Love Potion
by Jaye Nasir
When I found the vial tucked in the back of the medicine cabinet, I didn’t know what it was. It was colorless, pungent. It smelled like the air in early spring, pale blue and full of promise. Like my grandmother’s backyard and the passage beyond the fence that led to the old school where the honeysuckle grew wild and the afternoons bled slowly into nights. The sensation was euphoric. The hair on my arms stood on end. Some olfactory stimulation happened to connect me directly with childhood, its happy silence and sense of mystery.
I assumed it was a perfume, or an essential oil. It wasn’t the type of thing that I would have expected Jaime to own, but then this ongoing process of discovery was, I felt, part of the joy of moving in together.
I put the vial back where I’d found it, and grabbed the antacid I’d been fetching for him in the first place.
#
I didn’t rediscover the vial for weeks.
I was cleaning the bathroom, and had decided to reorganize everything as a surprise for Jaime, when I stumbled upon it again. I remembered how much I’d liked it, and opened it for another sniff. It smelled as it had, but this time it brought on different sense memories: the woods where Dad and I would take our walks; a bouquet of grocery store carnations in crinkly packaging; sitting in the passenger’s seat of a car with my head against the windowpane, watching the scenery roll by and knowing I was headed somewhere where I was welcome.
I must have sat on the bathroom floor for fifteen minutes or more, just sniffing it. Catching fireflies between my palms and watching my flesh glow. Jaime’s eyes, the sound of his voice. Holding hands with Rebecca, my best friend in second grade, scrunched into those sticky green bus seats. Falling into a heavy, dreamless sleep right after an orgasm.
When I heard Jaime’s key in the lock, I scrambled up, put the vial away, and got back to cleaning. I felt disappointed in myself, and embarrassed for feeling disappointed. I wanted to have everything perfect before he came home. I wanted to see that quirk of shock and delight in his eyes, for him to tell me, as he always did, that I was a dream come true.
#
He and I worked opposite schedules, and at times the only significant amount of time we spent together was early in the morning and late at night. We had sex religiously, fervently, even numb with exhaustion. I felt bruised inside, happy, empty of everything but the soft hum of my blood. I slept easier than I ever had in my life, and my dreams were of more consequence, though I could never recall them. It’d been like this since we’d started seeing one another, and unlike in my past relationships, the thrumming, full body want had never abated. Sometimes I wished that it would, that I could emerge from the fog of physical joy in order to have more intellectually stimulating conversations. But I felt altered around him. I became shy, more physically aware, careful with my movements. I recognized that this fear was part of love, part of its burning.
I usually only saw my friends when Jaime wasn’t around. When I brought him out with me, he didn’t seem to know what to say to them. He was only talkative when we were alone, where he could be comfortable, free with himself.
One day, a few weeks after discovering the vial, I was supposed to meet a friend for coffee. It was my day off, and I got up early, showered, and went into the medicine cabinet for one quick sniff of the vial—only to get caught up. I descended into deep green river water, the familiarity felt within certain dreamscapes, the way the light had refracted through a crystal paperweight that one of my college professors had kept on her desk. I felt it all and knew it all physically. Daphne blooming late in winter. Walking through the cemetery on a foggy morning. Jaime’s voice singing me to sleep: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
The ding of a text alert pulled me out of—wherever I was. I capped the vial and realized I was ten minutes late for coffee, naked, my hair still in a towel, the bathroom mirror fogged over, the air around me humid and lank.
I told myself it would be rude to make my friend wait even longer for me to get dressed and make it over there. That was how I justified it. I texted her that I was so sorry, I thought I was sick, I overslept, I felt awful.
Then I went back to the vial. I didn’t even bother getting dressed.
#
I worked at a bookstore, and Jaime managed the coffee shop adjacent to it. I’d known him vaguely for months, but we’d barely spoken until one day he brought me a free cup of coffee, some order that had gotten messed up. It was early spring. I remember, because through the windows I could see the sidewalks littered with cherry blossoms, but otherwise the street was gray and thick with fog.
Something happened to me then and there. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was close enough. I was struck by Jaime, enamored. Our interaction replayed in my head for days, and I began to dream of him. When other people at work mentioned his name, I clammed up, became nervous. I tried to shrug it off, push it down, but he must have felt it, too, because every time we shared a shift after that, he’d bring me a cup of coffee.
If I went a few days without seeing him, I began to feel composed, more sure of myself, but when I saw him again I would lose track of it all. My ideas about myself blurred, became inextricable from his body, the careful movements of his hands, the way he would look at me with such tenderness, such delight, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.
I realized, on the first night we slept together, that I had never been in love with anyone. I hadn’t known the meaning of the word. I had been play-acting, falling into step. People told me they loved me and I agreed, said it back, assumed that was all it was, muted, gentle, manageable.
What I felt for Jaime was tyrannical. I felt blessedly empty, without character, without ambition or interest. I wanted to feel the warmth of his body, his breath, to sit beside him, watch the weather, speak and listen, disappear into the soft pull of time. I had been striving for so long, making lists, goals, life plans, looking for meaning, trying to create meaning, working, always working for the answer which was contained, easily and without words, in him.
I felt, at last, that it was enough to simply live.
#
I knew I had a problem. I only wanted to smell the vial, to hold it in my hands. I was rigorous about checking up on it, and became paranoid that it would one day disappear, and I would be forced to give up my strange and inexplicable addiction. At some point, I noticed that the amount of liquid in the vial was reducing, very slightly, over time. I tried approaching the subject over coffee—which Jaime sweetly brewed and poured for me each morning, no matter how early either of us worked—but I felt too awkward, and the words didn’t come. If I had only brought it up months ago, when I had first discovered the vial, it would have been one thing. By now I felt too entangled with it, guilty of something I didn’t have a name for.
“Are you feeling alright, kitten?” Jaime asked. He liked pet names, and I had come to like them, too.
