FICTION

“You’re Too Early,” He Said

Excerpt from The novel The Love We Had. A reader’s feedback: “This is fierce writing on narcissistic abuse — this is exactly what it feels like.”

I’m sitting here looking for answers. I feel a turmoil inside me. — What should I do now when I know that I have crossed the border? — Now, when I have crossed the line, this invisible line. I know now that I love another man and not the one lying in bed next to me.

So what should I do now?

This voice in me does not leave me alone. These thoughts grind around and around in my head, and I know there will be little sleep at night. I have this unrest in me, an unrest that spreads and fills the space inside me with questions I do not know the answer to.

I feel insecure. He suddenly changes, it happened like lightning from clear skies. Last time I was there — he was calm, but then suddenly he becomes eager, intense, restless; he talks a lot.

When I was with him yesterday I saw something new. We had agreed that I should come to see him at five o’clock in the afternoon. I was outside his door five minutes before. When he opened the door he looked at me in surprise. He looked at his watch.

“You’re too early,” he said. “You shall not come now.”

“But dear,” I said, “it’s only five minutes, it must be fine! What’s the problem, you said I should come at five, and I’m here at five before five, what’s the problem?”

While I was saying this, he looked at me. He was silent. There was something strange, something I had not seen before in his face.

I did not think about it until afterwards, after I had been with him, for he finally let me in most graciously. I thought he was probably just a little stressed. For reasons I did not know. It can happen to anyone, I thought. But I did not quite manage to put it aside. The picture of him, his face came back to me. He suddenly became completely awkward, he shifted from being calm and smiling to being demanding, controlling.

After that episode, I started thinking about it a bit. There’s something strange about him. Something I do not understand. He can suddenly get a little intense, so overwhelming. He is different, completely different from my husband. When he comes to me, it is as if he fills me whole with the good that he gives me. He gives me something I have not known before, something I have not received from a man before. The room becomes magnetic — or should I say electric, I do not know what. He looks at me, and it’s like he sucks power out of me. He talks, he says a lot of things, he says I do not do things the way it is right to do them. I’m doing it wrong, I’m incompetent. I become a shapeless lump of jelly between his hands when he does that, and I know it’s not good.

Øivind H. Solheim is a novel author and a nature photographer from Norway who loves writing fiction, poetry, essays, and articles helping others understand life, other humans, and themselves. He has published six novels, two non-fiction books, and a poetry book.22

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