Page 10 of Sanguine
Prologue
Dear Royal E,
The girl I love keeps ghosting me.
That’s right—keeps.
Because she reappears after a week or so—full of love and apologies—and then for a month-ish, it’s like the ghosting never happened and she’s the best girlfriend in the world.
And then she disappears again.
She’s not on drugs, and I don’t think she’s cheating on me. What gives?
—Frustrated in Fairway
Dear Frustrated,
My friend, a flake has happened to you.
If this is your first experience with a flake, let me offer my hearty condolences and also a pamphlet for next week’s meeting of Flake-lovers Anonymous, because you are not alone. Many of us have been lured in by the vivacious energy and bright charm of a flake; many of us have been dashed upon the rocks of a flake’s inconstancy and fickleness.
I once loved a boy who was a flake. I told him I loved him, he nodded at me, and the next morning, he moved to a monastery, where he is a monk even now, and I was flake-sick for years.
You cannot cure a flake, but you can decide what you can and can’t live with. Tell your flake your boundaries, and if she can’t honor them, you know what you have to do. It’s better to end things now than with marriage on the horizon and your future on the line.
Signed with empathy and a reminder to join us at next week’s Flake Anon,
The Royal E
Chapter 1
I dream of him again.
This one is slow and almost painful in its sweetness. We are on a plane holding hands, and he is scolding me for getting extra rental insurance for a car we’ve hired at our destination. I respond by scraping the pads of his fingers with my teeth until his scolds turn into shivers. We can’t bear to wait until we get to our hotel later that day to ease the aches we’ve created in each other, but the cabin is full, and the first class seats aren’t convenient for under-the-airplane-blanket relief.
What if…he murmurs to me.
And it feels like the plane will never land, and maybe it never should, because at least if I’m here, then he’s here with me, and if we’re together, then that means I never left—
And then I wake up.
I’m sweating and my heart is racing and the sheets are slick with spilled semen. And my God, it’s like losing him all over again when I dream about him like this. All fucking over again.
I sit up and scrub my hair, miserable with myself. My cock—trapped in a cage I wear for just this purpose—twinges from its thwarted erection. Not that it matters. I somehow managed to ejaculate anyway.
Four years.
Four years and six months, and I am still trying to claw myself free from heartbreak and a love that I swear I still feel in my guts and my marrow.
I am still trying to let Elijah Iverson go.
* * *
Silence, if you didn’t already know, is a lie.
For example, I am currently in a hermitage in the woods, on the last day of a two-week period of silence. My monastic brothers are two miles away, and there is nothing and nobody anywhere near me. It should be the definition of silence. It should be a vacuum of sound, a bubble of pure, undisturbed stillness.
And yet.