“I’m fine. I’m happy. I’m happy.”
And I was. Behind and among my trepidation, I was alight with joy, blue joy, like Jaime’s eyes, the undertone of his skin, the veins that lined his forearms. Love was blooming in me. I was swollen with it, my rib cage aching, my gut heavy. I was in love. I was so in love that I was barely anything else.
#
Day by day the liquid in the vial decreased, until one day it was nearly empty, then it was gone, and the next day it was back, full up again. I asked Jaime all about what he’d done the day before, and it was only work, the bar, the grocery store. What did he buy?
“What we’re eating now, Angel. And some batteries, toilet paper. You worried about something?”
“Is there something for me to worry about?”
“If you think, if you have some suspicions—you can say them out loud. I won’t be angry. You know I’m not like that.”
“I know.” I tried to laugh it off. “I know. It’s no big deal. I’m just feeling...” I shrugged, and didn’t finish the thought.
He smiled his careful smile, and the look made things churn inside of me, humid as breath. It occurred to me for the first time that I could not, necessarily, trust this feeling.
#
The next time the vial went missing, a few weeks later, I lied about going to yoga, waited behind our building, and followed Jaime when he went out. I didn’t suspect him of anything specific. I had only an airy, imprecise anxiety. His walking pace was faster than mine, but I kept him within my line of sight at all times, weaving through the sparse weekday morning crowds and the hot breath of the cars at the crosswalks. I didn’t know what I was doing, and barely wanted to find out.
Jaime ran errands, picking up cigarettes and a few groceries at the corner store. Then, a few blocks further on, he went into a nondescript glass door that was tucked between a salon and a pawn shop. Though I had walked down this street many times, and sometimes went out of my way to take it because it was lined with silver birch trees that yellowed beautifully in autumn, I had never noticed this door before now. Dark inner curtains were drawn across its windowed surface, and only standing very close could I read the words printed, in black, across the glass: Botanical Supply & Unholy Ephemera.
Jaime wasn’t inside for long. I ducked into the salon just before he came out, and asked about their prices for coloring treatments. I could see through the frosted glass that it was his outline, wearing his clothes, so I spoke to the receptionist for too long, complimenting her on her jewelry with exaggerated enthusiasm, until I was sure he would be gone. Then, I stepped out, swallowed my unease, and slipped into Botanical Supply & Unholy Ephemera.
It was dimly lit and not very furnished. Behind the counter were glass jars containing what might have been tea or herbs of some kind, and against the wall there were several locked cases housing antiques. What little light there was in the room reflected against all this glass, giving the place a watery, mirrored atmosphere. Somber classical music played from a cheap sounding speaker system behind the front counter, where a middle-aged man in jeans and a button-down was looking at his phone.
I opened my mouth, standing just inside the door, and said nothing.
His gaze stayed on his phone screen for several more seconds before he put it away and greeted me. His eyes, too, were glassy.
“Hello. What are you in the market for?”
He was tall, but stooped, his posture caving forward.
“Uh. I’m just—browsing.” I looked around, trying to appear at ease. “What do you—sorry, I’ve never been in here before. What do you sell?”
The man’s expression didn’t shift. He gestured toward the cabinets by the far wall, then to the full shelves behind him.
I smiled awkwardly, wanting to leave, and wandered over to look into the cabinets. They were full of books, mostly, with a few odds and ends—single gloves, ornate knives, framed black and white photos, a few diagrams, decks of cards. A horned mask dominated one of the cabinets, and below it were several carvings of men’s faces, in stone or wood.
“These are cool,” I said conversationally.
“Green Men,” the shopkeeper said, “mostly.”
“Is this supposed to be the devil?” I pointed to the horned mask.
He smiled with placid condescension. “No.”
The music wasn’t overly loud, but it dominated the small room. The entire space must have been more extensive, because there were two doors, both unlabeled, at the side of the room furthest from the exit. I wanted to leave, but didn’t think I’d ever make it back in if I did. I was shy of asking about Jaime, or of engaging with this man at all. There was something knowing in the way his eyes followed me through the shop. His friendliness felt unkind.
Finally, I worked my way around to the front counter, scanning the glass containers behind it, at last catching sight of several jars on the lower shelves that looked empty. It took me a moment of focus to realize they each contained a colorless liquid. It could have been water. It could have been gin.
“What’s all that?” I asked, gesturing towards the jars.
“Concoctions.”
“Oh. I mean—what does that mean?”
“The word ‘concoctions’?”
I restrained an eye-roll. “No. I know what the word means. What kind of concoctions?”
The man’s look of distant irony was slight enough that I had to argue myself out of being enraged by it.
“For almost whatever you like: courage, expedience, prosperity, love—”
“Love?” I stopped him mid-sentence.
His smile widened. “Ah. Yes, that word always gets a woman’s attention.”
“That’s not…” I swallowed my argument, clenching my teeth. I didn’t need to waste my breath here, in this claustrophobic little room, struggling to prove or disprove something to this man.
“Would you like a small sample?”
I felt ill, but played along. “Maybe just a look.”
He turned his back to me, shuffled around for a few seconds, then carefully lifted a large jar and set it on the counter between us. He opened it slowly, his movements imprecise. His fingers were large, blunt and purpling.
“May I?” I asked, leaning forward, and he nodded.
I inhaled cautiously, holding my fear very still.
It smelled of the rain in late winter, when the ground begins to thaw and flowering yellow weeds push up out of the earth. Waking early in the morning on a day off and falling easily back to sleep. The warmth of another body, the lullaby of its breath.
I stumbled back. My head was swimming. “How—” I stuttered, “why is that love?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why would ‘love’ smell that way?”
He shrugged. “What way?”
“I can’t describe it. It’s—many things.”
“Love is many things, isn’t it?”
I pressed my lips together. My chest felt hollow. “What happens if you drink it?”
