Chapter 25
By the time I wake in my hammock later that night, Nico is reading quietly with one leg hanging out, foot scraping against the ground.
“Hey,” I say, yawning and stretching my arms. “How long have you been out here?” My friend, the bird with the tangerine collar, is back, watching me cautiously from the concrete bird bath.
It’s nice out here, quiet, and while it’s not the setting for the sexy summer escapade I had imagined, it’s lovely, and I’m lulled by the peace of it, the sense of easy comfort.
“A minute or so.” Nico closes his book. “Were you able to get any sleep?”
“I think so?” I check the time on my phone. No new messages. My sleep bank has been in the negative, so I’m surprised to see I’d managed to sleep for almost three hours. “What are you reading?” I sit up, steadying my feet on the ground.
Nico flashes the cover at me. “It’s on the Spanish Civil War.”
“What’s that, a beach read?” I joke, casting aside my book—about a frivolous romance with enemies-turned-lovers trapped on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean—to flip through his.
I bite my lip. It’s the same book he’d been reading the night we met, spine worn and margins full of scribbled notes, but if he’s so certain he won’t be going back to university, why continue all the prep work?
“You seem to love it. University, I mean.”
Nico sighs, leaning back to look up at the stars. “Sometimes… the pieces in life just don’t align, no matter how badly you may want them to.”
“Yeah,” I say, because I do get it. I wanted so badly to get out of Georgia.
I wanted so badly to make a relationship happen with Wes.
I had been willing to be as flexible as he needed me to be, to be the kind of girl he wanted, but in the end, I just couldn’t force him to be someone who wanted me back, and I couldn’t force myself to be someone who was okay with that.
We just don’t fit, and maybe we never did.
“But is it that you genuinely don’t want to leave?
Or is it that you feel the pressure to stay? ”
Nico thinks on that. “Not a pressure to stay, but a pressure to live up to the life my family thinks I should live. They all keep saying that I’m off to do big things, but what if I can’t?
What if all that work and all that effort and asking her to sacrifice the B and B so I can go off to Rome amounts to nothing, and then it won’t have been for anything, either?
” He gets a far-off look in his eye, like he’s a million miles away, before he says quietly, “It’s good here, it’s comfortable.
I could be happy here. I mean, how can you not? ”
Before us, the moon shines down on the ocean, making the still water shimmer, and he’s right, I could easily imagine being satisfied with this for the rest of my life.
But he sounds resigned, pushed into a future that’s only good enough.
Maybe some things only feel better because they’re easier, because you’re used to them.
Easier to stay where you know you’re comfortable, even if you’re miserable, because at least it’s the devil you know.
“ ‘Could be’ isn’t as good as ‘am,’ ” I say, a decree.
“The world is so big. I always knew that the only way I’d get to grow was if I left town—that’s why it kills me that I’m staying home for college and my best friends get to live my dream without me.
” My heart’s pounding—I’m getting fired up and annoyingly, there are tears pooling at the corners of my eyes.
“I’ve learned so much about myself being here in Italy.
Not everything is something that I can be proud of, but I would have never known myself if I didn’t come here. ”
Nico smiles and looks at me for a long beat that makes my cheeks start to flush. “That’s because you’re brave, Soraya.”
My face twists, confused. I couldn’t even tell my best friends the truth about how I feel; there is nothing brave about me. “I’m not—”
“You came to Italy, got on a plane, and crossed an ocean to have a chance at love. Consequences be damned. You know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you’re meant for more than the world has to offer you right now.
You’re fearless.” He’s looking into my eyes with such transparent admiration that I feel heat on my neck, my ears, my face.
My breath is caught in my throat. But then Nico looks down at his hands, breaking the moment, his smile turning sad.
“But maybe you don’t have to be as brave as you think you need to be. Maybe the opportunity to be happy is waiting there with its arms open and you just don’t know it yet. How do you know if you don’t try?”
He has no answer for that, but I think I understand what he doesn’t want to say—that if you do try, and you fail, the door slams shut and that failure will be yours forever.
But if you don’t, in your heart, there will always be a place where hope still lives, because you’ll have chosen failure for yourself.
Would I have felt better having never applied to those schools I didn’t get into?
Would I have felt better still pining after the possibility that Wes and I could work out, instead of seeing it through to its car crash of an end?
Anya, Mari, and I would still be friends.
But then I would still be miserable every time they made fun of the way I felt about him.
I’m not sure exactly how long we both stay awake reading in silence, but it’s the first time in a long time that my mind isn’t racing too quickly for me to catch up, and I’m finally able to sleep through the night.