This story is based on characters and situations described in Sunstone, created and owned by Stjephan Šejić, alias Shiniez. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is coincidental and unintended.

Let's address the elephant in the room at the outset. If you know about Sunstone, you know that its story involves sex. While this fan fiction work will mention sex, it will not delve too deeply into any depictions of it. This intends to be a story about people - one person in particular - dealing with motives, intentions, decisions, regrets, aftermaths, epiphanies, and liberation. If you are looking for... something else, this story may not be to your liking.

As I read Sunstone, one character struck a chord with me: a secondary character essential to the story but largely underdeveloped. This is that character's story, one that gestated and thrashed about in my brain until I had no alternative but to write it down so it could escape and leave me alone. Apologies to Mr. Šejić if this winds up not exactly being canon, but with so much open canvas for this character, it is easy to paint in what you believe fits.


"Nothing."

Let's start the story there, with the word that began it all. At the time, I would have sworn that it was the word that ended it all. In truth, it was neither and both. It was the end of the beginning.

To be one-hundred percent truthful, it did not start with that word. It started with the knowledge that there was "something". After all the time we had spent together, learning about her and about myself, I knew that there was "something." It was obvious in the way that she did not react to the kiss I gave her on the forehead. It was reinforced by the way that her arm draped across me like dead flesh. It was there even in the dimmest of lights within that room, provided by a streetlamp over a hundred yards down the street from my window, a gray just barely above pitch black that betrayed the disappointment in her opened, weepy eyes that started at some nothingness miles away.

There was definitely more than "nothing" behind that look.

That is why I did not believe her answer.

I loved her. At that specific moment in time, I was not entirely sure of that fact, because "love" in its romantic sense was still something undefined for me although I was searching hard with this woman to find its true meaning. I had felt the familial version of "love" before, that bond that binds child to parent and that at times frustratingly bound siblings to each other in such a way that you could equally wish for their instant death and their continued life simultaneously. I learned respect from my father, a police officer who treated his career as a noble calling instead of a means to a paycheck, but respect was not "love." I tapped my courage and practiced that respect with a sweet girl named Terry in high school and was rewarded with something much stronger than friendship, but by graduation we both agreed that what we experienced was born more of social requirements and hormonal systems turned up to eleven by puberty than anything we were willing to call "love."

I was hoping that I was beginning to finally experience it. I was wishing for it. I was placing my trust in the lessons that I had been taught and in the rituals passed down since humankind walked erect, trying to do everything in the correct, proper way. I knew kindness. I knew concern. I knew friendship. I wanted more. I wanted love. I wanted to be in love with her that night. But because I had never experienced it fully before, I didn't recognize its beginnings.

Now, I recognize them. Yes, I loved her back then.

Would it have mattered if I had known that for sure back then? Let's face it, probably not. Maybe I would have fought harder had I truly known. Then again, maybe by fighting harder I would have destroyed it sooner. That's the problem with life; no Saved Game feature. Perhaps the Almighty can add that in Life 2.0 when He releases it someday?

I gave her the kiss. I felt the weight of her limp arm against my chest. I heard the sniffling intake of air through her nose, and looking down in the eerie gray glow of the streetlamp reflected off of my bedroom room wall into her face, I saw that look, and my blood started turning to ice in my veins.

"Honey, what's wrong?"

I had tried to make it sound gentle and concerned. Constricted by a dry throat and laden with exhaustion, it came out as a grumble from a smoker with a pack-a-day habit.

"Nothing."

The word sounded from her mouth with the whisper of an opened grave. Her arm didn't flex, her eyes didn't move, her head didn't turn to face me.

It was a lie. I knew it, and I was certain that she knew that I knew it.

My heart started pounding harder than it had moments ago when she and I finally and awkwardly surrendered to our animalistic instincts for each other. Barely leashed lust and desire fueled my heart's pace then. Now it was fear - salivating, yellow-fanged, snarling, wolf-snouted fear - driving my heart to the point of cardiac arrest.

What have I done to her?!

We weren't virgins. This wasn't our first time, and it was not our first time with each other. We had enough experience to know that we both enjoyed sex, and we enjoyed it with each other. Or so I thought until that point.

I can recall every detail of it even today. I can tell you that her brow furrows into three folds and her irises grow wide as dimes when she gives that look.

I replayed every aspect that I could remember in my mind with all the grace and insight of a sports post-game show: five second highlight shots interspersed with completely hollow insight. Did I fail to make her climax? Did I ignore her needs? Did I miss some signal for something she wanted me to do? Those were the initial snowballs lodged from on high that started the rumblings of the avalanche that would start consuming my thoughts and fears, and as the avalanche gained momentum, my questions became more terrifying. Am I not "man" enough for her? Was I too forceful? My God, does she think that I raped her?!

