CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD
· · ·
We’ve been going on a lot of dates.
Like we’re making up for lost time.
Because we are.
I’ve done the math.
It’s a lot of food, movies, and sex.
This surprised me at first.
I thought Cassian would hold back in public.
That he’d keep a careful distance in the daylight, the way he always kept careful distance, and only let himself be real in the dark of my room with the window closed.
He doesn’t.
· · ·
He holds my hand in parking lots.
He sits on the same side of the booth.
He puts his arm around me without looking around first to see who’s watching.
He kissed me in the middle of a CVS last Tuesday for absolutely no reason.
Just because he felt like it.
Just because he could.
I stood there for a full five seconds after, holding a bottle of shampoo, completely short-circuited.
Two years ago I would have given anything for that.
Now it’s just a Tuesday.
I don’t know what to do with that.
And it makes me feel like I had to give up the person I loved most in this world to get it.
It makes me hate myself sometimes.
I’m still figuring it out.
· · ·
I don’t know this version of him.
I’ve spent so many years sorting through every version of Cassian and this one is new.
Easy. Present. Mine in public.
Maybe I never knew as much as I thought.
Or maybe this was always in there and he just needed eleven years and one very bad night to let it out.
Either way I’m not asking questions.
I’m going to the aquarium.
My dad is happy seeing me happy.
He’s currently funding our adventures without being asked or thanked properly, which says everything about Daniel Hayes.
I think he’s enjoying watching us.
He also packed us snacks this morning like we were going on a field trip.
We’re eighteen.
He packed us snacks.
I wanted to cry.
I ate every single one.
· · ·
Anyway, today is the seaquarium.
Cassian complained about this choice for approximately forty-five minutes.
Then bought me cotton candy the second we walked in.
And ate my cotton candy.
Make it make sense.
· · ·
We’re holding hands.
Him eating said cotton candy — mostly air, mostly nostalgia, completely worth the eight dollars apparently.
Standing in front of a tank full of seahorses like two people with nothing but time getting to know each other again.
“Did you know,” I say, “that the male seahorse carries the babies.”
Cassian looks at me.
“What.”
“The male one. He gets pregnant. Carries them.”
A pause.
“Why are you telling me this.”
“I just thought it was interesting.”
“Why are you looking at me like that while you say it.”
“I’m not looking at you.”
“Ro.”
“I’m looking at the seahorses.”
He stares at me for a long moment.
Then turns back to the tank.
“Not happening,” he says.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking something.”
I was absolutely thinking something.
· · ·
He finishes my cotton candy and we decide now is a good time to move on to the next exhibit.
I laugh at something he says at the jellyfish tank.
It surprises me.
The sound of it.
Like something coming back online.
Like a light flickering on in a room that’s been dark for a long time.
I’d forgotten what it felt like.
That specific lightness.
He took it with him when he left two years ago.
And just as easily carried it back.
· · ·
I tell him he looks like one of the puffed-up fish in the tank by the entrance.
Prickly but cute.
He doesn’t like that.
He responds by pretending to hang me over the shark tank.
They’re nurse sharks.
Completely harmless.
I know this factually.
I cry like a small girl anyway.
He laughs so hard he has to hold onto the railing to stay upright.
A family of four stares at us.
I wave at them while being dangled over a tank of technically harmless sharks by my boyfriend.
My boyfriend.
· · ·
I haven’t used that word yet.
Even in my head.
It fits so well it almost scares me.
We find a bench and sit with overpriced, slightly questionable hotdogs and I stare at him in a way I’ve never been allowed to stare at him before.
Openly.
In daylight.
In public.
Like he’s really mine.
Because he is.
He’s eating his hotdog and watching the crowd and completely relaxed, like he’s always been this person, like this has always been us, and I’m sitting here approximately two seconds from making a scene about it.
He catches me looking.
Of course he does.
He always catches me.
“Ro.” A warning in his voice. The familiar one. “You really can’t look at me like that.”
And just like that I’m sixteen again.
The bench dissolves and I’m back in my room, low blue light, his hand in mine, those exact words closing a door in my face.
Something in my expression must show it.
Everything in my expression always shows it.
I am an open book that has never once successfully pretended to be closed.
· · ·
He tilts my chin up with two fingers.
“Get out of your head.” His thumb moves along my jaw. “I wasn’t finished.”
