June First

by Jennifer Hartmann

“June always feels like a new beginning.”

She claimed me like the sunrise claims the morning sky with lightness and blush, promise and wonder. She claimed me like a cyclone funneling through a quiet town, taking no prisoners. She claimed my good and my bad, my light and my dark. She took my broken, ugly bits and molded them into something worthy of display. She turned my agony into art. June claimed me in a way that could ultimately be defined by a single word: Inevitable.

It’s hard to do bad things when someone wants you to be remarkable.

but fear is an ugly, unpredictable beast, and the greater the fear, the more strength it takes for us to face it.

Sometimes a lot of love can make you cry.” Her brow furrow. “I don’t cry about love.” “Maybe you will someday.” “That doesn’t sound so good. I don’t think I want a lot of love.” “It’s a good thing to have,” I tell her. “The downside is, the more love you have, the harder it is to lose it.”

“I’m serious, June. Being brave is a choice, and choice is the greatest weapon of all. I promise, you don’t need a sword.”

“Brant, wait… D-don’t leave me here.” “I’d never leave you. I love you.” “How much?” I’m not sure why I ask it, but I do. “To the moon and back.” Brant pauses, his brow furrowing. “No, that’s not enough. How about…over the rainbow and back again,” he settles on.

“Shh…she did. She did.” June strokes my hair, kisses my forehead, whispers her soft coos of solace into my ear. “She gave you to us, Brant.” Her own tears get the better of her, and she chokes out, “She gave you to me.” My heart stutters. My breath hitches, realization dawning on me. Oh my God. All this time… All this time I’d been angry and bitter, thinking my mother had broken her promise. She’d whispered hopeful words into a little boy’s ear that she couldn’t possibly keep. But June is right. My God, June is right. My mother never broke her promise. She said she’d always protect me and she did. Even in death.

I’m hopelessly, irrevocably in love with you, June Bailey. The desperate, aching kind of love. The kind there’s no coming back from. The kind there’s no way out of. The kind that’s going to be the death of me one day. I fall more in love with June than I ever thought possible as we clutch each other in a moonlit graveyard on her eighteenth birthday, with my mother on my mind and the scent of sweet desserts dancing in the air.

“I’m just saying, friend to friend, that there are worse things than loving the wrong person.” I stare at him, waiting, my stomach twisting into knots. “And that’s losing them.”

“It’s not fair that your face is so perfect, a piece of art on display that I’m not allowed to touch. I should only adore it from afar, even though its beauty calls to me. Even though I’m convinced it was created just for me.”

“It’s not fair that it holds two eyes that look at me the way they do, like they were made for seeing only me. It’s not fair that it has lips that I’ve memorized, that I can’t forget, and a tongue I’ve dreamed about tasting me over and over again.”

“You always smell like springtime and lemon drops,” I say gently, kissing the top of her head. My eyes close with contentment as I breathe her in. She sighs, her breath warming me through the fabric of my shirt. “You always smell like spearmint and Ivory soap.” Songbirds serenade us as we stand in the center of the patio, enmeshed in a potent embrace, breathing in perfect time and swaying lightly, as if nature is singing just for us. Then we say it at the same time: “Like home.”

All I can say is follow your heart—knowing that there might be a few casualties along the way. You have to weigh the good and the bad,” she tells me. “No relationship comes without a fight, but it has to be worth fighting for. It has to be worth all the sacrifices you’ll inevitably have to make.”

Passion is meaning. Passion is purpose. And tragedy is simply the risk we take in order to experience it.

“You told me one year on Christmas Eve that sometimes a lot of love can make you cry,” I whisper, pressing a kiss to the little freckle that dots his lower lip. “I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t even want it.” I kiss him again, lingering longer. “But I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, Brant. Loving you is worth every single tear.”

“A lot of love…is a good thing to have,” he says, his voice worn and raw, echoing his past words. “The downside is the more love you have, the harder it is to lose it.”

