Chapter 14 #2
The three of us work through more of the course. Clem is kicking our asses with these special “hole-in-one”s she’s managing.
When we approach hole ten, any negative thoughts are lifted from my mind. No more criticizing my past or feeling betrayed by my best friend. I lock in on the reason I wanted to come here, my face splitting into a smile.
The tenth hole was mom’s favorite. A replica of a Boston neighborhood, with miniature brick houses and apartment buildings varying in height, separate the beginning of the green from the final hole.
The buildings on the ends are small and stout while the middle is a skyscraper copy taller than Clementine.
There are two rocks near the middle, not big enough to completely stop someone in their path, but enough to hinder and send a ball rolling halfway down the green.
Every structure’s front doors open to tubes, each of which lead somewhere. Six of the seven routes to the beginning of the green. The last tube takes golf balls to the second half and straight to the end. A guaranteed hole-in-one.
By any standard, not just Clem’s.
My niece immediately sets her golf ball down and starts swinging. She always goes for the orange building because it’s her favorite color. It’s not how the hole is meant to be played, but it’s how the game works in her head. It’s the perfect example of what I want Liliana to see.
“I have an idea.”
She turns to me. Fairy lights are twisting throughout the trees, their glow making the brown of her freckles even more defined. I trace them with my eyes.
Interest fills her expression, eyebrows raising.
“Hear me out. You’re a writer.”
“Technically.”
“Still a writer.”
She huffs but doesn’t make a move to deny it. Progress is possible.
“You’re a writer, meaning you’re a creative, even if you can’t admit it to yourself.
” She thinks I can’t tell, but I notice the indent of her cheek where she’s biting down.
“You need to let yourself be inspired. You think there’s only one or two ways to get to your goal, but there’s more. There's always another option.”
“I’ve read the curriculum enough. I know my options.” I pinch the side of arm lightly, and she yelps. “Ow! Don’t be a jerk!”
I keep my gaze set and voice stern. “Stop pretending like you don’t know what I’m saying. And stop acting like you’re not capable of understanding it.”
Her arms cross over her chest, and her blushing shoulders remind me that she doesn’t have anything to ward off the cold April air.
I start taking off my cardigan before I can think. Words tumbling out of my mouth before I can register them.
“Textbooks can tell you what order to write your sentences and where to put certain scenes, but they can’t explain to you the feeling of a little girl clapping over a game she’s set herself up to win.
” I point to Clem, who finally knocks her ball into the orange building’s tube.
It sends her back to the start, but she’s excited anyways.
“Textbooks don’t tell you what colors you see in the sky when you’re finally away from the Boston skyscrapers. Only you can see that.”
Liliana looks towards the stars, mesmerized by a view that not enough people think to appreciate.
I swing my white and beige argyle cardigan over her shoulders, wrapping it around her.
“Nothing, and no one else, knows what happens when a guy who thinks you’re beautiful gives you his cardigan and says he wants to help you. To take care of you. You’re the only person who knows what you’re feeling in that moment.”
I pause. I let her soak up what I’ve said.
I’ve never hidden my feelings for Liliana. I don’t think it’s possible to, when a woman like that walks into your life and cements herself into your thoughts. But this is as explicit as I’ve gotten to voicing it aloud.
This wasn’t part of tonight’s plan. Hole ten was my segue into creativity and inner thoughts, sure, but not with the intention of telling her my inner thoughts. I just can’t help myself when I look at her.
My heart is beating into my ears. That was an unintentional risk. In undergrad, I was confident our feelings were mutual. Our connection was too strong not to be shared.
With everything that’s happened since, Liliana having romantic feelings for me is purely chance. I cling onto the small signs of blushes and side glances, but those could be fabricated by my want for her. I hope they’re not.
Her frame rises and falls in quick breaths. Her hazel eyes are wide.
