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166

LAURA’S POV
I am no longer lonely, but I was.
I had Lily, my best friend, who was always there for me and always followed me from my home to school. We would take turns to stop at one another's house after the school closes. I enjoyed her company and the smell of her minty breath, which she didn’t know that was a thing I liked. I liked the warmth that came with her presence. The primal way she cared when I needed help. It felt so intimate resting my head on her shoulders, sharing my troubles with her. I used to think, this is what love is, this is my best friend for life, this is the way I want love to be; As young as I was.
I used to feel I could be anything I wanted to be. I could disappear in a good way: as if never having existed, unlike the way I felt I was disappearing in the first year that Lily left, in my hot, cluttered apartment in Tudor City, surrounded by reminders of myself and Lily, suffocating in what was mine.
Lily had me do the impossible; deliver a fake passport for her to abscond the city. To this day, I still wonder how I was able to pull that off.
I miss Lily Anderson so much. After she left, I started investigating whatever the cause was. I always suspected that things were not exactly ideal between her parents so when I started investigating, I went to meet her mother first.
I was greeted by her father who did not allow me into the house to see anyone, then days later. I heard a news, circulated by Derek Gilford that Lily’s mother died in a car accident and Lily’s body has not been found. I knew something was not right, I couldn’t tell anyone that it was a lie and what I feared may be true; Derek is a cold-blooded Killer.
But who would believe me if I told them that Derek killed his wife? Derek was a very revered and well-respected military veteran, and, as it seemed, no one was ready to accept the truth that he may have murdered his wife and sent his daughter running.
Shortly after I heard the news, there was a burial organized to honor the dead Gilford women. It had damn near half of Tudor City coming out to pay respects to their beloved women.
I attended the burial out of the respect and love I had for Lily. During the ceremony, Derek Gilford gave a eulogy that reeked of bullshit. After I heard what he said, I swore to find out exactly what happened and find Lily, my best friend from whichever corner of the world she hid.
I investigated and when I finally found out the truth, I waited until I was old enough to leave home, my city, and set off to another man’s continent to find Lily.
The visa I had my dad fake for Lily Anderson was able to take her to Europe so I started there, I arrived at Paris because it seemed like a city that she would love. She always talked about how she loved arts and wanted to become an actress.
I went to Paris under the guise of college. I told my father that I want to study at a university in Paris and he was very supportive of it. He went as far as making sure that I arrived at Paris hale and hearty without any undue complications or arguments.

