by Anna Todd
“I have, unfortunately,” you say. You’ve met enough people to know that most of them are nothing like Daniel. Where he is happiness and yellow tones, blue eyes and a soft smile, they are harsh, deceitful, and stained with black tar.
“You’ve got to be the most negative person I’ve ever met.” That he’s turned your words around you can’t help but find funny. You decide to do the same.
“If this is true, then you haven’t met very many people.” You smile up at him with a challenging smile. You reach for his hand, and he doesn’t even flinch when you touch his skin. You shiver when his thumb begins to caress the skin between your thumb and index finger.
“If that is true,” he says, correcting you. “I believe my line was ‘if that is true,’ and since I literally memorize lines for a living, I’m pretty sure I’m correct.”
You laugh, telling him that he’s a smartass. He gets a kick out of it, and you find yourself wanting to make him laugh again. The problem is that you’re not very funny. You’re not like him; humor doesn’t come any more easily to you than do smiles.
Despite these thoughts, you’re laughing now, you’re smiling now. As his laughter trails off, you approach a massive rock. One side of the brown mass is covered in moss, and the other has been messed up with little words and hearts etched into the rock.
“I love this thing.” He pulls you closer to him, but you keep as much distance as you can. He’s like a magnet, and you try to remind yourself that this isn’t real, none of this is real. In a few hours, he will go back to his castle in La La Land, and your carriage will turn back into a pumpkin. Except, in this fucked-up fairy tale, you don’t even have a carriage. Your bus will turn into a squash?
His fingers trace a few words on the rock: JEFF + SARAH 9/17/2011. A thin, sad heart is drawn next to their names.
“This? You like that people wrote their names on the side of a rock?”
You’re beginning to think that if you were to walk over to the blackbirds’ feast and bring the dead animal to Daniel, he would find something beautiful about it. He would praise the ecosystem or something.
He clears his throat and traces another declaration of love: KRYSTAL + KEITH = FOREVER. “Yes.”
You want to rain on his parade and tell him that Krystal and Keith probably hate each other by now, that Keith probably slept with Sarah from the other tag, but actually you’re enjoying the way his fingers are tracing the words and treating them as though they’re much more beautiful than black Sharpie scribbles on a dirty brown rock.
“I like to imagine how they felt as they did it. Try to think about it.” He pulls you closer to him and puts his hands on your shoulders, turning you to face the rock. “Think about them, running along the beach, holding hands, laughing, and only focused on one another.”
He really is the most positive person you’ve ever met. People like him must have made a deal with the devil and stolen all the happiness from people like you and everyone you’ve ever known. His hand moves from yours, and he loosely wraps his arm around you, pulling you against his back. You can feel his breath on your neck when he speaks again.
“Imagine how big this Krystal woman must have been smiling when Keith wrote their names on the rock. She was probably blushing, her heart was probably racing, and he probably turned to kiss her. . . .”
Heat fills your cheeks, and your heart is pounding in your chest. Your eyes feel heavy as his breathing slows and yours picks up.
Daniel’s other hand moves to your waist, and he turns your body, gently pushing you against the surface of the cold rock. You can barely breathe and blood rushes behind your ears and you can barely process what’s happening as he lowers his head. His lips aren’t touching yours, but they are so close that if you were to move a fraction of an inch, they would touch.
He steals your breath when he begins to speak. “Are you imagining it? The way they felt?” A shiver runs through you with his words, and you press your back farther into the cold rock. You nod, overwhelmed and alive with adrenaline. You are certain that he won’t kiss you, he’s only trying to prove his point that this rock is more than a vandalized block of stone on a dirty beach.
“Don’t think of the possibility of anything else, only that they were in love when they were here, completely infatuated with one another. . . .”
