Page 3 of My Heart to Find

“Jana!” I find her by the DJ, where the music’s the loudest and most deafening. She looks bored as she stares at a couple who are making out.

With a jolt, I realize that the guy in the embrace is Jana’s ex, Max. And the girl is Anastacia, her cousin. Wow. Anastacia theAwful.

“You ready to go?” Jana asks me, her eyes brightening. She twists the black ring on her finger.

“I nod. Let’s get out of here,” I say, looking around again in case Rob’s watching. I can’t see him. My stomach feels empty and slimy, and it’s making me feel sicker now—both because of my illness, my medications, and the situation I narrowly avoided—but I also know I haven’t eaten in a while. “We can get takeaway.”

I know Jana’s always up for chips, especially when she’s had a drink or few. And I need to take my night-time meds, I should’ve already had them by this hour, and they have to be taken with food.

We say goodbye to Anastacia—not that she unlocks herself from Max’s lips long enough to speak—and head out.

“I can’t believe her,” Jana says as we exit the club and step out into the high street. “She justlaunchedherself at him...”

I make sympathetic noises—or, at least, I think I do. But I can tell my reactions are slow, and maybe they’re so slow they don’t leave my mouth at all. Because my mind is still on Rob.

What if he hadn’t accepted no for an answer?

No, don’t think of that. You’re safe. Nothing happened.

“And he didn’t exactly put up much of a fight, did he?” Jana huffs. “God, he can’t even keep it in his pants. I was stupid to think he was ever okay with me being ace.”

“Because that’s what he told you,” I say, and I have to concentrate on each word. I think I sound very drunk. “But don’t think about that now.”

She exhales sharply, digging a cigarette and lighter out of her bag. She checks which way the wind’s blowing before lighting it—so the smoke won’t blow over me, she’s always very particular about that—and then swears loudly. About Max.

I do my best to pacify her, but the heaviness is taking over my body again. That and the OCD is picking up. Even though the smoke isn’t directly going over me, I imagine it as a dusty blanket settling on my skin and dress and bag and hair.

You’ll never get it out,the OCD whispers.

I try to ignore it. Focus on my surroundings—the streetlights, the red taillights of cars, the crisp, night air. On how evenifthere is smoke on me, it won’t do me any harm. That’s what my therapist says. And the psychiatrist too. And, anyway, I’m showering as soon as I get home. And then I can grab my graphics tablet and work some more on my cartoon strip to calm me before I sleep. I could draw some new caricatures. Maybe Jana. She features regularly in my art. Jana the Jewel, one of the main characters of my story. But she could be Jana the...Jazzy, too?

We pass a streetlight with one of the missing posters for Marnie Wathem tacked onto it. Her pale blue eyes set in her pale face seem to latch onto me as we walk past, and even once we’re a block away from that poster, I still feel like the missing woman’s watching me. It makes me shudder.

The chip shop is in sight now, and there’s a man coming out of it, hands in his pockets, looking all casual and nonchalant. But there’s something familiar about him, about the way his blond hair flops over his face. How he walks with confidence, but he also manages to look casual too.

“Is that...?” I stop, squinting ahead.

“What?” Jana asks with a grunt.

It’s Damien. I inhale sharply. Damien Noelle. My eyes widen.

He hasn’t seen me, and my heart’s pounding, and I’m glad he hasn’t seen me. So glad. My knees weaken, and I’m nervous—of courseI’m nervous.

It’shim.

My palms are sweating, and suddenly, it’s like I’m back there, three years ago in Mallorca, on the retreat for those on the asexual spectrum, watching Damien Noelle make eye contact with me across the room. Eye contact that makes me giddy. Because he’shot.

Flashes of the rest of the two weeks and the time afterward fill my mind: Damien and me talking; Damien and me lounging in the games room; Damien telling me we’d have to meet up again back in England; Damien writing his number on the inside page of the book I was reading; me being too shy to call at first, and then realizing I’d lost the book when I was finally about to pick up my phone.

I swallow hard. How can hebehere? I mean, what are the chances? The one guy I’ve been dreaming of bumping into again, more often than I’d like to admit, ishere.

A numbness travels down the back of my right thigh.

“Nah, no one,” I say, because if I tell Jana it’s him, she’ll make me go over and see him. Make metalkto him. And I can’t talk to guys I like. I mean, sure I talked to Damien on the retreat, but that felt different. In Mallorca, I could almost be someone else. Someone confident. But here, I’m not confident. Not with guys. I’m shy and awkward. And I can’t have Jana forcing me to go and talk to him, even if she thinks she’s helping me.

Or Jana will have completely forgotten who he is. It’s been three years, after all. Just because I think about Damien almost every day—regretting that I didn’t decide to call him sooner—doesn’t mean Jana will even remember him. I mean, most of the time on the retreat she was with Ray, a guy who’s graysexual like her.

Unlike my relationship—if you could even call what Damien and I had on the retreat a ‘relationship’—Jana’s had survived the plane journey back. Ray lived in the midlands and they’d ended up in a long-distance relationship for a year after the retreat until they realized neither was willing to relocate. Jana has to stay in the area as she looks after her sister’s kids when her sister’s at work. And it was shortly after that breakup that she met Max the Moron, a straight guy who told her he was fine with her being on the ace spectrum.

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