The Fiancé (It's Just Us Here Book 6) Read online

  The Fiancé

  Book Six of the

  ROMANTIC SELF-PORTRAIT

  It's Just Us Here

  Christopher X Sullivan

  Published by Jester Publishing, 2019.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  It's Just Us Here: THE FIANCE

  First edition. August 13, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Christopher X Sullivan.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  Written by Christopher X Sullivan.

  Contact: ChristopherXSullivan

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  BOOK SIX: The Fiancé

  Changes

  Suhail's Revelation

  Another Monday Morning

  Mark's Assistant

  Tuesdays With My Parents

  Phone Call On Wednesday

  Beth

  Our First Separation

  Father Dunworthy

  Thursday's Home Cooking

  Out

  Prom

  Austen

  Suhail's Decision

  Mark's Assistance

  Chief Creative Officer

  My Birthday

  Selling A Boat

  A Perfect Proposal

  The Fiancé

  Book Six of the

  ROMANTIC SELF-PORTRAIT

  It's Just Us Here

  Christopher X Sullivan

  Published by Jester Publishing, 2019.

  Changes

  MARK SAT IN THE WAITING area, fidgeting with his shoulders hunched. He wasn’t there to get his foot examined—he was there to meet Tim. This was the only neutral location where Mark had been able to contact his friend over the past two months.

  It had been two days since Stacy demolished Mark’s car door and tore through his retractable roof with a golf club. Mark was pissed about the damage, but he was more disturbed by what Stacy had said. Through her rage and tears, Stacy had implied that I was addicted to heroin. That’s what had come out of her mouth. There could be no denying it.

  Mark couldn’t sleep after hearing those words—words that didn’t make sense so initially he tried to toss them aside, but he remained haunted by the image of Stacy standing in the street and screaming at the clouds. In that moment, she had gone temporarily insane. Stacy was normally the coolest, calmest person you were ever going to meet. For her to go off the deep end like that...

  Mark got to sleep that first night by convincing himself it was all an act and just another way for Stacy to make him feel bad. “She succeeded,” Mark grumbled as he turned over in bed for the tenth time that night. Then he walked into the guest room and took my pillow and sheet out of the closet. He made a nest in his bed and fell asleep with the familiar objects like they were a talisman. Mark had slept with my pillow for a week after our separation.

  He immediately knew we made a mistake in letting our relationship fall apart, but he couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

  The hardest part of the breakup was admitting it to his family. He nearly skipped Christmas because of it, so he was ready to fall into his old habits. Mark kept the reupholstered chairs and placed them on display in his living room instead of gifting them to Grandma Wolff as I had intended.

  Mark couldn’t get over me, but not in the same way that I couldn’t get over him. Mark rebounded quicker than I did—he had experience breaking hearts, so maybe that was to be expected. My heart had only been broken twice—once when my sister died because of that car crash, and once when my best friend from college cut me out of his life cold turkey and for no apparent reason. Mark broke my heart in a seemingly more painful way so that I spiraled into a black hole of my inner thoughts and an unkillable self-loathing.

  Mark was sad, but he wasn’t depressed. He was worried about me, but he wasn’t obsessed about it. Mark was upset because most of his friends had apparently sided with me due to how the split was handled and in retaliation he allowed some misconceptions his family had about me to fester. He never told anyone about the erotica... not even Marty or Claude. I’m sure everyone would have looked at me differently if they had learned about that particular side of my writing life. Our friends just assumed that the breakup happened because Mark could be an insensitive, selfish guy.

  He managed to live a pretty normal life after our breakup. He missed me. He still loved me and cared for me. For him, life went on.