“We’ll never lose it. I’ve been yours since the day I was born and I’ll be yours until the day I die. Distance doesn’t change destiny.”

He’s taken on my added weight, my heavy burdens, and he’s carried them with dignity. With pride. Brant has always gone out of his way to protect me, and now it’s my turn. It’s my turn to be brave. His mother’s last words to him filter through my mind, tightening my chest with sentiment. I heave in a rickety breath, taking a small step back. “I’ll always protect you.”

“I don’t want to leave,” I begin, placing my own hands over his, keeping my voice low. Tears pour down my face like a fractured dam. “I want to stay and build a life with you—a beautiful life I know we deserve. I want to marry you, Brant Elliott, and I want to make love to you every night beneath rainbows and stars. I want to have children with you. I want to raise them strong and brave, just like their father, and I want to sing them lullabies by the light of the moon.” My words clip with grief, and I take a moment to find my voice again. With a sorrow-filled sigh, I finish, “I don’t want to chase my dream because it’s not a dream without you in it.”

And when you’ve lost everything that matters, a crumb might as well be a four-course meal.

“I fell in love with her,” I mutter softly. “And it never felt like a choice, it was just…effortless.”

“I realize this may not be fixable,” I say, sorrow lacing my words, “but you have to know that I did everything I could to prevent this from happening. I fought it, and I fought hard—but for all the stigma surrounding our relationship, for all the fucked-up technicalities that shadowed us, my feelings for her never felt wrong. She never felt wrong.” I’m breathing hard, my heart pumping fast. “And it’s really hard to keep fighting something that feels so goddamn right.”

“She was never supposed to be my sister!” I burst out, my head falling back against the wall as venomous tears drench my eyes. My chest caves in, my ribs burn, my breath hitches. “And it’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair,” I chant, broken and hopeless. “She was supposed to be Theo’s sister and we were going to grow up together as neighbors. I would’ve just been a regular boy who had a crush on a regular girl, and that boy would have fallen in love with that girl the right way.”

“It’s not fair that my father had to lose his fucking mind and ruin my life, taking my mother away from me while also destroying any chance I had of a future with that girl—that amazing, incredible girl with the purest heart I’ve ever known.”

“The girl who removes all the purple taffies out of the bag because she knows I don’t like purple, and who wears perfume that smells like desserts because it reminds me of my mother, and who bakes me things even though she doesn’t like to bake because she knows I love sweets, and who’s brave and kind and so fucking good it’s impossible to see any other girl but her.”

“I love June. I’m in love with June…madly, completely, infinitely. I’m in so deep, there’s no way out. And I’d love her no matter what, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of if we were neighbors, friends, classmates, or strangers. I was always meant to love her.”

“Nineteen years ago, I was drinking lemonade on my front porch with your mother…with Caroline,” she says, stroking my face as I go still. “She’d caught you feeding the neighbor dog pieces of your pancake through the fence in your backyard that morning, petting its nose and giggling. She’d scolded you, of course—told you it wasn’t safe and that the dog could bite your hand.” Nostalgia laces her words. “But you didn’t care. You said the dog wanted love…and if you got bit, that was okay. At least you gave it love.”

“You’ve always put love first, Brant—regardless of the consequences. Regardless of the fact that you might get bit.”

“Just like my own instincts told me that my daughter was never going to be your sister.”

“You’ve always put love first, Brant,” Samantha says, her blue eyes glimmering with awareness. With knowing. With a mother’s instinct. “You’ve always put June first.”

“Sometimes that’s the greatest gift we can give someone,” she says. “Time.”

Do you know what it means?” I shake my head. I never bothered to look it up. “Sword,” she tells me. “Brant means ‘sword.’ Brave, gallant, a stalwart defender.” Aunt Kelly reaches into her purse and pulls out an opened bag of Skittles, quirking a smile as she tips the corner toward me.