“As it is, nothing much. Fleeting feelings of euphoria, amorphous, without focus, much like a drug. However, if you were to give me a strand of your hair, perhaps a fingernail or, best of all, a drop of blood—well, mixed in, it would direct the drinker’s euphoria towards you.”
“You mean that it would make somebody love me.” I didn’t ask it as a question. I knew the answer. I knew it with all of the bile in my throat.
“I can give you a deal on the first purchase, with a money-back guarantee if it doesn’t work to your satisfaction.”
“I don’t,” I began, but trailed off as the music cut out.
“Damn thing,” the shopkeeper said, fumbling with his phone.
He struggled to reconnect the Bluetooth, to get the music going again, but in the interval of silence I could hear from beyond one of the doors at the other end of the room, an eerie singing. If the voices were singing in words, I couldn’t understand them, but the emotion underlying the voices was ecstatic, unhinged. It sounded like a cross between a church choir and howling.
Shortly, the classical music came back on, and the shopkeeper regarded me with a look that in no way acknowledged what we’d both just heard. “So, would a few weeks’ supply do?”
I shook my head, thanked him hurriedly and went out of the store.
#
I took it in stride. To acknowledge my terror would have dismantled the architecture of my life, so I kept it tucked away in the pit of my stomach. My best course of action was to barely act at all. The next day, when Jaime brought me my morning cup of coffee, I took it with a smile, kissed him on the cheek, and held the rim of the cup to my lips. Once he’d left for work, I poured it down the drain. I worked a later shift, and could have brewed myself another cup, but somehow everything in the house seemed contaminated, as if doused in the clear liquid. Instead, I walked blind and silent through the autumn morning, taking little notice of the chill or the sweet scent of decay hanging over everything, to the coffee shop down the street. I sat for hours at a corner table, without appetite, listening to my pulse, to the shattered cadence of my breath, trying to detect the shift as it happened.
That first day, I barely noticed a change, but the next day I woke uneasily, feeling itchy, disgusted. Jaime was already up, had already brewed coffee and even made breakfast. He was always doing sweet things like that. Anyone would have been happy, but I felt nauseous, steeped in fog. Simply pretending to drink the coffee didn’t do anything to diminish my caffeine headache. Staring at him across the table, as we spoke about the previous day, I wondered how I could have ever been attracted to him. He was good to me, sure, but his face was blustering, pink as a child’s, and his kindnesses were laced with condescension. His hands, which I had so recently loved, looked ugly to me then, moving over his plate. Even his movements struck me as supercilious.
This had happened before, with previous partners. Time had worn their image into my mind, and one day I had looked at them and suddenly seen all of their flaws so glaringly, so magnified, that I wondered how I had never noticed them before. The magic had faded, and reality—or maybe just a seething unreality formed by the resentment of overexposure—had set in. This, I told myself, was just happening again. There was nothing to it but that. Still, I didn’t drink the coffee he served me.
After a week, he noticed my reticence, and I lied and said that the acidity was getting to my stomach, and that I was going to try to quit drinking coffee. To his credit, he only let the slightest flash of panic into his eyes before suggesting I try substituting tea in the mornings instead. So, he began to rise early each day and brew me a pot of tea, along with his own cup of coffee.
It was a gesture of love, I told myself, pouring huge gulpfuls out of my mug anytime he would leave the room.
The caffeine headaches got worse. I stopped by the coffee shop on my way to work each day, insisting on riding my bike even when Jaime wanted to drive me. One day it was pouring rain and I couldn’t refuse, so I went my whole shift without coffee, feeling at once deflated and full of rage.
With each day that passed Jaime became more and more intolerable to me. His sweetness became smothering, his loving looks made my skin crawl. When he called me pet names, I felt disassociated from myself, absent from my own body. When, in the past, people had questioned our apparent lack of compatibility, I had been so sure of my love that my confidence had overwhelmed their doubts. Now their doubts were my doubts. My sex drive was dead, and my dreams were labyrinths, endless and infuriating.
Somehow, I spent weeks like this, wading through depression, utter disenchantment with myself, my relationship, the material of my life. The daily grind kept me going, the long shifts and movie nights, bottles of wine, the twenty minutes of freedom between our work and our apartment, with the wind whipping past me, the hills carrying me down, down, my bicycle wheels spinning of their own accord. The movement of life carried me. Down, down. When Jaime kissed me, I felt bereft, full of grief for the blinding clarity of love that I had lost.
#
I gave in. I started drinking the cups of tea he gave me, quickly claimed recovery and switched back to coffee, and drank it down every day with gratitude. I kissed Jaime on both his eyelids. I laughed at his jokes. I let myself drown in the love that surged through me. I knew I was being drowned. We began to have sex regularly again, and I reentered the paradise of the body. I was flooded, dripping. My head rang with love. I was a victim of something I didn’t have a name for. I knew I was allowing myself to be erased by love, destroyed by it, but that was somehow so much easier than just being. So, I let him dose me. I let him poison me. Every day I said it would be the last day, that tomorrow I would dump the cup, come back to myself, but every day I drank it down just the same.
I still checked for the vial in the back of the medicine cabinet. I didn’t smell it anymore. I didn’t want to physically confront the material of my exploitation. I just watched it grow smaller day by day, then be emptied, refilled. I wondered if Jaime gave the man his hair, his fingernails, or his blood. Even knowing that I must be consuming part of him, taking a piece of him into my body, I was happy. I knew it was disgusting, but the poison prevented disgust. Love heightened some senses and muffled others. Was it real love if it was manufactured? Maybe it was better than real love. Real love bloomed and then wilted, or at best simply settled, was integrated into the self.
This love was always raging. I burned with it. I burned.
#
Rain on pavement. Halloween night. My mother dressing me early in the morning, before school, as I watched the blue frost on the windowpanes melt. A thicket of sunflowers taller than my head, bowing in a hot summer wind. These moments were all part of me and part of my love for Jaime. They made him part of me. I tried to understand it, but couldn’t. It didn’t matter. Understanding it wouldn’t make it more or less real.