If she tells me I’m overstepping, then I’ll accept it. I’ll be crushed inside for the unforeseeable future, but I’ll apologize and continue helping her purely as a friend.
When her arms move, painstakingly slow, every part of my body stands at attention.
Her hands reach up to grab onto either side of the cardigan. She bites her lip, sends heat rushing through me, and tightens the sweater around her body.
I listen to Liliana, even when she’s not speaking. This means something.
Everything has changed.
Clementine runs to us and starts excitedly pointing at her golf ball, purely unaware of what she’s interrupted. I try to focus on congratulating her, but I can barely go five seconds before looking back at Liliana’s red cheeks.
My niece high fives the both of us before spotting a ladybug on the bench nearby. An easily distracted kid, she immediately forgets anything about the golf course and focuses her attention on the bug.
It’s the perfect time to initiate what we came here for.
Squaring my shoulders, I tip my chin at hole ten.
“What do you see?”
“Um.” Liliana takes a moment to get her bearings together. I don’t blame her. Staring at her, wearing my cardigan, at my favorite spot in the world, I feel like I’ve just won the lottery. “Mini golf?”
The laugh that escapes me is instant. Fueled by the high and adrenaline of realizing that Liliana might reciprocate my feelings, my laughter won’t stop. I’m afraid she’s going to think I’m weird, but her high-pitched laugh meets mine and we egg each other on over a joke neither of us understand.
It’s bliss. Mindlessly laughing over nothing with her because I can. Because I get to.
When we calm down, I manage out, “Yes, Liliana, thank you so much for that eye-opening, detailed description.”
“You’re so welcome. I’m a writer, you know?”
She laughs again, but I’m too busy smiling. She called herself a writer. And when I’m done explaining this to her, it won’t be said sarcastically.
“You are.” I point my club at the Boston replica and repeat my question. “So, writer, what do you see?”
Her head tilts, focusing on every physical detail.
She’s searching for an answer I didn’t ask for.
But I give her the few minutes while glancing over her frame, noting that she’s slipped into the armholes of my cardigan and fastened the top button.
The sleeves fall over her hands, and my cardigan nearly covers the edge of her skirt, but it looks perfectly fitted to me.
“I see...” she says, “Someone’s misguided perception of what Boston is. It’s the diverse people and bright minds that make our city what it is, not its landscape.”
What she says is poetic and beautiful and so Liliana-coded, but not at all what I was hoping for.
Smirking, I reply, “It’s mini golf.”
This time, it’s her that pinches my skin and me yelping.
“Hey! Who’s the jerk now?”
“Still you!”
I chuckle, shrug, and I point my club again.
“You’re overthinking it. Just tell me what you see when you look at the buildings.”
She groans. “I told you. It’s mini golf. It’s a bunch of holes, only one of them is right and the others are all wrong.”
“Errr!” The buzzer sound that comes out of my mouth and my club hitting the green are timed together. “That’s the mindset you need to get out of. There’s more than one way to your goal.”
“I told you I used to come here when I was kid.” She reminds me, walking further into the green and pointing at the gray building two from the right. “I know this is the one that takes you to the other side.”
“You’re not wrong, but that’s not what I said.”
“Yes, it is.”
My legs cross, supporting myself with my club. “I said there was more than one way. Didn’t say anything about how to get there.”
I wait. I hope. Liliana doesn’t say anything, just walks around to examine the other buildings and dip her club into a few of the tubes before looking back at me, confused.
I sigh.
“Brainstorm. Think of something out-of-the-box that will get you there, even if it goes against what you know as the right answer. Be creative.”
Liliana takes another lap around the green, focus fixed on those damn buildings because that’s what she’s been told is the key to winning. Frustration might have settled in for someone else watching this unfold so painfully slow, but not me.
She’s spent, what I imagine has been years, creating a version of herself that only accepts perfection. Her attitude might trick people into thinking she’s just a good student, but her desperation to be good enough for something, someone, is too severe to be purely reliant on transcripts.
