I’m littered in bags.
I haven’t been here since I walked in on Peter and Calla.
That’s the first one I toss to the ground and kick away.
Next is when he banished me.
After that is that sneaking suspicion I have that Peter forgot about me mid-rescue—that’s not something I need to remember. I toss that to the ground and feel better about my choices already.
He was unreasonably outnumbered, after all. It was one against—what?—fifty? Of course his hands were full.
It just so happened that I began to drown, and he didn’t know.
I take off that bad thought Jamison planted about what Peter does when the boys turn sixteen. I really hated that one. The moment it’s off me, I feel better. Because I know he’d never do that! Whatever happened, it was definitely a misunderstanding and a salacious rumour.
The bags left on me now are all Hook.
I stare at myself, breathe in as the reflection staring back at me feels like a girl I used to know.
Time’s so strange here, how it moves. I feel like I spent an age with Jamison, loved him for centuries, but it was just weeks. That could be a component of the fate I no longer want. Maybe souls exist outside of our bodies on a plane we can’t otherwise see, and they know each other from this otherworld, so when they meet in this one, that’s how they know. Why you can meet a stranger who feels like an old friend. Maybe you’re just new friends in this life and old ones in all the others.
Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve been wrong about Jamison since the minute I met him. Maybe Peter was never the problem. It was that tricky pirate who found me when I first fell here.
Maybe I was a game to him this whole time. Maybe it was all pretend. He’s a good liar—he told me.
So I take a big breath, and then I drop it. All of it. Every single good and kind and happy memory I have of him, I shed it.
When he pulled me from the water. How he looked at me when he made me reach into his pocket. Our first night together. Days with his mother. When he remembered my birthday. Standing with him in the cave. The first time he called me his love. Our first kiss in the bath. Reading in his bed all day. When he bought me those dresses so I wouldn’t have to sell my earrings. Hope on his fingertips.
Him telling me he loves me.
Me loving him back.
I drop all of him to the floor with a clatter like it’s nothing, not everything to me, and I sigh like it relieves me, not kills me to do it. I wait to hear those ties snap, but they don’t. I can feel them still if I think of them, but I won’t think of them again.
I stare down at the mess of us. My god, we really were a mess.
I feel lighter and more lost without it all at once—much less myself than I did a moment ago but also somehow less bound and perhaps even freer, because to love someone isn’t freedom; it’s to be a captive. And I was his.
But not anymore. I step over my piles of baggage and walk to my shelf. My eyes catch on a few bags way up high that I don’t remember seeing before. Strange, I think to myself, but then, now’s not the time for mysteries. I pluck off that leather pouch of ours that I love so much, that once felt so precious to me but now feels like acid on my hands and my heart. I walk back out to Peter.
He’s sitting by John, who’s back in his chair., and he watches as I walk over, his eyes pinching at me, seeing all the things I’ve shaken off myself. He nods his chin at me, eyeing the bag in my hands that only he can see.
“You look a good bit lighter,” he tells me, but I don’t think he means it as a compliment.
“I am,” I tell him sternly to make a point.
John breathes out and looks away, like he feels sad for me, and I ignore him, going and standing with Peter instead.
The pouch feels impossibly solid in my hands. So strange, this invisible little thing that’s hurting me so much, even though no one else can see it.
I feel the breeze from that day and the snow swirling all around in it, the memory alive and vibrating inside as I hold it tightly, and I count to three.
Fated, that’s what the wind told me that day. And it scared me at first because of Peter. Because Peter was why I came here. Peter was who I thought I was supposed to be with. Because it was he and I, I thought, who were fated. Jamison felt like a threat to that, but actually, he was just a threat to me.
There are different kinds of fate in this world—someone said that to me once. I think I thought I was fated to love Jamison Hook. I think that’s what the wind tried to tell me.
He should have let him have me? I blow air out of my mouth like I’m breathing through labour pains.
I’m not fated to love him; I’m fated to hate him.
I toss the bag Peter can’t see onto the fire in front of us, and the flames swallow it with a shimmery, smoky lick.
Peter glances at me, frowning, confused. “What was that?”
I stretch my hands towards it, warm my shivering hands on my burning memory, and stare at the bag as the fire eats it, faster and faster, burning away like a piece of paper, and that day and how much I loved it begins to fade slowly from my mind the way it feels when you wake up and start to forget a dream.
And then it’s gone.
I look over at Peter, confused myself.
“I—” I purse my lips. “I don’t know.”
He pulls a face but puts his arms around me anyway.
God, he’s beautiful.
Rather statuesque, don’t you think?
Impossibly golden, especially all lit up by this particularly beautiful fire in front of us.
“Peter?” I fold myself in towards him and then stare up at him, stars in my eyes.
“Mm?” He looks down at me lazily.
I rest my chin on his chest. “I love you.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have carried this story in my heart for maybe 15 or 16 years now. I can’t believe that it’s out (finally) and in your hands. Probably if you’re here, reading this, it means you’ve likely read it*—or if you haven’t read it and you’re nevertheless here, you are maybe Ben or Aodhan?.
My very first thank you that will be slightly bigger than my second one? is for Emily Jane Averill. My sister-friend, ar*teest* extraordinaire, who has believed in me and this story since we met.
I am so grateful for how you have loved me and encouraged me, in all things but particularly this thing.
I am hugely confident that I would not be here—this would not be here without you.