One morning, in the pale depth of winter, I simply let my coffee go cold, untouched. Jaime didn’t notice. He was busy, rushing around, talking about himself as I listened eagerly, adoringly. I didn’t feel the adoration decrease, but began to disconnect from it, watching myself from a distance. I don’t know where my strength came from, if it was even strength, or just exhaustion. It happens to everyone: you try to beat down a door for years only to find one day that it was never even locked.
I stopped drinking or eating anything he served me, and within days I was just myself, lonely within my own body, clean and loveless as a saint. I looked at my own hands and felt their weight. I missed the poison. I wanted to drink the poison. Instead, I confronted Jaime.
#
It was evening. He brought home take-out for dinner, but instead of kissing him and asking about his day as I usually did, I sat still with my elbows against the table and said, “You raped me.”
The vial was sitting on the table in front of me. The cap was off. I had been sniffing it, waiting for him to come home, caught in the lavender atmosphere of a dream.
“Kitten,” he said, face wide with fear, dropping the bag on the counter. “You don’t understand.”
“It’s a love potion, right?” I didn’t sit up straight, and my voice lacked anger or even disgust. To my own ears, I just sounded tired. “You really believe in this shit, Jaime?”
His initial reaction must have been brought out by shock, because his expression disappeared, his posture eased up, and he seemed to put the full force of his ego into denying the reality of what was happening.
“I don’t know what’s going on right now, Kat, but let’s just calm down, talk about it.”
He took off his jacket and slung it, casually, over the back of the chair opposite me.
“Okay. I wouldn’t have had sex with you if you hadn’t dosed me. I wouldn’t have even gone out with you. It’s basically a date-rape drug. You understand that, right?”
He cocked his head to the side, and gave me a quizzical, fond look. “Kitty.”
“Do you understand what you did to me?” My voice came out harder. Somehow, his disinterest in my pain astounded me. He had always been so tender with me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you might be very confused, Katerina.”
His tone was measured, discreet.
“So, what is this, then?” I asked, gesturing to the vial that sat between us.
Jaime blinked at me exaggeratedly. “How should I know?”
I stood up, my voice rising, my face and neck growing hot. “You’re sick. You and that fucker from the store. I’m going to tell people. I’m going to tell everyone what you did to me.”
“You think anyone’s going to believe you?” he shot back, smiling. He no longer seemed afraid of implicating himself, though, after several moments of ugly silence, he repeated, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I tried not to cry. I knew, on some level, that he was right. Nobody would believe me. I wouldn’t have believed myself. But it had happened. It was real. Wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t? If I really was losing it, accusing my sweet and loving boyfriend of some absurd and fantastical crime? I could live in that reality. Just one drop a day and some concerted denial, and we could live out the fantasy forever.
“I loved you,” I spat at Jaime, making it into an accusation.
“I love you, too, Kitty,” he said softly, his eyes seeking mine, trying to lull me into following, I suppose, the path that I was staring down, full of longing and despair.
I looked from his face, to the vial, and back. “It’s not real.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then said at last, “It never is.” Something gentle in his gaze made me feel, for a second, the phantom of whatever it was that had burned between us. “It’s just a chemical in your brain. Your body produces it, and it creates the physical and psychological experience of love. A drop of this is barely different at all.” He nodded at the vial, taking slow steps toward me. “Love is never really consensual. It's just something that happens to you. Do you think I chose to feel the way I do about you?” He shook his head. “I can’t control it. I never could.”
“But my brain didn’t produce those chemicals for you,” I snapped. “It’s different.”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “But, if anything, the potion is better. No doubt, no fear, and no boredom. The flame never goes out.”
He gave me a slightly flirtatious smile. He had me. He was sure that he had me.
Didn’t he? He was right about what I’d loved most. Not him, but the experience of loving him, the act of loving. To be full of something, to never be empty, never feel the pangs of my own chaotic, existential longings. I could reject him, leave him, but what would I be leaving him for? The everyday ache of absence, of wondering what the point of it all was?
I picked up the vial and, holding Jaime’s gaze, took a tiny sip.
A beatific smile broke out in his face, and his gaze glowed with happiness.
“I love you so much, Katerina,” he said. He came close and took me in his arms, tilting my face up to his. He kissed me, and I kissed back, not with love, but with terror, even as I could feel the euphoria spitting through my blood. “Things are so good for us,” Jaime said. “We’re so happy. Our life is so beautiful, isn’t it?”
I didn’t reply, but swiftly, before he could register what I was doing, I lifted the vial to my lips again and drained it, grimacing as I swallowed the contents, though they were tasteless as my own spit.
“Hey,” Jaime said, grappling with my wrist, pulling my hand from my face, “you’re not supposed to…” He took the vial from my hand, turned it upside down, and shook. Then he took me in his arms again, and shook me. “Kat, he said never to—he said it was dangerous.”
His pupils were blown out. He looked elated and afraid.
“Jaime. I love you.” I gripped him with the force of it.
He kissed me, forgetting the danger. His mouth was hot and encompassing. His love fell into me and mine fell into him. My body sang with heat, my steps stumbled, and I fell against him. We stumbled back, jostling the table, pressing together, as if we could go right through each other, past the flesh.
“It’s so good to love,” I said, against his lips, and he laughed, simply, like a child, with relief and exhilaration.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
My body leaned into his like a weight. I felt fire in my fingers and at the creases of my hips. I felt mystical, divine. Love roared in me, poisoning everything. I pushed Jaime backwards over the chair and, laughing, he fell, and his head clattered back first, his skull colliding hard with the marble corner of the kitchen counter before banging against the floor. I fell on top of him, laughing too.
Beneath me, he shook for a moment, opening his mouth as if to speak, but I covered it with mine, breathing into him, breathing him into me, destroying him, destroying myself. Eventually, his body stilled beneath mine, his breathing ceased, but still I did not stop kissing him, pressing my body into his.