I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed her against me, hoping that my action might demonstrate my feelings for her.

She did no reciprocate.

"Come on, Honey. Tell me. What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm fine."

I had the borders mostly formed and a few of the interior pieces set in this human puzzle that was named Lisa Williams, enough to know that she could very well be The One if I didn't screw things up. She was fun, quirky in an attractive way, smart, strangely both introspective and outgoing, damned gorgeous, and she had a lip-bite smile that knocked me off my feet. For some reason Fate had smiled kindly upon me one day on campus, bringing us together by seeming random chance. I still had courage back then, so I approached her. Again, Fate favored me, and Lisa liked me. I'll go to my grave swearing that the birds were chirping sweetly in the trees when she accepted my offer to take her out to dinner.

I only needed one date to know that Lisa Williams was everything a guy could ever want and more than any guy could ever hope to handle. We had enough common interests to draw us together and enough differing interests to keep enough mystery between us that the other loved to unravel and solve. By our fifth date, I realized that she could be mine, so long as I took my time and did not force the pieces of the Lisa Williams puzzle to fit where they weren't supposed to go.

But now the puzzle was beginning to fall apart in my hands, and I was afraid that it was because maybe I was trying to force it to be finished too fast.

Yeah. Fate can smile upon you, and then that smile can turn to a carnivore's snarl and its fangs can rip your heart out.

So how did I screw things up? What did I do? What did I not do?

"Nothing."

That's what she kept saying.

But it had to be something. Something I did, or something that I didn't do. It had to be my fault.

No lesson or prior experience prepared me for this. The time-honored rituals suggested in an uncertain way to proceed with caution, so I did. I cradled the egg of her heart in the palm of my hand, too afraid to close my fingers around it and hold it tightly for fear of crushing it, but equally afraid that if my grip were too loose, it would slip from my grasp and shatter as it fell to the ground.

"Nothing."

You would think that, in this still very much male-centered society, it would not be all that impossible to get help. Yes, you would think. And you would be dead wrong.

Friends were no help. Face it: if you can't trust a group of guys whose respect for you depends on the stock of beer in your refrigerator with your e-mail password because of the damage they'd do, you are certainly not going to confide problems in your love life with them. All I would get from them is exaggerated tales of their own exploits, porn magazine advice, and derision. The last thing I needed was a mental chorus of frat boys jeering at me the next time I tried to make love to Lisa. That would ensure failure.

Forget men's magazines, because they're more interested in making money by showing you unrealistic naked women you're never going to be fortunate enough to meet outside of your fantasy world, while pimping over-simplified advice that has no possibility of working in the real world except in a one-night-stand situation. Lisa would think I was either a pig or a loser if I tried any of that advice, and she'd be gone in an instant. Lisa was not going to be a one-night-stand if I had anything to say about it.

Self-help books? Do you want to be the person spotted at the book store checking out the Relationship Self-Help section? I tried to be brave and looked anyway, but it's hard to trust a relationship advice book when the author biography on the jacket touts the woman's two failed marriages as her primary qualification for giving advice and her Masters in Psychology from a university I never of before as her back-up qualification.

Porn? Puh-lease. For starters, no parcel delivery guy I've ever known has made a stop to a home where a woman answers the door in an opened robe and a slutty grin. Second, if you ever try a move on your girl that you first saw in a porn film, your girl's going to decide that you're a pervert and that you need someone else besides her to get your rocks off, or so women always led me to believe. Third, no real woman would endure the degradation that most porn inflicted upon the females in their films. Finally, every porn film I've ever seen has made me feel worse about myself at the end than at the start, because it always makes me feel like I fail to "measure up" the the minimum accepted requirements of real manhood.

Even if I could find a source that I could trust, what would I ask? Can you envision the conversation?

"Yeah, uh, well, you see, my girl and I, we, uh, had sex last night, and, uh, well, it didn't go so well for her, and I need help."

"Did you ask her what the problem was?"

"Yes."

"What did she say?"

"'Nothing'."

"You should have asked her to open up more."

"I did. All she would say is, 'nothing'."

Do you have any idea how enlightening the advice from that conversation would be?

There was only one place to go for help. Only one person among the more than six billion on this planet that I could trust enough to confide this insatiable fear that was slowly eating away at my heart. Only one person who I could trust to sincerely listen and help me discover what I should do. But whenever I asked, she would only say one word.

"Nothing."

