Read We Won't Feel a Thing Online
Authors: J.C. Lillis
We Won't Feel a Thing (17 page)
She punched the shed door open and hurried away from him, into the safe cold rain.
Chapter Ten
Dear Rachel and Riley,
I apologize for my brief delay in responding. An unpleasant life situation reared up and required my intervention; fortunately, that fire is out, and I can safely turn my attention back to you.
Needless to say, your latest field notes were objectively distressing. The idea that Step Three led not only to a 28% increase in your attraction, but also to KISSING IN A SHED would be utterly devastating to me, if I were the unenlightened sort who experienced utter devastation. Rachel, you are correct in your assumption that “this should not be [expletive deleted] happening.” The Visual Intervention goggles have powerful built-in sensors that, in a perfect world, are supposed to prevent The Object from hijacking your future fantasies.
At present, I can say only this: Something overrode those sensors.
Something intervened.
I don’t know how it happened—I can’t venture a guess until I review the data recorded by your goggles—but I am grateful for the learning experience. I’ll report this to Paul and Wendy for Version 5.0. of the Forbidden Love Module; this issue absolutely merits careful scrutiny and action before the next round of testing begins. (I apologize, too, for the itchy eyes, as well as the lingering nosebleeds, loss of appetite, and insomnia. Please send me the bill for any over-the-counter salves, ointments, drops, and sleep aids you might be using to counter the side effects.)
If you want to quit now, I will understand and release you—but please do consider trying Step Four! We just made some strategic improvements to the
Auditory Intervention
track, and I’m extremely eager to test it. I can’t promise it’ll undo all the damage, but at the very least it should remove you from immediate danger and prevent further undesired interactions (i.e., shed kissing) from recurring.
Instructions and example are attached. Please, stay with me! Let’s aim our arrows straight and true.
Resolutely yours,
David A. Kerning
***
In the two days following the shed encounter, Rachel and Riley’s kingdom was tense and cold, as if winter had fallen after a summer of seventeen years. The mirror door stayed shut. Riley tweaked and grouted tiles with obsessive focus. Rachel typed up a comprehensive bathroom schedule to prevent them from crossing paths and seeing each other in towels. They nibbled dry toast and crackers and spoke only when necessary, and at night they slept in fitful two-hour bursts, interrupted by more dreams that made them sweat and loud alien sounds from the unfathomable bedroom of Riley’s parents.
Now they had Step Four instructions, and a 10 a.m. appointment at Oneira Sleep Solutions.
Rachel sprawled on her unmade bed: rapping on the laptop, conquering Level 79 of WrathQuest 5. Her red earbuds were jammed in. For the past two days she’d been blaring Thirsty Herd’s controversial third release, a concept album about ecological warfare. There were zero songs about kissing and only one ballad, which didn’t count because it was a ballad about acid rain. She blasted the thirteen songs over and over as her WrathQuest queen avatar flung fireballs at knights. When the thought of Riley’s lips threatened invasion, she muttered some of her favorite grammar facts, the ones that made her feel especially smart for knowing:
“Which” is used for non-defining clauses.
“
Lay” is a transitive verb, requiring a direct subject and an object. Appositives can’t function as standalone sentences.
Bob and Athena chimed. She heard them right through the earbuds, even though the clock was on Riley’s side.
8 a.m. Already.
Rachel pushed her window open and gulped in a breath. The morning was drab and humid, and a steamy funk of damp pavement and half-dead worms made her empty stomach swerve. Sun and clouds fought in the sky; the day could go either way.
She raked a comb through her snarled hair and rubbed on some colorless lip balm, avoiding the mirror.
He kissed me. I kissed him. We. Have. Kissed.
The fact filled her whole brain, tormented her on a loop like the world’s most infuriating run-on sentence. She heard Bob and Athena gossiping in her head:
“I don’t see a happy ending here, Bob.”
“I know, right?”
“That was the kind of kiss that makes you lose control.”
“And do incredibly stupid things.”
“Like fail your freshman classes.”
“And give up full scholarships.”
“And quit college to fly out west.”
“She’s so screwed now.”
“Our poor girl.”
Rachel ripped out her earbuds and wriggled into her poisoned-apple shirt.
Get it together.
She pulled up her crown socks.
Don’t look him in the eye. Don’t think of the shed.
You’ve got this.
Rachel tapped on the mirror door. After a long minute, Riley rolled it open. Her breath hitched when she saw him; his body looked thin and frail beneath his baggy white half-moon shirt, which he only wore when he was sick or sleeping. The circles under his eyes had etched themselves deeper, and his matted curls hung limp around his face, as if he were peering through brambles.
I want to shampoo his hair,
she thought,
and then kiss his entire face.
“You look awful,” she said.
His eyes locked on her lips. “So do you,” he said.
“Are you ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Do we have everything?”
“Uh-huh…”
“Console and headphones.”
“Check.”
“David’s email.”
