No Release

We're wandering around Dew Valley campsite at 3 AM, but it’s too overcast to see the stars. No matter how dark the sky gets—no matter how fierce the wind pressing at the flounce of clouds, piercing holes in that thin skin—there’s no clear view of the constellations he promised me. Strangers fumbling in the dark, we just about manage the hills and dips of the field without a light source to keep us upright. To keep us from tripping over all the things we can’t see in the murk. Love could have lit us from the inside out, perhaps, if we had any love left between us.

(You know, I wonder if we ever had any to begin with.)

“Know what?“ he says. The shape of his words say he’s smiling. “Rules don’t apply to us here, not tonight.”

And I know he’s serious—he truly thinks this sexy rogue act will absolve him of everything. So I do what I always do when I’m pissed off, after I have let him manipulate me again. Do what feels natural: I strike out.

“I want to go home,” I say flatly. “A real date is flowers and a restaurant and a walk around town square, not…whatever this is.”

“Full moon is just behind those clouds,” he says, ignoring me, and then drops another obscure segue. “Commitment's a funny thing,”

“What are you even talking about, Gregg?”

“I'm out here with you—because of you—and now I’m thinking…”

“Thinking?”

Of course he’s silent again; we’ve managed to break the flow of conversation already.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he says.

“Wouldn't I?”

“Get real, Amelia; the last time you believed anything I said it was, ‘I think we should break up,’ and that was three years ago.”

This is true. From the very start of us, I was only ever willing to believe the things he said in anger or frustration. Any attempt one of us made to truly, emotionally reach each other was lost in an avalanche of insecurity and paranoia. Other people have relationship problems, I’d tell myself, all couples make one another suffer. Guy, girl, nonbinary person—we all stuggle separately when we’re together. I had convinced myself this was just the way it was.

“Just tell me what you want, Amelia. Wanna break up or work this out? Tell me, and whatever it is, I will deal with it.”

“You say that like I know, Gregg. How can I just make that decision for the both of us?”

“I'm begging you, just tell me how you’re feeling once and for all.”

Feeling? Gotta lot of nerve there, buddy. Make a decision for our entire relationship, unpack the cottony layers around your heart and set out the fragilest fragments to sparkle in the dim light I emit.

“You can’t expect me to break us up just so you’re not the bad guy or keep us together so you can act like a martyr and secretly resent me for it. Understand?”

We've walked at least five miles by now; my feet are throbbing in my wellies, the only closed-toe shoes I hadn’t packed up with the rest of the winter stuff.

“Known quantities in a relationship like ours should make it easier to problem-solve,” he mumbles. Each time he opens his mouth, I want to take his words, pack them into a ball with my shaking hands, and block his windpipe with them.

Other people have relationship problems, I remind myself again. For fuck’s sake, Amelia, just suck it up.

“So, you’re saying we should know what to do because we’ve already discovered everything about each other and there’s nothing left to guess or suppose?”

Long minutes pass with just the low whistle of wind in the trees and the soft slush of the grass flattening under our feet.

“Your decision might be clearer if you consider what you really want, your heart’s desire.”

“Heart's desire? Been reading Cosmo much lately?”

Aching feet are really not helping my mood, nor is the noise I can hear just under the wind, a scrabbling, chittering sound like cackling cicadas . But I’m not in the right frame of mind to unpack the familiarity of that toneless giggle or why it makes my heart swell momentarily.

“You're not being fair,” he says finally, his voice low and almost mournful. Too many times I have fallen for this act where he sandwiches his real emotions between two false attitudes. Shy and remorseful wrapped around entitled asshat.

“To be honest,” he resumes and then stops again; my annoyance builds.

“Say it, Gregg.”

It takes everything I have not to stop where I am in the pitch blackness, toes screaming, and melt into the earth. Inside me, outside me, the scrabbling, chittering, cackling continues.

“We know we’re right for each other. Both of us know it. Know we’re going to end up together,” he says.

What's been bubbling inside me starts to burn my throat; it’s been making its way from my stomach to my esophagus. Been traveling my veins like a lost highway.

“Going forward, I think we should just assume that marriage is the end game,” he says, “And that will resolve a lot of what we’re not talking about.”

“On pain of death,” I say, “I can’t imagine assuming anything less obvious. How would I just assume—”

“Know.”

“—that marriage is the answer? The only thing I know is that you’re playing a fucking game with me right now—

“Game?”

“—pretending to be this innocent guy with no agenda, nothing to prove, nothing to gain, and I’m not doing it anymore, Gregg.”

We're at the top of a small hill; the swell of grass under my feet feels like the wide edge of an abyss and all I want is to tip forward and let the earth swallow me whole.

“Gonna take a walk for a few, Amelia,” he says, and this time his voice is cold and hard.

“Play it your way,” I snap back, and listen to the retreating clomp of his feet.

It has gotten cold at last; the chill has broken apart the threadbare clouds. And at last I can see the stars, glittering like gems against a velvet sky. If I think about where this leaves us—unexplained, unresolved—the deep heat in my chest expands and I know I have to finish us off.

“You ready to come back and face this, Gregg?” I call out.

“Ask me if I care what happens next,” he shouts back. “Me, the other person in this relationship, you know?”

How am I supposed to take that? I'm already shrinking inside my skin. Feeling at last like this costume fits too loosely, and I won’t be able to hide who I am much longer.

“Don't act like I’m not always taking you more into consideration than I should,” I hiss—literally hiss; I wonder if he can hear the sibilance from wherever he’s sulking. “Tell me you know how stupid and selfish that sounds.”

“Me? You're the one who sounds stupid right now.”

Too much at last. Blind, furious, scrabbling, I drop to my hands and knees and slither my way to where I can smell him, crouched and miserable under a tree. To where he draws in one last breath before I topple him and crack open his chest with one swipe of my dewclaw.

“See, Gregg,” I crow as his blood flows into the soft grass that surrounds us. “Never was one for marriage and forever. Gonna say it one last time since it’s, y’know, your one last time to hear it. Give a girl the choice between something and nothing and you’re giving her the chance to choose nothing. You were always going to be my last choice.”

Up in the trees, under the stars, the cicadas laugh along with me.