From the corner of my eye, I watched the blood spill out from behind his head, oozing across the tile, deep and dark. I loved his blood, his flesh, his silence.
It was so good to love.
I assumed it was a perfume, or an essential oil. It wasn’t the type of thing that I would have expected Jaime to own, but then this ongoing process of discovery was, I felt, part of the joy of moving in together.
I put the vial back where I’d found it, and grabbed the antacid I’d been fetching for him in the first place.
#
I didn’t rediscover the vial for weeks.
I was cleaning the bathroom, and had decided to reorganize everything as a surprise for Jaime, when I stumbled upon it again. I remembered how much I’d liked it, and opened it for another sniff. It smelled as it had, but this time it brought on different sense memories: the woods where Dad and I would take our walks; a bouquet of grocery store carnations in crinkly packaging; sitting in the passenger’s seat of a car with my head against the windowpane, watching the scenery roll by and knowing I was headed somewhere where I was welcome.
I must have sat on the bathroom floor for fifteen minutes or more, just sniffing it. Catching fireflies between my palms and watching my flesh glow. Jaime’s eyes, the sound of his voice. Holding hands with Rebecca, my best friend in second grade, scrunched into those sticky green bus seats. Falling into a heavy, dreamless sleep right after an orgasm.
When I heard Jaime’s key in the lock, I scrambled up, put the vial away, and got back to cleaning. I felt disappointed in myself, and embarrassed for feeling disappointed. I wanted to have everything perfect before he came home. I wanted to see that quirk of shock and delight in his eyes, for him to tell me, as he always did, that I was a dream come true.
#
He and I worked opposite schedules, and at times the only significant amount of time we spent together was early in the morning and late at night. We had sex religiously, fervently, even numb with exhaustion. I felt bruised inside, happy, empty of everything but the soft hum of my blood. I slept easier than I ever had in my life, and my dreams were of more consequence, though I could never recall them. It’d been like this since we’d started seeing one another, and unlike in my past relationships, the thrumming, full body want had never abated. Sometimes I wished that it would, that I could emerge from the fog of physical joy in order to have more intellectually stimulating conversations. But I felt altered around him. I became shy, more physically aware, careful with my movements. I recognized that this fear was part of love, part of its burning.
I usually only saw my friends when Jaime wasn’t around. When I brought him out with me, he didn’t seem to know what to say to them. He was only talkative when we were alone, where he could be comfortable, free with himself.
One day, a few weeks after discovering the vial, I was supposed to meet a friend for coffee. It was my day off, and I got up early, showered, and went into the medicine cabinet for one quick sniff of the vial—only to get caught up. I descended into deep green river water, the familiarity felt within certain dreamscapes, the way the light had refracted through a crystal paperweight that one of my college professors had kept on her desk. I felt it all and knew it all physically. Daphne blooming late in winter. Walking through the cemetery on a foggy morning. Jaime’s voice singing me to sleep: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
The ding of a text alert pulled me out of—wherever I was. I capped the vial and realized I was ten minutes late for coffee, naked, my hair still in a towel, the bathroom mirror fogged over, the air around me humid and lank.
I told myself it would be rude to make my friend wait even longer for me to get dressed and make it over there. That was how I justified it. I texted her that I was so sorry, I thought I was sick, I overslept, I felt awful.
Then I went back to the vial. I didn’t even bother getting dressed.
#
I worked at a bookstore, and Jaime managed the coffee shop adjacent to it. I’d known him vaguely for months, but we’d barely spoken until one day he brought me a free cup of coffee, some order that had gotten messed up. It was early spring. I remember, because through the windows I could see the sidewalks littered with cherry blossoms, but otherwise the street was gray and thick with fog.
Something happened to me then and there. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was close enough. I was struck by Jaime, enamored. Our interaction replayed in my head for days, and I began to dream of him. When other people at work mentioned his name, I clammed up, became nervous. I tried to shrug it off, push it down, but he must have felt it, too, because every time we shared a shift after that, he’d bring me a cup of coffee.
If I went a few days without seeing him, I began to feel composed, more sure of myself, but when I saw him again I would lose track of it all. My ideas about myself blurred, became inextricable from his body, the careful movements of his hands, the way he would look at me with such tenderness, such delight, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.
I realized, on the first night we slept together, that I had never been in love with anyone. I hadn’t known the meaning of the word. I had been play-acting, falling into step. People told me they loved me and I agreed, said it back, assumed that was all it was, muted, gentle, manageable.
What I felt for Jaime was tyrannical. I felt blessedly empty, without character, without ambition or interest. I wanted to feel the warmth of his body, his breath, to sit beside him, watch the weather, speak and listen, disappear into the soft pull of time. I had been striving for so long, making lists, goals, life plans, looking for meaning, trying to create meaning, working, always working for the answer which was contained, easily and without words, in him.
I felt, at last, that it was enough to simply live.
#
I knew I had a problem. I only wanted to smell the vial, to hold it in my hands. I was rigorous about checking up on it, and became paranoid that it would one day disappear, and I would be forced to give up my strange and inexplicable addiction. At some point, I noticed that the amount of liquid in the vial was reducing, very slightly, over time. I tried approaching the subject over coffee—which Jaime sweetly brewed and poured for me each morning, no matter how early either of us worked—but I felt too awkward, and the words didn’t come. If I had only brought it up months ago, when I had first discovered the vial, it would have been one thing. By now I felt too entangled with it, guilty of something I didn’t have a name for.
“Are you feeling alright, kitten?” Jaime asked. He liked pet names, and I had come to like them, too.
“I’m fine. I’m happy. I’m happy.”
And I was. Behind and among my trepidation, I was alight with joy, blue joy, like Jaime’s eyes, the undertone of his skin, the veins that lined his forearms. Love was blooming in me. I was swollen with it, my rib cage aching, my gut heavy. I was in love. I was so in love that I was barely anything else.