  But after his encounter with Stacy, he started to spiral, too. After hearing about the depths to which I had sunk... he couldn’t get me out of his mind. He obsessed over my health and my mental state and his contribution to both. He worried about my weaknesses, which he had first-hand experience with. He repeatedly deluded himself into thinking that I would never, ever stoop to drugs because he remembered all the times I had so violently rejected medication of any kind. I was always stubborn about pills, even for migraines. Mark had a hell of a time giving me ibuprofen. I would rage against his ministrations and tell him I didn’t want to be dependent on anything, fearful of my addictive personality.

  It was bad enough that I had an autoimmune disorder.

  He had heard me talk about my addictive personality often enough that it made Stacy’s words all the more alarming—all the more real. It was just plausible enough... and if it were true—and I was in the throes of addiction—then Mark would have been responsible.

  This truth drove Mark crazy.

  He slept poorly the second night after his rendezvous with Stacy and in the morning he called Suhail, who didn’t respond, as he hadn’t all winter. Suhail and Melanie had agreed to break off their relationship in light of Mark’s separation from me (and the fact that Mark would pester them with random questions about me). The calls to my friend didn’t work, so that afternoon he drove to my apartment and waited for Suhail to show up, loitering on the street like a stalker. He jumped at Suhail with nervous energy. Suhail ignored Mark, like this was all perfectly normal behavior.

  “Please,” Mark had begged. “Is he really that low? Is he really... Stacy said he was using heroin.”

  Suhail stopped at the door to his building and sighed. “He never took the drug. He bought it. He thought about it a lot. He got scared and ran to Stacy.”

  “How did he get like that?” Mark asked in a rush. “Who sold it? Was it Nick? If it was Nick, I’m gonna—”

  “It wasn’t Nick, asshole. Chris is getting better. Finally. He’s getting back to his old self and working on projects again. Leave him alone. Everything is fine.”

  “Everything isn’t fine! Nobody should have let him get—”

  “What do you care?” Suhail retorted. “You let him go. He destroyed his computer, you fuckwad. I came home and it was smashed to pieces. He was in the wind for hours. Freaked me out. I even called his mother. You know how important that was to him.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Mark said, begging Suhail to believe him. “Please, I never meant to yell like that. I got worked up. Please tell Chris...”

  “Chris isn’t here. He hasn’t been here for months. Leave us alone.”

  “So he—”

  Suhail turned his back on Mark and left him standing in the cold on the bottom step outside my apartment building. Mark had stubbornly waited at my building with the intention of finding good news and assuaging his fears, but instead he left with more questions and additional reasons for despair. He couldn’t comprehend the amount of pain I must have been in to destroy my life’s work—something I’d been proud of. He couldn’t comprehend how low I must have been to turn
to drugs as a means of escape—me, who rebuffed even the simplest over-the-counter medication. Me, who was enraged that I had to take stuff for my autoimmune disorder.

  Mark took a sleeping pill that night and promised himself that one way or another he would get to the bottom of what was going on with me.

  So Mark stomped into Tim’s office and made an appointment with the secretary the very next day. He attempted to charm the lady behind the counter, but none of his moves worked. “I’ll let Dr. Tim know you’re here,” she said calmly, like how when a mother tries to placate an unruly child.

  “I need to speak with him,” Mark begged.

  “He told me you would come by again. It’s best that you leave. Don’t disrupt his business. I’m to call security if you don’t leave peacefully.”

  “I need to speak with him,” Mark pleaded, dropping all pretense. “It’s very important. Life or death. I need to know what’s happening to my best friend. I haven’t heard from him in months.”

  The woman hesitated. “I’ll go ask him.” She disappeared for a moment.

  Mark silently mulled his options. If Tim refused to see him again...

  The receptionist returned; her face was firm and unwelcoming. Mark walked up to the desk and the woman shared the negative response.

  Mark didn’t accept it. He walked straight to the hall door and tried the handle, which was locked.

  “Open this,” Mark demanded. There were other people in the waiting area and all were scandalized by this uncouth behavior. The receptionist was breathless with dread.

  “Sir, please leave. I’m calling security now.”

