My Boyfriend is a Bigfoot?

Chapter Twelve

Darla leant back in the loveseat and gave a heavy sigh. I stared into my feet. "You told me you wouldn't stop me if I didn't want to be stopped. You said you would do your best to keep me safe. You didn't think it was completely hopeless," I told her. "You must've thought there was a chance." I pulled up the sleeve of my shirt to reveal the tattoo she'd given me. "Come on. You let me go after him. You must think there's a chance!"

"I want to see Evelyn stopped. Of course I do. But I know the odds. I'll... I'm gonna keep my word, all right? I'll do my best to keep you safe." She reached a hand forward and landed it softly over mine. "I'll help you. But you have to promise me to let it go if she has us in check. If it comes down to your life over his, you have to it go, okay?"

There was no escaping the truth in her words, nor the pragmatism that I'd foregone entirely in my own decision-making. She was right, but I was righteous. There was no going back. "Okay."

Darla was stern, stone-like. The conception I held of her in my mind was soft and effervescent, bubbly and mild like a can of LaCroix, but the Darla sitting across from me was straight absinthe: uncompromising and acrid. "You have to know that it's more than likely than this will end ugly. You understand me, Saff?"

My convictions burned too brightly to be tempered by any magnitude of warning. "I understand."

Her hand returned to her side and went for her phone. She checked the time and set it back down. "I have to go soon." Her eyes kept revisiting my wrist, flitting between the mark and my face like she couldn't decide which was the appropriate place to focus. "I think you're doing the right thing. You know that, right? Just... The right thing ain't always the feasible thing, too." Her tone began to soften into its usual pleasant lilt, the harshness draining from her expression. "All I'm asking is for you to be ready to save yourself, if it comes to it. If it's a choice between two evils... settle on the lesser one, huh?"

I envisioned a selection of the countless scenarios that ended in Brad's death or my own, mapping out the forks in the coming road where I would have to concede before it was too late, feeling a stab in my chest every time a premonition concluded in surrender. I felt I was already choosing the lesser of two evils.

"Okay," I repeated once more, sensing that my soul had taken the shape of a plastic grocery bag adrift in a riptide.

"The next time you're headed off to the cave, give me heads-up, would ya?" She sounded defeated, resigned to a fate she'd fought to avoid. I loathed being the catalyst of that fate, but if the alternative meant sacrificing Brad, it was the only way forward.

"I will, yeah. I'm sorry about the trespassing, by the way. I'm sorry about the whole thing, actually." None of it was fair to Darla, and I couldn't deny that it seemed a enormous imposition to rope her in further after everything she'd already done for me. Little of my embarkment seemed anything short of hugely unfair. "You've already done way beyond your share of helping me out, and... I'm sorry. You're just... You're sort of my only hope, here."

The faintest corners of a smile returned to her face. "Yeah, I know. Hey, if we don't die, maybe you can pay me back for all my assistance with a lifetime supply of bagels down at Voilà, eh?"

I smiled back, still a good distance from being properly happy, but at the very least somewhat more at ease than I'd been prior. I could sense that she was only injecting humour into our goodbye so we wouldn't part on uneasy terms, and I was fully content to go along with it. "I'll see what I can do."

I stepped into the bus and began down the endless tunnel of rumination that awaited within. I hadn't been so relentlessly anxious since high school. The whole world had narrowed to a single objective that obliterated all other needs and desires in its wake. Humming beneath the physical world was a constant chorus of 'Brad, Darla, Evelyn' set to an imagined supercut of all the ways my mission could end in catastrophe.