Typical of San Francisco, the air was frigid but Kenya barely minded tonight.  She welcomed the bite of the air on the exposed skin of her wrists.  She pulled her gloves off to feel the night air on her hands.  She imagined she was an ice queen and the coldness couldn’t touch her, didn’t hurt her.  It would make her stronger instead.   She’d take it inside until it became a part of her, invading her veins and surrounding her heart, building a wall that nothing could penetrate.

How do you reconcile yourself with the fact that the man you love is a liar?  That was the sneaky, poisonous question that Kenya couldn’t banish from her thoughts.   She stood on the CalTrain platform waiting for the very last train. 

Her fingers began to burn.  Maybe she was transforming, transcending one form of pain to another.

Malcolm Conner.  She’d met him in a bar.  It had been a girl’s night out, no men allowed type of deal.  She’d elbowed her way to the bar to buy the next round of drinks only for her gaze to meet a pair of green eyes with the power to change her. 

The beginning of Malcolm and Kenya was intoxicating.  It was as if someone had taken a peek inside of her cluttered brain and provided all of her fantasies and desires in bartender form.  He was intelligent, attractive and polite to her friends.  All the little things other guys were always missing came neatly packaged with Malcolm.  He was perfect, but above all that, what made Kenya fall fast and hard was the sincerity that drove his every word and action towards her.  He never said anything he didn’t mean.  He didn’t fill silence with fluff and nonsense.  Three months into their relationship, when he told her he loved her, she knew she could believe him.

It had been a Saturday and they were busy being lazy.  They’d rolled around in her bed alternating between reading their respective novels and pawing at one another.  He’d asked her what her book was about and right in the middle of her synopsis about time travel through space and inter-planetary race-relations he’d whispered it.  “I love you.” 

She had dated “cooler” men that had always reconsidered their relationships with her when her geeky habits and true self came to light, but Malcolm look at her as if she were brilliant, like she had hung the stars and the moon or something.  She loved him back, in a desperate and frantic way, and she made sure he understood how much every time she saw him.

Her train pulled up as her fingers began to get numb.   The train was deserted at this time of night.  Kenya found her seat.

She hadn’t minded his unreliability in the beginning.  She trusted him completely and didn’t feel the need to keep tabs on him.  But he wasn’t always where he said he would be.  Excuses became a habit and so did broken dates and nights spent alone.  There were days he seemed distracted and just mentally gone.  He would leave her apartment that way, only to return with scratches and bruises he couldn’t explain. Not that she asked.  The questions formed on her tongue but she never put them to air.  She felt a deep certainty that she wouldn’t like Malcolm’s answers.

Kenya had experienced some bad relationships in her life but they’d always been with men she didn’t minded losing.  Any pain from those breakups was superficial and had come from a place of pride more than anything else.  What she had with Malcolm was different.  The thought of losing him made her feel crazy. 

Fear, mixed with morbid curiosity, spurred her to follow Malcolm when he left her apartment earlier that evening.  It was a decision she now recognized as a terrible mistake.

© 2010 A. Bowie-Hankins