THE MAN OF YOUR DREAMS

The doctor suggested that Lena get a hobby.

She laughed. “I’m admitted into the hospital for exhaustion and you want me to do more?”

He shrugged. “You need to do something for yourself, Lena. Something apart from Jesse and the kids.”

Lena laughed at the prospect of having time for that, but the doctor insisted that surely she could spare thirty measly minutes for self-care. Lena eyed him warily. Collapsing in Hy-Vee had been the first moment of quiet she’d experienced in years. Did this appointment count as thirty minutes to herself?

She sighed. “What do you suggest, Doctor?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Kelp said. “Some people paint or crochet.”

Lena stared at him.

“I like to unwind with long-distance running, myself.”

Lena’s eyes narrowed.

“Or,” the doctor said, eyeing the broken-spined paperback peeking out of Lena’s bag. “You could try writing. Maybe exercising some creativity could be good for you?”

Lena sagged back into her chair. She couldn’t even come up with a way out of this conversation, let alone write a competent story.

“It doesn’t have to be good,” Dr. Kelp said. “You just need to use your brain in a different way. Give it a break, you know? Doctor’s orders,” he laughed.

“Fine,” Lena said. “I suppose it beats marathons.”

#

“I wish I’d picked running,” she said the next night, sitting at the kitchen table as her husband poured her a glass of Sauv Blanc.

“You don’t mean that,” Jesse laughed. “You majored in literature, this should be right up your alley.”

That had been a long time ago. Lena barely remembered that person, the girl who would spend entire afternoons sipping coffee and losing herself in a thousand-page classic. It felt like a fantasy now, when there was always a thing on her to-list that never got to-done, a million people she needed to be in order to make sure her kids made it from bed in the morning back to bed again at night.

“Are you sure you’ve got bath time? Cooper just gets so fussy…”

“Relax,” he said. “He’s basically a potato, he barely knows the difference between you and me. And Ella’s four now, I can just stick her in the shower, right?”

Lena started to get up.

“I’m kidding!” Jesse said, holding her shoulders. “Hon, you don’t have to write if you don’t want to. Just take a break. Stream a show. Paint your nails or…something.”

“I just…” Lena stared at the blinking cursor on her empty Word document. “I don’t know what to write.”

Jesse shrugged. “Write what you know.”

Lena took a deep breath.

Lisa was running late. The frigid November cold blew her hair back from her face, freezing tears in the corner of her eyes and making the tip of her nose sting. She burst into the warm embrace of the cafe and breathed a sigh of relief. Her professor wasn’t here yet, and there were two open seats.

She took one and set her bag on the other, grateful for a moment to prepare before presenting her thesis to Professor Lumley.

What she was not prepared for, however, was to look up into the warm eyes of a handsome stranger.

“Hi there,” he said, and suddenly she wasn’t in such a hurry for the professor to arrive. Suddenly, she had a few moments to linger in this kind man’s gaze.

Lena sighed and pressed the delete key. She didn’t need to rehash the night she first met Jesse only to arrive years later back on the linoleum tile of Hy-Vee.

But this is fiction! A voice in her head whispered. This doesn’t have to be you and Jesse, it could be Lisa and… Jamie.

Lena set her fingers back down on the keys.

What Lisa was not prepared for, however, was to look up into the mahogany eyes of one of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen.

“Hi there,” he said with a flashing grin, and suddenly she forgot all about the professor and her thesis and why she had come to the cafe in the first place.

It seemed so obvious to her now. She had come here for him. For Jamie.

#

Lena woke up the next morning filled with ideas for Lisa and Jamie. As she started getting breakfast ready for Ella and Cooper, she imagined the lush brunch spread the couple would be eating filled with savory eggs and delicate flutes of mimosas. As she kissed Jesse goodbye on his way out the door, she found herself picturing Jamie, who, with his coffee-colored skin and crooked smile, resembled her husband, but with a slightly more chiseled chin and the hint of a sparkle in his eye.

“Goodbye, my love,” she said as he buttoned his coat.

Jesse raised an eyebrow. “Oh, uh, okay. Have a good one, hun.”

But Jamie would not have been able to leave for work. He would have pulled Lisa in and kissed her neck, breathing in the scent of her shampoo and entwining himself with her until his coat was off along with the rest of his clothes, the two of them a tangle on the floor.

“MoOOM”!” Ella screeched, banging her fork on the kitchen table, breaking the spell. “Where are the hearts? I want the hearts!”

Lena set a plate of limp, heart-shaped waffles down before her daughter.

She spent the rest of the morning daydreaming about her characters and the various ways they’d lace themselves together and tear themselves apart. Ways in which their exciting attraction could exist between the spaces of Lena’s own navigation of feedings and playtime.

When Cooper spit up all over the couch, she pictured Lisa home from a night on the town, trying to get over her undeniable feelings for Jamie. Where her daughter sat, playing with her purple Furby, Lisa’s best friend and confidant would have been perched, rubbing Lisa’s back and telling her that instead of drinking Jamie away, she just needed to tell him how she really felt.

That night when her husband got home, Lena couldn’t skip off fast enough to her laptop, abandoning her previous worries about Jesse not being able to properly care for their children on his own. She spent the entire delicious evening falling deeper and deeper for Jamie.

#

“I don’t know, Jamie. Our spark is undeniable but how am I ever supposed to trust you again? Why didn’t you show up?”

“Lisa,” Jamie said, cupping her face with his hands. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than by your side. I was on my way to the airport to meet you when my taxi crashed. I tried to hobble on a broken leg, if you can believe it.”

