to roll and I didn’t like the ending of this film.

“What’s all this…? Ice on the Turret?” He slowly stood up, his eyes scanning the page. Sir Erwyn’s name was on that page. It had to be. Alongside descriptors or chunks of dialogue or something that would thread my words to his character.

“Evan—” I shot up and reached out to grab the book from him, which was now solidly planted in his grip.

He pulled it away from me, his eyes turned to ice. He kept reading. My limbs were going numb. My heart was racing.

“No, seriously. What is this?” Evan's body language shifted, he stood up straighter and put more distance between the two of us. “Why do you have these character descriptions? Why is Sir Erwyn written down? What are you writing in here?”

If only I had followed through with my empty promise from earlier in the week to burn them. I should have gotten rid of them and brought this up in the future as a funny anecdote from a past version of me. Because that’s how I’d kept referring to my fandom, as some distant, passive thing. Not a present obsession that had been eating me alive. It was mildly amusing to Evan in the past tense, maybe even charming, this was anything but.

“It’s…it’s…” What was I supposed to say? No witty remark or aloofness could get me out of this. I couldn’t keep it obscured anymore. I felt sick to my stomach.

“Is this…fanfiction?” Evan bit. The word stung like a slur.

I laughed nervously, thinking I had one last shot to explain away this quirk of mine, “I can explain.”

“Can you?”

Seeing the mounting frustration and confusion in Evan, I took a few steps back. I suddenly felt disgusting, and from the way Evan was looking at me, he agreed. We were two magnets, and the polarity had been flipped.

“It’s a silly hobby, I’m not like⁠—”

That was the problem. I was exactly like that other woman right now in his eyes. I rubbed my temples, willing my brain to think of something better to say. I couldn’t come up with anything.

It wasn’t a silly hobby, either.

It was years of honing my craft and staying committed to storytelling. It was late nights curled up in bed finishing paragraphs or editing dialogue. Fanfiction was my favorite thing to create, and the world of Thorndown was my favorite fictional place to be.

“Like what? Like her?” His eyes darkened as he glared past me. He couldn’t look at me. My heart was shattering over and over again.

For all he knew there were pages upon pages of words of sexual fantasies with him hidden inside the notebook. It could have been a manifesto of sorts on how I’d get together with him.

“It’s different, I promise,” I said quietly. “It’s storytelling, not anything about…”

“Us?” For a moment Evan stopped, his anger quieted. Looking at my pleading eyes like he was asking if I was being truthful. There was so little in his life that was authentic. He’d been treated differently for years, everything was a masquerade. I’d led him to believe he found something real. And I burned him.

“You told me I was nothing like her. You said you would never lump the two of us together⁠—”

“That was before I saw this,” he cut me off. He was still holding the notebook, the pages were wrinkling in his hands with how tight his grip was. “You were so sympathetic about that story I shared. I can’t believe I thought you understood how I felt.” I saw glassy streams of tears falling down his cheeks. I wanted to reach out and swipe them away. I knew I couldn’t.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “When I said I wrote about you this week I didn’t mean in this context. I am being a hundred percent honest about that. I was planning on destroying all these notebooks and deleting my accounts on the fanfiction sites⁠—”

“Fanfiction sites?” he barked. “How much have you—actually, nevermind. I don’t want to know,” he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. He was trying to force the tears back in. He was no longer Evan McLeod, the guy from camp I was falling for. He was turning back into Evan McLeod the untouchable celebrity. The ghost of his touch was burning my skin.