I knew it to be a lie. Maybe it was a lie to protect me and my feelings, but it could have been a lie she was making to protect herself. I couldn't know for certain, because she wouldn't tell me. In absence of any evidence to the contrary, I assumed the worst: that whatever it was, I was to blame.

I tried harder. I tried to take things slower. I made sure that I paid attention to her arousal and her pleasure. I made sure she came to climax and wasn't bluffing her way through it for my sake. I was so involved with making sure I was satisfying her that twice I went without climaxing myself. I focused entirely on her and not on myself, trying to be aware of signs or clues but not seeing any. I even tried some Kama Sutra bullshit I found online. I did everything that I could think of to do to erase that look.

Despite every effort of mine, that look would return. To avoid my prying, she tried to hide it from me and slapped on a smile, telling me how wonderful it was, how wonderful I was, how lucky she was. But it wasn't her genuine, gorgeous lip-bite that knocked my feet out from under me when she flashed it. It was a soap opera actress smile stapled on for the close-up shot and discarded once the cameras stopped. In those moments when she thought I wasn't looking or could not see, I noticed that disappointed blank stare return.

"Nothing."

After a while, I made sure that she understood that I knew it to be a lie. I wanted to know the truth. I couldn't fix the problem if I didn't know what the problem was, and I tried to convey that in words that did not shake with the worry that was sinking my heart. She tried to deflect my questions with other phrases besides, "nothing." But I knew these phrases to be empty, women's magazine inspired responses aimed at sparing a man's feelings.

The lie remained, and in time, I exhausted my patience. I stopped trying to find out the truth. The lie eroded the unhardened foundation of my love for her, turning it from cement into quicksand.

It manifested itself in the worst possible of ways: an inability to "perform" for her. The knowledge that there was something wrong with our intimacy evolved into a festering fear that I was not able to please her no matter what I tried. That fear would take root every time, because I knew that in the end, she'd be disappointed with me. I tried to go through the motions, hoping that the spirit of the moment or just the biological reflex of grinding naked bodies together would help me live up to the role I was supposed to play in our relationship. But knowing that she was hiding something from me, I could no longer go through the motions of intercourse with her and "fake it." I know this is going to sound chauvinistic, but men are cursed with the inability to pretend that they've been aroused; they either are or they are not. Lisa could at least channel her inner Sally Albright, and with my lack of experience with women other than Terry, I could be easily convinced by a less than heartfelt performance. But when Junior can't reach full mast, it's obvious to everyone.

This convinced Lisa that I no longer desired her, which was the farthest thing from the truth.

A monster was birthed behind my eyes, one that devoured my despair with relish but found its appetite unsated. That monster was not content with only ruining our sex lives. It decided that it needed to destroy everything we possessed. It rose from the sea in Godzilla mindless fury and obliterated our relationship underfoot. I started assuming that there were other lies, ones to which I had been blind before now. I now translated any hesitant answer, any nervous glance, any minor disagreement into another manifestation of the original lie.

"Nothing."

Suddenly, much sooner than I would have thought, that's what it looked like we had. Two people, clinging to nothing.

Neither of us tried to save its remnants. I felt used, wounded, ignored. What once looked like a possible love destined for marriage and Happily Ever After now was nothing more than a spilled drink to be mopped up with a paper towel and discarded with the same amount of care one would give to tossing that towel in the trash. And forgive me for not being able to see this in a completely objective manner, but the consensus decision that I heard from both her friends and mine was that it had to be all my fault.

I'm sure it was.

We decided to end it, to move on. Ending it was the easy part. Moving on was impossible. I tried. Multiple times. Enough to make me believe my own bad press and decide that my breakup with Lisa must have been my fault, because every attempt I made afterwards also failed miserably.

Shirley had been a classmate at the university in my Engineering courses, and she was continuing on through graduate school. We met again through the college work-study program where I was volunteering as an adviser. She was anime cute, smart, fun-loving, and she didn't seem to have a boyfriend or at least one that I ever noticed before then. We seemed to hit it off decently in our first couple of small dates that were nothing more than meeting for dinner someplace and walking back to her student apartment. She was Friend Zoning me, the zone without any benefits, but I was working on improving that by giving this new relationship all the attention that I had given to the one with Lisa. I really thought that I was making progress, that Shirley was warming to me, and that she was considering making our young relationship a bit more serious.

Just like with Lisa, I was dead wrong.

I abruptly discovered that Shirley was a player in some Fantasy Boyfriend League. Boyfriends were drafted and used until a better option came along. Once that better option appeared, she'd trade in the current boyfriend to acquire the one with the higher BVI: that's Boyfriend Value Index. I had a higher value as an employed architect than the Liberal Arts major she dated the previous semester, who had higher market value than the jock boyfriend from her senior year in high school who didn't get a scholarship offer, who was better than the neighborhood boy she experimented with in her high school sophomore year who was destined for minimum wage labor jobs for the rest of his life. In only two months, I was dumped for some rich kid whose degree had already been purchased with his family's money.

