This wasn't how it was supposed to be.
Alan couldn't say he could think of any other way in which his life could have turned out. He wasn't a man known for his extensive imagination. He could not dream up different scenarios. He could only be certain that had never expected his life to turn out this way, and he would have given anything for that to have changed.
He had married Katarina some two years after he had met her. It had been a small ceremony with family and select friends (with one noticeable absence that he tried not to read too much into for sanity's sake). He had been deliriously happy that day, and Katarina had been too. He could not think up another time when he had been happier than that night, stumbling up to their hotel room, Katarina carrying her heels in her hand with his arm slung over her shoulder and giggling about his current inability to carry her over the threshold. They'd wound up falling over it, but the bruises and ridiculousness of the situation didn't matter because they had been happy.
If only such things weren't fleeting by their very nature.
It had started some year and a half after their wedding day, just after Katarina had gotten a promotion at work. He'd been dancing her around the kitchen to celebrate because she hadn't wanted to go out. He remembered that he'd had a rose clenched between his teeth, dipping her in a most debonair fashion while she laughed into his neck (she didn't giggle, finding it girlish and immature in spite of the fact that he could tell that sometimes she wanted to be like that).
That's when the song had changed and they heard her voice on the radio.
Alan had nearly dropped Katarina in shock, and it was a good thing that she had possessed the presence of mind to pull herself to her feet via the kitchen counter. He'd been white, shaking, thrilled, and terrified all in the same moment. Katarina had asked about him three times before he answered and then sat him down before he keeled over.
Of course he knew that she was alive. Katarina had told him after she had gotten back from Tokyo that she hadn't died. Money was the one thing that kept him from going to see her the minute he had heard - that and the fact that Katarina had said that it probably wasn't a good idea (though she never told him exactly why). Still, even though he had known she was alive, it had been nearly five years since he had seen her or heard her voice or received any real confirmation that she still existed. Hearing her singing on the radio, something that he remembered had been one of her greatest dreams, had made the fact that she was alive real for him.
He thought that maybe he had cried. He wasn’t certain, but he had a feeling that he had.
Over the next year, Minako Aino’s star had risen to almost ridiculous heights. She had been big in Japan since she was seventeen, but her nearly flawless English (with a charming mish-mash of a Japanese and British accent) had made her extremely accessible to the public. Her music had just the right mix of popular appeal and thoughtful lyrics to make it big in the United States. Her looks probably had a great deal to do with it as well.
He could remember seeing her for the first time since the day he thought she had died. It wasn’t even a proper reunion. He’d been working at home, singing the song she had gotten thoroughly entrenched in his mind under his breath. It had been two weeks since he’d heard the song, but there it was, sitting between his ears in a way that he didn’t find entirely unpleasant given the singer. He had switched on the television to take a break.
And then he saw her.
He couldn’t properly describe her to others (nor would he have if asked) to make them understand the effect that she had had on him over the airwaves. He could say that she’d had blonde hair, blue eyes, and that she looked great in every way possible, but that was as far as he could go. He simply could not do her justice no matter how hard he tried.
She had thought him a very poetic soul when she’d known him, but he hadn’t been. He’d been little more than a fraud trying to impress a wide-eyed teenager and her lovely “older sister.” He loved reading Bryon, Keats, and Shakespeare, but he could do little more than quote them at women in order to appeal deep. He had once thought that was the greatest cruelty life had dealt him – to make him love poetry and fine art but to have him be completely unable to produce it himself.
But then, he hadn’t even anticipated this cruelty as of yet.
He sometimes melodramatically thought that that had been the end of him. Her song had been stuck in his head – haunting him – for some time, but actually seeing her after all those years had made him completely obsessed. He sought out recordings and merchandise with more vigor than the casual fan. He tracked her in every way that was available to him via the internet and fan clubs and newspaper clippings. He no longer thought of himself as a friend of Minako Aino – he was a collector.
His wife called him obsessed, screaming at him as he watched her on the television, performing the latest hit for some charity he didn’t care about. She cried and threw things and asked him about children and bills and obligations and other things that had absolutely nothing to do with Minako so he didn’t pay much attention.
Sometimes, in more sober moments, he did want to talk to Katarina. He almost wanted to tell her that this scared him. That he knew he shouldn’t feel this way, but that he couldn’t help it. Something had happened to him. Some wire had been crossed or some chemical had been overproduced to make him that way. He almost wanted to go to a psychiatrist, but this was a disease he didn’t think he wanted to be cured of, no matter how horrifying it was.
And sometimes he wanted to blame Minako for bewitching him, for surely she must have done something to insight this fixation. He had heard of stories of other men – stalkers they called them – going to the ends of the Earth to get near her. He knew she’d been threatened. He knew she’d been attacked. He knew that she’d put at least one man in the hospital for getting too close.
Sometimes he wondered if he could get close enough.
Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to touch her.
Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to feel her writhe beneath him.
Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to close his hands around her throat.
Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to be the last person Minako Aino ever saw.
He scared himself with those thoughts. He dreamt about it some nights, and he’d wake up alone in bed, drenched in sweat and his blood pounding with need. He would be dizzy with fear and lust, never quite sure which was the stronger emotion, never quite sure just how much control he had over his own mind. It was why he never called her, never even went to one of her concerts. He was terrified of what he would do if she were too near. Because he did love her, more so than he should have.
The voice on the radio was driving him mad, but it was a madness to which he was willing to succumb to.
