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, being BJ Ballentine, my first . . . everything, really. Love, time, heartbreak. He’s the boy with the golden hair and the golden eyes even though his hair is brown, and his eyes are green, the most beautiful boy in all of London they say—and probably I agree. On his good days. But why am I explaining him to you? You already know who he is.

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

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

But I’m in love with her. And this is the only way she lets me have her, so fuck it, I’ll go down with the ship.

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.

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.

Painful things can still be beautiful things, in case you didn’t know.

And he can’t be alone, so I know, if he’s not with me, he’s with someone else, and that’s too heavy a thought for the morning time.

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

my chest panged because I didn’t understand how I could know him how I knew him and not know he was doing this.

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.

You know how there are a few key moments in your life that stand out, like, your first kiss, and the first time you realise your parents are just people too and hearing Coldplay’s “The Scientist” for the first time and falling over and really fucking up your knee, like your first hospital visit, all that shit—meeting Parks is one of them for me.

And sometimes I wish I could go back in time and tell little me to fucking run—that this girl is going to ruin you, she’ll be all you think of, all the time, she’s going to bake biscuits, grind up your heart and use it for sprinkles, she’ll hurt you and you’ll hurt her, and you’ll never, fucking ever, get past her. But I can’t. And even if I could, what parts would I change? The parts where I had her? Never.

What a mind fuck it is to comfort the person who just blew your whole heart open with a rifle. Carnage everywhere, men down, blood spilled.

But the truth is, when you love someone how we were in love, it didn’t matter what he’d do to me—he could have hit me with a bus, kind of wish he did—I still would have done everything I could to make him not feel what he was feeling.

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.

This is my nightmare. Parks and Tom England? My actual nightmare. Because it works. It makes sense. They make sense. More than we make sense.

Want to know how many times Magnolia Parks has made her own bed since she left boarding school? A grand total of zero. She might pull up the duvet once in a while herself—refer to it as a hard day’s work or some shit, but here she is making this bed with the precision of an ophthalmologist and the determination of an Olympian just so she has a reason to touch me as she yanks me off it.

“All this time I thought it was me, something wrong with me, some deficiency in me, something I couldn’t give you, but now, having seen you, seen what you’re like when I’m not there—it’s not.” Her voice goes soft. “It’s not me, it’s you. You’re just . . . a slut.” She delivers this with straight-faced perfect execution.

My heart lives outside of my chest over in Holland Park and it just wandered into the arms of England’s most eligible bachelor.

Magnets. That’s what the boys say about us. Sometimes we’re the same pole, sometimes we’re opposites, but we move each other. Pushing away, pulling closer.

haven’t seen them kiss before. 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.

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.

“Parks, there’s not much about me that isn’t about you.”

“So,” Gus says, “how many men here are infatuated with you?” He looks over. “By my count it’s three.”

I swallow heavy, staring at her. Her eyes don’t move, they stay on mine. Her hand doesn’t move either, and I should kiss her. I know I should kiss her. How many times am I not going to kiss her, you’re wondering—it’s a fair question and the answer is hard to pin down.

I think about kissing Magnolia Parks more than I think about anything else, literally in the world. It’s my go-to thought when my mind has a minute to spare.

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.

I hate fighting with her. We do it too well, better than anyone I’ve ever seen.

How many loves do we get in a lifetime?

Is this what I’ve been doing to her all these years? Is this how her chest feels? Because it feels like I’ve got carpet burn inside my chest. This weird slow sinking like my ribs are collapsing in on themselves and like maybe I’m actually finally losing her.

How will I ever get past her? I won’t. Can’t. Couldn’t.

She’s her wounded self around him, and that might feel worse. Because the only other person I’ve ever known her to be that exposed with is me.

We stayed kissing until we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped a few feet, and I nearly went flying into the ceiling, but he grabbed me, and he was laughing, and then he apologised to everyone over the loudspeaker, told them his co-pilot was a bit distracting and not overly attentive in the aviation arena. I didn’t know whether he said that for me or for himself, but I hoped it hurt BJ either way.

Shove my hands through my hair. “I gave you an answer.” Her face looks like I’ve hit her. She swallows and her eyes go glassy. “And if that’s your answer, then here’s mine: We’re done.” Someone could have hit me in the stomach with a pole.

“Because he said if I wasn’t fake-dating his best friend he’d have a crack—” Tom’s jaw immediately goes tight and his eyes pinch, but a small smile still surfaces before he chuckles. “Of course he did, the smarmy shit—” He shakes his head, laughing. “Yeah, he’d love you. You’re just his type . . .” He looks a tiny bit annoyed by this and that actually makes me happy.

He peels my hands off me, and ducks down so we’re eye to eye. “This is me tossing my hat in the ring,” he tells me. “Just so you know.” Then he pecks me on the lips again and walks out the door.

The problem with me and Parks is, I think we love each other more than ourselves. Again, that sounds romantic but it’s not—

We’ll both take you. Tom We will? Beej Unless you don’t want to, England? Fine by me. I’ll take her myself. You want us to go . . . together? Beej

See you tomorrow x Beej Sleep well, cutie @Tom Alright, bye then?

I watch her, the girl of my dreams, love of my life, alpha, omega, beginning and end, till death do us part and even then I’m still hanging on—and all I say is, “Yeah.”

I have this peculiar floaty feeling that perhaps I have loved too many boys and maybe I’ve made too many boys love me.

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.

“I’m in love with her, Beej—” My jaw goes tight. Heart falls down five flights of stairs. He’s in love with her? I sniff out this laugh that’s suspended in disbelief. “What?” he asks, nervous. I shake my head. “You’re just not the first person to tell me that lately.”

For years, boys probably paid attention to you and you just didn’t even know, because all you saw was BJ. And then he cheated on you—” “I’m aware.” “—And that undercut all the attention he’d paid you till then.” My brows drop a little. “Sullied it. Made it untrustworthy and invaluable. So now I think, maybe you just collect the attention of men—” “Fuck you—” “—Keep it in your back pocket for a rainy day.”

I don’t want her to know I always assumed we’d just wind back up together and I also don’t want her to know that until this waking moment, I hadn’t realised that maybe we might not.

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 you told me she was a master manipulator or, I don’t know—a witch?—I’d probably nearly be relieved. Relieved to have a reason to be stuck on her how I am more than just because I love her in a way I can’t undo.

The way we’re sitting—shoulder to shoulder—one of my arms sitting on the concrete behind her, her leaning back into me without even knowing she’s doing it. This is what we’re like. This is what we’re always like.