On the Lisa Williams scale of zero to ten, she'd rate about a three, based on looks alone. Hardly a reasonable alternative. To coin a phrase, "nothing."

Strike one for moving on.

Donna was a member of the same health club that Shirley used. I'd hesitate to call them friends but they certainly weren't enemies; perhaps rivals is the best description. Donna supported her gym-rat habit by working at a doughnut shop between the college and my first job, which is where I met her. A brunette with a body that you'd only see on 1990's comic book super-heroines and doe-brown eyes that could entrance men into doing her bidding in a mere glance, she had a sexual appetite that swallowed men whole. Either she guessed or was told that Shirley had dumped me, and she turned on that hypnotic gaze every time I entered the shop. I was in in what you'd politely call a "dry spell" and emotionally bleeding from two break-ups in less than a year, so I fell for that look. I fell hard.

There was nothing that she didn't want to do, no physical part of her that she kept off-limits, and her desires rivaled those of porn actresses. If nothing else, I was able to prove to myself that Junior could still get excited about a woman, that I could make a woman happy, that I could satisfy her sexual desires and have her beg me for more. However, this woman with the body of an Amazon princess had the brain of Kelly Bundy, the heart of Ted Bundy, and the determined clinginess of a venereal disease. It took her half a year to understand that "we're through" meant "never again on God's Green Earth or the Life To Come."

The Lisa Williams scale doesn't have a negative range, so I can't tell you where Donna ends up. Donna has no business being measured on that scale. It would be an insult to Lisa to make such a comparison. Heck, it would be an insult to Shirley. Worse than "nothing."

Strike two for moving on.

A couple of years went by before I met Paula. Paula worked in the Accounting department of the engineering firm that hired me after the first company I worked for went bankrupt in the last Recession. A little older than me, Paula was fighting the slippery, uphill battle that most women find themselves embroiled in today's corporate world. She was fighting it in heels, because Office Casual somehow wasn't applying to women in this firm. We met by accident because we both tried to find the same out-of-the-way corner at a corporate function that all employees were required to attend. All we had in common was the fact that we were lonely, but it was enough of a common ground to give me the courage to reach out to her. She was attractive in an average fashion, but by that time in my life I had convinced myself that I did not even measure up to that. Her intellect was keen, but it was blunted by cynicism born of a painful past and a cut-throat present.

I played this one by the book. I make every effort to take us to the Committed Relationship level, but Paula just pretended. Her parents' ruined marriage and her fiancé's cheating had convinced Paula long ago that she didn't need a man to complete her life, and that sentiment came through loud and clear in the background music of our short-lived relationship. I was simply boredom therapy for her.

None of them were Lisa. None of them were even close.

Strike three for moving on. You're out. A busted draft pick at 28 years old.

I once had a chance at everything, and through my own negligence, incompetence and blindness, I lost it.

"Nothing."

That's all I had.

In between, there were plenty of mistakes, balks, technical fouls, and forfeits. From the smoky temples to the alcohol gods where the desperate and irreparably broken grasp desperately for a lifeline before they drown in their misery, to the sterile confines of the workplace where the distinctions of romance and harassment ominously overlap, to Internet dating sites where trolls with axes to grind lay in wait to ambush the unwary, I ventured. My sense of respect mutated into a fear of the opposite gender. I was no longer walking tall in life as Dad had taught me; I was cowering in the comforting safety of the shadows with the rest of the rodents that feared what the light would expose of me.

I never removed Lisa's cellphone number from my phone, even though I went through four cellphones since our break-up. I'd never been brave enough to try to see if it still worked. I almost caved in one desperate night when my self-loathing would not let me sleep. I yearned to know if she would answer, to hope if there was still just the glimmer of possibility, a last spark of a long-dead fire longing to be set ablaze one last time. I chickened out, afraid that I would instead get the answering machine for a falafel shop in midtown. I kept my number as I moved from phone to phone, just in case she might decide to give our relationship one more try. I tried to keep the last ropes of that dangling bridge between us in place, hoping for a miracle.

But those ropes were finally severed, bringing more sorrow than I ever expected.

Why?

Because I still loved her. Why else would I measure everyone against the Lisa Williams Scale?

And because I learned from a friend of a friend that Lisa had married.

Married.

