Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
HAPPILY EVER BEFORE
Arden
He said he loved me. He showed me he loves me. He made love to me. What a way to say that, even to myself. There’s something about the notion of physical intimacy that I’ve always understood more easily than emotional. Maybe it’s the idea that it’s more readable. I can see exactly when their view of me changes from friend, classmate, colleague, stranger, into something else. The way it drips down my skin, sometimes in soft ripples and sometimes in unwanted goosebumps. When a man is in my bed, I can see the reaction to my touch, see how it makes them wild, and uncontrolled. Even in the silence of sex there is noise that tells me exactly what they are thinking. The passing breaths, the grunts of desire. But when a man is standing in front of you pouring his soul out, despite all the words he uses, it feels like he’s speaking a language I’ve never heard.
‘ I love you.’ he said.
‘Tell me what you want and I’ll build it,’ he said.
And I stood there as he left all of these promises at my feet, not waiting for me to say it back, but no doubt wanting me to.
But I didn’t. I hate that I didn’t. Why the fuck didn’t I. I kissed him in a way to tell him, and I think he knew. I hope he did. He said I didn’t need to say it back, and I believe him.
Each night he comes to bed with me, and in my dreams, the ones that used to evade me, I can hear his breath like the comfort it has become. Each day he pours his soul into mine like filling a glass of water to leave by the bed. The comfort in knowing it’s there in the middle of the night when I get thirsty.
My fingers type away, going through the motions of my work day. But there’s only him occupying my mind. Every crevice, every corner. The dark ones I stand in when I don’t want to be seen, he stands there with me.
I do, I love him. But it’s thinking about the last time someone told me they loved me, and the feeling that went along with it that has me spiraling in a way I can’t articulate. It’s a desperate feeling of grasping at air trying to hold on to anything. Feeling the betrayal of love, and hollowness at the loss of what you perceive as safety in another person.
It all happened so long ago, but still the idea of it has always loomed in some way. The parts I remember, the parts I forced myself to forget. But no matter how much I’ve tried, it lives in one of those dark corners, and it isn’t alone.
I take a breath, and another.
I open my drafts folder and it’s just where I’ve always kept it on ice. The idea that if he had just known, maybe he would change his mind. Despite that he never did.
I open the email and I think I can see the digital dust flutter away as it pulls up on my screen.
Dear Reid,
This isn’t the first time I’ve written a version of this email. One that isn’t just cheery updates pretending I’m okay. But I’m not and you don’t know that, and worst of all you don’t care. I’ve been so mad at you. And I don’t want to be, because it just makes me mad at myself for ever believing you. I needed you, not as my friend, I have friends, I needed you. And you took that from me and so much of me with it. Because I loved you and you just stopped loving me. But even though you broke my heart, I don’t have the energy to be mad anymore, because that’s the only thing I remember now. So even though I don’t understand it, and I may never, if there’s ever a chance for us again, for me again, I have to forgive you now.
I forgive you for ending it. I forgive you for needing space. I forgive you for making me feel easy to love, and I forgive you for showing me that wasn’t true. I even forgive you for not knowing how to love me. But I needed you in ways, and I’m sorry, I can’t ever forgive you for not trying.
Arden Bancroft
The person who wrote that was hurt in ways she didn’t understand, I’m not sure reading it back now that I do any better. But what I know better now, is myself.
I click into the draft watching the cursor blink and I hold down the delete button without hesitation. It’s the breath I’ve been holding buried under the weight of her sadness and fear for so long.
You don’t realize you love someone when you’re clinging to an orgasm, or when you’re lonely, when you’re in bed with someone else, or you’re thinking about what they're doing. It’s the person you miss when you’re busy at two in the afternoon, not bored at two in the morning. And that’s what he is, what he became. I miss him in ways of missing the future we haven’t experienced yet, not a memory of the past. The person you talk to in the seconds you’ve found in time that didn’t exist before, just because you want to know they are on the other side of the emotional string you choose to tug.