“Check.”
“Bus tickets?”
“…Hang on.”
Riley fetched them from the wilderness of his desk. He grabbed Bob and Athena from his art toolbox and stuck the clock in the duffel with the console. Rachel spotted the wave mosaic on the floor: revised for the last time, the grout almost dry on the finished left wave. She felt a stab of disappointment for him. It wasn’t as good as his usual work. There was still something off about it, like a story with an ending that didn’t quite fit.
“Got ‘em.” Riley stuffed the tickets in his pocket. He didn’t look at her. “Let’s go.”
Downstairs, dirt and cupcake crumbs and household debris cloaked the living room floor. Rachel scanned the latest damage. Mr. Woodlawn’s armchair had been stabbed; orange foam stuffing burst from the wounds. The ruined couch was covered with dark smears that might have been mud or frosting. Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn sat on the couch in rumpled bathrobes, tippling red wine and murmuring toasts to each other. Their legs were bare and their cheeks were ruddy and plump, like the cheeks of children in old storybooks. On the floor sat their silver wedding platter, which bore the bloody remains of a rare steak.
“Mom.” Riley backed away and sucked in a breath.
“Yes, love.” Mrs. Woodlawn didn’t look at him.
“Your foot is bleeding.”
“Is it?” She looked down. Red dripped from a small gash between her toes. “Thank you, Riley! Do you know, I didn’t even feel it!”
“Let me help, sweetie,” said Mr. Woodlawn.
“What a gentleman.” Mrs. Woodlawn laughed as Mr. Woodlawn patted the wound with a napkin. Riley grimaced and looked away. “We’re fixing so many things. One after the other!”
“We’ll be back from the library seminar by three,” Rachel fibbed.
“Fine, fine.” Mrs. Woodlawn stroked her husband’s leg. “It’s so nice they take initiative with their education, isn’t it,
mon petit cochon
?”
“Yes, sweet potato. It gives you an excuse to be lazy.”
“You’re right! You’re
absolutely
right.” She fed him a piece of brown something from a box wedged between them. “Not that you’ve ever been involved, beyond a trip to a carnival here and there. You should never have been a father
.”
“True! That’s true. And you shouldn’t have been a mom.” He fed her something from the box. “Kids, this week we discovered we’re miserable in all the same ways. It’s amazing. I had no idea.”
“For example,” prompted Mrs. Woodlawn.
“For example, I’ve finally confessed that I’m still sexually and romantically obsessed with Laurie Semper, and I have been since high school. But I’m working through that.”
“And Rachel, I was secretly in hopeless, blinding love with your grandfather when we taught school together, but he didn’t want to marry me, so I’ve been bitter and depressed for nineteen years and I always blamed your father for not being Arthur.” Mrs. Woodlawn clapped Mr. Woodlawn’s knee. “But I’m working through that as well.”
“I really wish she wore sexy stuff like Laurie and loved roller coasters and superheroes.”
“And I really wish he had a full, distinguished beard and took an interest in my writing.”
“Anyway.” Mr. Woodlawn laced his fingers through his wife’s. “We thought we should be honest with you guys.”
Do not attempt to process this,
Rachel warned herself.
Stay focused on today’s objective.
But then Mr. Woodlawn shifted to refill his wine, and she caught a glimpse of what they were eating: stale chocolate-covered cherries from the heart-shaped box Chad Armstrong had brought her before the Valentine dance.
Her tongue went numb. Heat rushed up her neck and roasted her face. She felt Riley’s gaze on her cheek, questioning.
“I—” she said. “We’ll be—”
Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn licked their fingers pornographically. Rachel hurried to the door, heart thumping hard, hoping the bus to the city wasn’t too full. She needed space and air and silence before Step Four. And she needed to sit alone.
***
On the rumbling bus to Oneira Sleep Solutions, Riley clutched the printout of David’s latest case study and focused his eyes in its general direction. This made him look normal, he told himself. He could be a drama kid memorizing a monologue, or a college kid studying a syllabus. No one would ever guess how deeply unhinged he was, or how thoroughly his brain had been emptied of anything resembling reason.
For the past two days, as he rushed to finish the wave mosaic, he’d thought of nothing but the shed kisses. He’d tried his best not to, but it was no use. Everything unrelated to kissing had been stuffed in a small dark closet in the back of his mind, and the rest of his brain had been converted into a golden Kiss Museum, with sculptures of giant lips and thousands of Rachel paintings and the actual kisses looping on a pull-down screen, so he could relive them and analyze them and find tiny new things to appreciate each time. His parents’ raw confessions were part of the Kiss Museum now, on a pedestal in a heart-shaped box that trembled and smelled like bitter chocolates. He heard Bob and Athena in his head, gossiping in the voices he and Rachel had made up for them:
“So his mother was in love with her grandfather.”
“Love is in their blood, Bob. Handed down like an heirloom.”
“And his father and Laurie? I knew it.”
