Magnolia Parks (The Magnolia Parks Universe, #1)

by Jessa Hastings

Some loves you pretend you don’t feel, even when you can, even when you know you do, even if he’s the first thing you think of in the morning, even if he’s like a match in the darkened room of your heart—because loving something how you love him is a painful love that puts rocks in your pockets and melancholy in your eyeballs and if time has taught you anything it’s that it doesn’t matter. You’ll love him forever anyway.

He’s the only man I’ve ever grieved the loss of, the only love I’ve ever loved.

You mustn’t believe everything you read online but you can believe this: once upon a time, BJ Ballentine was the love of my life. He isn’t anymore. And right now, that’s all you need to know.

“So which are you tonight, her guard dog or her boyfriend?”

BJ shifts in front of me a little, gives him a tight smile. “I’m whatever the fuck she needs me to be.”

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

She’s a sucker for a head tilt. She swallows heavy and I hate this. Hate whatever we are. Hate that I can’t just rush her and kiss her and take her in the shower. Hate this box she’s put me in, hate the walls she’s built around her. Hate these bones of a relationship, but it’s all we have left. And it’s the best part of my day.

And in another lifetime, I’d drop the towel, grab her by the waist, kiss her stupid and carry her backwards to her bed but in this lifetime she slams the door in my face.

We stare at each other. My eyes nearly as round as hers, both of us frozen in what we used to be as everything we’ve done in this room floats off the walls and dances around us like ghosts from another time. Have you ever had someone stare you dead in the eyes and wearing all the ways you hurt them? It’s fucking intense. But you know what, she hurt me too.

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.

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.

“It’s very easy to take break-ups like a champ if you strictly date twats.”

His eyes drop from mine. And I stare at him, feeling more betrayed than I want to, more betrayed than I should. He’s crushed. He’s crushed he’s crushed me. This is an old dance we do. A ritual, almost. Breaking our hearts open on the altar of each other.

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

It happens because people are careless and callous and casual with hearts and emotions, and those people are dangerous to be involved with and so even if you love them, you shouldn’t love them, because nothing is worth feeling how he made me feel, and there was no guaranteeing that what happened before wouldn’t happen again because the word of a cheater, she said, is void.

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. I remember hating him for doing this to us.

He’s a time bomb for me, do you see now? He’ll hurt me. He’ll always hurt me. I’ll never be safe with him, even if I’m always safe next to him. 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.

For so many years, his pain was my pain. But that pain, the one he was crying about then, was mine. He was crying my tears, feeling what he had done to me, broken by his own actions. He cried into my neck and said sorry so many times, the word lost meaning . . . the word stopped sounding like a word.

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.

Our eyes caught and I felt like she was reaching out for me, like she thought I was far away, but I wasn’t. That pulled at a weird thread in my head actually,

She knows. She always knows me, and I always know her, and it’s probably unhealthy and it’s probably fucked up because it’s not just that I can’t move past her, it’s that even if I could figure out how to do it—I wouldn’t anyway.

Because her eyes right now, all raw and weighed down the same way mine are, they anchor us to the seabed of whatever the fuck we are and were and will be. And I wonder what love is like for other people . . . Is love for everyone wordless exchanges and a million memories that fuck you up to the bone?

We can’t go slow. The weight of us is too heavy. Gravity calls us, conspires against us . . .

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.

And I wonder if I’ll ever feel like that with anyone else again. I wonder if BJ has? Or is it a once in a lifetime thing? How many loves do we get in a lifetime?

It’s the nuances of all the ways we love each other and have loved each other and keep on accidentally loving each other and it’s the intricacies of our threads we’ve knotted together and it’s the secrets we know about each other and it’s that one broken heart we share.

The problem with me and Parks is, I think we love each other more than ourselves.

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.

no time or heartache or infidelities have passed between us, and maybe this is how we’ll always be—stuck together, drifting back to each other if we somehow pull apart.

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.

It’s strange, don’t you think, the way we attach to people. The way our best intentions are cast aside, and the seed gets deeper into the soil of us than we planned and their place in our lives grow roots. I don’t think we’re supposed to love people lightly.

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.