6 Years Ago
She can pinpoint the exact moment Bren falls in love with her.
The way he looks at her is intoxicating, ravishing, and she loses hold of all common sense as she slides toward feelings that should remain boxed.
They are on their third night out in a row, a reckless indulgence, but every time he tugs on her ribbons, she spins into him without resistance.
She kisses him beneath trees wrapped in fairy lights in the magical garden of a restaurant she couldn’t dream of affording alone, and when he rests his forehead against hers with this breathless whimper of infatuation, she knows he isn’t going to let go. Not tonight, not ever.
It thrills her, horribly, hungrily.
He rests his thumb on the corner of her mouth, forlorn and desperate. “I need to take you out tomorrow too. Elodie, I think I’m dying. I can’t breathe.”
She presses a mocking kiss to the tip of his nose. “You’re pretty for a dying thing.”
“No, I really am.” A vexed strain pulls at his voice as he folds her into a hug, their bodies shadowed by trees blossoming in the dark.
Music and lightly clinking glasses fade into nonexistence until it is just them in this garden, in the whole world.
“I only think of you. It’s like there’s this blown-out hole in my chest and you fit there perfectly, and I’ve known it since I saw you. ”
“Which was all of three days ago.” She’s teasing, but there’s an odd look in his eyes and she wonders if he, too, is nervous at how fast they’re falling.
He presses his face into her neck, his voice muffled. “I’ve never been this way about anyone. It’s like I can tell you everything, it’s like you see me when no one else does, it’s like…” He’s run out of words, his yearning so obvious she cannot help but melt as he tucks a loose curl behind her ear.
The mocking smile drops from her mouth and there is a sudden ruinous weight in her chest, a clawing desperation for him to keep looking at her like she means something. “It’s like need,” she whispers, raw and shaky.
“I only want you,” he says with irrefutable earnestness. “In the whole world, I only want you.”
There is a messiness to love, a hysteria that veers too close to madness.
It is looking at someone and being unable to breathe, being reduced to a wretched, obsessive creature who wants to latch on to the other like a carnivorous leech.
They have already kissed so many times. They are moving too fast.
Neither of them cares.
No one has ever wanted her with this much conviction.
She has never been anything but overlooked and unlovable, her life full of lonely silences, her parents refusing to glance her way in case they see the ghost of their son lingering in her shadow.
Her sins were marked in their eyes and transmuted to hate long before she understood why.
She starves for this, for affection, for him.
When his time in her country runs out, it is an end to their midnight hours spent walking the city and talking nonstop.
Once he’s gone she will have only real life to face—long days at the dance studio with no late nights with Bren to look forward to, picking up Jude from preschool where he will commence overtired meltdowns, lying alone on her mattress in a mildewy garage where her future looks like a cracked mirror, the glass shattered all over the floor.
Each night so far, she has drugged Jude to sleep and layered makeup under her tired eyes, ignoring how little rest she’s getting. But she needs this fantasy world.
Except, now Bren is going home, and the dream has ended.
She is never getting out of her parents’ garage.
“So … I booked a motel room near the airport. What if— Do you want to stay with me? Just once?” He has her in his arms, her back to his chest, his arms wrapped around her middle, as they stand on the esplanade overlooking the ocean, the moon a chalky smear on the glossy, black surface.
Two a.m. has passed; they have been at a street art festival, they have eaten too much sugar like giddy teenagers, they have stolen kisses and flirted and both ignored the cavernous gouge growing between them at the reality that this is his last night.
All she can think is Yes, I want to. I want nothing more.
In her mouth, the words feel like broken marbles. “I can’t.”
Maybe the intensity of their conversations, his soft touches, how he listens to her and lights up at her laugh, are things he does to all girls he wants to sleep with.
She doesn’t truly know him.
His face is full of pulverized devastation as she slips from his arms and whispers, “Have a nice life,” before kissing his cheek and walking away.
In her dank garage, she cries, her body a crescent moon around Jude as he sleeps deep and calm, his floppy limbs flung out like a starfish.
She kisses his cheeks and reminds herself that he is enough.
It doesn’t matter that he will wake and have an inevitable tantrum over something and hit her and cry and fight everything she says.
