Chapter 8

It has been nearly 6 months and not a day has gone by that I have not thought of her. I am currently driving east on US 84 with Richard. We have been considering diversifying into the alternative energy market, looking at wind farms in Texas and New Mexico. The numbers look good, but it's all underpinned by subsidies, and the power generation is still too inconsistent to be reliable. I can't decide if the landscape, flat as a pancake but incredibly arable, looks more bleak with the addition of thousands of the solitary wind vanes facing in what seem like random directions, or if that is just what is being imposed by the barren landscape that my mind has been occupying since last summer.

My mind drifts back to that week. I left the Bingley's place the night of the quiz night, claiming pressing matters with Richard, but I just went to ground and laid low at my Aunt's holiday house in Denmark. Spent the whole time debating with myself to go back to Bing's but in the end fear won. From the texts I got from Bing and Caz, things got pretty ugly, as I knew they would, with Caz insulting everyone and everything associated with the Bennets. Lizzy, apparently, held her own, but Jane was pretty hurt by some of the things she said. Bing has always been conflict-averse, it's one of the reasons he's such good company, so I was surprised to hear he told Caz to get her own place or move in permanently with Louisa. I didn't care about her, though. I wanted to know how Elizabeth was doing.

I googled her, hoping to find her on social media, but she keeps about as low a personal profile as I do. I could only find some mentions of her winning awards as a psych major. I'm pretty sure she was doing her final year, first class honours. She's probably going to go straight into a PhD. I shake my head at the thought. That's not my Elizabeth. She'll want to get her hands into something real first. I don't know why I think I know her so well, or why I think of her as mine. I've built up this idea of who she is, and I can happily ruminate for hours at a time on what she would do, say or think about every single thing I'm doing. She has somehow gotten under my skin and has become the lens through which I view my life. I know I'm crazy. I guess it makes sense I would fall for a psych.

"What? Did you miss an exit?" Rich was startled awake when I slammed the steering wheel and audibly told myself to get a grip.

"Nah, mate. Just talking to myself."

"What the hell happened, D? I've been waiting for months for you to come clean, and now you are muttering to yourself like a lunatic. I know you ended up in Denmark at Mum & Dad's place. What happened with Charles? You guys haven't hung out much since then. I'm used to your morose, sullen silences, especially on boring Sunday afternoons or long drives, but this is ridiculous."

I am not prepared for this. The silence stretches past the point of rudeness while I'm deciding how much to reveal. Richard feigns sleep but I can tell he's just waiting. He waits until we get to the private airfield outside San Antonio to take the jet home. Just like in a movie where time passes in a montage with suitably sombre orchestral music, or maybe an ironic pop song, I launch into my answer as though only seconds have passed, once we're in flight. In the end, his silence draws it all out of me. His response is typically Richard.

"Well, at least we can be certain you're not gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that."

"Jeez, Rich. That's the best you can do? I know I'm not gay."

He looks at me with an eyebrow raised. Silence, again.

"I'm just glad I felt something work like it's supposed to, even though it scared the crap out of me."

"Why did you run, though? You had a week, you could have seen her again, maybe the next time you saw her it would have fizzled? Now, you're obsessing about her like you're 12 and just had your first kiss."

"I'm 28 and I've just had my first kiss! It took me 5 years of therapy not to wash my hands every time I touched a doorknob or had to suppress the gag reflex when someone inadvertently touched me. I had a normal interaction, I initiated an intimate gesture, and I didn't have a meltdown."

"So, what exactly, is the problem?"

"I don't know, Rich. I've spent the last 10 years cleaning up my mind from the mess it was left in after Mum died. I was so lost and confused and the hormones went haywire and got all distorted by the grief and then Aunt Catherine twisted it all into some toxic germ phobia and I know it's not the same, but I just can't go there. Being around people like that, it just feels like I'm going backwards. I can't go back there again, I thought I had gotten past it but clearly I've just avoided it."

"Darcy, you just said yourself that this is a whole new feeling. You're actually moving forward, not backward. I think there's a reason for that, and I think you'll actually go backwards if you keep running. You dream about her every night, don't you? You mumble in your sleep, Darce. I've heard you say her name almost every night this trip. How long are you going to live with that?"

"I don't think I can stand to be her project and I don't want to be some kind of experiment to see if she can make me a normal person or something. She won't be able to help herself. And I've already burned my bridges there anyway, she's better off without me."

"Oh right, so this is all about you being noble?" His snort of derision is punctuated by an expletive about me being a coward.

He might be right.