It is the fear I will always be the other woman. It is the idea that though we are together, he is somehow more hers than mine. I feel sorry for her, the girl he belongs with. The girl he loves.

I hack into his email account to send her a few words. I want to say something terse, but significant. “Thinking of you,” or “miss you,” or some phrase only they will understand. I type and delete the word “love” several times. The sound of the keyboard is so loud that pictures fall off the walls. Plaster cracks where the kitchen meets the living room.

I give up and call her, speaking in his voice. I say the right things and she begins to reminisce, saying things I have no prior way of knowing. The time they fucked in her living room and he pulled out and came on the wall. She had been so mad, demanding he clean the wall, but he had only laughed and watched it run down and clump on the baseboard.

My hands sweat, not because I am angry or nervous, but because the phone feels warm. I switch from one hand to the other, but after a few minutes I can barely hold the damn thing without it burning my palms.

She talks about the afternoon they got caught in her parents’ bedroom and how he waved at her mom and kept going. And the time in her bedroom when he helped her with her econ homework. That one problem they struggled with. And when they figured it out at the same time, the way they’d kissed. She calls those “good times.”

The phone’s too hot to hold now. My hands are turning bright red and I can’t concentrate on what she’s saying, so I say goodbye and hang up.

I go back to that afternoon, just a few seconds before they kissed, and hide in her closet. I stumble out, hangers clanging, clothes tumbling and I scream and rip posters off her walls. I throw stuffed animals at them and laugh without ever closing my mouth. They marvel at how wide my mouth is and how far they can see down my throat. I laugh at the way overstuffed pandas and elephants bounce off her forehead.

Neither of them recognizes me. It will be several years before we meet.

Then, I vanish. They are confused and maybe sad. This makes them closer. Much closer than their kiss would have. There will be years of him and her, holding hands and kissing and fucking and fighting. She will buy him cock rings so he’ll last longer in bed. He will complain that he cannot feel his dick and she will laugh.

And later there will be me.

Brandi Wells has fiction in or forthcoming in Dzanc Book’s Best Of The Web, Pank, McSweeney’s, Smokelong Quarterly and Hobart. She has a chapbook forthcoming as part of the chapbook collective Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/.