Taillon 35

Honest Love

By E.S. Taillon

Shortlisted for the 2026 "London" Literary Prizes in the Canadian Prose category

“You know,” she says, “I think I like the feeling of anger. I prefer anger to sadness.”

“Well, you thought you liked the feeling of sadness, a while ago,” I say.

We’re walking back to her home. Their home, warm and clean like a museum full of treasures I’ve admired long into the night, sometimes with her knowledge. But the street is cold and salted, and it’s as far as I’ll be allowed today. She and Dale are fighting. It’s not that they’ve had a fight—a discrete event, the flare of a wound opening and closing—it’s that this is their state now. They are married; that is a state. They are fighting; that is another. Or is it one and the same, both melding into one charged miasma? I glance over at Charis’s foxlike face, her eyes on the power lines above, and wonder how it feels to be her. Whether it’s as terrible as my ordeal or as wonderful as the fantasy I’ve built around her, and him, and their diorama home.

We stop in the shelter of the community centre doorway and kiss like we always do. Her eyes dart aside as though she’s looking for him standing there in the alley with us, an accusatory finger pointed right at her. He’s never there, of course. But he’s always there, in our minds, in the press of our hungry hands, on our frosted breath.

“Love you,” she says, already stepping back. “I’m sorry.”

“Love you,” I say. “It’s not your fault.”

I watch her dart off and wonder if the hint of nostalgic scent on her collar was her perfume, or his cologne, or a fabric softener they picked out together. I’m lost in it. I’m adrift in my own imaginings, a familiar place. My mind is bottomless. That’s why it consumes them whole, one, then the other. I’m just the conduit.

Our meeting was all cinematic promise. A coffee shop. A collection of mismatched chairs and tables in the back, and stacks of board games. I reached for a deck of cards to play solitaire, and she was reaching for it too. My apologetic smile developed slowly as I took in her beauty, the sweetness of her expression and the clever movement of her eyebrows. We talked over the cards until it seemed inevitable that I’d be invited to sit with her and her husband— husband, a word like a stone in my stomach. That we would talk about games and meetups and the best coffee. That she would rest her hand on his leg in a way that drew my attention (if not my eyes; it would have been too obvious) and that I would read into this gesture, indelibly remember the curl of her fingers like a perfect shadow puppet of a crab, take the low melody of his voice into my ears where it would always be waiting for me, that I would taste their harmony and forever be hungry for them no matter what I did to sate this void.

Before I left, they asked me for my number. Charis asked me. This seemed the most natural, I think—Dale can be a bit intimidating, not that he means to be. But there’s this one, indisputable fact: they asked me. They wanted me in their lives. Maybe not in the way I’ve invaded, twined, overgrown. But they wanted me. I almost tripped over my own feet all the way home, reliving and cataloguing every moment of the encounter. I would regret this encyclopedic knowledge later, when it haunted me. I’d wish I didn’t remember the way she pressed her shoulder into his or the gesture with which he brushed a lock of her hair behind her ear. I read everything into those details—tenderness, care, indifference, longing, dissatisfaction, anger, lust. They meant more to me, certainly, than they ever would to Dale and Charis.

I’d fallen for them.

The months passed and we grew closer. At first, I was the odd addition that no one really knew at gatherings. But eventually the friends, the brothers, the coworkers that united the couple knit around me too—the new body—until I was bringing steaming casserole dishes of scalloped potatoes to games night on the regular, and Charis’s best friend sometimes brought me the hot chocolate that I liked.

Being close to Charis and Dale was easy. Far too easy for something that felt like a crime already, the desire to commit a crime, although I was from the outside entirely innocent. It just seemed like it should have been harder. When I sat on their cozy beige couch, one on either side of me, wondering when I would remember how to breathe, it seemed ridiculous to me that the others could look straight at me and say something about the stock market instead of leaping to their feet and crying out that I was there, right there between them, the perfect couple split in two.

The perfect couple. It was true. It also wasn’t. But wherever it wasn’t, I explained it away. If he seemed brusque while telling her to scrape the ice off the car because he’d done it the last three times, surely there was a hidden note of teasing I didn’t understand. I can’t really explain why I admired them so much, just that I wanted to savour every trace of their shared lives. They were fine, they were gold; and they were beautiful, but more beautiful together. The idea that anything would separate them horrified me. All those years and moments and inside jokes, interrupted? Inconceivable. At the same time, I imagined myself between them, one in each arm, aglow with their happiness, and wasn’t that the very inexcusable act of separation that I feared?

I didn’t know it was happening until the moment after it did, mostly because I’d thoroughly convinced myself that I was as separate from their magic as I could possibly be. Dale was asleep on the couch—the heaviest sleeper anyone in our circle knew—and Charis and I were in the kitchen, picking the last canapés and bits of charcuterie off the plates and not a little drunk.

“Prosciutto,” I said, putting on an egregious Italian accent, dangling it by her mouth.

She laughed and chomped at it like a hungry dog, then picked up a mini quiche.

“Egg,” she said, simply.

She threw it at me and I almost caught it in my mouth, but fumbled, grabbed it before it hit the floor, ate it in one bite. She slumped against the counter, wheezing in silent laughter, holding her side. I held her head without thinking, imagining an accident, her skull bashing into the cabinet. But she was still in control. And then, pressing against me, all too suddenly, she wasn’t laughing at all. Her lips tasted like champagne. My whole body felt numb as my mind pedalled to catch up to this new and impossible reality. And then the proximity of those deep brown eyes, the softness of her breath, was all I could feel and I tuned to its frequency, every part of me humming with its music, even as Dale slept barely ten feet away from us. The warmth of her didn’t leave my chest for hours afterwards.

