Magnolia Parks (The Magnolia Parks Universe, #1)

by Jessa Hastings

Loving someone like I love her fucks you up a bit. Fucking up how I fucked up also fucks you up a bit.

The lights go off and she stares at me through the darkness a few seconds longer, and I love her in the dark. I mean, fuck it—I down and out love her in all spectrums of light, even the absence of it.

He laughed once, all cool and calm and I think if we all could have peeked behind heaven’s curtains at that moment we’d have seen those old Fates knotting our threads together, me and Beej, in this pure, sunny, inexorable, undoable way. I said knotted, not tied. Because I don’t know whether we’ll ever come undone. Not easily, anyway.

Usually when I wake early I tell him I do it to meditate on the beautiful parts of life but really, I just watch him. He is a beautiful part of life, I suppose. Painful things can still be beautiful things, in case you didn’t know.

They leave a mark on your mind in a way other things can’t. Old books. My sister. Milky sweet tea. Marsaili. Hoyo de Monterrey. My father. Menthol cigarettes. Bushka. Chanel No. 5 and Rosehip oil. My mother. Cardamom and leather. A one Baxter-James Ballentine. Musk and orange blossom? The worst day of my life.

Normal is relative, I know. Normal for two broken hearts who can’t fit their pieces with anyone but each other.

The most beautiful boy in every room, the great love of my life—how many loves do you get in a lifetime? I remember wondering that. How many people will look at me like he does, not just like I’m the sun but like I’m the whole goddamn universe.

So, it doesn’t matter if I love him—which I don’t—but if I did, it doesn’t matter, even now. Because loving him is the same thing as tossing the keys to my heart to a valet without a driver’s licence. He’ll drive me off a cliff.

It wasn’t just what happened, it was an absence of him and the way my life had grown around him, like ribs around a heart.

Everything wonderful, everything magical, everything painful, everything beautiful and spectacular and wretched and defining that has happened to me happened with him. And I hate him for that.

“Is Tom England Tom England like I am Bushka Russia?” “No.” Bridget smiles at her gently. “That’s his surname.” “He is very British though,” I offer. “He’s almost like a prince,” my mother inserts. “Like the purple rain?” Bushka clarifies. We’re all silent. “Yes.” I nod. It’s just easier sometimes. “Anyway.” I look at Marsaili. “I have a boyfriend now and it’s new. I wouldn’t want to rock the boat—” “Of course.” Mars rolls her eyes. “Who would want to upset The Artist Formally Known As Prince?”

Fifteen. She had me at one.

I’d never before had lust be met with having. I remember how heavy he was on top of me. I equated that feeling with safety for the longest time. Him lying on me like the best quilt until he lay like that on someone else and changed everything.

It’s strange, the feeling it gives me. Nothing at first. Just . . . nothing . . . and then it was like someone lobbed my fucking arm off with a machete. Nothing, and then everything. Everything bleeding out everywhere, dying right here on a bed of peonies with the love of my life on the other side of the room with a man who isn’t me, who’s actually fucking probably finally worthy of her and the bleeding out starts to feel too real. That thing in your brain that sounds an alarm: we’re not okay? It’s going off. I’m not okay. I feel like I’ve fallen into a hole. No edge to grab, no end in sight, arse in your stomach, stomach in your throat, heart in the hand of a girl who’s holding someone else’s—just a kind of forever falling, this fucking suspending always falling, which is sort of what it feels like to be in love with her at this point anyway.

I’ve taught myself to live within the walls of our weird touching—it’s dysfunctional as shit, I know, but if being with her was heroin, what we have now is methadone. The shit isn’t the same, but it keeps the monsters at bay.

My eyes felt like they were bleeding, my heart felt like it was going to bottom out.

And in retrospect, when I’ll look back at this moment some time from now, this is when I’ll mark it—write it down, dog-ear the moment in my mind that this—right here, is when the molecular structure of who Tom England is to me will begin to change. Not soon at dinner when he’ll nearly fight BJ, not when he steps in front of me, shielding me from the boy who broke and breaks and keeps breaking my unlearnable, untrainable heart, not later tonight when I’ll pull him back into our hotel room with rushy hands and a mind eager to forget and have sex with him, but here, now, with his eyes on me like that, spotting the cracks in my finish before I do, preempting them with his hands on my face, trying to hold me together but he can’t.