His hands tighten on your waist, and you can taste his breath on your tongue. You have never, not once in your entire life, felt the way you do right now. You feel like you’re floating, yet you’ve never felt so grounded before. You feel present—you feel like you’re actually involved in your own life for once. You feel strong and in control of your own thoughts, your own body, for once. You don’t hesitate when he inches closer. You press your lips to his without hesitation, and the moment they touch, something in him snaps. He’s no longer the controlled, nice, charming guy who finds radiance in everything. He’s shifted into a wild, grunting force, and his hands push through your messy hair and his breath comes in fast spurts, along with his tongue. He’s not tentative; he’s not gentle. But you don’t want gentle, you want this. You want to be lost in the madness of him, you want his teeth biting at your lips, you want his hips pressed against yours. You’ve never felt this, you’ve never felt wild before in your boring, unsatisfying life, and you are terrified that when you’re no longer tasting the sweet taste of him, when your hands aren’t exploring his chest, you will be become you again. You don’t want to go back to being a simple, no-name waitress . . . you want to be this. You want to be his. The crushing reminder of reality is trying forcibly to take this moment from you. Every doubt you have about yourself, from your appearance to your achievements, is threatening to overtake the wildness, and you use every ounce of strength inside of you to crush that doubt. You need the wildness; you need to live in this moment for as long as you can. Your doubts have taken enough from you since the day you decided to let them, and you refuse to let them today.
His mouth is unforgiving, unashamed, as his hands move from your hair, to your neck, to your chest. He doesn’t grope at your chest the way you see in movies, and despite the madness, you know he’s aware of the crowd closing in on us. As if he’s reading your mind, he turns you again, hiding you from the sunlight, from the crowd.
“Fuck,” he mutters into your mouth. You grow bolder with each second. Each flick of his tongue makes you more powerful, more aware of yourself and your body. Your hands clench his shirt, needing more of him. You are panting, adrenaline rushing through your veins like blood, and you try to shut your thoughts out completely. The only thing you want to think about is the way his hungry mouth feels as he kisses you. This is the longest, most important kiss you’ve ever had, and you know that even when you’re back to reality, you will never, ever forget how it feels. He presses his body against yours, leaving no space between you. An instinct you didn’t know that you possessed is nagging at you, begging you to touch him, pleading for you to take more.
“Oh my God!” a girl’s voice shrieks, and Daniel jerks away from you like he’s been burned. You feel as if someone ripped out a part of you, the best part of you, when he turns to the crowd.
“Is this your girlfriend?”
“How cute!”
“Get a room!”
His fans joke, teasing him. A younger girl toward the back of the crowd is scowling at you, eyeing you from your dirty boots to your messy hair and swollen lips.
“Guys . . .” Daniel is gentle with them and his demeanor is impeccable. He’s completely unaffected by what just happened, and you feel the threads inside you coming undone, one by one. The crowd swallows your Daniel—
And you realize how insane you sound thinking of him as yours. He’s not yours; he never was, and he never will be. At best, you could claim him for the last two minutes, but now that your time has run out and he’s smiling for pictures and graciously thanking random people for their compliments, he’s theirs.
They have stolen him from you, and you don’t ha
ve anything to offer him that they don’t have too.
You can’t tell him how great he was in some play, like a woman in a red shirt is doing. You can’t say that you loved him in his latest big-screen role, like a teenage boy is doing. You can’t offer him anything that he can’t get from anyone else, and that knowledge is a bitter taste in your mouth. You swallow the acid and your pride and slip out from behind the rock. The wind drowns out their praises behind you, and you couldn’t be more grateful for that. You rush up the shore and curse at yourself when your boot catches the sharp corner of a rock. You fall to the ground, landing on your knees. The toe of your boot is ripped now, along with your jeans and skin, but you keep running. You take the stairs without fear this time and run past the white buildings as fast as you can. Your chest is burning—your entire body is burning—by the time you make it down the street and away from the beach. You don’t stop running until you can no longer hear the waves crashing against the shore. You want to vomit. You want to cry. You want to scream by the time you stop.
