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The words haunt her.
Days after, she spent hours bent over the bathroom sink of the hotel room the feds placed her in. She scrubbed at the cursive until the delicate skin of her inner wrist was blotchy red. Sometimes she’d break skin, the blood staining the soapy rag in her hands. Each day, she’d switch off, giving one wrist a break while she abused the other. By the end of the week, most of the skin had been rubbed off, leaving her wrists raw and painful. Even with her ruined epidermis, the words shone, black and gleaming amongst the bloody skin. Twin sayings, one on each arm, scrawled in neat penmanship.
Not at all. That was backup. You got the ball rolling.
Before before, she had been more cautiously optimistic of her marks. When she was younger and more naïve, the idea of having her greatest love and enemy be the same person felt poetic. She had loved literature, and that was the kind of stuff that made for great fiction. She imagined she would meet her destined at the worst possible moment, if only because fate loved dramatics. What followed: grand, sweeping monologues, heartbreak of disastrous proportions, the inevitable reunion and passion that shook the earth and moved mountains.
Then, she was scarred. Literally and figuratively. Her optimism fell silent. She clammed up when it came to anything intimate. Her previously scarce dating life became nonexistent. She took measures to speak in clipped sentences, trying to dissuade any potential for those words to come up. She didn’t want to meet them, whoever they were. She’s not sure she would be able to bare what her “greatest enemy” would do to her. What could be worse than what she already had been through? She didn’t want to find out.
She finds out he’s escaped when the feds whisk her away, saying something about danger to your life. She’s shuttled off to the north, far from the sunny skies and clawing heat of Miami.
She’s told she can’t have any contact with her old life. The sight of her father’s tears breaks something inside her.
Now, she only has snowcapped mountains and cloudy days.
She’s given a new name she barely ever responds to. The feds give her two job options; she could work as a librarian or as a receptionist. She finds the idea of answering phones strangely nauseating. She picks the library.
She doesn’t even think of the words amid the verbal altercation. She just feels warmth, when the stranger behind her sticks up for her, backs her up. She’s so frazzled that it takes her a moment, and her grin freezes on her face as what he says registers in her mind. The twin sets of words on her wrists burn bright white underneath her blazer, underneath the cotton cuffs she wears to hide them when she’s out.
It’s all the years of management training that keeps her from reacting physically. She’s used to strangers, mostly hotel guests, request or otherwise say the strangest things, so she’s trained her expressions well. She pastes a bland smile, looks away to her luggage. She says something about reflexes, but her mind is in a whirlwind, compartmentalizing.
There’s no recognition in the man’s too blue eyes, and she wonders if it’s some error, the worst of coincidences. She has heard plenty of stories of this happening, where one person had a common saying on their wrist and ended up thinking they had met their soulmate. There’s even a subsection of romantic comedies based on the trope.
But her words aren’t common. They’re three sentences, packed together in tiny script on her wrist. And yet, he doesn’t say anything, and she decides not too either.
He seems like a nice enough guy, but nothing about him screams archenemy and also soulmate. She thinks he might be flirting, but not in any blatant you’re the person I’m destined to be with kind of way. She makes some kind of non-answer, turning down his advancement, her avoidant nature rearing its head suddenly. He doesn’t make a fuss about it, and by the end of the brief conversation, her scattered thoughts have all concluded that it must have been some kind of fluke. She glances down at his wrists before walking toward the airport worker, but his suit covered the skin entirely.
In the north, it’s always cold. She’s not used to it. Dreariness settles in her bones. Her nose always seems red and puffy. Her skin cracks from the bitter air, and lotion becomes her new best friend.
She’s always covered up, bundled up in long and loose cardigans. She swims in her clothes, something she’s never really done before, but it helps. Before, she wanted to be a calming presence. Now she wants to disappear in the background.
She finds him at the bar anyways.
She finds him on the plane anyways.
It seems fate is laughing at her, pitting the two together repeatedly. She has a brief moment where she almost bares her wrists to him, showing him her words. But she keeps her hands in her lap, gripped together.
It’s just a coincidence, she repeats in her mind as they chat. it’s just a coincidence, she repeats as the plane takes off. It’s just a coincidence, she repeats when he focuses the conversation on her father. It’s just a coincidence.
And then it’s not.
Her tan disappears. She pales, fades away like a ghost. She haunts the shelves of the decrepit library she works at, filing away books from 9-5 most days. Most of the patrons are the elderly, or exuberant kids and their harried mothers. She tries to build rapport with some of them, but there must be some kind of look in her eye, something that keeps most at bay. She’s lost the charm that made her such a successful manager before.
She wonders what else he’s taken from her.
Her day off, Sundays, are spent in her apartment building, blinds closed, and dark drapes pulled over them. She reads books she finds on her shift. Science fiction, something she never had a heart for before. But the protagonists are too busy discovering a new planet, or fighting off aliens, or trying to discover what’s on the other side of a black hole to worry about the marks on their wrists. She finds it refreshing, and pores through the books, shut off from the world. She thinks this is the kind of thing all those self-help books warn against. She doesn’t find it in herself to care.
The days pass her by. She barely notices. All she can think about is the way his hot skin felt against hers. How he’d warm her up here. How he’d make her feel something, raise her from the apathy that she seems to drown in.
He confirms it in the bathroom. She’s seeing stars and he hisses in her ear, “I expect more from the person I’m fated to.”
She gasps into the air, squeezes her eyes shut. How could she have just brushed it off? He’d been playing with her from the very beginning. Of course, this would be a part of it. Keep her guessing, keep her tethered with curiousity.
He backs off when she spits out that she can’t breathe, and she heaves against the wall. She fights the tears that threaten to fall. She looks at him with a glare, feeling betrayal swell in her veins. Even after everything, this hurts the worst. It cuts deep.
“Oh, don’t give me that look. I was going to admit it sooner or later. Take you out on a date after this was all over,” he sighs, runs his hand through his hair. He laughs a little, “I’m sure that’s off the table now, isn’t it?”
She bites down the bile.
She sits on her living room couch. She traces the words on her right wrist, the side that designated the words your soulmate would speak. The skin was bumpy and scarred, white tissue that rolled over the mark like mountain ranges.
Her finger pads rove over the mark as she stares ahead of her. There’s a simple rose on her coffee table, blood red and riddled with thorns. Underneath it is an envelope. None of this had been here Saturday night. She knows for certain of that.
She wonders how long he’s known her location, how long he’s watched her. She thinks of where she’s been the past month. The library, home, and, on brief occasions, the market located down the street from her apartments. She goes after work when the day is still bright. She never went out at night. Had he been there, in the background? Her days are such a fog sometimes she’s sure he could have walked right in front her, and she wouldn’t have noticed.
She notices now.
There’s a burner phone somewhere deep in her bedside drawer. If she gave the number on there a ring, the feds would come back and whisk her away again. All she needed was to call.
She’d have a new identity, live another life. Become a ghost all over again.
Her bones seem to creak when she finally moves. She’s not sure how long she’s been sitting there.
She grabs the envelope, turns it over. His nickname for her is written on the front, the handwriting so painfully familiar it’s like a punch in the gut. She traces the word, like she does with her marks. Her heart stutters, realizing he’s really the only person who truly knows her now. She reads Leese and suddenly she can feel something again. Anger, annoyance. The nickname kickstarts something within her that begins to rapidly defrost her.
She opens it with shaking hands, and almost laughs. There’s a picture of a cat on the front, looking at her with big sad eyes. Above the picture, I’m sorry! is printed in giant yellow lettering.
She takes a breath and flips the card open. The same handwriting that’s forever imprinted on her skin marks the white page. It reads, How about that date?