And I know that he smells like a Sunday morning. Slow, easy, uncomplicated. Like fresh coffee. New towels and a light-flooded room. Oak moss, patchouli, bergamot, lavender. And if Tom smells like a Sunday morning, then BJ smells like a Saturday night spent in the emergency room—don’t think of BJ—and I just would love not to be in the emergency room anymore.

Echoes all through the ancient mountains around us and the Greek philosophers who waxed lyrical about true love and soulmates roll in their graves as I try for the billionth time to sever myself from mine.

Marsaili used to say something about how love can go sour like milk and then it turns to hate. Maybe we left our love out.

It felt like I was lost at sea and he was this saviour piece of driftwood that I could cling to.

“Good girl,”

Even in the Dark Ages where we’d fucked around and each other over, even then we’d find ways to touch, find our ways back to the centre of us. I don’t know what the centre of us is, by the way. Sounds romantic as shit, I know. But it’s more than that. Also worse than that. The problem with me and Parks is, I think we love each other more than ourselves. Again, that sounds romantic but it’s not— Because if she loved herself more than she loves me, she’d have fucked off years ago. I don’t deserve all the chances she half-tries to give me. And if I loved myself more than I love her, I would have cut the ties between us as soon as she started to strangle me with them. If I loved me more I would have let me drift away, into the dark, out of her light, but I didn’t, and I couldn’t and I won’t because when it comes to her, I have zero instinct for self-preservation. I’ll die in her arms or at her doorstep trying to get back into them, I don’t give a fuck.

Perry shrugs. “Shit-stirrer, truth-teller—they’re the same things to liars.”

“I dunno—I can never tell if we’re dancing in a burning room or taking turns dragging the other unconscious up a mountain.”

“You think she does it to everyone?” “Does what?” He shrugs. “Makes them feel like they’re—I don’t know? The sun.”

“It’s that gunpowder fire thing from Shakespeare. Your chemistry is what makes you—no doubt, man. It’s unparalleled.” Pause. “It’s maybe what’ll kill you though.”

There are all sorts of loves in this world, I know that now. I don’t know it completely—it’s not a full moon of knowing just yet, maybe at best I’m at the waxing crescent of understanding what I can about love. They say it conquers all, but does it? Can it even? All is so vast.

And even then, me and Beej, we keep losing each other, and it doesn’t seem to matter that we love each other how we do, which is with a fullness—kind of like those animals that will eat themselves to death if they’re left to their own devices. I’ll love him till I die, love him till it consumes me whole and kills me dead—so maybe love doesn’t conquer all but just some. Because all is vast and love is so varied, like light in a prism; if you move it around a room, depending on how it catches, it changes. It means different things and there are so many different things love can be to people. I know that some love is beautiful, and some is freeing, some unravels you, some love poisons you, some blinds you, some betters you, and some loves break you in invisible ways that no one else knows about until you have to stand up and the weight of your love crushes your bones.

Some loves, like ours was, are like wrecking balls in glass houses. And wrecking balls have no business being in glass houses like I had no business loving Christian how I did once upon a time, except that sometimes, some loves keep your head above the water when you’re drowning. Some loves might fog up a phone booth on a rainy London afternoon and make you feel less alone than you did before your lips touched.

If BJ is the storm that’s sinking me, Tom is the place where my heart’s ship is getting patched up.

How many loves do you get? Tell me it’s two. Fuck. Please, tell me it’s two. Jo pulls me backwards and away from her and I think the ties that bind us, I think I hear them snap. It’s not two.

I have a feeling running right through like being tucked tightly into your bed at night, like a safe certainty that I will major in the minor details of him forever. I will never unlearn the shape of his mouth.

And the world falls to black. It’s just me and him in all the universe. The stars have exploded, the sun’s burnt out. And it’s rushy, and I love him and it’s urgent. I love him, and it’s like someone’s put a fire under us or maybe in our bones and we need to put it out, but maybe we don’t want to—and I love him.

Can you die from a broken heart, do you know? And if I did and they cut me wide open, would I bleed loving him? When they lift my heart out of my chest cavity to weigh it, does it weigh the same as his top lip? Is his name carved into my third rib to the left? Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. He’s killing me. Loving him is killing me too, and I’m afraid because how many loves really, do you get in a lifetime? How many chances do you give it before you let it go? I’m letting it go.