I wait.
“You can’t look at me like that,” he says, quieter now. “Because it makes me so fucking shy.”
A beat.
“The way you look at me and the way you smile every time—it’s everything to me. Perfect.”
I stare at him.
I feel the blush moving up my face in real time.
Completely unstoppable.
Deeply humiliating.
· · ·
“Well,” I say, looking away. “How many smiles have you seen, you slut.”
I flick ketchup on his nose.
And skip away before he can retaliate.
Skipping might be a new thing.
Happy Rowan is apparently a little feral.
I’m getting used to him.
· · ·
He catches up and grabs my hand and doesn’t mention the skipping which I appreciate because now I regret it.
We spend another hour wandering.
He makes up wrong names for every fish with complete confidence.
I correct him every time.
He ignores every correction.
We watch the stingrays for a while.
I tell him they look like they’re flying.
He says they look like wet pancakes.
We are not the same person.
I love him anyway.
· · ·
At some point we end up in the gift shop because of course we do.
He buys me a small stuffed seahorse without being asked.
Doesn’t make it a thing.
Just hands it to me and moves on.
I stare at the back of his head for a full ten seconds.
He so wants me to get him pregnant.
He made me wait ten years and now he’s buying me stuffed animals in gift shops like it’s nothing.
I’m going to need some time with this.
We drive home with the windows down.
His hand on the gearshift.
Mine on top of his.
The radio on something neither of us picked and neither of us changes.
· · ·
My dad is in the kitchen when we get back.
He’s attempting dinner.
He’s been attempting dinner a lot since my mom died.
She was the cook.
Everyone in this house is learning that the hard way.
Last week he made pasta and somehow burned the water.
The water, specifically.
We still don’t know how.
Tonight appears to be chicken.
He’s staring at it on the stove like it’s a puzzle he hasn’t solved yet.
“How were the fish?” he asks without turning around.
“Good,” I say. “We saw sharks.”
“I held him over the tank,” Cassian adds.
My dad turns around.
Looks at me.
“Were you scared?”
“No,” I say.
“He cried,” Cassian says.
My dad laughs.
It’s a real laugh.
The kind I haven’t heard enough of lately.
The kind that sounds like him — big and easy and filling the whole kitchen.
Something loosens in my chest.
Cassian takes over the chicken without being asked.
This is becoming a pattern.
My dad leans against the counter and talks to him while he cooks, the way he used to when Cassian would come over after school, the way he’s always talked to him — easy and genuine, like a person he chose.
Like a son.
I sit at the kitchen table and watch them.
Her chair is empty.
It’s always empty now.
But tonight the kitchen is warm and something smells good and my dad is laughing and Cassian is here and it feels —
· · ·
Not okay.
Not yet.
But closer.
Something like the shape of okay.
We eat together.
The three of us.
It’s the most normal thing that’s happened in months.
My dad tells the story about the time my mom tried to teach him to cook when they first moved in together and set off three separate smoke alarms.
I’ve heard it a hundred times.
I let him tell it again.
· · ·
I’m still on medication.
The correct amount now.
Someone was very bossy about it and stood in my room and watched me put the extras away and hasn’t brought it up since.
That’s the whole conversation we’ve had about it.
That’s enough for now.
· · ·
After dinner my dad shoos us out of the kitchen.
“Go outside,” he says. “It’s a nice night. I’ve got this.”
He gestures at the dishes.
We look at the dishes.
We look at him.
“Dad —”
“Go.” He’s already running the water. “Enjoy it. That’s an order.”
Cassian grabs a blanket from the closet —
he knows where we keep everything, he’s always known — and we go out through the back.
· · ·
The garden.
My mom’s garden.
The daisies are everywhere.
Every color.
Messy and bright in the dark, catching the light from the back porch.
Still going.
Still alive.
Still hers.
My dad has been tending them.
I know this without having to ask.
Every morning, I assume.
Because that’s who he is.
Because they’re her third love and he’s her first and so they’re his responsibility now.
· · ·
I stand at the edge of the blanket and look at them for a second.
Just a second.
Then Cassian pulls me down next to him and we lie on our sides, facing each other, the garden all around us, the sky doing something extraordinary above it.
A new kind of stargazing.