Lisa gazed up into the stars of his eyes, feeling oceans arise in her own. “You…did?”

Jamie laughed. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to be with you, crazy girl.”

He looked at her and she saw the same face that caught her by surprise in the café that first night, the face she would love for the rest of her life.

#

Lena reread her last sentence again. She’d spent the last six days pouring everything she had into Lisa and Jamie’s love story and knew it was time for their happily ever after. But something about them spending the rest of their lives together made her feel nauseous.

She looked up at Jesse, pressing the bottom flap of a diaper closed around their son’s waist. Is this what her beloved characters had to look forward to? Is this all she truly had to offer them? She slapped her laptop shut and got up, pushing her husband to the side to fix Cooper’s diaper.

“Done writing for the night?” he asked.

She nodded. “I think I’m done for a while. I need to give my story some space.”

“Does this mean I can finally read it?”

Lena went white, realizing she never wanted Jesse and Jamie to meet. Her character belonged to her, and he felt too intimate to share with her husband.

“I mean, okay,” Jesse grinned, “I read over your shoulder a little bit the other night and I saw that it’s about the night we met at Racy’s…”

“You…what?” Lena felt the tips of her ears start to burn. “It’s not about us, Jess! And it’s private.”

She pressed Cooper to her chest and stormed out, thinking about how Jamie would never make Lisa feel this way. Jamie would have respected Lisa’s privacy. Jamie would never be so…so oblivious.

Jesse is not Jamie, Lena thought to herself. And then she let herself think the thing that had been crawling out from the back of her mind since the night she’d written Jamie and Lisa into existence, the thing that had grown harder and harder to chase back. But, god, do I wish he was.

#

Later that night, after bath time and bedtime were done, the kids were down and Jesse was blissfully snoring on his side of the bed, Lena unfolded her laptop and deleted the happy ending she had given her characters. “They deserve more than this,” she muttered to herself, giving her couple one last passionate kiss to remember each other by before shredding them apart forever.

“It’s better this way,” she whispered to them. “Go be free.”

She felt a tension lift from her shoulders and a wave of exhaustion come over her. She pushed her laptop away, content in the knowledge that everyone had ended up where they were supposed to. Jamie and Lisa could go on to experience any adventure of their choosing and recall their fervid affair fondly.

Her husband let out a loud fart next to her.

Lena exhaled. She had saved them.

#

She woke up a few hours later to find Jesse’s face illuminated by a fluorescent glow, eyes unblinking as he focused on the screen of her laptop with a grim-set mouth. Lena’s blood rushed to her cheeks and she scrambled upright.

“What are you doing?”

He looked up, that kind gaze she’d first seen over the counter at Racy’s coffee shop gone, now filled with ire and betrayal.

“Me?” he asked. He shook his head at the screen. “You took our story and bastardized it.”

“I…I…” she sputtered. “I told you it’s not about us!”

Jesse scoffed. “Come on, Lena. Lisa and Jamie meet at a coffee shop while she’s waiting on her professor to get advice on her thesis?”

“Okay,” she mumbled. “It may have started out about us but it became something entirely different.”

“I can see that,” her husband said, pushing the computer off his lap. “I mean, what even is all this, Lena? Is this your subconscious way of telling me you need more sex or something?” Lena scoffed. “And why…” he rubbed his eyes, the anger and indignation deflating from his voice. “Why don’t they end up together?” He looked up at her. “What are you trying to say, here?”

Lena swallowed, feeling tears well up in her eyes. When was the last time she’d cried? She never felt like she had the time to get emotional anymore, always needing to show the kids a brave face.

But there were no kids now, just her and the man she had once looked at and thought was so handsome she forgot the stress of presenting a college thesis. Just her and the man who concocted specialty coffees based on her mood every day of her final semester to get her through to graduation. The man who had followed her to a teaching position halfway across the country. Who had cried tears of joy when he found out she was pregnant. Who had understood completely when she said she wanted to quit work and take care of their daughter full time. Who had kept the family afloat when a second baby came and Lena retreated further into herself. The man who she’d spent years thinking was no longer enough.

What had she been trying to say with Lisa and Jamie?

She wiped her eyes. “Maybe it was some misguided, subconscious need for drama. Some curiosity about if things had been different.”

“Do you wish things had been different?”

Did she actually want Jamie, with his strong jaw and tendency to disappear right when Lisa needed him most? Did she want to look back and remember the love she shared with her husband fondly rather than face the hard times?

“No,” she said. “I don’t.” A tear escaped down her face. “But Jess, I’m just so tired and I feel so lost. I can feel myself slipping away, and I miss who I was before. I love our kids, but I miss me.”

“Then tell me that,” he said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. “You don’t have to do this by yourself.” He tipped her chin to face him. “You can write all the stories you like about love and drama and theatrics.” She laughed. “But when it comes to something you need from me, you have to say it out loud so we can figure it out together.”

She nodded, burying her face in his shoulder. “I love you,” she said into his worn college sweatshirt.

“I love you too, Lena.”

She looked up at him and saw the same face that caught her by surprise in the cafe that first night, the face she would love for the rest of her life. If not always happily, then honestly. Compassionately. Dearly. Forever after.

Kate Niestrom (she/her) is a writer of speculative and contemporary fiction with a degree in Creative Writing and Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Her non-fiction essays have been published on Thought Catalog. Her short stories and microfiction have made it to the final rounds of NYC Midnight fiction competitions. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.