Paris, Present day.
The house I live in a contemporary glass fortress in Paris, sparse enough to seem like something off a Hollywood movie. On the second-story deck of the beach house I escape the hell of my own smelly bathrobe, wearing one of the silk kimonos I got from a thrift store. I fall asleep out on the deck every night, tipsy on white wine, under the Paris stars, belonging to nothing familiar. I feel no pressure to fall asleep, and so, after three months of insomnia and searching for Lily, I am finally able to drift off easily every night. Then at three a.m. I would wake gently and traipse to the bed with the Egyptian cotton sheets, kicking my legs all over them in celebration, rolling around and touching my own skin as though I am a stranger touching someone foreign.
Three months in and I am almost giving up my search for Lily Anderson.
On some nights, to pass time, I would go on dates with random men to feel something, or I would just walk on the beach and observe people living their lives.
Apart from my little job, working remotely as a digital marketer, I had all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted to do.
Walking on the quiet streets of Paris one night at the end of my first month here, passing the windows of the yuppie shops—each their own white cube gallery—I saw two people, a man and a woman, early twenties maybe, definitely on a first or second date. They were discussing intently where they should go to eat and drink, as though it really mattered. He had an accent, Italian, I think, and was handsome and fuckable: hair close-cropped and boyish, strong arms, an Adam’s apple that protruded and made me think of sucking on it.
The woman was, as the undergrads at the university that I study at might say, a butterface.
For two months I have been at Sorbonne Universite in the dual lit and classics B.A program. Somehow, miraculously, despite having not attending lectures, I have been able to catch up with everything going on.
As a result of my tardiness, I’d been appointed a new advisory committee, comprised of both the classics and English department chairpersons, and I was no longer flying under the radar.
In the second month I had to deliver a paper. I had met with the advisory board at a yuppie shop, just like the one I am starting at. They delivered the news over paninis—Napa almond chicken salad for the English chair in her coffee-stained Easter sweater and tuna salad for the classics chair, his nose swollen with rosacea—that I was to have a paper completed by the fall semester or my funding or I would be kept on probation. So far, this had not made me hustle to be serious or fix my tardiness any faster.
It wasn’t that I no longer felt passion to learn. I did, or sort of do, as much as you can feel impassioned living alone in a foreign land. But it had dawned on me around the beginning of the third month that I had to deliver a very good paper.
The paper, that I am working on operates under the notion that scholars always assume a first-person speaker when reading Sappho’s poetry. Scholars are kind of assholes and they actually hate mystery; they detest any inability to fill in the blanks. They are victims, like the rest of us, of the way their brains work: trying to compartmentalize every fragment of information into a pattern.
They want the world to make sense. Who doesn’t? So, when reading Sappho’s work, they take details that they already know, or think they know, of Sappho’s life, and use them to fill in the blanks. But they do so erroneously, like a psychologist who, after learning three extraneous things about a person’s childhood, believes they know the whole person.
My paper will present the argument that one should read the vast number of erasures in Sappho’s work as intentional. True, Sappho had not included these herself. They were created by the passage of time and dirt since 600 BCE. Most of her work was actually missing, with only 650 lines of 10,000 surviving. But I will argue that to reimagine these blanks as created by Sappho herself is far less of a co-option than filling in the gaps with what little we know of her life, creating our own meanings for them out of a desire to make history our own, and above all, projecting a first-person speaker upon them. I feel that the only way we would cease projecting was if the blanks were read as intentional text themselves. Forget whether she was a lesbian, preferred younger men, was hypersexual, bisexual, or had multiple male lovers. If we are going to ascribe meaning, let’s do it with what is there rather than what is not there.
Unfortunately, this is a total garbage proposition. I, myself, have a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I want only to fill it, frightened that if I don’t it will eat me alive or kill me.
Lily was the only person that made me feel otherwise. Even when I hung around other girls in school, I never felt as was as I felt with Lily.
Sometimes I long for total annihilation; a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished. And so, I am most guilty of all in projecting an agenda. I know it, which is why I have not really pressed ahead. I am not sure if my advisory committee knows it. But I am about to be put on probation and I figure that a shitty paper is probably better than no paper at all.
So, I continued to trudge, because I know my job as a digital marketer can sustain me if anything was to ever happen; say, I get suspended from the University. Plus, university is not what brought me to Europe, Lily is.
Most of my time in public is spent in the library, amidst the undergrads, and that is where I had heard them use the words butterface and brown bagger.
They use these words to describe women of attractive body and unattractive face, and this woman that I am staring at in this little restaurant is, in my opinion, definitely one. I move quickly behind her to observe her further.
Her visage, when she turns her head to talk to the man, is hard and pronounced, with a jutting nose and chin, but she has good hair and a hot body to save her. She wears a pair of tiny navy silk shorts from which the very bottom of her ass cheeks protrudes ever so slightly. You almost feel compelled to touch them.
Everything she says is filtered through her own awareness of how good her ass looks, the words she speaks merely an afterthought compared to the glory at the bottom of those shorts. She is almost like a vehicle for shorts and an ass. She sort of dances a little down the sidewalk and flicks her hair.
He is no better. He asks stupid questions; “So how long have you lived here?” and “Do you like it?” but every question is just a chance to put his own hotness into action. Why are they even bothering to speak? Who has time for all of this?
The entire performance is merely a vessel for something else. It is nothingness. Sure, compared to the greater nothingness; the void, the lack of explicit meaning in life, the fact that none of us knows what is going on here, it is at least something. Their engagement in this dance of elevating a stupid restaurant to high levels of importance, discussing kombucha, making the fleeting matter, the shorts: all of these were a fuck-you to emptiness. Or perhaps these details are symptomatic of their ignorance of nothingness. Is nothingness so imperceptible to them that these things could matter?
Or maybe they are just stupid. Oh, the sweet gift of stupidity. I envy them. But really, I know that everything comes down to her shorts. All of the answers are in that ass line; the reduction of all fear, all unknown, all nothingness, eclipsed by the ass line. It is holding its own in all of this. It is just existing as though living is easy. The ass line doesn’t really have to do anything, but it is running the whole show. All dialogue begins and ends at that ass line. The direction of their evening, their conversation, and in a way, the universe ends there. I don’t know who I resent more: the man or the woman.
The night is not getting any younger and I am bored already. Walking further down the street, I decide to walk into the Opera at the center of town.
Maybe, I can get some inspiration to change my paper topic.
Walking closer to the Opera, still a million feet away, my instincts can tell me that something wrong is going on there, but my curiosity wants nothing more than to move closer and check out what is going on.
Moving closer, I see a lot of dead bodies on the ground at the foot of the stairs.
My heart and head, screams ‘Run!’ but my feet and every part of me that wants to find out what is happening retains me from moving.
I can hear the police siren from afar. I can smell the blood on the floor. I can count six dead bodies on the ground. I can smell the gunpowder in the air.
A shootout definitely happened here. I look up the steep stairs leading to the opera and what I see scares the shit out of me.
It is Lily Gilford, my best friend, staring down at the dead bodies without remorse or any look of pity on her face. There are armed men standing behind her, and even more so, there is one standing closer to her and looking more terrifying.
I cannot be spotted from my hiding spot. I just stand and watch my best-friend display what I describe as the coldest, most inhumane act I have ever witnessed; after her faux father.
I stand and watch as Lily hugs and kisses the man beside her. I intensify my gaze, squinting my eyes, to recall where I have seen the man before. Then it clicks; ‘Isn’t that the most wanted man in Italy, Leonardo Dicaprio!’

Hey Guys please check my other stories: The Lycan and His healer mate, His Purchased Wife, 365 Days in Dmitry Cage, The fatal Lycan and his mysterious mate, Xiol's Treasured Mate, The luna and the lycan, Flash Marriage: President's Seduction, In Adonis world, Alpha's little Vampire Mate on R.a.d.i.s.h. 

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