But you don’t. You simply pull out your cell phone and call a cab. You’ll use your entire savings to get back to West Hollywood if you have to. You need to get away from here, away from this fake paradise where beautiful, thoughtful, and intelligent men are actors who kiss sad, simple girls backed up against the rocks.
WHEN YOU WAKE UP, the cab is pulling up to your apartment building. Your legs burn as you climb out of the car and try to forget how much money you just threw away. The entire day has been nothing but a waste of time and money and energy. You drink half a bottle of wine and pass out on your couch watching a string of horror movies. You don’t even like horror movies; you just can’t stand to see even a flicker of happiness right now.
Or ever again.
Okay, you’re being dramatic, you know this, but it doesn’t make any difference. When you wake up, your chest feels as empty as your wallet, and you call your job to see if you can pick up a shift. You need the money and the distraction.
You’ve always been a bit of a masochist, so it doesn’t surprise you when you’re googling his name on the bus ride to work. You try to keep your mouth closed and your breakfast down as you scroll through the newest pictures of him. He’s on the beach, walking next to you, then talking to you while touching the rock. He’s kissing you, his hands in your hair, his mouth crushed against yours. You can’t stop yourself from reading the comments attached to each picture.
You aren’t surprised to find that not a single one of them is nice—not even close to it. You’ve been insulted plenty in your life. Hell, you tear yourself down on a daily basis. But the list of names and insults these people behind the screen of anonymity are saying is something else entirely. You have never been the center of attention—you’re not stupid enough to think you could be a model—like every single one of Daniel’s exes listed on the internet—but you also weren’t aware of the many flaws you have that these people are ready and willing to point out.
She looks like a bird pecking him to death, one man from Michigan says. When you click on his profile, he has a Confederate flag as his icon. You roll your eyes and completely disregard everything and anything he says.
The next few comments are claiming that you’re a whore and too ugly to be with someone as “sexy” as Daniel. You hate that you agree with the second part of that.
You keep scrolling, torturing yourself until your stop. When you step off the bus, you look up at the sky, hoping that the sun will grant you even the tiniest reason to be hopeful. Except there’s a massive billboard blocking the sun, and, lo and behold, there is Daniel’s face, blown up to the size of a damn house. His eyes are locked onto a blond woman. Her blue eyes are just as stunning as his, and you really believe that he and the featured actress are in love.
You feel like an idiot for more than one reason, and you now remember why he seemed familiar to you in the first place. This billboard has been up for nearly a month, and you pass it daily. He looks different here, glossier and slightly Photoshopped. You prefer the real Daniel with the hint of purple in his lips, the slightly darker rings under his eyes. These things aren’t flaws to be edited out; they are a few of the most appealing parts of him. You hate that they took away the shadows under his eyes. They’re barely noticeable, not giving the impression that he’s tired or overworked but showing that there’s something more to him. Something that keeps him up at night pacing around his mansion. You don’t know him any better than his adoring fans, but you know he’s more than some shiny face on a billboard. He finds happiness in everything, and he cares about more than the materialistic shit people likely assume he loves. And you hate him all the more for it.
You wish you could pretend that he’s some snobby, conceited, rich asshole with a pretty face, but you know better than that. You force your eyes to tear away from the massive reminder of the best day of your life and walk into what will be far from it.
At the restaurant, the smell of garlic and the grease fryer takes away the hint of ocean salt that you couldn’t get out of your nose. Seeing the way the other employees glare at you and hearing rich men in suits demand continual scotch refills help you wash the memories of yesterday from your mind. You get hit on twice, and it takes everything inside you not to pour plates of steaming-hot pasta onto the laps of leering, worthless, perverted men. By the end of your shift, you’re back to hating everything, and you’re okay with that.
