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The first time I fell in love with Zoe, she was scream singing a Taylor Swift song in my parents’ living room while my sister Luna laughed at her. At least, I think that’s the first time. It’s happened so many times now.
Sometimes, the world gives you people that, from the start, you know they’ll be there forever.
“Don’t play stupid, Davidson. You gonna grow a pair and put a ring on my little girl’s finger?”
“Luna, I’m lying in my bed, staring at a goddamned One Direction poster on my ceiling.”
So so real
“On that road trip we planned.” “I would remember planning a road trip with you, Zander. I don’t—” He stops me with his words. “You were twelve and I was sixteen. You said when I got my license, we should go on a road trip. We never did it. I’m off for a week and so are you. Let’s go. I’m tired of the cold. Let’s go somewhere warm.”
“You remember that?” I say, my voice low and shaky. I barely remember that. And I only do because back then, I was so incredibly head over heels in love with Zander Davidson that every interaction we had is burned into my subconscious. “I remember everything that has to do with you, Zo,” he says.
I hold them in my hand, staring at the old-school red hotel keychain with the words fuck the patriarchy on it. “Are you kidding me right now?” I ask, and she turns with a smile, definitely knowing what I’m talking about.
A goddamn handful. But a handful I’ll hold on to as long as she’ll let me.
“You don’t get that the need I feel to keep you safe has absolutely nothing to do with your father, Zoe.”
“Go to sleep, baby,” he says in a low voice, and I want to question that, too, the sweet pet name, but instead, my eyelids get heavy, my mind focuses on the constant stroke of his thumb on the back of my hand, and I fall asleep.
“We’re watching the sunrise on the first day of our road trip.”
“Yeah, it is,” he says, and when I look at him, I realize he isn’t looking at the sky at all. His eyes are on me.
“You need that, Zoe. You need that wake-up call.” “Why are you the one to give it to me?” I ask quietly. “What makes you so qualified?” “Because from the time you were five, I could always convince you to do crazy shit with me. I just spent the last ten years or so forgetting that that was my self-appointed job.”
I was raised on The Notebook and fairy tales and Taylor Swift. It’s hard not to idealize dumb things, I guess.”
He tugs until I step out, and he walks me back five or so steps before pulling me in, his arms around my waist, my hands instinctively moving around his neck. “What are we doing?” I whisper, familiar music playing as I dance in the headlights in a parking lot with Zander Davidson. “We’re dancing in a parking lot, Zoe.”
“Wanting a man to dance with you in a parking lot because he’s so fucking in love with you he can’t wait to get you home and into his arms isn’t childish. Thinking you’re too manly to pull over and give your girl that? That’s childish.”
“What are you doing to me?” I whisper against his lips. “Whatever it takes to convince you to be mine,” he says, and my heart stops. “Zee, I’ve been yours for as long as I can remember,” I confess because it’s the truth, and in this moment, I only have the truth as an option.
While she laughs, I reach out to her hand, pulling it across the table and manipulating the straw wrapper onto her ring finger.
And without a word or a pause or anything, he pulls our twined hands up to his lips, pressing a light kiss on my knuckles before lowering them again.
I don’t tell him that I overheard my mom on the phone with my aunt one year, sighing that it was a pain to go three towns over to get an ice cream cake in February.
🥺
“I’ve spent my entire life categorizing your likes and dislikes, waiting for the moment you’d let me in.”
“I’m going to kiss you, Zoe,” he says. “I’m going to kiss you, and it’s going to be real, but you can pretend it’s all part of the game. I’m going to kiss you because I can’t stop thinking about it, and you’re driving me fucking insane.”
This is not a girl kissing the boy she’s loved for as long as she can remember. This is a man kissing a woman that he needs wholly.
are. I don’t know much about the universe except that it’s never steered me wrong because it’s always directed me to you.”
“Can I ask you a question?” “What is this?” she asks, moving and looking up at me. “What’s this midnight question thing?” “I want to start every single day on this trip learning something about you. I want to know all of your midnight secrets.”
I will never tell her that this entire trip, from the questions to the stops to the random shit we’re doing, is all based on things her ten-year-old self put into a box. I won’t tell her I’m trying to make all her fairy-tale ideas come to life so we can live in the real world together.
“On my way,” I say, putting her on speaker and placing the phone in the cupholder. “Okay, I’ll just—” “You’ll stay on the line, Zo. You’re not going anywhere.” The way she sounds, I need to keep her on the damn line. “You don’t have—” “I do and I will. Your voice? Zoe, it’s shaking. You’ve got me worried. I’m not letting you go until I see your face.”
Because Zoe has been mine for so fucking long, I don’t even remember when it happened.
“Zoe, I like every fucking version of you: the princess who used to chase me around with a wand and try to turn me into a toad, the version that sang karaoke in my living room like she didn’t care who was watching, the version that wrote in diaries about how big of a crush she had on me then left them under my little sister’s bed.” She tries to pull her head back, to escape—from embarrassment or to yell at me, I don’t know—but I hold her head in place, continuing. “I love the version that keeps a ticket from a concert we went to fifteen years ago. I love the version that wants everyone to see
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“It should have been us, you know? All along. That should have been me and you, getting engaged in front of everyone, the couple everyone knew would make it from the start.”
“You. You’re why I’ve stayed here. Not intentionally, but when I look at it? Yeah. It tracks. You tied me to this town the same way I did to you. It wasn’t your parents, not your friends. We were both waiting for the moment when it was right. I think we ignored seventeen thousand signs along the way, but here the fuck we are, Zoe. Where we were always gonna end up one day.”
I was definitely wrong about him being my dream man, I think.
He does the move that, even now, still gives me butterflies, doing a push-up and kissing me before straightening.
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