He’s only five years old. He’s not doing this on purpose.
Or maybe it’s her fault he’s like this, because he grew inside her where she’d packed down all her vile secrets, her rot and lies and misery, and his resentment of her is simply her hate for herself.
Twenty-four hours after Bren leaves, her phone starts going off with nonstop texts.
Turns out I couldn’t stop thinking about you.
She is smiling as she texts back. Strange. I forgot all about you.
They message each other all day, video-calling when they can.
He stays up till the small hours of the morning, hyped up on espresso shots with his hair a rumpled bedhead, pacing through his dark skeleton of a house as he rambles to her about his day.
Behind him, on the tiny screen, she can see torn-up floorboards and sagging walls, and when she asks how the renovations are going, he quickly pivots to show her a nice room he’s almost finished.
To see the wreckage of his home would make her feel better, actually, feel as if she’s included in his reality.
But he prefers her to look at pretty things.
He keeps calling.
He keeps texting.
Weeks pass and there is so much of him in her life that she doesn’t care that all their conversations are cotton candy instead of meat.
“You deserve better,” he says. “Shit, Elodie, you deserve the whole goddamn world.”
His words are warm honey, and he spoons them into her mouth until she is filled by him.
He is an addiction that leaves her shaky and distracted, late for work and uninterested in food.
When Jude has a two-hour meltdown, she simply shuts the door of the garage and sits on the curb to call Bren, pretending the shrieks in the background are someone else’s child.
Bad mother.
Bad mother.
Bad mother.
They have two months of this tentative, wondrous bliss, and then one morning she answers a video call to him walking briskly through a crowd with loudspeakers booming out metallic announcements in the background.
“Hey, so. I thought…” He glances behind him as he hurries across a street.
Car horns blare. The sun flashes bright in the sky, and her sleep-mussy brain finally makes the connection that it should be nighttime in America.
“I might be even more of an idiot than usual, but I maybe got on a flight.”
“Bren.” Something like wanting, like terror, has lit her up. She’s barely awake, Jude playing at her ankles with his favorite stuffed rabbit, jam smeared all over his mouth, and she was meant to be thinking about work, preschool, laundry, groceries.
“To Australia,” he clarifies. “Because there’s this girl. Like, holy shit, there’s this girl. I’m so in love with her.”
She is going to cry; she wants so desperately for it to be real.
“I booked this resort on an island, because I thought, I want this girl to know how I feel about her or I will explode.” He sounds so keyed up, talking fast, his eyes bright with just a hint of anxiety. “But she could say no. I mean, who does this? It’s crazy. I’m crazy.”
She rubs her grubby pajama sleeve against her eyes. “Bren, I can’t—”
“Tell me to fuck off and I will.” But his eyes are endless wells of pleading hope.
“Fuck off,” she whispers. “Then please come get me.”
The island resort lies off the city coastline, luxurious in ways she’s never experienced.
A bellhop takes their bags to a room overlooking crisp white beaches and palm trees and an ocean polished brighter than a glossy gemstone.
The bedsheets look ironed, decadence in the decor and artful curve of the sofas.
They can’t stop smiling at each other, both talking without pause since she met him at the ferry.
It’s as if they’re catching up on years apart instead of two months.
It can’t be this easy to fall into sync with him, but she forgets to feel self-conscious when he holds her hand, forgets her usual shame at her cheap clothes, her tiny suitcase, her scraggly curls escaping their ballerina bun.
A tiny nub of doubt grows in the back of her throat, small enough to ignore, but its persistence wears at her. There has to be something wrong with him if he loves you.
When Bren flops backward on the bed with an exhausted groan, Elodie hesitates with fingertips on the doorframe as she soaks in the room with giddy delight.
A surreal glow has settled over her, the flutter of anticipation in her belly sweet and tentative.
She carefully closes their door, too aware of her body, her hammering pulse, the thrill of electricity turning her blood to gold.
Bren sits bolt upright, scrubbing a hand through tousled hair. “Sorry, I didn’t even ask if you wanted to, um, share this room. But if you don’t, I’ll fix it right now. I can—”