CHAPTER 40
“LEX, BABY…” HIS left arm, which was wrapped around me, squeezed as he peppered kisses down my hair.
All I could do was cry into my sleeve. He was softly shushing me, rocking me back and forth. He didn’t speak until my breathing had settled and only the occasional tear fell from my eyes.
“I’ve never been in love before,” he said solemnly.
I shook my head. That wasn’t right. This man? This man, with his…everything, hadn’t been in love?
“But—” I barely got the word out before he cut me off.
“No. I’ve never been in love. I’ve said I was, maybe even thought I was, but I wasn’t.” His fingers were still working their way through my hair. “Until you.”
The exhalation that came out of my chest was slow and even. “You didn’t say it,” I told him. Really, I didn’t have any other words. If he did, why hadn’t he told me before? If he really did, why did it take me asking for him to admit it?
“I know,” he admitted, resting his chin across my right shoulder. “I didn’t know how.”
“It’s just three words. You seem to do it pretty well from what I hear.”
“Hillary had no right saying that to you, and believe me, now she knows there is no future of mine that she will ever be in.”
“How did you know what she said to me?” I knew I hadn’t told him. I’d strategically avoided having any conversation involving the L word, and I wasn’t in the habit of pointing out all of my own insecurities.
“She told me, after telling me she and I were meant to be and trying to convince me I loved her and a whole bunch of other garbage.” I should have punched her harder.
“Even if she hadn’t said anything, Ben, you didn’t tell me. I was falling for you, had already fallen for you, and then I got the job in Chicago and I just didn’t know how to stay here, feeling like it was inevitable that we’d break up because I was in love with a boy who didn’t love me back.”
“Lex…” He paused, trying to find words. I could feel the heavy beat of his heart against my back. “I didn’t know what it meant before you. When I finally felt it for the first time, when I finally meant it, I couldn’t make the words do it justice.”
Story of my life.
“I do love you, Lex. I’m sorry I didn’t say it sooner.” I felt his lips press against my skin where my jaw met my neck. Kiss after kiss lingered on my skin as slow tears fell down my cheeks. He wrapped his arms around me, pointing us toward the glowing moon. “My dad used to take us camping here when we were kids.”
“It’s beautiful.” He rested his head against mine, turning every so often to kiss my hair. For the longest time, all you could hear was the tide moving in and out, water sloshing against the wooden posts of the dock.
“Looking up at the darkened sky makes me feel so small. All the stars, the infinite number of stars, and I wonder what really matters, if I really matter,” I told him.
“Of course you matter, Lex,” he assured me, squeezing me tighter.
“Yeah, but I seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Look at all the stars. I mean we’re just one little dot on the horizon.”
“You know I’m not as well read as you, so this probably came from a fortune cookie or the back of a cereal box or those ads they put on the doors of the bathroom stalls in movie theaters, but hear me out.” He laughed, and I smiled. “Maybe we are stars. Maybe some of us are only meant to be a little bit visible on certain nights when the clouds allow it. I’m happy just impacting a few lives, one in particular.” His arms squeezed me gently. “But you? You shine so bright. I think you’re destined to impact lots of lives, to impact the world. So, maybe we are stars. Maybe some of us shine brighter than others. You, Lex, you’re the sun to me. You shine and you make everything in my world brighter.”
Maybe I wasn’t anyone great. Maybe I couldn’t change my own oil, and maybe I still burned frozen pizza occasionally. Maybe I didn’t have plans beyond graduation, but those words, coming from this man, made me feel like I did shine bright.
“I can get a job in Chicago.” Shock clouded my face at his statement. It must have said the words I was thinking, because he continued. “I have a great GPA, I’ve interned with my dad’s company for three summers, and you know, I’m charming.” He laughed, running his fingers through his own hair. “I shouldn’t have any trouble finding a job.” Oh, to be that confident.
“I thought you had a job,”
“My dad owns his own firm and has had a job waiting for me since I decided to do engineering, too, but it’s not a necessity.”
“Won’t he be mad?” I asked, shifting around to look at him.
“My dad? No. Maybe a little sad, but he just wants me to be happy, and he’d probably kick my ass if I let you go.” A soft laugh fell from his lips, and I felt the rumble in his chest.
“You would do that? For me?”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t the one word he used that got to me, but the confidence behind it. No hesitation. No doubt.
“I turned it down,” I told him. “Probably stupid considering I don’t have any other prospects. Now I’m just worried I’ll never do anything important, like I’ll live my whole life just existing.” I didn’t want to just exist. I wanted to live, even if that living only meant waking up in the morning and going to a less than perfect job, knowing I was going home to a closer to perfect love, even if it wasn’t forever.
I swallowed the lump in my throat before snuggling in closer so I could feel his pulse at his throat where I rested my lips. “I love you,” I repeated. “More than first loves.”
His fingertips trailed down my bare skin. My lips found his in the darkness, and a smile came to my mouth as he kissed me deeper. It was forceful, urgent, needy. I skimmed my fingernails along the short hair at the base of his neck. His fingers wove into my hair, and we were both a little breathless when I pulled away.
