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But then what is he hiding?
My eyes flicker to the screen as my nails tap on the pale blue ceramic mug next to my laptop.Tick,tick,tick. I read the line over and over:Love is a stubborn heart.
Magdalene, the editor, highlighted the line. She thinks it’s beautiful and she wants repetition of the metaphor throughout the book.
Love is a stubborn heart.
Is it, though? My forehead scrunches as I think back to the story in the manuscript. The tale about a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. Two families who hated each other and their children who wanted nothing more than to run away together. It’s not a tragedy but it doesn’t have a happily ever after either. It’s too realistic.
If love really was that stubborn, wouldn’t they have been together in the end?
Maybe it wasn’t really love.
Or maybe love just wasn’t enough.
I don’t know that I agree that love is stubborn. I suppose it is, but more than that, it’s stealthy and lethal. I nod my head at the thought.
Love is deadly.
Rolling my eyes. I push the laptop away. My comments don’t belong on this manuscript right now.
I don’t know the very moment I fell in love with Evan. It felt like I was counting the days until it would be over, and then one day, I simply decided on forever. Just like that, a snap of myfingers. Slow, so slow and resistant, and then in an instant, I was his and he was mine. And that’s how it was going to be forever.
I smile at the thought and try to focus on the lines staring back at me from the computer. I try to read the words, but I keep glancing at the wall behind me. At a photo of the first night he took me to meet his parents. It was after I’d decided on forever.
I’d never felt that kind of fear before. The fear of rejection. Not like I did that night and I know why: it’s because I’d never put my heart out there for anyone to take.
I was very much aware that Evan had every piece of me. Unless he didn’t want me. In which case, I’d be broken and I didn’t know how I’d recover.
The thought consumed me the night he brought me to his family home. I was sure his family wouldn’t like me. It’d been so long since I’d been with a family for dinner. I used to go to my friend Marissa’s when I was in high school. But that’s not the same. Not at all. It was also a rarity that I accepted Marissa’s parents’ offer for dinner.
When you lose your parents at fifteen, people tend to look at you as though they’ve never seen anything sadder. I’d rather be alone than deal with that.
So I was, until Evan. And he didn’t come on his own, he had a family that
“had to meet me.”
My back rests against the desk chair as my gaze lingers on the photograph. I had it printed in black and white. It’s the four of us on the sofa in his family home’s living room. It’s funny how I can see the colors of the sofa so clearly, the faded plaid, even though there isn’t any color in the picture that hangs on my wall.
All four of us are smiling. His mother insisted on taking the photo. Just as she’d insisted he bring me that night.
It’s only now that I can remember how Evan’s father looked at her. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but that’s because they hadn’t told us that she was sick.
I guess in some ways it was the last photograph. If that isn’t accepting someone into your family, I don’t know what is.
I have to hold back the prick of tears as I think of her. I only met Marie a handful of times. The dinner was the second. The third was after she’d told Evan; she didn’t have a choice, seeing as how she had to be hospitalized. The last time I saw her was at the funeral.
I may not know when I fell in love with him, but I think I know the moment he fell in love with me. The moment a part of his heart died and he needed something, or someone, to fill it. Maybe I got lucky that it was me. Or maybe it was a curse.
I roll my eyes, hating that I’m stuck in the past because I can’t move ahead with the future.
Maybe we weren’t really meant to be. Maybe it was never the type of love that’s meant to keep people together. Just the type of love when you feel compelled to give someone compassion.
Are there types of love?I find myself leaving the question as a comment on the book and then deleting it.
If there are, then maybe Evan’s love is the stubborn kind. He’s not so stubborn that he’ll stay this weekend, though. Come Friday he’ll be gone again. Maybe it’s a different kind of love then …
It’s only when I hear the bedroom door shut that I finally look back at the manuscript and email the editor back. I need more time before I can give feedback on any of these to the author and I’m ready to fall asleep in the corner chair, or any place I can where Evan will leave me alone.