Forget Me Not

by Karissa Kinword

I’ve innocently kept it from Logan because there was nothing to say. It was just dreams up until a few spins ago, and Silas was just a handsome, nameless figure of my vivid imagination. Well, he’s not that anymore. He knows it, and I know it, and the words that left his mouth before I stormed out of his pod are still ringing in my ears.

These things you write about me, they’re kindred sentiments.

Because of me. The voice in my head screams. Because he’s not alone.

I had just spent three cycles on the Glades completely lost in Logan, exploring untraveled culture, cultivating our relationship, planning a future and unapologetically in love.

It only took three days for Silas to completely unravel that, and it just isn’t fair. Three days isn’t enough time for me to truly figure this out, regardless of how strongly I believe I feel about him.

I’m stuck here, between faithful partner and wandering soul. My conscience is half inside my body, half knocking on the door of a different life.

The faint scent of my hair taunts him into finding release with his eyes pinched closed and his dick hard and wanting between his legs.

Silas thinks about it all night, unable to sleep, because in his own depraved way he doesn’t need to, he already has me.

“Maybe Birdie jogs your memory?”

“Go after her then,” she says a bit louder, somewhat accusatory and with a harsh push that he desperately needs. “Before she’s written you off like I would.”

Maybe watching me leave was the incentive Silas hopelessly needed. While I was every ounce the woman in his dreams—heart, mind and body—I was also never so catastrophically out of his control.

When he closed his eyes at night he never had to fight. We never argued, we never disagreed.

Silas doesn’t know what it’s like to displease me, or disappoint me. But even after this, he wants to. More than anything he wants those parts of me too. The wild, angry, sarcastic, passionate edge...

He wants to know where my mind goes when I can’t see...

It’s not enough this time to give me bits and pieces of himself in order to keep me close.

The longer we hide from one another the thicker the fog of regret will be when it all comes to an inevitable climax.

“But love,” he continues, “that’s its own kind of magic.”

“What if everything in the universe is already decided, you know? What if it doesn’t matter what I do anyway, because I’m just along for the ride?”

“You love me,”

“I love you,” he agrees.

“I’ll never tire of the taste of you, Birdie,”

“Can you spill for me again?” he asks, unanswered. “I think you can give me one more—just one more time on my tongue, yes?”

Maker, I could come from just his voice alone.

I always understand him though. I speak the same language.

“You can’t control your own emotions, I get it Birdie. You’re confused, I’m confused as well. Neither of us could have ever seen this coming, not in the way it’s panned out at least. I know you.”

“Fuck off, you don’t know me.” I scoff. “You don’t know anything about me, and I don’t know anything about you.”

“No, but you know what I do know, Eliza?” he grits out, leaning in closer again. “I know that when you’re riding him, you’re thinking about me. Me inside you, me tasting you, me whispering in your ear while you come on my cock.” He takes in my parted lips and the short way my breath catches when he pauses. “If you can live with that guilt, live with yourself—then be my guest.”

The way he knows me is intrinsic. I can fight and say that he’s not the same person in my dreams, but he is. The same way I’m the same person in his.

I was sick with a need to be close to him.

“No, Eliza, I think I know why you’re here.” He turns the pages of the book in his lap purposefully, as if he knows the index like the back of his own hand. “I think you know why you’re here too.”

“Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world.” He looks up at me and recites the last words of the line from memory. “May the liars’ vile tongue be cut out.”

“‘Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.’

‘She and I love in ways that can’t be explained, bottled, written, or imitated. Our love is for the stars.’”

“Close the door,” he says. I hesitate, swallowing what feels like the last tie to the life I’ve lived thus far, because I know beyond this decision there is no going back—and then I do.

“Can I read to you, Eliza?”

“She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was - anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant.”

“There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.”

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”

I realize he did know that very first spin, handing me The Master and Margarita, that he didn’t have to find me in those pages anymore, because I was standing right in front of him. That, maybe I would need them to find him. Be it metaphorically or literally—tripping over the thick binding when I’d given up hope.

Silas simply speaks like he’s always in love.

‘My pleasure comes in pleasuring her, so we conquer each other. I think more often than anything about what she might taste like coming apart on my tongue.’”

“There is a heat of love, the pulsing rush of longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible - magic to make the sanest man go mad.”

Silas doesn’t love me like all the characters love their counterparts in these books—because it’s more than that. He loves me through them, in pieces, like patchwork on a quilt, a stitch here, a pattern there, never completely sewn together. Like he hasn’t yet read his favorite story, but he’s constantly trying.

“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

“Will you ever forgive me?” I whisper.

“Don’t ever apologize for living the fullest life you could find. If not for that, you wouldn’t be here with me right now.”

There is no more dream Silas, or dream me, we both just simply are. Come into our final form, existing on the same plane.

“When I saw you that day everything changed,” I admit. “I tried so hard to fight it, but even when I wasn’t sleeping—you were still my every waking thought.”

“You’ve been trying not to sleep at night to avoid me,” he whispers. “Meanwhile, Eliza, all I want to do is sleep, because that’s the only place I can have you.”

“It’s so hard to crave a person that I cannot touch,” he utters.