And no one jumps into an arts program, especially not post-grad, because they think it’d be fun. Not Liliana, who has based everything she knows about herself on what a professor decides is passable.
She loves to write. That was obvious when she enrolled. She’s amazing at it. That was obvious the first time we worked on our project together. And again, when she let me read her drafts. And minutes ago, when she came up with a monologue about Boston.
I can’t change how deeply rooted the issue of her self-confidence is. I can tell her the reasons why she needs to give herself a chance, trust in her talents and support herself. I can guide her as much to the answer as possible, but she has to do the rest.
“The rocks!” Liliana screams and tosses her club. A group of teenagers two holes down glance back to stare, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “It’s the rocks! You can bounce a golf ball off them, jump over the shorter buildings and get to the end!”
The answer sounds so sweet coming from her. I give her a thumbs up. She jogs over and starts high fiving me excessively. I don’t care if my hands start to sting with the impact. I’m too distracted by the pride tumbling out of her.
“It’s off course, but it totally works! That’s what you were trying to say, wasn’t it?”
“Exactly. You got it.”
“That’s so smart!” Her hazel eyes are sparkling with admiration and awe. “How did you come up with that?! You’re so intuitive!”
Liliana high fives me a final time before Clem calls us over to meet her ladybug friend.
I’ll tell her the truth later.
As much as I wish I could take credit for it, jumping the rocks wasn’t my idea.
It was my mom’s secret play; the one she mastered and used to surpass me every time we came here.
I never figured out how to do it. This is the only hole I could never beat my mom at, and that skill that belonged to her and no one else.
Now, it’ll be Liliana’s.
Half an hour later, when Clementine’s eyes are drooping, I scoop her into my arms. Liliana holds our clubs in one hand, and with the other, she locks her fingers with mine as I lead her out.
The car ride to her apartment building is filled with too many discussions and too little time. How she totally would’ve beat me at an actual game of mini golf, and how the rock-over-building trick was a good metaphor she’d keep in mind later.
In the middle of it, Liliana tries to return my cardigan to me, but I tell her she needs it for the walk to her door. I say she can give it back the next time we see each other.
She sits in my car a few minutes after I’ve parked in front of her brown brick building, thanking me for the night and getting her out of her head. She says it was nice to do something fun for a change, to not be so consumed in schoolwork.
Her mouth has traces of lip gloss when she speaks, glitter reflecting off the light coming through the passenger window. I watch the glitter as she talks. See the way it shifts when she thanks me, again, for such a good night.
I think about kissing her. Cupping the side of her face and resting my hand on the curve of her jaw when I lean forward and touch my lips to hers. Soft and sweet like every other part of Liliana, her lips would move in tandem with mine, steadily, wanting.
And when we pull apart, it's her who’d see the reflection of glitter on my lips.
But I don’t.
I don’t kiss Liliana. I’ve tested my luck enough for one night. A breakthrough in her creativity means too much to risk being overshadowed by a kiss, whether it’s failed or successful.
I opt for a vocal goodbye and say our next meeting should be outside the café. Instead of pushing back and reminding me about our deal, she says she’ll text me if she thinks of any good locations.
Then she leaves and I watch her building door close behind her.
On the drive back to my place, Clementine snoozes in her seat and Heath texts me he’s on his way. Honest by The Band CAMINO plays in the background.
I smile to myself, taking one hand off the steering wheel to bite on my finger and keep the happiness contained.
My big plan for the night wasn’t to reinvent Liliana’s way of thinking or pull the smoothest move I’ve ever thought of. It wasn’t to get Clementine to whisper to me half-asleep that she likes Liliana and wants to hang out with her again.
It wasn’t to get a kiss from her, either, despite how close I came to making that happen.
My big plan—if it can really be categorized as “big” considering its simplicity—was just to spend a Thursday night with my three favorite girls. And it couldn’t have gone any better.