#
Day by day the liquid in the vial decreased, until one day it was nearly empty, then it was gone, and the next day it was back, full up again. I asked Jaime all about what he’d done the day before, and it was only work, the bar, the grocery store. What did he buy?
“What we’re eating now, Angel. And some batteries, toilet paper. You worried about something?”
“Is there something for me to worry about?”
“If you think, if you have some suspicions—you can say them out loud. I won’t be angry. You know I’m not like that.”
“I know.” I tried to laugh it off. “I know. It’s no big deal. I’m just feeling...” I shrugged, and didn’t finish the thought.
He smiled his careful smile, and the look made things churn inside of me, humid as breath. It occurred to me for the first time that I could not, necessarily, trust this feeling.
#
The next time the vial went missing, a few weeks later, I lied about going to yoga, waited behind our building, and followed Jaime when he went out. I didn’t suspect him of anything specific. I had only an airy, imprecise anxiety. His walking pace was faster than mine, but I kept him within my line of sight at all times, weaving through the sparse weekday morning crowds and the hot breath of the cars at the crosswalks. I didn’t know what I was doing, and barely wanted to find out.
Jaime ran errands, picking up cigarettes and a few groceries at the corner store. Then, a few blocks further on, he went into a nondescript glass door that was tucked between a salon and a pawn shop. Though I had walked down this street many times, and sometimes went out of my way to take it because it was lined with silver birch trees that yellowed beautifully in autumn, I had never noticed this door before now. Dark inner curtains were drawn across its windowed surface, and only standing very close could I read the words printed, in black, across the glass: Botanical Supply & Unholy Ephemera.
Jaime wasn’t inside for long. I ducked into the salon just before he came out, and asked about their prices for coloring treatments. I could see through the frosted glass that it was his outline, wearing his clothes, so I spoke to the receptionist for too long, complimenting her on her jewelry with exaggerated enthusiasm, until I was sure he would be gone. Then, I stepped out, swallowed my unease, and slipped into Botanical Supply & Unholy Ephemera.
It was dimly lit and not very furnished. Behind the counter were glass jars containing what might have been tea or herbs of some kind, and against the wall there were several locked cases housing antiques. What little light there was in the room reflected against all this glass, giving the place a watery, mirrored atmosphere. Somber classical music played from a cheap sounding speaker system behind the front counter, where a middle-aged man in jeans and a button-down was looking at his phone.
I opened my mouth, standing just inside the door, and said nothing.
His gaze stayed on his phone screen for several more seconds before he put it away and greeted me. His eyes, too, were glassy.
“Hello. What are you in the market for?”
He was tall, but stooped, his posture caving forward.
“Uh. I’m just—browsing.” I looked around, trying to appear at ease. “What do you—sorry, I’ve never been in here before. What do you sell?”
The man’s expression didn’t shift. He gestured toward the cabinets by the far wall, then to the full shelves behind him.
I smiled awkwardly, wanting to leave, and wandered over to look into the cabinets. They were full of books, mostly, with a few odds and ends—single gloves, ornate knives, framed black and white photos, a few diagrams, decks of cards. A horned mask dominated one of the cabinets, and below it were several carvings of men’s faces, in stone or wood.
“These are cool,” I said conversationally.
“Green Men,” the shopkeeper said, “mostly.”
“Is this supposed to be the devil?” I pointed to the horned mask.
He smiled with placid condescension. “No.”
The music wasn’t overly loud, but it dominated the small room. The entire space must have been more extensive, because there were two doors, both unlabeled, at the side of the room furthest from the exit. I wanted to leave, but didn’t think I’d ever make it back in if I did. I was shy of asking about Jaime, or of engaging with this man at all. There was something knowing in the way his eyes followed me through the shop. His friendliness felt unkind.
Finally, I worked my way around to the front counter, scanning the glass containers behind it, at last catching sight of several jars on the lower shelves that looked empty. It took me a moment of focus to realize they each contained a colorless liquid. It could have been water. It could have been gin.
“What’s all that?” I asked, gesturing towards the jars.
“Concoctions.”
“Oh. I mean—what does that mean?”
“The word ‘concoctions’?”
I restrained an eye-roll. “No. I know what the word means. What kind of concoctions?”
The man’s look of distant irony was slight enough that I had to argue myself out of being enraged by it.
“For almost whatever you like: courage, expedience, prosperity, love—”
“Love?” I stopped him mid-sentence.
His smile widened. “Ah. Yes, that word always gets a woman’s attention.”
“That’s not…” I swallowed my argument, clenching my teeth. I didn’t need to waste my breath here, in this claustrophobic little room, struggling to prove or disprove something to this man.
“Would you like a small sample?”
I felt ill, but played along. “Maybe just a look.”
He turned his back to me, shuffled around for a few seconds, then carefully lifted a large jar and set it on the counter between us. He opened it slowly, his movements imprecise. His fingers were large, blunt and purpling.
“May I?” I asked, leaning forward, and he nodded.
I inhaled cautiously, holding my fear very still.
It smelled of the rain in late winter, when the ground begins to thaw and flowering yellow weeds push up out of the earth. Waking early in the morning on a day off and falling easily back to sleep. The warmth of another body, the lullaby of its breath.
I stumbled back. My head was swimming. “How—” I stuttered, “why is that love?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why would ‘love’ smell that way?”
He shrugged. “What way?”
“I can’t describe it. It’s—many things.”
“Love is many things, isn’t it?”
I pressed my lips together. My chest felt hollow. “What happens if you drink it?”
“As it is, nothing much. Fleeting feelings of euphoria, amorphous, without focus, much like a drug. However, if you were to give me a strand of your hair, perhaps a fingernail or, best of all, a drop of blood—well, mixed in, it would direct the drinker’s euphoria towards you.”
