Magnolia Parks: The Long Way Home (The Magnolia Parks Universe, #3)

by Jessa Hastings

She doesn’t know that I’m a wolf and Parks is the moon whose name I’ve howled since I was fifteen. Jordan doesn’t know how me and Parks are. Were. I mean were.

It’s just easier dating someone who doesn’t rip your heart out of your chest all the fucking time. And Parks always will. She can’t help it. One look at her stupid eyes and I’m undone.

For fuck’s sake. Please, not any more.

“Uh—no. No, everyone listen. I, metaphorically—” I try to clarify just for him—“dropped the—metaphorical—plant of our love into the desert and willingly abandoned it there. So, to just elucidate—not sad—” I give Henry a stern look. “Very empowered.”

Everything. Breakfast time, cups of tea. Bumblebees. Honey. The stars. Gucci. The Discovery Channel. Long drives. Driving in general. Willow trees. Uno. Old Skool Vans. Tiffany’s. Maserati’s. Boys with tattoos.

a thudding heart in my throat and eyes that don’t know where to look because I’m afraid they’ll find the thing they’re dying to see.

I can feel his eyes on me—he’s

That pull we have, the undertow of the universe always dragging us back towards each other, it has to mean something, don’t you think? That great magnetic force I’ve spent the better (or worst) part of a year fighting and defying and I feel it still, my legs trying to walk me back into his orbit—I think it means something.

It’s all a lie.

We weren’t any of those things but don’t you for a second try to tell me we weren’t in love. I loved him more than anything and at the end of everything, it’s all we had and it did not persevere. It failed.

he makes me wish I were a gay man. Or he were a straight one.

“How’s the weather, Parks?”

My favourite forget-me-not bow still on his thumb.

And his stupid pillow mouth rips at the seams of my resolve not to love him how I worry I always will, and my mind falls through an infinity of memories I’ve had with him and thought I’d have with him and worry I won’t ever have with him again.

He smirks and goes “hah” and I miss him.

“I look good in lilac.”

“Yes, you do.”

and in that moment we’re still each other’s and time wraps around us in the infinity we thought we had but we don’t anymore because he broke us.

He laughs and for some reason it sounds like I’m ringing the doorbell of the home I grew up in.

I’m just glad I can still tell. Glad to have not lost him completely.

“Is that a tattoo of two dead bees?”

“She wasn’t the one who killed them.”

u were

but I don’t care because it’s BJ and something about him will always be worth it.

I slip into the toilet, lock the door and lean against it as a terrible revelation dawns on me. It’s like the morning sun when you forget to close the curtain—it’s my fault, I should have closed the curtain, I knew the sun was there, I knew the sun would eventually rise again, but I didn’t close the curtain and now this invasive, bright, shimmering light wakens me from the slumber I was using to avoid it. I still love him.

Parks would never order that. Too many things touching each other.

He’s been living out of the sunlight for a year. But join the fucking club, mate.

I look over at her more tenderly than I should, feel an old kind of missing her in my chest that I wish would just die but it can’t seem to take its last breath. Every time it takes one it takes another and another, and it’s never a last breath. Loving her like this is a kind of breathing that feels like dying.

The wheel of the ship’s spinning out of control and why the fuck is it that when Magnolia Parks is in my life I am all riddles and nautical metaphors?

It rolls through my mind like a thundercloud how in another lifetime I could have just walked over to her, slipped my hand behind her head, and kissed her real good up against the wall.

Sounds like it wounded me. Did a bit.

She’s crying for me in a way I’ve never done for myself and I love her for it.

Maybe it’s me. Me undoing her, because we do that to each other.

She says nothing. Her eyes don’t move from me. It’s just me and her alone in the universe, how it used to be, how it’s supposed to be in all the lifetimes. Maybe even this one.

“BJ, you can love someone and not have it rule you, not have it dictate your every waking thought and decision. You can love someone and still retain your power and autonomy. You can love someone and have it just be there, a part of you, and still have a completely functional life—” She pauses and gives me a long look. “Even if it’s a life without them.”

That she looks okay—and I want her to be—but she looks okay without me.

And then my eyes fall down the trunk to the stone we lay to remember the tiny baby girl we lost that no one even knows we had, and there are magnolias laying there and I know he was here.

Sleep off losing the only girls I’ve ever loved.

Probably just love the idea of her, love the idea of a tiny Parks I helped make bossing me around forever, driving me mental.

red robin

our two smashed-up hearts on the floor and we can’t even tell our pieces apart anymore but we’re the only glue we need so it doesn’t matter anyway—maybe

Looks like that deer I love.

try to make it sound like having too much history with Magnolia Parks isn’t the mounted deer I’ll hang in the hallway of who I am, like loving her isn’t the first thing you see when you walk through the door of me.

“How’s the weather, Parks?”

I watch her walk away for the billionth time in my life and I sigh. What the fuck am I going to do now?

Didn’t used to be like this, but since I cheated on her it’s like she needs me to prove to her that I want her infinitely. It’s a glass that can’t be full. There’s a hole in the bottom of the cup where I broke her and all the ways I want her fall through it.

I could drown in the what ifs if I let myself—might as well. I’ll be drowning in her anyway for the rest of my life. Happily, too. What a way to go. What a life.

“You’ve loved him since you were fourteen,” he tells me. “Magnolia, you never stopped.”

Each of them are like bricks laid in the house I built to love him, but the point is really that house I built isn’t a monument to a love I used to have. It’s a house I want to live inside of still.

Even when I’ve hated him I’ve loved him.

And for all the pain and all the sadness, for all the shitty things that happened, I still find myself not regretting it at all because he loved me. It’ll be what they put on my tombstone, I think.