  “Just open the damn door,” Mark yelled, hoping to get Tim’s attention.

  “Sir, please leave. This is a place of business.”

  Mark jumped at the receptionist and vaulted over the counter into the office area.

  “Sir!”

  “Just five minutes,” Mark said, taking the phone from the woman’s hands and hanging up. “Five minutes,” he repeated, like it was a promise.

  Mark strode down the hall past the exam rooms until he found the closed door with Tim behind it. Tim was talking to a patient as Mark barged in.

  “Tim,” Mark said.

  “Not now, Mark.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  The receptionist bustled in behind Mark. “I’m sorry, Dr. Tim. He jumped the counter! I couldn’t stop him.”

  “It’s okay, Claire. Take Mr. Wazowski and finish his paperwork. We’re done here.”

  “Dr. Tim, do you want security?”

  Tim glared at Mark.

  “Five minutes,” Mark promised.

  “It’s alright, Claire. Mark and I were old friends.” Tim waited until his patient and receptionist left, then he walked out the side door of the examination room and into his office. Mark followed without being invited. “What do you want?” Tim said as he walked to his desk chair.

  “How’s he doing?” Mark was desperate.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Don’t be like that. You know I love him.”

  Tim pressed his lips together and held his fire.

  “I do... I do still love him. I heard about... well, you know. What happened?”

  Tim engaged, but made sure to remain calm. “What happened was... you broke him, Mark. I’ve never seen someone so... broken.”

  “I didn’t mean to. We had a fight. I—”

  “He was in a car crash.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you wanted to know. What started it all. He was in a car crash and he broke his arm and they gave him pain pills. Vicodin.”

  “They never should have given him that! He told me so many times that—”

  “You weren’t there!” Tim shouted, overriding Mark’s tirade. “You don’t get to care! You weren’t there!”

  “I wanted to be. I would have been... if I knew how to fix it... please, Tim, you’ve gotta help me.”

  “We’re not friends anymore,” Tim declared. “I’m done making excuses for you.”

  “Come on, don’t be like that.” Mark smiled nervously and tried to coax the friendliness out of his old friend. “We’ve done a ton of crazy shit together. I hooked you up with Stacy. You’ve got to keep me around for that alone... right?” Mark grinned encouragingly, but it faltered in the face of Tim’s stiff and unflinching glare.

  “He cried on my shoulder,” Tim sneered. “He slept in my bed for three weeks.”

  “What?” Mark wasn’t expecting that.

  “He couldn’t sleep alone. He was fucking suicidal, you fucking asshole.”

  “No he wasn’t,” Mark begged. “Sometimes he gets overwhelmed and you just need to hold him.” Mark opened his arms, mimicking how he used to comfort me.

  “You weren’t there.” Tim nearly spat. “You need to leave the kid alone.” Tim had taken to referring to me as a kid even though I was a year older than him.

  “I just want to make it right.”

  “You can’t!” Tim shouted. “It’s over. You left him... broken. He was... FUCK!” Tim stormed away and stared out the window. “You weren’t there. Yes, I put my arm around him when he was shaking and unable to sleep. Yes, I told him... fuck, I told him I loved him and that we all loved him. He slept between me and my pregnant wife... in our bed. But I love him. He was mine. He was so much better than I deserved.” Tim mocked my whiny voice. “I had to fall asleep listening to that for three fucking weeks.” Tim pointed at Mark with anger pouring out of his eyes. “LEAVE HIM ALONE!”

  “I miss him,” Mark said pathetically.

  “Mark.” Tim’s anger suddenly melted and it was his turn to beg. “You don’t get to come back. Please, leave him alone.”

  “I’ve got to make it right.”

  Tim consulted his phone and scribbled a name and number on a slip of paper. “Here’s a therapist. Take it out on her and leave Chris alone.” He held out the paper. Mark hesitated, but then he took it. “And she’s expensive,” Tim added. “So right up your alley.”

