Hamartia

by Scarlett Drake

Me falling in love with a guy? Ha, probably, you know. I’m sure the second he was born he was meant for me.

I’d never seen anything as beautiful or as…fuck…as perfect as him. It really was like a religious experience for me.

But him…well, he was my inevitability. He was when it started. When everything else ended.

Everything I was before. He was the moon and the stars and everything in-between and all I wanted to do was worship at his feet.

The band, my girlfriend, my dad, everything that I thought was important to me, just ceased to exist the moment I first saw him. I’m no...

There was before him and after him, two sides, and I am two completely se...

He’d given me a look. A look that shifted something inside me in a way that all those separate parts that made up the whole changed imperceptibly. So that they didn’t fit back the way they were supposed to. Like I no longer fit inside myself. That’s how I’d come to describe it. That was the power of that shift. The power of him. I was like a stranger to my own fucking soul.

I can bleed and sweat and cry every day if it makes me feel like I have done enough, but it won’t fix me inside.

I feel so utterly alone. Then I feel guilty for feeling like that because I am surrounded by my best friends, people who would do anything for me, people who I love like brothers. And yet, I still feel like they really don’t know me.

A chilly understanding that no matter what I achieve—how much success we have—there will always be that part of me left wanting something else.

In the two years since I became aware of this guy’s existence, I’ve forced myself to think of other guys in the same sorts of ways that I can’t seem to stop myself thinking of him—it just doesn’t work.

My obsession with this guy became weird a long time ago. Some dirty secret I have that no one knows about. Like watching furries porn or something. Worse maybe.

I go to bed hoping I have a sex dream about him because I still haven’t gotten over the one I had a few months ago where he rode me wearing fishnets and a thick silver chain necklace I could pull on. His nipples were pierced and he played with them as I came inside him.

I want to spit on my dad’s fucking grave and tell him that I’m better than he ever fucking was. That I did all of this myself. Without his name or his presence or his love. I wish he was alive so I could call him up and tell him that over the phone. Tell him that he was nothing to me.

“About me being on my knees for you?” “Fuck, Jaehyun…please.”

“Feed it to me. Feed me your cock, Raphael. I want it so much.”

It feels like divinity. And he’s my god.

She never judged and never expected and it was easy to just be myself with her. It’s one of the reasons we’ve lasted this long. I do love her.

“It’s Jaehyun right?” I hear myself ask. Fuck, is that my voice? It echoes clumsily around the bathroom sounding nervous and unstable. I’m not ready for what he says next. “And you are Raphael.”

It’s him holding a cat up for a kiss. A furry white thing with bright blue eyes and a pink nose. It’s cute as fuck.

I pull open the bathroom door at the same time it’s pushed open and it fucks me, hard, in the face.

“I told you. It wasn’t your fault, man. I’m just clumsy as shit, honestly. And not in a cute, adorable way, in a really fucking chaotic way.”

“I’ve sent you a message now, so you can find me,” he says, and I want to laugh at that. So I can find him? I check his account more than I check my own.

On some level I like the idea of him watching me perform, of him seeing me when I’m at my most confident, most assured, but mainly it just scares the shit out of me.

It’s hard. To stay focused and stop my eyes from searching him out, drawn to where I think he might be.

Haven gets up from her piano and crosses the stage to meet him, hugging him tightly. Like they’re friends. A weird rush of envy comes at me as I understand how far away from being able to do that I am. Hold him in some way. Touch him.

and when Jae’s head turns over his shoulder and his mouth and eyes widen with warmth, it makes it feel like a million little fireworks are going off in every blood cell.

“Thanks Mom, I love you.” Fuck you, Finn.

Maybe it could be our thing. A private joke about always meeting in bathrooms. Third time is a charm and all that.

I’m half distracted because Jae still hasn’t noticed me, completely enraptured by whatever Haven is telling him.

“I have been obsessed with that performance since he posted it,” Haven says. Same.

But it’s Jae I look at. If he’s going to be there, then there’s no question. To have the chance to talk to him out of this fucking goldfish bowl again. To hear him say my name in that quiet way he does. To have his focus and his energy and his attention. It had been heady that day in the car. I crave it again.

Jaehyun is an angel, like an absolute ethereal being not of this earth. I think he’s the most beautiful human alive, I really do.” Same, Haven, same.

“But you should probably tell your face that because when you were telling that little story earlier about when he almost broke your nose… and the way you were looking at each other. Sort of made me feel some kinda way.”

She pulls me gently towards the stairs. But then, it hits me. Smacks me right in the face. “Wait. You said each other.” I turn to her. “You said, the way you were looking at each other.”

“Look, I just threw an invite out there to you both and here we are. Here you both are. You’ve spent the night waiting for him to arrive. And now you’re up here looking for him, so why don’t you wait here and I’ll get him up here and you guys can…talk about whatever this thing is and see where it leaves you.”

But I suspect he’s only here for one of two reasons.”

“Politeness or you,” she clarifies. “Only one way to find out which it is.”

“Do me a favor and tell him to check his Instagram DM, in about ten minutes?” She beams at me and gives me a salute. “Roger, that, soldier.”

If Haven was right; if we had been looking at each other the same way, then he’d come. And if he doesn’t show then this has all been purely on me and I can move on, finally.

can marry Camille and live a life where his name is just something I hear occasionally and experience a rush of confused emotion about. Like Finn’s is.

Nerves and excitement, guilt and terror, but the worst, I realize, is the idea of him not coming. The idea of never seeing him or hearing from him again at all.

“Why am I here, Raphael?”

“But I hoped you’d come because…I’ve been wanting to have this…to talk to you like this for a while. Since I saw you in September, but I guess since Paris, if I’m being honest and I guess tonight I’m being real honest.

“I haven’t been able to…I mean, I’ve just thought a lot about you…maybe it started off being about guilt, for not being cool that day, but then it wasn’t just about that, and I guess I wondered if you ever, like, think of me. If you feel something like…about me. Fuck, I don’t know, man.”

Except when I lift my gaze, I find him watching me. So fucking closely, so completely, like nothing else exists but me and I fucking love how that feels.

“Are you trying to say that you want to fuck me, Raphael?” He says it in that same soft voice and this time my stomach does drop out of my ass.

“It seems you have a lot to figure out, Raphael. I do not know what you expected to happen here, but I am not the one to help you do it.”

realize then that I’d forgotten. I’d fucking forgotten. I’d achieved one of my single greatest professional goals and a few hours later…I’d forgotten.

“I do not understand,” he says, still frowning. “Which part?” “Are you trying to ask me out on a date, or do you want to hang out as friends?”