The drive home was silent. I was content sitting beside him, resting my head on Ben’s shoulder while his fingertips traced little designs on my knee.
I wondered how many people had fallen in love on this one-lane backroad, how many stories it’d played a part in. As I looked over the console at him humming along to the song on the radio, backward cap allowing me to see the light in his eyes, I just knew there was magic in this moment, magic that made me feel things I had long ago given up the hope of feeling. The magic infiltrated my blood stream and made me want to do things, things like eat chocolate and believe in forever.
Maybe we wouldn’t get forever. Maybe this love wasn’t everlasting or infinite, but we had each other, and right then, that meant we had all that mattered—happiness.
When we made it back to Lola’s and climbed into my bed, which had missed Ben almost as much as I had, our skin hadn’t been separated. Like so many people do every night, I uttered the three words that now were used more as a goodbye than a declaration. Even as I said them, meant them, believed them with all I was, I knew they still didn’t do it justice.
Love. It was just four letters, one word, one word that couldn’t possibly describe everything I was feeling. The intensity of the ache in my chest when he was away, the glow of my morning when he was there—there was no way one word could explain everything I felt, but I guess that’s what love is, right? The unexplainable. It’s different for everyone. It’s all of it encompassed together, every kind of happiness and devotion. We all use the same word to describe it because no other words do it justice. No one else has the words either.
CHAPTER 41
“WHAT DO YOU want to be, Lex?” There she went with that question again. Couldn’t she see it caused me physical discomfort? It wasn’t like I hid the flinch at her words, and I was positive she noticed the involuntary twitch of my right eye. Sherri at least looked sheepish when I sighed.
I was so tired of having this conversation. It never changed. My natural instinct was to say something snarky like, If I knew that, don’t you think I wouldn
’t be spending precious time attending these lovely sessions? I refrained, but just barely. I was working on my sarcasm. Well, not really. I just accepted it as one of my failings, along with procrastination and forgetting where my car was parked in multi-level garages.
Thankfully, this was the last time I had to have it with Sherri. Since graduation was looming, my mandatory counseling sessions were ending. I supposed even they could only do so much to help a writer get a job.
I played with her dandelion paperweight while I chose my words. “Here’s the thing,” I told her, passing it from hand to hand. “I don’t know for sure.” My voice was the closest thing I could get to sounding confident. Her eyes stayed on mine, completely focused. “Because I’m still learning me.” That was an understatement. “And I feel like that’s going to be a lifelong process, but I’m trying. I’m really trying. You know, I took an astronomy class my freshman year. I’ve spent my dad’s tuition money on all kinds of classes: belly dancing, interior design, forensic science. I’ve taken electives in political science and anthropology, and I’ve spent hours and days trying to decide what job I’m supposed to do for the rest of my life.
“This year, you, my professors, my parents, and basically everyone in the world has been pushing me and pushing me to make a decision, but I can’t yet—at least I can’t tell you what I want to be for the rest of my life, and maybe I’ll never be able to tell you.
“Maybe it’s a trial and error thing. Maybe I’ll try dozens of jobs before I decide what I really like. Maybe I’ll never be a successful writer, and maybe I’ll find a job that’s ten times better than continually beating my head against my desk. What I do know without a doubt is that I don’t have to make a decision because the world tells me it’s time to.
“I’ll get a job. I don’t want to have to rely on my parents for support. That kind of defeats the purpose of becoming an adult, or so I’ve been told. I need a place to live, food to eat, and all those other things adults have to spend money on, like insurance and taxes. I’ll get a job,” I repeated, “and it’ll probably barely pay more than minimum wage, so I’ll have to learn some serious budgeting skills. Who knows? Maybe I’ll still end up waitressing on the side. I’m not entirely sure what job is going to make me happy right now, and I’m completely positive I don’t know what career is going to make me happy for the next thirty years. What I did learn from this very expensive four years is that I should be chasing happiness. A career is just one part of a life, and even though I do hope I find a way to make money that also satisfies my happiness, I hope I don’t judge my entire life based on what I do for an income.”
CHAPTER 42
EVERY TIME I sat at my keyboard and stared at the nothingness that filled my screen, I realized maybe I didn’t have as much to say as I thought. I’d always shared a lot with my computer. Like a diary, it knew my deepest secrets, and thanks to password protection, it kept them. I typed out my feelings and cleansed my soul. Paper doesn’t judge. Paper doesn’t giggle at your expense. Paper doesn’t have opinions about your lack of dating habits, or at least not a mouth to voice them.
I stared at a new blank document every night and arranged my unpredictable thoughts into a color-coded, bulleted catalogue of the strange notions that had been floating around in my head. Taking inventory of the madness didn’t produce consistent thinking, but it helped manage my erratic brainwaves.