Two weeks pass without a single thought of Daniel. Okay, that’s a lie, but you haven’t googled him in over a week, and you’ve stopped looking up at that stupid fucking billboard every time you step off the bus. You even came across his face in a magazine at your local grocery store and didn’t want to crawl into a hole or burn the thing. Progress. Still, you’re a bit ashamed that you almost created a Twitter profile after finding his. You were close to crossing the line to becoming a fan of his, but you still haven’t seen his work, so you have no excuse.
Your resolve is getting stronger, and the burning memory of his mouth on yours is sizzling out; only a tiny flame remains. You give yourself a few days and it will be gone, you know it. You can’t afford to live in a dreamland where Daniel Sharman waltzes into your job and sweeps you off your feet. There’s no horse-drawn carriage, no happy ending. He’s already forgotten you.
Days come and go; you pick up as many shifts as you can and otherwise avoid human contact any way you can. The sun seems dimmer after week three, and you finally stop thinking about him enough to brave attending another art class. You find one closer to home, not caring if it’s more expensive and more crowded. You take the bus to the Studio City community center and keep your bag closed during the bumpy ride, protecting your new pack of markers. When you step off the bus, you divert your eyes from billboards, as you’ve learned to do, and cross the street. Your directions tell you that you have a five-minute walk, which makes you glad you live in a city where it hardly ever rains.
Inside the large building, the classroom is quite full. You manage to find an empty spot in the far back corner and begin to dig your supplies out of your bag. This isn’t a beginners’ class; the one where you met Daniel was enough. This is a moderately advanced-level class that focuses on using markers and colored pens as a medium. It’s perfect despite the crowd and the lack of air-conditioning in the musty room. Trying to open the window behind you, you find it’s stuck. Of course it is. The woman next to you makes small talk, and you try your best to engage with her even though you aren’t listening to a word she’s saying. You think she’s talking about her pet, or maybe her child? You’re not sure, but you find it hard to pretend like you care what she’s saying. When she looks at you, staring for a moment, expecting a response, you feel a twinge of guilt.
Why couldn’t you just listen to her? It’s not that hard to be polite, and she just spent the last three minutes sharing a part of her life with you. You hate that it’s so hard to engage with people; you wish you were more like Daniel.
Dani
el. His name burns like lava in your stomach, and you take a few deep breaths to calm down. You don’t have to allow his face to burn you from the inside out, but you start to think you should allow a part of him back into your mind. Even though you’ll never see him again, the short encounter with him made you want to be just a little kinder, make a little bit of effort to be more involved in your own life.
You smile warmly at the woman. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t get the end of that. Tell me that part again,” you tell her.
She smiles back at you, obviously pleased by your polite interest, and you realize that being nice actually makes you feel good. She had been talking about her daughter, her only daughter, who just beat breast cancer. She tells you that her granddaughter is seven and asked the entire family to wear a cape, like a superhero, every day that the little girl’s mom was battling the cancer that threatened her life. Whether it was the capes her family wore or simply modern medicine that gave the woman her life back, you’re so glad you took the time to actually listen to the story. You make yourself a promise that you will make a conscious effort to engage with people who make an effort to engage with you. You owe it to yourself and to them.
The woman’s glasses are foggy and your eyes are burning, holding back tears, by the time she finishes. You almost tell her about your grandmother, who you lost to cancer, but then decide one step at a time is best with this. A few minutes later, the last two spots in the classroom fill up, and the instructor begins. A landscape is what you’re told to draw. A landscape of your choosing—even better. You love landscapes, and you really need the distraction of being able to zone out of life and onto paper. You begin with a dark shade of green, close to olive, and make small lines on the right corner of your page. You completely focus on turning the blank page into something beautiful.
The door opens and something inspires you to look up. Your hand drags across the page, ruining the blades of grass you’ve spent the last twenty minutes perfecting. You groan and look around to find your marker eraser. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on the paper you’re using, and of course, this paper causes the mistake to bleed and blur the lines even more than they already were. But when you hear murmurings of “excuse me” and “sorry,” your heart begins to race. That voice.