Chapter 10 Julian #2
I take my window seat at the front of the plane and buckle in. I wave off the flight attendant and lay my head back. I close my eyes, an indicator to anyone who wants to take the seat next to me that I’m not in a conversing mood.
At first, nothing changes. The world holds its shape.
Then, slowly, as if someone is lowering the lights on everything sharp and defined, blurring the lines between what is real and what is remembered, the noise stretches and thins, dissolving into a distant and indistinct blur, and the tension I’ve been carrying loosens its grip, unwinding.
Before I realize it, I’m drifting away, transported somewhere else completely.
Central Park in April, the trees were fully green, and the typical smell of the city gave way to warm grass and the faint sweetness of the cherry blossoms.
Kylie walked a few steps ahead of me on the path, her dark curls loose and catching the breeze off the water.
The sun found the auburn buried in all that brown, mesmerizing me.
She glanced back over her shoulder, brown eyes bright with mischief. “That sound you just made is really cute,” she said.
“I did not make a sound,” I say drolly, although I’m pretty sure I’d hummed low in my chest when she beamed at a baby in a passing stroller.
“You absolutely did make a sound.” She slowed until I fell into step beside her and grinned in that confident way that said she was going to win this argument. “It was a very small, very cute sound of delight, but it was a sound nonetheless.”
“I don’t make cute sounds,” I grumbled. “I’m a man. I make beastly sounds.”
She laughed, oh so knowingly. “You make cute sounds when there’s good pie involved. You have absolutely no grace around pie, Julian. It’s honestly your most attractive imperfection.”
I put on my best aristocratic and egotistical voice. “I have very few flaws, I’ll have you know.”
She laughed again, looping her arm through mine and pressed into me. “The absolute confidence of that sentence is also adorable.”
“Now you’re just inventing things.”
Kylie stopped walking and turned to face me fully, reaching up to straighten the collar of my jacket. “You’re blushing now.”
“I don’t—”
She touched two fingers lightly to my cheek. “Pink… just on the edge of your beard. You think that thing can hide your emotions, but it can’t.”
And God help me, I felt the heat rise in my face. She giggled with delight, so purely Kylie, that I reached for her without thinking and pulled her into me.
“Don’t you dare ever repeat that,” I warned into her hair, my lips curling into a smile.
“Too late,” she said, still laughing, her arms coming around my waist. “I’m telling everyone.”
The memory fades, ending with the way it always starts… her laugh.
My Kylie.
She was just thirty when we met all those years ago, already so confident in a way I never was. There was nothing tentative about her, nothing cautious. She moved through the world as if it belonged to her, as if she had every right to shape it to her will.
It burned hot between us. Love should unfold gradually, but it took hold all at once. A conversation that turned electric, a challenge that turned into fascination, fascination into infatuation.
But beyond that, she met me head-on. And I loved her for it almost immediately.
After only a few months together, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to exist without her.
The rhythm of my days revolved around her presence so seamlessly it felt inevitable, as though she had always been there, just waiting for me to catch up.
She had a way of cutting through the noise, through the endless calculations and contingencies that defined everything else in my life, leaving something clear in their place.
There was never any doubt… she was going to be my wife and in less than a year, she was.
And then there was Ben.
The memory of him comes softer, but no less powerful. I see him as he was then—small enough to fit entirely within the curve of my arm, wrapped in a blanket that seemed too large for him, his fingers instinctively closing around mine as though he had already decided I was worth holding on to.
I didn’t know I was capable of that kind of completeness.
Everything else—the expectations, the legacy, the constant, unspoken weight of my name—changed and felt smaller in the face of it. Not gone. Never gone. But pushed to the side, reduced to a secondary matter.
Kylie. Ben. They were the center of everything. They were what mattered.
Of course, my father saw it differently.
Even now, I can sense his disapproval, the cold precision with which he assessed her, as though she were a variable as opposed to the person I had chosen.
He never needed to raise his voice. His disappointment was far more effective when delivered calmly, with that measured certainty that suggested he was simply stating a fact.
“She doesn’t understand our world,” he told me once. “And she never will.”
Maybe she didn’t.
But I did.
And I chose her anyway.
I chose her every time, despite the friction it created, despite the widening distance between my father and me that neither of us acknowledged out loud.
Because when Kylie looked at me, she stripped away all of the expectations, obligations, and endless structure, and saw a simpler version of me underneath.
She saw me.
And she loved me so fully that everything around us seemed… negotiable.
And Ben—
Ben made it all worth it. Every silent tension that stretched between the life I had been born into and the one I was building for myself.
None of it mattered when I walked through the door and she was there, or when Ben reached for me, his entire world contained in that small, unsteady grasp.
Nothing else mattered.
The memory lingers, suspended in its clarity, and then—without warning—it gives way to a profound grief.
It moves through me with a familiarity that physically compromises me.
I try, instinctively, to hold on to the sound of her laugh, the feeling of Ben’s hand in mine—but they slip, distorted, pulled under by a force I can’t keep at bay.
Because I know where this goes.
I know what comes next. And I never let myself stay long enough to see it.
The pressure builds, rising too quickly, threatening to drag everything down with it—the warmth, the memory, all of it collapsing inward under the weight of what followed.
The dream fractures.
And just as the grief crests, as it threatens to pull me fully under—everything goes dark.