No Longer Landing for Him

In the third year of my imprisonment, I stumbled upon a post on an online forum. The topic was: [Can young love ever last?] The original poster wrote about her deskmate, how he got into fights for her, how he brought her breakfast every morning. How he’d plastered a love letter with her name on it all over the school’s public notice board. Between the lines, her own budding affection was impossible to miss. But then I saw the date of the post and the username, and I froze. It was from me, ten years ago. Ten years later, the boy who wrote that letter was my husband. And he had chained my ankles to the bed, the floor around me littered with graphic photos of him and a buzzy new actress. I swallowed the sleeping pills I had been hoarding for months and replied with a self-deprecating laugh. [Don’t say yes. In the end, all love turns into this.] … The bitter taste of the pills hadn’t even faded from my tongue when the door slammed open with a deafening crash. Damien Blackwood slapped the bottle from my hand, his voice a furious growl. “Are you insane?!” Before I could answer, he swept me into his arms and sprinted to the car. He ran who knows how many red lights on the way, a symphony of blaring horns and screaming drivers trailing behind us. It wasn’t until the cold feeding tube was pulled from my stomach that he grabbed me by the collar. “What the hell are you trying to pull now?” “You knew Stella was accepting her award tonight. Did you have to arrange for someone to humiliate her during her press interviews?” My face was pale, but I smiled. “She sent me those photos of you two, didn’t she? She wanted to see me lose my mind.” “You love her so much. Why not just let me die and give her my spot?” He took several deep breaths. “You know I would never let anyone come before you. Even with her baby, if you wanted…” “I don’t want it!” I screamed, cutting him off. “Damien, don’t you dare talk to me about a baby!” It was like I was back in that hopeless night, the air thick and suffocating. In an instant, I lost all energy to fight him. My hand trembled as I touched my lower abdomen. “Damien, just let me go. Stella will give you so many children. But we… we’ll never have another one.” His cool fingertips brushed my cheek as he regained the cold composure of a man long accustomed to being in charge. “You know I love you the most.” Most, but not only. I laughed so hard tears started to form. He leaned down, as if to place a kiss on the corner of my eye. I turned my head away, and his movement froze in mid-air. After a long moment, he sighed softly. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid again, okay? Otherwise, your journalist friend might get very worried about you.” I understood his threat perfectly. Stop trying to die. I have your friend. The moment he stepped out of the hospital room, I collapsed onto the bed, all strength gone. I was so tired of this life of mutual torture. The phone in my palm suddenly vibrated. [All love turns into this? Why do you say that?] My numb heart gave a violent jolt. I stared at the words on the screen, finally realizing that the post I’d replied to wasn’t a hallucination. A new reply popped up. [Do you… know Damien Blackwood?] It felt like a lifeline, a chance to escape. Fat tears splattered onto the screen as my trembling fingers flew across the keyboard. [He’s your future husband. And I am you, ten years from now.] [Stay away from him! Run!] There was a short silence, then two simple words appeared. [Prove it.] I stared at the phone, completely blank. For a moment, I couldn’t think of a single thing that could prove I was the woman who had spent a decade as Damien’s wife. The five hundred love letters he wrote me? The night he slept with Stella, I’d set them all on fire and thrown the ashes at them. Our marriage certificate? I’d stuffed it into the bouquet of flowers Stella received at her wrap party, subjecting her to three months of negative press. The torn pieces of that certificate had come back to me, wrapped in the sting of Damien’s palm across my face. They say love gives you armor. But for me, all the proof of our past love had become a blade I tried to use against him. The problem was, he had new armor now. My dull, old blade was useless against him. I was the only one left bleeding. Finally, I lifted my shirt and sent a photo of a faded tattoo. It was on my left side, over the fifth rib, the one closest to the heart. Damien had a matching one. Ten years ago, I was harassed by some street thugs. Damien, all by himself, fought them until his shirt was soaked through with blood. The worst of his wounds was a long gash that ran diagonally across his chest. An inch deeper, and he would have been dead. Later, that deep scar was covered by a tattoo of a vibrant red koi fish. The teenage boy had grinned at me in the setting sun, his smile wild and free. “Cora, I want you on my heart forever.” I’d cried until I couldn’t breathe, overwhelmed by the intensity of his