Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
taylor
The driver was kind enough to point me up the trail before pulling away, and I spent the next hour and seventeen minutes counting steps because I’d forgotten to bring anything else to occupy myself with.
No water, no blanket. Just the sunglasses folded in my jacket pocket and whatever was left of my better judgment, which had been running on fumes since the morning.
Harrison had told me about this place in the way he told me everything: like it was the only thing worth knowing, and he had been watching my face while I received it.
A total solar eclipse, visible from Alderman’s Ledge at twenty minutes past three.
He’d said it with the quiet of someone holding something carefully, and I’d heard it the way you hear a thing when you don’t yet know you’re going to lose it soon.
That was the trouble with Harrison. He made every ordinary thing feel special.
The path up was steep in places, and my lungs argued with me through the third switchback. The forest was loud with birdsong and the white noise of distant water, and above it, when I crested the final slope and the trees parted, the sky opened in front of me, blue and infinite.
Alderman’s Ledge was large enough that the handful of people already there didn’t crowd it. A family sat far to my right on a blanket they’d remembered to bring. Two women stood shoulder to shoulder a little further down, facing west. A man lay in the grass with his arm over his eyes, waiting.
I sat in the grass without a blanket, felt the cold of the earth come through my jeans immediately, and stayed anyway. The sky ahead was still ordinary. Still just sky.
I’d done the right thing. I knew I had. Knowing it didn’t make the afternoon any softer. It just meant I couldn’t be angry at anyone, which was a special kind of loneliness.
The wind moved over the ledge in slow, steady pulls, lifting the hair off my forehead and pressing the fabric of my jacket flat against my chest. I watched a hawk ride a thermal without moving its wings.
I thought about the easy thing I hadn’t done.
How simple it would have been to stay in that kitchen and ask him to stay with me.
To be the person who takes what he wants and worries about the rest of it later.
I’d spent most of my life being exactly that person. The one who goes over to the table. The one who says yes to the dare. The one who never counts the cost until the bill is already in front of him and paid by someone else.
This one I paid myself.
It was something like pride and something like grief, and they didn’t cancel each other out.
They lived side by side in my ribs, perfectly aware of one another, politely not fighting.
I’d given Harrison the choice because it was his to make, not mine to make for him.
That wasn’t nobility. It was just the bare minimum of decency, the thing a person did when they understood that love wasn’t a thing you collected.
You either held it open or you didn’t. And I had given him a chance to take what he wanted the most in life. The thing that had started it all.
I pressed my palms flat against the cold grass and held them open.
The sun had moved lower by the time the light began to change in the way I’d been told to watch for: thinning first at the edges of everything, objects sharpening the way they do before a storm, but without any of the threat.
Colors shifted toward wrong versions of themselves.
The grass beneath my hands was still green but no longer real.
Shadows stretched and confused themselves.
The hawk had vanished without my noticing, and the sky where it had been was a shade of blue I had no word for.
My chest ached.
I let it.
That was the whole point of being here without water or a blanket.
There was nowhere to put it and nothing to do with it, so I sat in the cold grass and let the pain fill whatever shape it needed to fill, let it press against the roof of my mouth, let it be real for once instead of something I joked around until it seemed manageable.
It wasn’t manageable. It was just mine.
The moon had begun to take its position.
A thin, bright scythe of sun still showed at the left edge of the corona, and the temperature dropped so quickly I felt it on my forearms before my brain had registered the change.
Around me, quiet murmuring from the family to my right, a single soft word from one of the women to the other, all of it muffled and reverent as something in a church.
Then, from somewhere above and behind me, a small portable speaker crackled to life. The sound was tinny at first, the bass struggling in the open air, before it found its footing and settled into something clear enough to recognize.
Piano. A twelve-string guitar underneath. The opening bars of “Brain Damage.”
I knew this shape of song because Harrison had played me this album twice already, once in his apartment and once in the car, and he’d talked about it with the particular reverence people reserve for the things that formed them.
“Brain Damage” meant “Eclipse” was coming.
“Eclipse” meant Harrison had planned this down to the track.
I didn’t turn around immediately.
I pressed my palms harder into the grass and sat with that for a breath, two, three. The light narrowed to a ring of white fire at the edge of the moon. The world went the color of old photographs.
Then I turned around.
He was walking up the last of the slope with the speaker in his left hand and his right hand free, and his eyes were already on mine by the time they had anywhere to look.
I got to my feet before I’d decided to.
It happened the way things happened with Harrison: my body understood before my mind had finished its argument. The grass pulled at my jeans as I stood, and the eclipse was behind me now, the world around it gone to that deep, bruised blue, and I faced him instead.
He came up the last of the slope without hurrying. He looked at me the whole way up.
Not at the eclipse.
At me.
The family to my right had gone quiet. The two women were holding each other by the shoulders.