“You mean that it would make somebody love me.” I didn’t ask it as a question. I knew the answer. I knew it with all of the bile in my throat.
“I can give you a deal on the first purchase, with a money-back guarantee if it doesn’t work to your satisfaction.”
“I don’t,” I began, but trailed off as the music cut out.
“Damn thing,” the shopkeeper said, fumbling with his phone.
He struggled to reconnect the Bluetooth, to get the music going again, but in the interval of silence I could hear from beyond one of the doors at the other end of the room, an eerie singing. If the voices were singing in words, I couldn’t understand them, but the emotion underlying the voices was ecstatic, unhinged. It sounded like a cross between a church choir and howling.
Shortly, the classical music came back on, and the shopkeeper regarded me with a look that in no way acknowledged what we’d both just heard. “So, would a few weeks’ supply do?”
I shook my head, thanked him hurriedly and went out of the store.
#
I took it in stride. To acknowledge my terror would have dismantled the architecture of my life, so I kept it tucked away in the pit of my stomach. My best course of action was to barely act at all. The next day, when Jaime brought me my morning cup of coffee, I took it with a smile, kissed him on the cheek, and held the rim of the cup to my lips. Once he’d left for work, I poured it down the drain. I worked a later shift, and could have brewed myself another cup, but somehow everything in the house seemed contaminated, as if doused in the clear liquid. Instead, I walked blind and silent through the autumn morning, taking little notice of the chill or the sweet scent of decay hanging over everything, to the coffee shop down the street. I sat for hours at a corner table, without appetite, listening to my pulse, to the shattered cadence of my breath, trying to detect the shift as it happened.
That first day, I barely noticed a change, but the next day I woke uneasily, feeling itchy, disgusted. Jaime was already up, had already brewed coffee and even made breakfast. He was always doing sweet things like that. Anyone would have been happy, but I felt nauseous, steeped in fog. Simply pretending to drink the coffee didn’t do anything to diminish my caffeine headache. Staring at him across the table, as we spoke about the previous day, I wondered how I could have ever been attracted to him. He was good to me, sure, but his face was blustering, pink as a child’s, and his kindnesses were laced with condescension. His hands, which I had so recently loved, looked ugly to me then, moving over his plate. Even his movements struck me as supercilious.
This had happened before, with previous partners. Time had worn their image into my mind, and one day I had looked at them and suddenly seen all of their flaws so glaringly, so magnified, that I wondered how I had never noticed them before. The magic had faded, and reality—or maybe just a seething unreality formed by the resentment of overexposure—had set in. This, I told myself, was just happening again. There was nothing to it but that. Still, I didn’t drink the coffee he served me.
After a week, he noticed my reticence, and I lied and said that the acidity was getting to my stomach, and that I was going to try to quit drinking coffee. To his credit, he only let the slightest flash of panic into his eyes before suggesting I try substituting tea in the mornings instead. So, he began to rise early each day and brew me a pot of tea, along with his own cup of coffee.
It was a gesture of love, I told myself, pouring huge gulpfuls out of my mug anytime he would leave the room.
The caffeine headaches got worse. I stopped by the coffee shop on my way to work each day, insisting on riding my bike even when Jaime wanted to drive me. One day it was pouring rain and I couldn’t refuse, so I went my whole shift without coffee, feeling at once deflated and full of rage.
With each day that passed Jaime became more and more intolerable to me. His sweetness became smothering, his loving looks made my skin crawl. When he called me pet names, I felt disassociated from myself, absent from my own body. When, in the past, people had questioned our apparent lack of compatibility, I had been so sure of my love that my confidence had overwhelmed their doubts. Now their doubts were my doubts. My sex drive was dead, and my dreams were labyrinths, endless and infuriating.
Somehow, I spent weeks like this, wading through depression, utter disenchantment with myself, my relationship, the material of my life. The daily grind kept me going, the long shifts and movie nights, bottles of wine, the twenty minutes of freedom between our work and our apartment, with the wind whipping past me, the hills carrying me down, down, my bicycle wheels spinning of their own accord. The movement of life carried me. Down, down. When Jaime kissed me, I felt bereft, full of grief for the blinding clarity of love that I had lost.
#
I gave in. I started drinking the cups of tea he gave me, quickly claimed recovery and switched back to coffee, and drank it down every day with gratitude. I kissed Jaime on both his eyelids. I laughed at his jokes. I let myself drown in the love that surged through me. I knew I was being drowned. We began to have sex regularly again, and I reentered the paradise of the body. I was flooded, dripping. My head rang with love. I was a victim of something I didn’t have a name for. I knew I was allowing myself to be erased by love, destroyed by it, but that was somehow so much easier than just being. So, I let him dose me. I let him poison me. Every day I said it would be the last day, that tomorrow I would dump the cup, come back to myself, but every day I drank it down just the same.
I still checked for the vial in the back of the medicine cabinet. I didn’t smell it anymore. I didn’t want to physically confront the material of my exploitation. I just watched it grow smaller day by day, then be emptied, refilled. I wondered if Jaime gave the man his hair, his fingernails, or his blood. Even knowing that I must be consuming part of him, taking a piece of him into my body, I was happy. I knew it was disgusting, but the poison prevented disgust. Love heightened some senses and muffled others. Was it real love if it was manufactured? Maybe it was better than real love. Real love bloomed and then wilted, or at best simply settled, was integrated into the self.
This love was always raging. I burned with it. I burned.
#
Rain on pavement. Halloween night. My mother dressing me early in the morning, before school, as I watched the blue frost on the windowpanes melt. A thicket of sunflowers taller than my head, bowing in a hot summer wind. These moments were all part of me and part of my love for Jaime. They made him part of me. I tried to understand it, but couldn’t. It didn’t matter. Understanding it wouldn’t make it more or less real.
