I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as I am. Sometimes when I am too quick to look at her stories, I block her temporarily so she doesn’t know I absent-mindedly refresh her page fifteen times a minute while Netflix plays in the background on my laptop, my stomach flipping sick with delight when her profile picture is ringed red.

The man I want to be with does not offer up his number at the beginning and so I do not ask. He emails which is clunky and cumbersome but there is an unspoken understanding he does not want to be easily contactable by me. We have short bursts of intense contact which I increasingly have to initiate and then nothing for weeks in between. He is in Hydra in Greece installing a joint show of work with his wife. I’m not supposed to know about this show but I do

She texted him and asked him why he left and he replied, it was too much for him to see her. I realise many things very quickly. She is better in bed than me. She has his number which means he wants to be easily contactable by her.

A couple of years on from this, when we are in a bad patch of him completely ignoring me, I think, won’t it be a great idea to send him a letter to tell him how I feel.

I heave up salty, fat tears in buckets from the blue caves of my stomach to prove the depths of my love for him. Once or twice, I cry so hard I am unable to breathe easily afterwards, my ribs are bruised from sobbing and another time I am unable to swallow properly for a week.

Sometimes I think about what I could do for revenge. Sometimes I think about posting a letter to his wife and in it I will write in black sharpie, he’s fucked the woman I am obsessed with in your bed.

I want to know if he changed the sheets before he fucked the woman I am obsessed with to erase his wife, or did he change the sheets after to erase the woman I am obsessed with, or did he not change them thereby erasing neither because to change the sheets would be weird because why would someone who does zero housework suddenly change the sheets and did the woman who I am obsessed with revel in piercing the sanctity of their bed as she fucked him, was she more turned on because she was thinking of two people and not just one? Telling his wife still won’t be enough to break them up I’m sure, she has stuck with him through so much already.

I open WhatsApp and look at the last time he was online as a sign he is alive and breathing. It is a betrayal.

I need to keep hearing him reject me. I am unable to see what is right in front of me, I refuse the reality of it. I see his rejection as merely a first offer and keep going.

I want to know what combination of words can break his silence—can his silence be broken. Telling him I love him and it being greeted with a cavernous void becomes addictive. These momentous words are greeted with blankness.

He would ask, did you come, and I would say, no, because I have never come with him, I never felt safe enough to. Instead I would clench to keep his sperm incubated inside my body. I would throw myself flat down on the bed, raise my legs up, rock side to side like I’ve seen women do on television. I could curl up like a scorpion, hold him hostage, a piece of him all mine—