Page 95 of Fate Fiction

I wrote the first draft in a two week long fever dream, using every chance I could to get words down. I’d type obsessively in my notes app on the train or on the elevator at work. I shouted across the bathroom to Siri while I was in the shower and had the perfect line pop into my head. I edited during my lunch breaks and every night until my eyes glazed over. I’d been running on maybe five hours of sleep a night for the last month.

I rested my elbows on the table, seeking any sort of micro reaction from Andrea. She played with a strand of her long blonde hair as she read. As her manicured fingers twisted around the strand I remembered how wonderful it felt to have Evan’s hands tangled in my hair. How he’d reach for a dark brown curl at every chance he could. My own finger found itself wrapped around my hair, seeking the ghost of his touch while trying to push the thought of him away.

A few minutes later she looked up at me, her brows furrowed. “Can you not stare at me? I sense you breathing over me and I can’t actually enjoy a single word.”

I stood up from my seat and sighed, dejected. I’d have a lot of time to kill. “I’m going to go stress clean my entire kitchen and make…something. Call me over when you want to tell me it sucks.”

She rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t suck. At least not yet.”

I began cleaning. I found stains in the grout of my kitchen backsplash that were probably from the Bush administration. The senior one. I wiped down corners that had probably never seen water, let alone the cocktail of chemicals I was scouring it with.

Once the kitchen was sparkling, I decided to dirty it again to kill more time.

I popped my head out, “do you want lunch? I’ll make us something.”

Andrea was engrossed in the story, she didn’t look up at me. This was a good sign, or she was too ashamed to look at me because it was that terrible. “Sure, sure, whatever you want.”

I knew exactly what I wanted to make. The small bag of masa harina I had in my kitchen was on the verge of expiration, and I had a pitiful onion and a can of beans. I’d make a pathetic excuse for pupusas.

“I’ll tell Caroline to come by when she’s done teaching,” I said as I assessed the ingredients.

Her ears perked up and she grinned at the mention of her fiancée. “Sounds perfect.” She went right back to reading.

I hacked together some quick refried beans that were almost as good as authentic ones, and started rolling the dough out. Cooking served as a great distraction from the mortifying reality of someone consuming your art.

Andrea ate with one hand while continuing to scroll. The only words she said were, “damn that’s good” after she took her first bite. I wasn’t sure at first if she meant the food or the writing. It was only when she happily hummed after her second bite it was confirmed to be the food. I sat across from her, trying to focus on my own meal and not her reactions. She was painfully expressive, gasping at times from either shock or fear or delight—I couldn’t tell.

I kept wondering what part she was reading. What lines elicited these reactions? I had gotten plenty of feedback on my writing before, but it was contained to the comment section of a fic. I’d never seen it in real time like this.

Caroline came over sometime mid-afternoon while I was wrapping up cleaning the kitchen a second time. Aside from a quick kiss, Andrea hardly acknowledged her.

“That’s a first,” Caroline shrugged when she came into the kitchen. “What spell do you have her under?”

“Apparently the book doesn’t suck as much as I thought it would.”

She turned excitedly to the laptop and looked back at me, flashing the dimples in her cheeks from an excited grin. “You finished it? Even after the whole…Evan thing?”

“It’s incredibly far removed from Evan.” A half truth. He haunted the narrative in a sense. Pieces of him were sprinkled into one of the protagonists. His easygoing nature, the way he carried himself, but he was little more than a phantom in this story.

“I’m proud of you, seriously,” she replied.

I made popcorn for Caroline and I, and we watched a romcom we’d both seen a million times as Andrea continued reading. We recited lines and gave commentary as we watched, yelling at the male protagonist for every poor decision he made.

As the credits rolled, my phone buzzed on the coffee table. I glanced over at the glowing screen. The only two people I regularly talked to were here with me. Andrea was still engrossed in my manuscript, and Caroline was lounging on the couch scrolling through videos on her phone. We were collectively doing nothing together.

I swiped the phone off the table to see an Instagram notification declaring “@eomc195 has followed you.”

I dismissed it as another spam account. They seemed to appear in bursts with their fake usernames that were a random mix of letters and numbers, sliding into DMs proposing to be my sugar daddy or selling me cryptocurrency. But I was bored. And curious. I clicked on the profile.

It was a private account with a few hundred followers, no bio, and a photo that was nothing more than a silhouette of a person backdropped by a city skyline.

My eyes tracked to the bottom of my screen, where my DMs glowed with a message request. Out of sheer curiosity I opened it, expecting to find the same spam message I’d received countless times before.

@eomc195

Hey.

It’s Evan.