In the last month or so, it hadn’t been as unpredictable, and it wasn’t as strange. When I relaxed into my nightly routine, consistent inspirations hit me. Deliberate truths occupied my thinking. I sat every night and poured out from my inner artist. Even during the day, I couldn’t stop the thoughts demanding to be written down. In the shower, driving to campus, daydreaming in class, I couldn’t stop writing, which was a welcome change from the radio silence my mind usually gave when I considered trying to stick to an actual topic.
Through sheer willpower and unrelenting perseverance—or you know, just luck, whatever—I wrote. And I wrote. And I wrote some more. It was mostly crap, mostly words that felt the cold death of my delete button. Still, in between the paragraphs of waste, there were occasional bits of clarity that were now forming an actual plot to a story that had potential.
It wasn’t love. It wasn’t a happily-ever-after fairy tale. It was deep and honest. It was unapologetically truthful, and it demanded to be real, which typically ruled out labeling it as part of the romance genre.
The writing actually started while watching reality television. As unpromising as that seemed, it opened my eyes. I had wasted too many hours debating the extent of their surgical enhancement, and it dawned on me that these women were role models—role models for very impressionable teenage girls. I couldn’t imagine what the future held for them, what this was doing to their perception of the world.
There is no shortage of admirable female heroines in literature, for which I am infinitely grateful. We can still find brave girls who grow into courageous women. We can still unearth knowledge of good and evil. If we look hard enough, we can still find truth among the inaccuracies the world tries to feed us.
Contrary to what the ratings of popular TV shows or the cover stories of numerous magazines say, it’s not actually important who wore what, who dates who, or who checks into rehab. If we are going to dive into the everyday lives of the rich and famous, the only thing that should be important is the talent, charity work, philanthropy, and hope they spread.
What is worse, those things are actually happening, but we treat them as a side note. Celebrities can donate millions of dollars to cancer research and in the same week get dumped, and society treats one as way more important than the other. The only problem is, it’s the wrong one.
Susceptible girls are being swallowed whole by a deceitful society and pressured to walk the microscopic line of contradiction, an impossible task. Girls are supposed to be soft but hard. Either you are opinionated or mindless. This world is a turning ball of contradiction, and for some reason, it’s been deemed that girls are supposed to tread this delicate balance of lady and boss.
Even as a twenty-two-year-old on the verge of graduating college, something society deems successful, I looked in the mirror and saw all my imperfections. I dwelled on them until they took over, and I forgot that I actually had redeeming qualities. My focus remained on my faults, not my strengths.
Why is the world always telling us we have to hide our humanity? We are humans. We have flaws, stitched together with imperfections, and yet we constantly pretend we don’t.
We are damaged. That’s what makes us real. That’s what makes our souls worthy of love.
I wanted to write a book that fed the soul, showed the world the dark side of humanity, confronted the evils and inspired change. I wanted to write something that healed our popularity-plagued culture.
It was why I chose writing, why I continued to torture myself by staring at blank pieces of paper. One of these days, my name was going to be among the authors. One of these days, I was going to be able to step out of the rain, pop into a small-town book store, and see my words in print, waiting to be plucked off the shelf, waiting to inspire, waiting to provoke change, invoke feeling, give hope.
Words offer so many things to us: answers, insight, love. Words on a page linked together in the most rhythmic way inspire our soul and influence our life, and I wanted to do that.
Words had always been my communication, my vice. They were my drug of choice. In a world full of things we don’t get to pick and choose, our words aren’t one of them. They create worlds before us, each one new and exciting, each one showing us a little something we didn’t see before. We read and we read, and we leave a little piece of our self in each book that sets our soul on fire, and we take a piece with us. We become attached to characters, to places, to the feelings we get as we spend time diving into worlds of fiction. At the end of that road, when we turn the last page and say goodbye to the voices we’ve come to love, it’s piercing in its finalit
y, and we’re a little less and a little more because of it. They make us who we are, each and every one.
I felt like if I pierced my skin, ink would pour out. Cutting myself open wouldn’t have resulted in blood loss, because ink flowed through my every vein, and every night when I sat down to purge myself of the words, I did so with the knowledge that this writing had the potential to heal a soul. For the first time among my own blank pages, I was writing with the intention of making a productive dent in this crater-filled world.
CHAPTER 43
“SO YOU HAVE a job working at your father’s firm after graduation?” I asked Ben a couple weeks after we’d settled back into our routine of study, snack, snuggle, although now I was crumbling under the immense pressure of figuring out my next steps. Of course, my mom would have been delighted if I’d moved home. I did plan on an extended visit once I was finished with finals, but beyond that, my future was uncharted.
“Yeah, that’s kind of always been the plan. It’ll be my firm one day. He’s got some projects already waiting for me.” The pride showed through his voice, as it should have. I knew how hard he’d worked for his degree, how proud his dad was of him. He deserved to bask in his success.
“And that’s in Connely, right?” I verified. Nerves made my fingers tremble. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint the source of my anxiety. It wasn’t like we were breaking up, but I still feared rejection.
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