love, and by the hopeless, head-over-heels way I felt for him. The day I made that forum post, I accepted Damien’s confession of love. And I had the same tattoo etched onto my own skin. When my family found out, my strict, disciplinarian parents were furious and demanded I break up with him. For the first time in my life, I, the ever-obedient daughter, defied them. I ran away from our gated community and went with Damien to the city where we planned to attend university. My family, perhaps giving up on me, never came looking for me after that. I was sad, but with Damien by my side, it all felt worth it. Damien’s grades weren’t great, so he gave up on college and dedicated himself to supporting my education. We curled up in a tiny, cramped apartment, sharing a single bowl of instant ramen. Through winters so cold the water froze in the pipes, we kept each other warm. Under the dim glow of a tungsten lamp, I made a wish over a small birthday cake that one day I would become a famous screenwriter. Damien just watched me, his chin resting on his hand, a smile playing on his lips. “Your wish is my command. Your personal genie has received your request.” He traded his work coveralls for a suit and became a bodyguard for a powerful figure. After five years of living on the edge, his suits got more expensive, and the places we lived in got bigger and bigger. Finally, he handed me a project proposal for a film. “Honey,” he said, “go cast the actors for the story you wrote.” And Stella was the leading lady I chose. Back then, she had just come from a poor, rural town, and she carried a kind of gray, faded quality about her. But her eyes… her eyes burned with a stunning light, filled with a stubborn refusal to let go of any opportunity that came her way. She told me, “Mrs. Blackwood, I won’t let you down.” Her spirit was a perfect match for the protagonist in my script. We were the same age and shared similar passions, and we quickly became inseparable. We spent countless nights revising the script, often too busy to even go home. Damien would bring us hot meals, watching with a fond indulgence as we devoured them. The warmth in his gaze was like the sun to me. But that same sun also shone its way into Stella’s heart. A month before filming wrapped, I found out I was pregnant. Suffering from morning sickness, I went home early one day, only to find a mess of clothes scattered in front of our familiar bed. The two people tangled together under the sheets were also painfully familiar. When my hand struck Stella’s face, Damien just grabbed my wrist, his brow furrowed as he asked if I was hurt. I slapped him across the face with my other hand. He just worked his jaw and smiled, trying to pull me into a hug. “Don’t stress the baby. It was just for fun, to blow off some steam.” But the man who said it was “just for fun” ran after Stella the moment her face went pale and she fled the room. The next day, every entertainment headline was screaming about how the CEO of Blackwood Corporation had dispatched dozens of cars to search every street in the city, all for the love of an actress. And me, sick with stress and fear for my baby, I couldn’t find a single car that night. Alone in our villa in the hills, I could only lie there in despair as my child slipped away from me. After that, I cried. I raged. I leaked the story of Damien’s affair to a rival media company. I added scenes for Stella that required her to be submerged in freezing water in the middle of winter. Damien didn’t even look up from feeding me chicken soup, meant to help me recover. He just had the people who came to complain thrown out. “The stock price will go back up. Stella’s cold will get better. As long as you’re happy, anything is fine.” It wasn’t until the wrap party, with reporters everywhere, that I exposed Stella as the other woman. By then, some on-set photos had already given her a bit of fame. Overnight, the internet was flooded with venomous attacks against her, nearly destroying her career before it had even begun. I thought I had won. But I couldn’t see it then. I thought losing was when someone stopped loving you completely. It wasn’t until Stella jumped into a river because of the public backlash that I realized I had already lost everything. The sting of Damien’s hand across my face hurt more than any blade. He carried a dripping wet Stella away. “Cora, I saved you all those years ago so you could have a life, not so you could become this… this malicious woman.” For Damien Blackwood, who by then held the city in the palm of his hand, protecting someone was easy. Destroying someone was even easier. He released stories about how I had changed the script to torment Stella, and then he told the world about how he had dropped out of school to put me through college. Unsurprisingly, I became the vampiric, shrewish wife in the public eye, sucking him dry. Damien’s affair was reframed as a justifiable release after years of sacrifice. And Stella… Stella became his redemption.