Never (Never, #1)

by Jessa Hastings

Beauty is funny though, don’t you think? Because beautiful doesn’t necessarily always mean good, and just because something doesn’t make you happy doesn’t preclude it from being beautiful either.

It’s as though the boy lives in their memories and so do they, young and immortal, the clock hand rolling backwards, unwinding time and loosing its chains on them, and they are, once again, unbound by the cages of age.

it’s strange how love can undo you. Time unravels in its presence, she says. It pierces the veil of our understanding.

You know how the air gets when summertime’s close? Like frangipani and the ocean. He smells how the air feels right before the storm. He smells like freedom, and I don’t mean to, but I breathe him in. And once I feel him inside my chest, there’s this peculiar sinking—it’s rather distinct—that the feeling of him being there might not ever quite leave. Do you ever get a feeling like that? A foreboding? A grave permanence to whatever’s about to come next? That’s how breathing Peter Pan in feels. Like taking the first step on a carpet rolled out in front of you.

there are just some things you don’t want the sunshine to know.

“I’ll fly you to the stars when it happens,” he tells her quite solemnly. “I’ll be young again when you do.” She smiles ever so sadly. “Remember me as I was, Peter,” she tells him, and he nods obediently. “And you…” She turns to me, smiling gently at the door. “Remember me as you will be.”

So then, the answer is no, actually, I’m not ready for any of that, and even still, my heart begins to float away, like a kite trapped in the sky that is his eyes, and I can feel that none of that matters. It’s not a choice, is it? It’s what Mary said it was. It’s the fate of my family; we’re tied to him. “And thus, it will go on,” Wendy always said. It is our burden to love him. Which I don’t, and I shan’t. But I could see how one might.

“Never really is such an awfully long time…”

I suppose a part of me could tell that one day, Neverland would be both the great landmark and landslide of my life.

He glides in the sky and skims the stars, and I’ve never seen anything like him, like a stone skipping across the sky, weaving through comets like a beam of light. He’s all the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum we can see and even parts of it that we can’t, all bound in wonderful flesh to the freest of souls.

easy way to discern a true man among men is how much of yourself he allows you to be in his presence. A real man will allow you to be your whole entire self, with breathing room and space to change your mind and even evolve it. A mere boy might let you be yourself just an eighth of the way, if you’re lucky.

Or with how he’s looking at me, my hand still in his, his face now lit up with the light of three rather close suns and I can see his cheeks are the slightest

bit pink, perhaps actually it’s him who’s still holding on to me.

I swallow heavy at the sight of them. Something a bit like home in them. Like all the darkest blues of the water on that planet I’m so very fond of.

as he takes my hand, pulling me up off the ground, and when we touch, it feels as though something gets knocked off of a shelf that I’ve kept very neat and very tidy for my whole entire life. It’s a very organised shelf—colour coordinated and alphabetised—but somewhere inside of me, I hear something shatter, and it frightens me,

Before, his eyes on me felt like a cardigan, and now it feels like a winter coat.

look up at him,* and I guess if I could feel the galaxies or even just see them, maybe I could have seen a new moon peeling open behind Jamison Hook, but my eyes aren’t quite yet that way inclined.

“No.” I shake my head, and I tell myself that I’m not even remotely unnerved by how quickly the tides of him can change. Because the ocean changes quickly too, and it’s fine and safe and people hardly ever die in it.

“Sometimes when I think about you, the sky turns pink.”

“The first time we kissed, there was a meteor shower that night after.”

He laughs and I like the sound so much. Like you’re sitting by a fire with a drink in your hand that you love, that’s how his laugh feels when it hits you—it warms you up from the inside out.

raining leaves and smells like smoldering logs and cinnamon, and Jamison Hook blends right in because something about him feels like when you’ve walked inside after being caught in the rain and a fire’s already lit.

“Aye, Bow, I do, because I give a fuck about ye.” His eyes settle on me, steady, and his jaw tightens as he says this. “And y’are all-consuming.”

He shakes his head, eyes falling down me. “Who the fuck is leaving ye behind if they have a choice?”

but this feels the same to me as when he put his coat around me. Sort of weighted. More than just keeping me warm, it’s a heavy thing that feels like an anchor being laid on the seabed of who I am. Just settling in, making itself at home.

Your eyes drift in a room, you know? Mine drift to him.

“Of all the things I have, you’re my favourite one.”

“Fer what it’s worth.” He gives me a look that makes me turn to a puddle. “I fell a long time ago.”

I’m happy he loves me like I’m shipwrecked out at sea and he is the first bit of land I’ve seen in weeks.

I’m excited not to drown anymore.

That could be a component of the fate I no longer want. Maybe souls exist outside of our bodies on a plane we can’t otherwise see, and they know each other from this otherworld, so when they meet in this one, that’s how they know. Why you can meet a stranger who feels like an old friend. Maybe you’re just new friends in this life and old ones in all the others.

because to love someone isn’t freedom; it’s to be a captive. And I was his.