29. “Someone Like You” - Adele
“Someone Like You” - Adele
Henry’s words hang suspended in the silence of the car. I’m terrified, C. The only sound is the soft rush of the warm air pumping through the vents.
“Is love really that scary?” I finally say, matching the car’s hushed tones.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, because I’m a naive child who doesn’t know what it is to love someone?”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“Actually, I have no idea what you mean. You just told me that you hide who you really are to manipulate people.”
He reaches for my hand on the console between us. “Celia—”
I pull back. “How am I ever supposed to trust you again?”
“I’m still the same person I was.”
“I loved you!”
He smacks the steering wheel. “Damn it, C. You think I don’t know that?”
“You destroyed me.”
Henry slows the car and pulls over to the side of the road. I have no idea what he’s planning to do, and my heart mashes the accelerator to the floor of my chest as he turns toward me.
“No, baby, I didn’t. You’re too strong for that.”
His calling me “baby” creates a hiccup in my veins. But it doesn’t erase the blinding anger I feel toward him right now. “You have no idea what it did to me. You weren’t there.”
He jabs his fingers into his hair, causing it to stand up at weird angles. “I won’t insult you by making excuses.”
“How comforting.”
“But I am sorry.”
“Why did you tell them to stop taking care of the Sunken Garden?”
He turns to me with a frown. “How do you know about that?”
“Just answer the question.”
It takes him a minute to formulate his response. “That was our spot. And after . . . everything, I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone touching it.”
It’s not what I’m expecting, and I’m not sure what the appropriate reaction is.
“I’m sorry, C. Truly.”
I rest my head against the cool windowpane. “Take me home, Henry.” Nothing he says can take away the pain. Nothing can erase the past. Nothing can change the future.
We are damaged and broken and beyond redemption. But how do you unspool someone from your heart when they’re the very thread holding it together?
I close my eyes, and I’m back there again.
It’s one of those glorious days of summer, the kind you only get a handful of a year and that you have to grab with both hands before it’s gone.
Henry’s sprawled in the grass, his feet bare and kicked up behind him, reading aloud from Wuthering Heights, our latest book.
I’m sitting a few feet away, obediently wearing the sunhat my mother insists upon.
The sun is the enemy, Celia. It will not hesitate to ruin your skin.
The Sunken Garden becomes a realm of its own on days like this, everything a little more vibrant, a little more immortal. The whole thing is so sweet it nearly hurts your teeth to think about. The fact that it mirrors the way I feel on the inside is just another coating of bliss on the package.
“Cathy and Heathcliff remind me of us,” I say, stripping the rose in my hand of its petals.
“Because I’m a dark-skinned gypsy boy your father brought home?” Henry teases.
“No, stupid.” I toss the naked stem at him. “Because they were best friends.” I finish the sentence in my head: who fell in love. We haven’t said it to each other yet, but it’s there in the way he looks at me, the way I catch him smiling when he thinks I’m not looking.
“My second guess was going to be because you’re an undisciplined hoyden who screams to get her way.”
“I hate you.”
“You love me.”
My entire body freezes. I should do something, say something, but I’m immobile, held in place by invisible chains.
He doesn’t even notice, just picks up the book and starts reading again, giving Edgar Linton a nasal voice that would normally have me convulsing in giggles if my stomach wasn’t hanging out in my throat right now.
Henry’s been inching into my heart more every year, and now he’s become my whole world.
I have other friends, of course, but it’s so much easier with him, the way ordering the same dish at a restaurant is easier than trying something new.
I know what to expect with him, and I don’t need to fake interest in celebrity gossip or obsess over my latest blowout to feel seen.
Just last week, I gave him a leather wallet for his seventeenth birthday, after months of trying to find the perfect gift. He said it was the best thing he’s ever received. I don’t even care if it’s true or not, because in that moment, it was exactly what I needed to hear.
“You okay?” he asks, looking up from the book. His eyes are pools of melted chocolate in the sunshine, and I could lose myself in them.
“I’m fine,” I manage. “Why?”
“You just let me read uninterrupted for five minutes. You’re not running a fever, are you?”
I pull the hat from my head and whack him with it. “Why are you so horrible?”
“The question of the year.”
We’ve started calling each other almost nightly. My mum doesn’t know, and I intend to keep it that way. She’s orchestrated every day I’ve spent with him, but this feels like it’s our own, the only thing we still have control over.
But lately, that control seems to be slipping through my fingers whenever I’m with him. He’s been more quiet and withdrawn, and I wonder if it’s for the same reason that I’ve been feeling shy around him, which I never have before.
“Wanna go find something to eat?” he says.
“Do you make all your decisions with your stomach?”
“Duh. It’s more fun than making them with your head.” He stands and extends his hand.
As I take it and allow him to pull me up, he steps closer. My heart cartwheels around my rib cage as he lifts his fingers to my hair. When did touching him start to feel like touching live wires? He removes his hand and holds up a blade of grass, smiling broadly.
My mouth is full of sand as I look up at him, my heart having given up the gymnastics to go banging around in my chest like it’s in a marching band.
It’s the perfect time to tell him. He doesn’t have the courage to go first, so I’ll be the brave one this time.
I imagine his reaction, the way his face will soften, how he’ll take me in his arms and kiss me the way I’ve been imagining for the past three months.