One morning, in the pale depth of winter, I simply let my coffee go cold, untouched. Jaime didn’t notice. He was busy, rushing around, talking about himself as I listened eagerly, adoringly. I didn’t feel the adoration decrease, but began to disconnect from it, watching myself from a distance. I don’t know where my strength came from, if it was even strength, or just exhaustion. It happens to everyone: you try to beat down a door for years only to find one day that it was never even locked.
I stopped drinking or eating anything he served me, and within days I was just myself, lonely within my own body, clean and loveless as a saint. I looked at my own hands and felt their weight. I missed the poison. I wanted to drink the poison. Instead, I confronted Jaime.
#
It was evening. He brought home take-out for dinner, but instead of kissing him and asking about his day as I usually did, I sat still with my elbows against the table and said, “You raped me.”
The vial was sitting on the table in front of me. The cap was off. I had been sniffing it, waiting for him to come home, caught in the lavender atmosphere of a dream.
“Kitten,” he said, face wide with fear, dropping the bag on the counter. “You don’t understand.”
“It’s a love potion, right?” I didn’t sit up straight, and my voice lacked anger or even disgust. To my own ears, I just sounded tired. “You really believe in this shit, Jaime?”
His initial reaction must have been brought out by shock, because his expression disappeared, his posture eased up, and he seemed to put the full force of his ego into denying the reality of what was happening.
“I don’t know what’s going on right now, Kat, but let’s just calm down, talk about it.”
He took off his jacket and slung it, casually, over the back of the chair opposite me.
“Okay. I wouldn’t have had sex with you if you hadn’t dosed me. I wouldn’t have even gone out with you. It’s basically a date-rape drug. You understand that, right?”
He cocked his head to the side, and gave me a quizzical, fond look. “Kitty.”
“Do you understand what you did to me?” My voice came out harder. Somehow, his disinterest in my pain astounded me. He had always been so tender with me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you might be very confused, Katerina.”
His tone was measured, discreet.
“So, what is this, then?” I asked, gesturing to the vial that sat between us.
Jaime blinked at me exaggeratedly. “How should I know?”
I stood up, my voice rising, my face and neck growing hot. “You’re sick. You and that fucker from the store. I’m going to tell people. I’m going to tell everyone what you did to me.”
“You think anyone’s going to believe you?” he shot back, smiling. He no longer seemed afraid of implicating himself, though, after several moments of ugly silence, he repeated, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I tried not to cry. I knew, on some level, that he was right. Nobody would believe me. I wouldn’t have believed myself. But it had happened. It was real. Wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t? If I really was losing it, accusing my sweet and loving boyfriend of some absurd and fantastical crime? I could live in that reality. Just one drop a day and some concerted denial, and we could live out the fantasy forever.
“I loved you,” I spat at Jaime, making it into an accusation.
“I love you, too, Kitty,” he said softly, his eyes seeking mine, trying to lull me into following, I suppose, the path that I was staring down, full of longing and despair.
I looked from his face, to the vial, and back. “It’s not real.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then said at last, “It never is.” Something gentle in his gaze made me feel, for a second, the phantom of whatever it was that had burned between us. “It’s just a chemical in your brain. Your body produces it, and it creates the physical and psychological experience of love. A drop of this is barely different at all.” He nodded at the vial, taking slow steps toward me. “Love is never really consensual. It's just something that happens to you. Do you think I chose to feel the way I do about you?” He shook his head. “I can’t control it. I never could.”
“But my brain didn’t produce those chemicals for you,” I snapped. “It’s different.”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “But, if anything, the potion is better. No doubt, no fear, and no boredom. The flame never goes out.”
He gave me a slightly flirtatious smile. He had me. He was sure that he had me.
Didn’t he? He was right about what I’d loved most. Not him, but the experience of loving him, the act of loving. To be full of something, to never be empty, never feel the pangs of my own chaotic, existential longings. I could reject him, leave him, but what would I be leaving him for? The everyday ache of absence, of wondering what the point of it all was?
I picked up the vial and, holding Jaime’s gaze, took a tiny sip.
A beatific smile broke out in his face, and his gaze glowed with happiness.
“I love you so much, Katerina,” he said. He came close and took me in his arms, tilting my face up to his. He kissed me, and I kissed back, not with love, but with terror, even as I could feel the euphoria spitting through my blood. “Things are so good for us,” Jaime said. “We’re so happy. Our life is so beautiful, isn’t it?”
I didn’t reply, but swiftly, before he could register what I was doing, I lifted the vial to my lips again and drained it, grimacing as I swallowed the contents, though they were tasteless as my own spit.
“Hey,” Jaime said, grappling with my wrist, pulling my hand from my face, “you’re not supposed to…” He took the vial from my hand, turned it upside down, and shook. Then he took me in his arms again, and shook me. “Kat, he said never to—he said it was dangerous.”
His pupils were blown out. He looked elated and afraid.
“Jaime. I love you.” I gripped him with the force of it.
He kissed me, forgetting the danger. His mouth was hot and encompassing. His love fell into me and mine fell into him. My body sang with heat, my steps stumbled, and I fell against him. We stumbled back, jostling the table, pressing together, as if we could go right through each other, past the flesh.
“It’s so good to love,” I said, against his lips, and he laughed, simply, like a child, with relief and exhilaration.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
My body leaned into his like a weight. I felt fire in my fingers and at the creases of my hips. I felt mystical, divine. Love roared in me, poisoning everything. I pushed Jaime backwards over the chair and, laughing, he fell, and his head clattered back first, his skull colliding hard with the marble corner of the kitchen counter before banging against the floor. I fell on top of him, laughing too.
Beneath me, he shook for a moment, opening his mouth as if to speak, but I covered it with mine, breathing into him, breathing him into me, destroying him, destroying myself. Eventually, his body stilled beneath mine, his breathing ceased, but still I did not stop kissing him, pressing my body into his.
From the corner of my eye, I watched the blood spill out from behind his head, oozing across the tile, deep and dark. I loved his blood, his flesh, his silence.
It was so good to love.