Somewhere in the sky above and behind me, the corona burned in a ring of white and gold that I felt on the back of my neck like a held breath, like the universe leaning in, and Harrison walked through it with his eyes on my face.
“You’re here,” I whispered.
He stopped a few feet away. One corner of his mouth lifted into that lopsided smile, the one that arrived before the rest of him caught up, the one I’d been memorizing without knowing I was doing it. “There’s nowhere else I’d ever want to be.”
Something in my chest lurched upward, and I pushed it down, hard, with both hands, metaphorically speaking. I was terrified to take it. Terrified to open my hands around something this good when they were still holding the shape of letting go.
Harrison set the speaker in the grass without breaking eye contact, and then he closed what was left of the distance, turning us slightly as he did, so that the eclipse unfolded to my left at the very edge of everything.
The moon’s shadow sat across the world like a single, held note.
The air was ten degrees colder than it had any right to be.
He took my hands in both of his.
His fingers were warm. His hands were always warm.
“I’ve been so afraid of telling you this,” he said, and his voice was quiet enough that it belonged only to us and the thin, cold air.
“And because I haven’t told you, you somehow decided to be gallant and let me go.
” He looked at me steadily. “And if you’re ever gallant with me again, Taylor, I’ll make you watch the three-hour director’s cut of every film I’ve ever loved, in silence, without commentary.
” The smile came back, brief and gentle.
“But it’s my fault. Because I’ve been a coward.
And I haven’t told you all the things I wanted you to know.
I haven’t told you, so long ago, that it’s not about her. It’s not been about her for weeks.”
He looked down at our hands for a moment, his thumbs moving over my knuckles, slow and deliberate, like he was mapping me.
“I didn’t want to scare you away.”
“You won’t scare me away,” I said. Too fast. A little eager. I didn’t take it back.
Harrison looked up.
For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. The track shifted somewhere below us, the piano of “Brain Damage” giving way to something larger, building, the opening of “Eclipse,” and Harrison’s fingers tightened around mine so suddenly and so surely that I felt it in my sternum.
“It’s as simple as this,” he said.
He said it the way he said everything important: without announcement, without performance, dropping it into the space between us like something that had always been there and simply needed to be named.
“Taylor, I love you.” His eyes didn’t move from mine. “I love you more than you can ever know. And I’ll keep telling you that until you believe it. And when that isn’t enough, I’ll show you.” His hands tightened again. “And I’ll keep showing it for as long as I breathe. I swear.”
The words went in slowly. They went down through every layer, every careful wall, every place I’d built a joke or a shrug or a too-casual departure so that nothing could reach the part of me that wanted this exact thing, exactly like this, exactly from him.
I stood in the cold grass at the edge of the world while a solar eclipse happened to my left and Harrison loved me, and I let it be real.
“And I want you to be my boyfriend,” he said, and something in his voice shifted, cracked open a little, warm underneath. “Because you are my boyfriend. You are my world.” A breath. “You are my everything.”
My throat was full of something I didn’t have words for.
I’d always had words. That had been the one reliable thing about me, the jokes arriving before the feelings, the punchline already positioned before the pain could land.
But standing here, with Harrison’s hands holding mine in the shadow of the moon, I had nothing.
Nothing except the truth of it.
I squeezed his hands, both of them, hard.
“I love you,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I expected, and I didn’t mind. “I love you, Harrison. I have for a long time. I just kept putting other names on it.”
He exhaled, and I felt it, the length of the breath, the relief inside it.
Something unknotted in his face. Something that had been held taut for longer than I’d realized loosened all at once, and he was so beautiful standing there in the strange blue light of the eclipse that my chest couldn’t hold it.
I stepped into him. Or he stepped into me. Both. Neither. The world shrank between us, and we simply were where we were.
His mouth found mine, and I kissed him the way you kiss someone when you’re not performing it for anyone, when there’s no audience and no dare and no plan, when it’s only the two of you and the cold air and the grass and the thin ring of fire at the edge of the moon.
He kissed me back just the same.
And then, at the left edge of my closed eyes, through the skin of my eyelids, light returned.
Slowly at first, a warmth more than a brightness, the sun finding the first millimeter of its return from behind the moon’s shoulder.
The air changed. The temperature shifted upward by degrees.
The deep bruised blue of the eclipse shadow retreated across the grass in a slow tide, and warmth spread over us, incremental, patient, the way things come back when you think they’ve gone forever.
We pulled apart.
His forehead came down to rest against mine, and we stayed there for a while, breathing the same cold air, the light slowly completing itself around us.
I looked into his eyes. They were dark and warm and so alive, and he was looking at me with everything he had, with no part of it held back or measured or made careful, and I understood, standing in the returning sunlight on a grass slope at the edge of the world, that this was what it felt like to be seen by someone who had decided on you completely.
I held his gaze.
I loved him.
He loved me.
The rest of it, all the rest of it, could wait.