We’ll keep our plans secret for a while, away from the prying hands of my mother. But someday . . .
No matter how many versions of the future I spin, there isn’t one that doesn’t contain him. It will be the best fairy tale.
I take a deep breath, hoping it will steady my nerves. It doesn’t. “I—I have something to tell you.” My voice sounds small, like a child’s. I need it to sound older, more mature.
Henry watches me, his eyes growing darker as a shadow crosses over them.
“I’m in love with you,” I blurt out, relieved to have the words off my tongue, where they’ve been searing the skin right off. The hard part is over.
But he doesn’t look happy. In fact, he looks upset. Did he want to say it first after all?
“You can’t love me,” he says quietly.
My heart skydives from ten thousand feet. “But I do.”
“Then find a way to stop.”
“What the hell, Henry? You can’t just stop loving someone.”
“You need to try.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” Hysteria is threading its way through my voice. “It’s not something I can just shut off. Besides, I don’t want to.”
“You’re young. You’ll get over it.”
“Excuse me?” I take a step back as if he’s slapped me. I think I might actually prefer it if he had. “Because I’m young, I must not know what love is?”
He looks truly miserable, as if I’ve just put him into the worse situation imaginable. I had no idea my love could be so off-putting to anyone, especially not to him.
“Celia, you know how it is. We make fun of girls who think they’re in love at fifteen.”
I shake my head. “It’s different for us.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You let me think we had a future together.”
“That was your mother, not me.”
My mouth falls open. “I don’t believe this. You told me I was the only girl for you. You—”
“I meant as a friend.”
His voice is an ice pick to my heart, and I fight the confusion swirling through my head. For a second, I think I’m trapped in a nightmare, but the sun on my face is too warm, too real.
“Fine,” I tell him. “We’ll just stay friends.
” Even as I say it, I’m battling my inner critic, who says there’s no way I can be friends with him after this.
But if there’s even a chance he’ll change his mind, I have to try.
I love this boy so much, I would walk across hell if it meant we could be together.
“I don’t think that’s a possibility either.”
For a second, I’m afraid I’ve said the words out loud, but then I realize what he’s referring to.
“You’re saying you don’t want to be my friend anymore?”
“I’m saying I think we’re both too old for this kind of relationship.”
He’s breaking up with me, and we’re not even together.
“Goodbye, Celia.”
And just like that, he walks away. Not a backward glance, not a hesitation in his step. Just gone. Out of the garden and out of my life, taking my heart and my dreams and my future with him.
Smashing the fairy tale under his heels as he goes.
I can still remember the bitterness on my tongue as he walked away, that acrid flavor of heartbreak.
I found Wuthering Heights discarded in the grass where he’d been lying.
I picked it up and threw it into the fountain at the center of the garden.
The splash it made as it hit the water did nothing to soothe the inferno raging in my chest.
I’m not proud of how I spiraled after that.
I would sleep all day to forget, then wrestle with insomnia at night.
My appetite fled town, and I dropped five pounds in just over a week.
My mother was worried, but it didn’t last long, because a bigger issue arose.
Two weeks after Henry minced my heart into tiny little pieces, my father was diagnosed with a rapidly growing brain tumor. There was no cure.
Henry was the only person I could imagine talking to about it. He’d ignored all of my texts up to that point, but I thought he would want to know that my dad was dying.
When I rang him, a girl answered. She told me Henry was in the shower, but she’d tell him I called when he got out. I told her not to bother.
Six months later, my father was gone, and Henry had become the world’s favorite playboy.
Henry pulls into the palace garage. We didn’t speak the rest of the way home, and the silence is tight and thick. Releasing my seat belt, I reach for my purse in the back. He stops me with a hand on my arm, and my breath snags in my throat, clawing but unable to get out.
“C, wait a second.” Eros himself couldn’t sound more alluring.
Frozen by Henry’s intoxicating presence, so close I can nearly inhale him, I can’t do anything but breathe and hope he doesn’t require me to speak.
“I’m truly sorry for all the times I’ve hurt you. I know it doesn’t excuse anything, but for what it’s worth, I regret each and every one,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper.
He’s right. It doesn’t make it better, but a small part of me appreciates the effort anyway.
Lifting my chin with his electrifying fingers, he forces my gaze away from the belt buckle and into his eyes. “Regardless of what I’ve said or done, you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
The pull is there. I want to tell him. Tell him that nothing has changed, that I love him more now than I ever did. That a young girl’s love is nothing compared to a grown woman’s.
But that would only give him the ammo he needs to shatter what’s left of my heart. I can’t do it. I will never put myself at his mercy again.
So instead I say, “If that’s true, you’ll let me go.”
His eyes grow wounded. “Is that really what you want?”
It’s a trap—I know it is—but I falter. For three agonizing seconds, I contemplate what would happen if I told him what I really want. But reality catches up with me, breathless, to remind me that this isn’t a fairy tale. There will be no happily ever after in our story.
“Yes. I need you to let go.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“It is,” I say, but I don’t make a move to get out of the car. Once I leave, it will be over, and I just want to soak up his presence a little longer.
I meet his eyes, as black as the night we just came through, and I feel him rooting around in my soul. “I can’t breathe when you look at me like that,” I whisper.
“I don’t know how else to look at you.”
And I don’t know how to stop loving you.