I love him.
I’ve loved him.
I’m in love with him.
He’s become the grains of sand in the glass jar full of marbles. Taking up space in all the smallest moments. Filling all the air pockets surrounding the spheres that make up the bigger moments of my day.
He is sand and I wonder if I could love him more than grains exist. Knowing the limitlessness to determining that number. But suddenly, that's how this feels.
I have been in love before, but it wasn’t this, in the way I suddenly believe Plato. That souls are split. Perhaps all this time, we’ve been in search of each other. Just watching him in the darkness through the glass across the way. In the way our friends have been friends, but not us. As we shared spaces and walked the same streets passing each other in ways to uncover when the time is right.
I didn’t want to fall in love with him. I didn’t want to fall in love, period . I think it’s the idea of falling. Being tripped up over a person. But I love him in a way that I haven’t before, and more terrifyingly, I don’t know that I will again.
Despite all that’s happened, maybe because of all that happened, we ended up here.
Inexplicably intertwined.
And he needs to know that I know it, too.
"Hey Mack!" I say as I open the door to the museum, the security guard smiles at me the way he has from the first time Will introduced us. ‘Arden is a VIP, take good care of her for me.’
"Hi Ms. Arden… he’s just started a tour… I’m sure you can catch up." I thank him and hurry off towards the galleries. I love it here, of course I do, it’s because he is here.
The warm tenor of his voice reaches me before I see him, and I follow it, much like I did that first day, until I reach the small crowd gathered around one of the contemporary exhibits.
Will is crouched down, eye-level with a tiny critic who can't be more than six, earnestly discussing what appears to be a very serious question. His sleeves are just rolled enough to show the edge of his tattoos begin to peer out from their normal hidden view. His hair is slightly mussed like he's been running his hands through it while thinking, something I know the last few days have only increased.
I slip into the crowd just as he rises back to his full height, all six-foot-something of him commanding attention without even trying.
"Are there any other questions?" he asks, and he actually sounds eager for more. I know why it's so easy to hold his own with his family, because of moments like this, where he actually feels rewarded by what he does. Like he could spend forever sharing this passion of his. And I want to share it with him.
My hand shoots up before I can overthink as the smile split across his face
"Ah, yes, the lady in the back with the suspicious timing and the propensity for challenging my expertise," he teases, eyes flaring with excitement and recognition, playing along as he weaves through the crowd toward me.
"Not a question," I say, my voice remaining steadier than my heartbeat. "A correction, actually."
"It seems you think you know something I don't..." He's close enough now that I can see the flecks of gold in his eyes, the way his mouth twitches like he's fighting back a bigger smile, waiting for the moment to let it free.
"That's probably true in most cases," I admit, earning scattered laughter from our impromptu audience. "But I’m actually here to say, that just this once, you're right."
"And what might that be?"
"That I love you." The words come out stronger than I expect, and I feel stronger for saying them.
"Ms. Bancroft," Will says, his voice taking on that professional tour guide tone he uses when he's about to say something decidedly unprofessional, "are you interrupting my carefully planned tour to tell me you love me?"
“Well, you interrupted my carefully planned life to love me, seems only fair. And I'm interrupting your ‘carefully planned tour’ to tell you that Cubism began in 1907, not 1908 like you said." I take a step closer. "But yes, I love you."
"First of all, I said 1907-1908, which is historically accurate," he counters, closing the distance between us. "And second..."
His hands find my waist like they belong there, which they do , and he kisses me as the crowd around us breaks into applause. Because apparently we're that kind of story now, and I can feel his smile against my lips.
"Say it again” his voice is rough with emotion, not quiet, not hushed or bothered who might hear.
“You’re right,” I say as his eyes hold mine.
“Not that…”
“I love you," I speak into his kiss, just for him this time.
"There it is," he says softly, resting his forehead against mine, "the only time I'll ever need to be right."
"Don't get used to it," I warn him, but we both know it's too late. I'm already used to this, to him, to us.