“This is one of my favorite memories,” I say. “Whenever things got hard, I’d always come back to that first night. Us out here. Looking at the stars.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“Oh—I always thought that was me and Abby.”
I punch him so hard I immediately apologize.
He’s laughing.
I’m rubbing his arm.
Both of us slightly ridiculous.
“Anyway,” he says, when the laughing settles.
Quieter now.
Looking at me in that way that means he’s decided something and is making peace with the decision.
“I don’t think I was ever confused. I think I always loved you.”
The words land slow and complete.
And then I wait.
Because his words are always doing something to me.
The weight of it.
The years tucked inside it.
And then I notice.
He hasn’t said it back.
Not directly.
I always loved you is not the same as I love you and my brain, unhelpfully, knows this distinction.
And then the thoughts start.
Quiet at first.
Then louder.
Maybe this was all in my head.
Maybe he’s only here because of my mom and he feels guilty about it.
Maybe it’s happening right now, I’m getting burned again—I’ll be alone again.
Maybe he’s going to leave and this is the softest goodbye he knows how to give.
Maybe Abby —
· · ·
He grabs my face with both hands.
Gentle. Firm.
“I’m shaking them out,” he says. “Whatever’s in there. I can see them.”
I almost laugh.
Almost.
He keeps his hands where they are.
His eyes on mine.
Serious in the specific way that means he’s about to say something that costs him.
“You love so easily,” he says. “You always have. Because you grew up with it everywhere. Your mom, your dad, this house. You were so full of it you didn’t even know how special that was.”
· · ·
I don’t say anything.
“Things with my mom were —” He stops. Jaw moving. Choosing words carefully. “Complicated. And things with my dad are still hard. In ways I —”
He doesn’t finish that sentence.
The door.
That goddamn door.
“So it’s hard for me to say this,” he continues. “Because I don’t think I’ve ever said it. To anyone. Not once.”
He exhales.
“Of course I love you, Ro.”
Of course.
Like it was never a question.
Like it was always the answer and he just needed to find his way to it.
I kiss him soft and slow.
Full of everything I don’t have words for.
Full of rooftops and sirens and open windows and blue daisies and every night I fell asleep wanting exactly this.
Full of regret that it took this long.
Full of gratitude that we got here anyway.
· · ·
When we break apart I look at him for a long moment.
And then I notice where we are.
Really notice.
The daisies.
All around us.
Every color.
Completely indifferent.
Full of life.
Life.
Death.
I haven’t been out here since she died.
I didn’t realize.
I didn’t even know I’d been avoiding it.
The tightening starts.
Low in my chest.
All I see is her.
Her hands in the soil.
Her pride in every bloom.
Her third love, she always said.
After me and my dad.
And I’ve been out here laughing.
I’ve been so happy.
So consumed with getting everything I’ve always wanted —
I forgot.
Just for a little while.
I forgot.
· · ·
“Ro.” His hand on my back. “Baby. Breathe.”
I can’t.
My dad has been tending these alone.
Every morning.
By himself.
While I’ve been wrapped up in Cassian, forgetting, and he’s been out here with her.
Alone.
I always pick Cassian.
Even now.
Even over the people who have never once let me down.
That thought goes through me like something breaking at the root.
The tears come hard and fast and don’t stop.
The gasping kind.
The kind that hurt on the way out.
Cassian gathers me in.
His hand on the back of my head.
His voice low against my hair — it’s okay, you’re okay, I’ve got you, your dad is okay, you’re not alone, I’m not going anywhere —
Over and over.
Like he knows the loop I’m in and is trying to interrupt it.
· · ·
I cry until I can’t.
Until I’m dry and hollow and the garden is just a garden again.
He takes me back to my room.
Tucks me in the way my mom used to.
The thing we keep passing between us.
I stare at the wall.
I thought I was better.
I thought having him would fix the parts of me that broke.
I thought love was the missing piece and I’d finally found it and that would be enough.
· · ·
But the daisies are still there.
And she isn’t.
And my dad tends them alone.
And I’m still on medication.
And the panic attacks still come.
And the grey still finds me on the good days.
Maybe Cassian was never the cure.
Maybe I’ve just been using him as one.
Maybe I’m not better at all.
Maybe I’m just broken.
And the distance between those two things — between better and broken —
is the size of a garden full of daisies she’ll never tend again.