It’s not her fault, not at all. I’m the bad actor. I wandered into their lives and loved them with such ferocity that she was drawn inevitably to the lip of my precipice. Things carried on. They weren’t the same. Now, when I watch his hand settle in the small of her back, the thrill of warmth I feel on my own skin is tinged with guilt, and then jealousy. Imagine—me, jealous of two people who have each other wholly and completely, pieces carved to fit each other, jealous because my whole being longs for them, and my whole being longs for them precisely because of the seamless perfection with which they press together. A puzzle without answer. I trace the grain of their lives in my sleep and after I wake. Some days I don’t leave the bed for hours. I am suspended between hope and fear and have no way down.

He puts his arm around her shoulder and his hand brushes me, sitting on her other side. A cup clinks against a plate like the littlest bell of a set. The smell of roasting food washes over us as someone opens the oven door. And there it is: hope, burning my stomach like liquor. One day, we will all three of us know each other’s hearts. They will be two, continuous and uninterrupted. We will be three, strong and perfect.

But then I see Charis through the spyhole looking over her shoulder, then smoothing down her jacket. Her expression is taut with a delicate kind of pain. Even after she knocks, and I let her into my place and all traces of pain have been replaced with her greed for me, I know what it cost her to be there. Fear, fluttering its way up my throat. The math just doesn’t check out.

His winning smile reminds me of tracing her hipbones with my fingers. Her head between my legs can’t distract me from the thought of his lips curling as he speaks. They’re one being intent on destroying me with kindness if I don’t undo myself first. Well, that’s not true. They’re as disparate as any two people could be, with their own habits and anxieties, which is why I love them both so identically.

I drive to their place with a fresh blueberry pie buckled into the passenger seat. We’re gathering to celebrate Charis’s promotion, just dinner and drinks, just a few of us. She texted me a few hours ago, joking about fingers in pies; then nothing. It isn’t unusual for her to become entangled in some wifely duty or caper. Probably, she and Dale were playing video games on the couch, legs woven together. Maybe they had to clean the house before guests arrived.

Of course, the first thing I imagine when I don’t get a response from her is that they’re fucking. I even pretend to myself that I thought of other possibilities first, but it’s always that fear—hope—that they’re sprawled out on their luxurious bed, hips burrowing, tongues engrossed in the business of tasting each other, glorious and unforgiving. Once, I heard them. I’d crashed on their couch, too intoxicated with wine and with the brush of their hands on my shoulders to drive myself home, not so out of it that I didn’t pick up the faint noises of their entanglement. Carnal, yes. Uninhibited. But at just the moment when a part of me might’ve been convinced that they were human, just an ordinary couple unfortunate enough to have known me, I heard them laugh, foolish and tender. The honesty in it surprised me. I wanted to be in on that joke, share it with both of them. It had almost gone the other way, but after that, I wanted them more, not less. I hadn’t thought it possible.

So, they’re probably in bed, enjoying each other. The act of imagining it blurs my vision. I pass through several intersections without registering whether the light is green or red. There’s an undulation in my stomach, a pleasant feel that rises through my lungs and spreads through me until I am vibrating with the frequency of their love. I know the thing in my stomach is poison, that certain substances kill by euphoria. But I can’t think of anything else.

Theirs is the only car in the driveway. I park and carefully balance the pie. Steam escapes its foil covering and drifts into the winter dark. I knock and hear nothing. The door is unlocked when I try it. I know by the completeness of the silence that something isn’t right. I place the pie down on the counter and head into the living room.

They’re staring at different patches of carpet when I enter. Sitting opposite each other. Charis flinches when I come in, but Dale barely reacts. I take a few steps closer to them. Then Dale’s on his feet, turning to face me, an anger I’ve never seen twisting his face into a different man entirely, impenetrable and ugly.

“Oh, there you are,” he says in a voice too jovial for the hard edge that accompanies it. “Come here to fuck my wife?”

Ah.

He goes on. “I want to understand, I really do.” A pause. “No, actually, I don’t.”

He says other things, too, and lets out short mirthless laughs. Charis darts a look at me and says something. I don’t hear them, just the blood beating in my ears, my lips. Dale is almost touching me now. I could count the lines of his lips. He stands taller than me, the weight and heat of him all bearing down. Standing in his lee, I’m still safe. He won’t hurt me. I know this because I know him, his gestures and the whorls of his speech, I know the deep eddies of his heart even if I’ve never touched the bottom; I want him to crush me into dust but I know he won’t do it. It’s on my tongue like too much saliva. I could just say it: I did this for you, too. The idea of you. I want you to bite me raw, kiss me better. I want to say, I love you. But it’s not love, not really, when it hurts people this much. Is it?

He tells me to leave and not to wait for any calls from them. It was always going to be this way. Right from the beginning. Even as she rested her hand on his leg in the coffee shop the day I met them, the curl of her fingers like a perfect shadow puppet of a crab, trembling. I know how this ends but I don’t want it to. They don’t deserve the pain that’s coming, and neither do I, and we could all just skip over this terribly real undoing and instead be happy. All I have to do is take his handsome face between my hands with enough tenderness to signal my intentions. All I have to do is aim well and press my mouth into his and let him taste my hunger and sate it. He will taste like milk and bread. He will be so painfully soft and up close he’ll look a little different, a little younger and more open and hapless, the way people do when you kiss them. I know him. I know them both in every line of me.

I reach up and cradle his face in my hands.

E.S. Taillon is a queer, neurodivergent writer based in Tkaronto and former managing editor at PRISM Magazine. Their French-to-English translation of Scenes from the Underground was shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers. She is currently crocheting new covers for some worn-out chairs.