Page 9

8

Fane

Before

“I knew you were too good to be true,” Cali said, hopping out of the truck and rounding the front.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m here to meet my fatal end.” She shrugged one shoulder and looked around.

I rolled my eyes at her. “No, you’re not.”

“That’s exactly what the person leading me to my doom would say!” She heaved a sigh. “At least I get a good view as I’m going out.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose, looking back at me. “No, I meant this pleasant junkyard you’ve brought us to.”

I’d known Cali for four months. It had been four months of feeling like I’d known her my whole life. Of getting up and moving through each moment, each shift, each mundane task only because I knew that doing all those things brought me closer to seeing her again.

She was so completely different from anything I’d ever had in my life before that the way she made me laugh stopped shocking me a long time ago. I tipped my head back and released the bubbling, foreign feeling that started in the very center of my chest and pushed out of me with determination.

I shook my head and walked to the back of the truck to set up all the blankets and pillows I’d thrown back there. I looked back at her, her face soft with this sort of starstruck expression that she made every time I laughed. Like she was constantly in awe that I found her funny.

“You coming, Rose?”

It only took us minutes to turn the back of my old, beaten-up truck into one of the pictures Cali had pinned to her Pinterest board about date ideas she thought would be cool. She didn’t know this was what we were doing until she saw the blankets I’d hidden under a tarp at the back, and it was worth spending the money I didn’t really have on blankets I’d probably never use again just to see that look on her face.

We were quiet for a long time, shoulder to shoulder, looking up at the clear, black sky above us. We were a little ways outside of Artington, but my best friend Ash’s cousin owned this junkyard, and it had always been the perfect place to see the stars.

“Tell me what you were like growing up?” She asked it so innocently.

And why wouldn’t she? Cali had no idea how fucked up my upbringing was. It felt almost criminal to put the weight of those memories on her. This woman who was light and bright and warm.

“It’s not a nice story,” I warned her, my voice catching at the memories.

“Okay,” she said. Quiet but strong. Giving me the choice to share my past with her or not and no judgment regardless of whether I did or didn’t.

So, I told her.

It had been awkward at first, piecing together words to depict the memories I had worked hard to forget. To expose her to the monster I had worked tirelessly to be nothing like in every capacity. To admit that I had been too young and too weak to do anything for my mother until she had endured her own hell for seventeen years. To confess that, as much as I wished it didn’t, growing up like that had fucked me up more than I’d ever admitted before. Both out loud and to myself.

“Never felt like there was a safe place to land, to fall into,” I said, eyes back on the sky above. “That sucked.”

I think one of the best things about Cali was that she’d taken the time to learn how to be around me without working to change me. Without asking me all the time if I was okay, if something was wrong, if I was mad. She just realized that this was the way I was, and she wanted me anyway.

Keeping quiet was a habit I formed when I was a kid, and the only thing I wanted was to be invisible. When it was safest to simply disappear.

The older I got, the less it became about that and more about just not having all too much to say. I spoke when it was important, when it was necessary. When it was needed.

With her, it had been enough to let someone else hear the worst parts of me—the poison in my blood that felt like a ticking time bomb. This unavoidable clear view of my future. That something would happen, and I’d snap.

Cali wasn’t like me. She told me about her family, her childhood, and what her town had meant to her. She shared all her light with me and didn’t so much as flinch when all I had to give her was shadows.

It was enough that she heard it all and still held my hand as if the weight of me didn’t scare her away. She didn’t see me as tainted. When she spoke, I hadn’t expected it—that she would think she needed to give me anything more than what she already had.

“You can fall into me,” Cali whispered, her eyes glued to the stars above us.

I turned onto my side to look at her. Watching her eyes flicker rapidly, determined to find a shooting star. To cast one of the wishes she kept in the Notes app of her phone up and into the universe. I let my eyes run over the slope of her nose and watched how it crinkled every so often in concentration. Felt her hand twitch in mine every time it did.

I knew it before, but I was certain then. I could look at this woman every day for the rest of my life and never tire of the view.

It’s a surreal feeling, knowing that you’re looking at your whole fucking world. That for some reason, when millions of people never got answers to even their smallest, most mundane wishes, I got an answer to my biggest and wildest one.

“I mean it.” Her voice was soft. Desperate not to disturb the world.

I felt my throat tighten because, fuck, I believed her.

“And what about you?” I asked instead.

“What about me?”

A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, lighting up those hazel eyes of hers—eyes I already knew somehow, even before I’d had the privilege of meeting them.

It was like Cali’s soul sat so close to the surface, and for some reason, it had looked at me and said, “ That one. I’ll have that one”.

“Who will you fall into?”

“You,” she said, turning onto her side fully.

“And you’re sure I’ll catch you?”

There it was. Right there for her to see. One of my biggest fears. That I wasn’t enough for her. That I hadn’t been ready for her when she found me, and I still walked right up to her anyway, desperate to know what it would feel like to have her palm slide into mine.

“I am.” She was so sure. Her free hand pressed against my cheek, moving to the back of my head to sink her fingers into my hair.

“How?” I whispered and closed my eyes.

“Because,” she whispered back just before I felt the air shift between us, and I could feel her moving closer to me. Freeing both her hands, she pushed me gently onto my back and climbed on top of me. Straddling me while my hands found their home on her hips.

Hips I loved. Hips I dreamed about.

“You already have.”

And then she kissed me, and I knew I would never belong to anyone ever again, the way I belonged to her.