When Alex and I started dating I didn’t tell him about how my first boyfriend, Eliot, rescued me from a laboratory, or how he helped me open a portal to another dimension with the power of love. Like, real, true love. Who wants to hear something like that? On our first date I made the girls working at Cold Stone Creamery think everything in their store had melted. They didn’t understand why we wanted gooey puddles of thawed ice cream poured into waffle cones, but they gave it to us for free anyway.
The Man in the Yellow Suit told me this is how it would be on the outside. That I’d be a party trick, another nameless face in a sea of nobodies, and that my talents would go to waste. Not that I felt like my abilities were being put to good use by making a squadron full of Russian paramilitary operatives make out on live TV, or by convincing the Man in the Yellow Suit’s ex-wife, Stacy, to jump off her roof. I didn’t even know we were still worried about the Russians. Sometimes I find myself thinking about all those men dressed head to toe in olive green, and their tongues exploring each other’s mouths.
I shouldn’t have told Alex about how bicycles reminded me of my first time. Sometimes, when I see a kid riding a ten-speed with a barely illuminated headlight my heart jumps into my throat and all the glass shatters from here to the next county. We were having some dumb argument and I was trying to make a point about relationships not having to be defined by what came before them or something, or maybe I secretly wanted to tell him about Eliot and the kiss that opened a wormhole into another dimension. How the Man in the Yellow Suit was sucked into the vortex, and how Eliot never looked at me the same way after that night.
Alex got quiet in the way that meant he wanted to scream. I said that I was sorry he felt hurt, but I couldn’t change my past. He picked up his backpack and silently walked away, pretending that he didn’t know me. A car jumped the curb and smashed him through the front window of a coffee shop. Luckily no one else was hurt.