  “I’ve got to see him. Help me, Tim. Please.”

  Tim lashed out with his fist, using the strength of a man who served a tennis ball with more power than his size should allow. He punched Mark directly in the nose, breaking the cartilage, which resulted in an immediate rush of blood onto Mark’s shirt and the office carpet.

  Mark recoiled, then touched his nose. “You just punched me,” he said in a daze.

  “Leave!” Tim shouted. “Leave my family alone. Leave Chris alone. For once in your goddamn life, think about what someone else needs and leave him alone.”

  “You broke my nose,” Mark repeated, dabbing his finger in the blood on his chin.

  “We aren’t friends anymore. Stop trying to pretend otherwise.” Tim pushed Mark through the door, then he flicked his wrist against the pain; punching faces wasn’t a great idea for a man whose livelihood was based on surgeries.

  Mark stumbled into the hallway and wandered to the exit. He pinched the bridge of his nose to stem the bleeding. Then he opened the door into the sitting room. There were two burly security guards waiting for him.

  “Oh my goodness!” the receptionist cried. “Dr. Tim! Dr. Tim.”

  “He’s alright,” Mark said, scowling. “He punched me. I can’t believe he punched me.” Mark’s face was slack. “Can I have a tissue please?” His voice was thick, probably because his nose was crunched.

  Mark got his tissue and was escorted from the building once Claire affirmed that Tim was unharmed.

  Suhail's Revelation

  SIX MONTHS LATER:

  My friends kept Mark out of my life like a patrolling police force because they didn’t want me to spiral again. I didn’t realize the extent to which they had joined forces and were unanimously opposed to ever opening a dialogue with Mark.

  Suhail—who had become a pillar in my new life—was the one to finally break the moratorium.

  Suhail was a fun guy. We worked out together. I
got a full membership at Tim and Ryan’s gym and made sure Suhail went with me. I trained his body. He wanted a bigger chest and bigger arms and bigger shoulders. I chastised him and reminded him how my only goal was to be able to do a handstand-pushup.

  Suhail said that was a load of shit. Why did I look at myself in the mirror so much, if that was the case?

  “I don’t do that!”

  But I did do that. I had absorbed too much of Mark, and wasn’t willing to let go. I heard his voice at the start of every set and felt the ghost of his hands guiding my form. He would tell me to go slow and keep my elbows tucked in. It was important not to use the maximal weight, but to maintain the mind-muscle connection.

  I repeated many of the phrases Mark used as I helped Suhail get started in the gym. It was amazing that I remembered so much—I assumed it had gone in one ear and out the other... or maybe I just wanted Mark to tell me what to do and therefore pretended to be helpless.

  Every little thing apparently had the potential to remind me of Mark.

  I liked my routines.

  I had completely changed my weekly habits after the Big Fight in case Mark might try to look for me. I changed my running days to Wednesday and Sunday, and my gym days to Tuesday and Thursday. The only element of my old routine that I kept was working out with Tim and Ryan on Friday followed by tennis on Saturday.

  Suhail played tennis with me when the weather improved in the spring. We didn’t go to Tim and Ryan’s courts because I had pledged to never take Suhail there again after we had a minor racist encounter. Suhail told me it wasn’t a big deal and stuff like that had happened to him ever since he could remember (he was eleven on 9/11 so his formative years were pretty harsh).

  I occasionally took Suhail to work out with Tim and Ryan on Friday. The four of us got along well.

  Suhail and I had a lot in common. We were both conscientious. We were both nerdy. He got me into Minecraft, which got me into Dwarf Fortress (omg, Dwarf Fortress!). Pro tip: Dwarf Fortress has a huge learning curve, but once you get there, it’s intense. It took me forever to learn how to farm, and mostly because I was too proud to ask Suhail how to set it up. Part of the fun of Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress was learning how to live in the world (and not get killed by goblins or blown up by creepers). Those games are all about the journey.