“You’ve lived up to your name, Brant. More than you know.” We both glance at the headstone, feeling my mother’s presence swirling around us, wrapping us up in a warm hug. “I know she’d be so very proud.”

People talk about rehabilitation all the time. Broken bodies learning to walk again. Impaired minds fighting disease, addiction, and dark thoughts. But have they ever had to rehabilitate a heart? Hearts fall apart, too. Bodies crumble, minds fail us, and hearts turn hopeless. They can deteriorate if we’re not careful, and for all the tragedies I’ve suffered through, for all the tears and pitfalls, I can’t think of anything more tragic than a hopeless heart.

The heart is the crux of life itself, and once it starts to wither, everything else starts to wither, too. And that’s a damn shame. That’s a devastating injustice to everything we’ve fought so hard to overcome and to everything still worth fighting for. And there’s always something. There’s always a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, waiting for us to turn that corner.

Fate disguised in sinful wrapping paper. But it doesn’t feel wrong anymore. His hands on my body don’t feel criminal, and his lips on mine don’t feel like a fluke.

he’s accepting the moment—this inevitable, meant to be, fateful moment. A moment that confirms that we were never wrong. Our love story was never wrong.

“I’m done missing you. I’m done sleeping alone. I’m done wishing for a future with you when you’re still here.”

“You…you haven’t been with anyone else? In two years?” “No.” “But you’re…” “What? A man?” He peppers kisses down my jaw and nibbles my neck, his fingers raking through my hair as our bodies slap and grind together. “And men have needs?” I nod, tilting my head to the side to give him better access. “I’m your man, June. And the only thing I’ve ever needed is you.” Kissing

“Never underestimate a man willing to wait forever for the woman he loves.”

For a moment, he’s just a boy again. He’s the boy who stole my heart before I was old enough to even consider giving it to anyone else. With floppy bangs, knee-weakening dimples, and a stalwart soul, he’s fighting off invisible monsters in our backyard, tucking me into bed with a lullaby, and reading me storybooks beneath our childhood tree house.

In a lot of ways, he’ll always be that boy. But he’s also a man. He’s the man who fought for my dreams, who never stopped waiting for me, and who made love to me all night long, cherishing every single piece of me. I loved the boy, and I’m in love with the man.

Brant Elliott lays claim to all of my most precious memories of the past, and I know without a doubt ...

“I recognize that color in your cheeks, Junebug,” he rasps near my ear, curling his fingers inside me. “That’s all me.”

“Where were we?” I murmur. “I’m not sure where you were, but I was right here…wishing I could be wherever you were.”

And I’ve been happy. Yes, I’ve been happy pursuing a lifelong dream, making new friends, dancing and working, experiencing my first foray into independence. I’ve been happy. But I haven’t been truly happy… There has always been a hole. An absence.

True happiness is a puzzle. It’s a jigsaw puzzle we’re all carefully putting together, searching for those pieces that link and connect, that allow us to move on to the next part of the puzzle. Some puzzles remain incomplete, and I think that’s because many people don’t know what makes them truly happy. Or…they’re unwilling to take the time to find those other missing pieces first. They just want to squeeze the last piece into a space it won’t fit. Those other pieces are integral, though. They are the stepping stones for the finished puzzle. And as I lie here beside the man I love, watching his organic, soul-deep smile put light back into his eyes, I’m thankful we both took the time to find those pieces.

“I think he’ll get there…and we’re all going to feel pretty damn remarkable one day. And when that day comes, every unremarkable minute will have been worth it.”

“True happiness is worth every sad, unremarkable minute,” I tell him, my smile lingering. “It’s been worth every night sleeping alone, every tear spilled without you here to wipe it away, every rainbow I’ve watched paint the sky only for it to fade like it was never even there, all while I begged for it to come back. While I ached for one last glimpse.” Pressing a tender kiss to his mouth, I tell him, “It’s been worth the wait just to see you smile like that.”