“Obsessed with her for thirty years. Doomed to live in the past.”
“That’ll be Riley if Step Four doesn’t work.”
“Stuck in the Kiss Museum. Replaying the same kiss forever…and ever…”
“Poor boy.”
Rachel coughed in the seat across the aisle. He jumped and sneaked a look at her.
She was editing something furiously—the
Are You Ready for End Times?
leaflet some nut in a fedora had given them at the bus station. A mark from Arthur Seton’s red pen nicked her cheek. He thought of how her face had flinched when she saw those Chad Armstrong chocolates, and his fingers throttled his knees. There would be other boys soon. Other boys, other men, hurting her and loving her in all sorts of big and small ways, and he would be demoted to some agonizing bit part in the swirling shifting drama of her stupid cool New York life. He’d be the funny confidante. The tough-love counselor. The fading friend she’d kissed once when she was young and foolish, a friend she sometimes texted before she dashed off to eat ostrich at a tapas bar or listen to some poet read haiku about plums and bare trees.
His stomach roiled. Step Four had to work.
It had to.
He took a plastic baggie from his pocket and crunched some saltines. He consoled himself with David’s latest case study, which practically steamed with comforting misery.
Let’s say he asks her to marry him.
Imagine, if you will, that Tilly informs my fictional self of the proposal at 11:58 p.m. in a bar in Indianapolis. She calls up the video on her phone. Hitch strums a self-penned song called “So Willya,” attempts to rhyme “Tilly” with “really,” and produces a clichéd velvet box at the end with a diamond inside that looks too large to be genuine.
“Oh man, I thought I’d be thrilled, but now that it’s happened I’m like should I, should I not…?” Picture Tilly half-drunk on three Fuzzy Navels, smacking her palms on the bar for emphasis. “I mean, we kind of passed the honeymoon stage junior year in college.”
“Why stay with him, then?”
“We’ve been together forever. It’s comfortable.” She toys with a paper umbrella. “He loves me so…unthinkingly.”
In response, I might say something like: “Ah. Is brainlessness the new prerequisite for true love?” I might sip my ginger ale, imperiously.
“Don’t be dense. I mean it’s automatic with us. No disturbing new discoveries, no drama—”
“I thought you loved drama.” Here I recall the paranormal fantasy she was reading me at the dry-cleaner’s while my suit was being pressed. “She’s a mercenary siren on the run from Death. He’s a maladjusted were-zombie who can’t love anyone—or CAN he?”
She laughs and shoves me, and let’s say her strawberry-printed camisole slips off her perfect shoulder. “Those are stories, David,” she says. “You can’t have comfort AND drama in real life.”
“So marry him.”
“I should, right?”
“If you have to confer with friends,” I say, “then perhaps that’s a bad sign.”
“Oh. Are you my friend, then?” A wry, tipsy smile plays on her lips. She clasps my hand in both of hers and leans so close I can smell her root-beer lip gloss. “I wasn’t sure.”
“I…consider you a close associate, yes.”
“Good, good. That sounds very official.”
We pause, dazzled by our own romcom banter. For the sake of precision, let’s say I see forever in her eyes.
“Try to talk me out of this,” she whispers. “And we’ll see if any of it sticks.”
I could overthrow Hitch now, I realize. I could be a louse, no better than eighteen-year-old Gannon when he lured Lotte away. But Tilly is not what I need, and I can’t possibly be what she wants, so I do the correct and sensible thing and say “No.”
“No?”
“No.”
She tilts her head, admiring my virtue.
Then she deposits a slow, careful kiss on my lips.
After this unfortunate detour, which has caused a temporary 24% surge in my attraction to Tilly, I am more than ready to conduct Step Four. After I rush Tilly safely to her motel room, I retire to mine. I switch on my noise machine. (This is an absolute must: a quiet setting with NO interference whatsoever.)
Once I am under the bedspread, I put on the headphones, plug them into port #4, and plug the MP3 player into the jack on the console’s left panel. I press button #4 and dial up the track labeled “STEP 4: AUDITORY INTERVENTION” on the MP3 player. My ears are filled with a gentle swishing sound, like leaves through childhood trees. I give myself over to sleep. Over the next two hours, as I wander dreamland, I receive subliminal messaging explicitly designed to highlight the flaws of my female distraction and curdle my unwanted passions.
When I wake, I feel refreshed and five and a half times lighter. Step Four has done its job. The next time I think of Tilly, my passion has dimmed significantly and I perceive her as she truly is: an amusing but silly woman, wacky-friend material at best, an unsuitable love partner for a scientist of my station. I now count myself 79% over her.
WARNING:
During Step Four, please try not to die in your dream. I would tell you the stories from previous test rounds, but I’d rather not make this a self-fulfilling prophecy. The revised track contains subliminal cues that should help you avoid dream-death, but be on alert for monsters, quicksand, and weaponry all the same.