Page 100 of The Lovers

Her fade shaved.

Her nose glinting with a piercing.

In her hand she holds a card. I recognize it immediately as one of my own from a deck I haven’t touched since the desert. I didn’t know it was missing, but somehow it makes sense that she has it.

“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”

She steps closer. I step closer, too.

“You got your speech,” Julia says, her face coming into sharp clarity as she nears me. She’s never looked more like herself. Her wild waves tossed to the side, her skin tan and glowing, her tiny waist snatched up with a belt. “Let me have mine.”

I bite my bottom lip. Waiting.

“You’re no one’s manic pixie dream girl,” she begins, catchingmy eyes in hers. Reeling me in with her gaze. “You’re not the ingenue of a story someone else is writing. You’re here for so much more than just to inspire a greater appreciation for life in the main character.” She smiles with her whole body and it cracks me open. Feelings I’ve been holding in erupt all over my skin.

The sharpest of them being joy.

“You aren’t for my benefit, but still, it’s hard to believe that you might want me. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, because in my wildest dreams I never expected I’d get to fall in love with a woman like you.”

My heart races, but it’s the kind of racing that makes you feel like you can fly.

“I don’t know everything about you. You don’t know everything about me. But I want to uncover every mystery that you want me to, and I want to be with you for every hard decision and scary moment. I don’t want to own you or make you feel like you aren’t your own person. I want you to be free and I want nothing more than to be by your side for a lifetime of unexpected adventure or just lying on the couch and watching Netflix.” I laugh as tears break free from my eyes. “I’ll take anything, really, I’m way less picky than I used to be.”

Somehow as she’s been speaking, we’ve kept moving, like at the centers of our bodies are magnets that draw us into each other.

From somewhere in the room, music begins to play.

The song.

The one we last danced to. The one Piper tried to steal from us.

But this love is good. It is alive, back from the dead.

“I triple-dog dare you to dance every dance with me.” Her voice quivers as she extends her hand to me.

“Do I need to say yes?” I reply, taking her hand and pulling her into me.

“I wouldn’t mind hearing it,” she says, tucking her free hand into my hair and running it over my earlobe to my chin, where she holds on. Ready to kiss me. “Just one more time.”

“Yes.” I let my forehead fall against hers. “Forever, a million times, yes.”

When our lips touch

two flames, broken apart, mended together, become finally, forever

one.