I accepted that it had to happen eventually. Like I said, Lisa Williams is everything anyone could ever want. Everyone else was sure to see that. Eventually, someone would find her. Someone would love her. Someone would discover the key that opened her heart in the way that I never could, discover what that "nothing" was, and help her overcome it. I accepted it, much in the same way as a cancer victim's family accepts that death is near. It turns out that accepting things doesn't make those things hurt any less when they actually do happen.

I always hoped that the someone who could open her heart and defeat the "nothing" would be me, that someday I'd find my way back to her or she'd find her way back to me, that I could be her hero and banish that "nothing" forever. That hope disappeared forever. Dust. Ashes. "Nothing."

That was enough to hurt, but that wasn't the soul-crushing worst of it.

She had married a woman.

Before you bite my head off and start applying convenient labels to me, let me try to explain something.

I don't have anything against lesbians. You want proof? My cousin Crystal is a lesbian, and I'm the only one in my family that still talks to her after her epiphany. She never struck me as gay when we were growing up. She had her required dose of boyfriends in school and afterwards, enough experience to know for certain that something wasn't clicking into place for her. The, one day, she figured out what the issue was: she was gay.

I never asked Crystal how she came to know this; it was none of my business. However, Crystal decided that someone needed to know, perhaps someone who could plant some seeds of acceptance within the family, and I was the only one she trusted enough to make the attempt. Her sexual orientation was not a decision consciously made in response to an event or a series of events, at least in the way she tried to describe it to me. One day, she simply realized that something wasn't right, that she was simply going through the motions as society demanded. I can't imagine the terror she must have felt in making that first step into the void in front of her, afraid that she was wrong but hoping that she was right and praying that someone would be on the other side of that thin veil that could catch her.

My take on her sexuality? What's the big deal? That's her own business, not mine. What is my business is that I love Crystal like a sister and always will, and she returns that love to me. Crystal found purpose, contentment and fulfillment once she discovered who she truly was, which were things that continued o elude. I am overjoyed for her and I don't care one damn that a woman helped her discover who she truly is.

In truth, I was damned jealous of her.

Crystal's wife Jenni, on the other hand, is not so guarded with her sexual orientation and sees herself as a walking, talking LGBT Public Service Announcement. Unfortunately, Jenni's not a helpful PSA for her cause because she doesn't exactly shatter the long-perpetuated stereotypes. She never bothers to disguise her disdain for men. On those few times that Jenni's deigned to speak to me, she's let me know that her lesbian orientation was influenced in no small part by the men in her life that took advantage of her.

So the question became: was Lisa more like Crystal, or was she more like Jenni?

With no evidence to prevent me from coming to the worst possible conclusion, the worst possible conclusion was the only one I could reach.

Lisa could be more like Jenni, which lead to the follow-up questions: Did something "turn" Lisa gay? Did I do that to her? Was I the last straw? Did I poison her? Does she hate men like Jenni does? Does she hate men because of me?

I hoped that I was mistaken, but I knew that to be the desperate hope of a falling climber trying to flap his arms to learn how to fly before crashing to his death. Maybe her orientation was the "nothing," and maybe she was more afraid to tell that to herself than to tell it to me. Maybe she was scared of telling me because I'd take it more as an accusation of doing something wrong that her realization of something finally being right. Maybe she was dating me only because of society's demands even in this "enlightened" time.

I truly felt that Lisa liked me, that she liked being with me, that she liked sharing her life and her story with me. Maybe I just imagined that. Maybe I saw only what I wanted to see, only what I had been trained to see, and ignored the truth. Maybe I was just being defensive, erecting an intellectual lie to save my dying emotions. Maybe I was polyurethaning one lie over another to hide the scratches and soothe my own feelings. Maybe at my core, I am evil, despite all Dad taught me. Maybe Lisa saw that, and she fled to save herself.

I could never know for sure, because she would never tell me. I asked. Over and over again, I asked.

"Nothing."

What did I do to her? Did I do it to Terry too? Did I do it to the others? Is that why I drive them away? Is that why I couldn't have a lasting relationship, why I could only attract the broken? Did women see right through the respectful façade I've erected around myself and discover the evil lurking in wait within me? Were the only ones willing to take the risk so desperate that they'll take whatever they can, even if it's evil?

Did Lisa ever think about me? Was I a mistake? Was I the root of all evil to her?

I was probably an afterthought, if even that much. Forgotten. More likely, I was consciously amputated from her memory, banished for all time, erased. A mistake from the distant past, one given no more importance than choosing the wrong Chinese take-out place.

In the end, that's all I was. Beaten. Broken.

"Nothing."

Or so I thought at the time, because - as a different writer once penned it - it is always the darkest before the dawn.