The Love Interest

Chapter 19

I am fucked.

Legitimately fucked.

Somewhere out there, in this universe, there is a scientist looking for a new planet to inhabit for when the Sun and the Earth collide billions of years from now and we have to rebuild our life on Mars. If I were genetically gifted with the ability to create such spacecraft, I'd venture to Mars right now. Set up camp and wait for the oxygen in my spacesuit go out. Or, I'd remember that I caught myself mentally cheating on a perfectly good human being, and I'd take the helmet off to speed up the asphyxiation process.

The processing of what I've become only hit me this morning, at four a.m, where the sky is dark, and people are just now coming home from clubs. I have to go to work in two hours— two, not three, not four, but two— and face one boy I've betrayed, and another I have the incapability of even touching without dying of love sickness.

I am guilty. So. Very. Guilty. 

The shock of yesterday's revelation caused me to completely blur out the existence of Blue— the entire existence of everything, actually. I am just relearning how to breathe again, how to think without fainting, how to sleep without dreaming. I feel like I've been re-birthed, like maybe I'm not Genevieve anymore. Genevieve does not cheat on others. Genevieve does not use kind people as a distraction from what she really wants.

And Genevieve doesn't get what she wants. The boy never likes her back, the boy never b-breaks a decade long pattern of breaking hearts and batting beautiful...dark, thick eye lashes at girls simply because Genevieve was herself and he liked it. That doesn't happen. That didn't happen, now did it?

My dreams have been getting too vivid recently.

But I can feel my face still tingling from where his fingers once held it; it's the only evidence that his confession was real. And the lingering scent of rosewood and spicy tree sap, it's all around me. Did he die? Is his ghost following me? This cannot be physically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, physiologically possible. I am having tactile hallucinations. Tactile.

And this boy, this stupid, little, overly attractive boy— I have to k-kiss him today, don't I. I cannot speak, even my thoughts are stuttering. Even my vocal cords are trembling. If I go onto set like this, I will not make it through a line without being accused of being ill with pneumonia.

I'm staring at the hotel ceiling where a leakage stain makes itself known, and I turn over in my bed to suffocate myself with my pillow.

I groan.

Out loud.

I must make a to-do list. A how-to-get-out-of-a-losing-love-triangle-before-somebody-gets-hurt, and then I think; somebody already is hurt. Me. The possibility of my love for Eden not being one sided makes something in me swell, enlargen. I evaluate it closely, hoping it doesn't become large enough to consume me. If Eden is truthful— if he told the entire truth, and nothing but the truth— we both...feel things for each other. Unappeasable things. Things that hit a self destruct button inside of me.

He's getting too, too close to me.

I'm feeling something.

Oh, God.

Fear.

By five a.m, I've made up my mind: I am going to break up with Blue, possibly tell him the whole thing. Apologize with a bouquet of Blue Bells and offer up Atticus for therapeutic effect. But is that something I do today? Will I even have time to see him before we begin filming? Will he think I'm breaking it off because I'm going to kiss Eden, said {Passionately}, and he doesn't trust me? But that's the problem: Blue does trust me.