Magnolia Parks (The Magnolia Parks Universe, #1)

by Jessa Hastings

start to wonder how many people in your lifetime do you get to love how I love her? Can’t be that many. How many loves do you get? Tell me it’s two. Fuck. Please, tell me it’s two.

It won’t ever be. There’s no such thing as enough when it comes to her. No enough and I’ll never be done.

Why was I crying? BJ. The answer’s always BJ. What does that say about us? There is no us.

And he isn’t mine completely, I know that. I know he loves someone else but so do I, and maybe that’s okay because maybe you do get more than one love in a lifetime.

My heart’s in my throat waiting for her. I don’t care that she’ll be with England, I’ll just be happy to see her. Her eyes that’ll glare over at me angrily—her pouty mouth. Maybe I’ll start a fight with her, so she’ll say something to me? I miss her voice.

“But the root of what she’s doing here is self-preservation,” Bridget keeps going. “She thinks if you die, she’ll die.” She gives a small shrug, happy with her conclusions.

I’m holding her how I’ve thought about holding her since the last time I did. It’s the best day of my life.

She falls asleep on my chest, and I breathe, relieved for the first time since I lost her.

If BJ’s water to me, Tom is wine. I don’t need him to survive, but I love him anyway; he tastes good, makes me feel better, makes me feel braver.

It’s strange, don’t you think, the way we attach to people.

“Magnolia.” He shakes his head. “I’m not telling you to change your mind. I couldn’t, anyway. You two are—” he pauses, looking for the word—“bound.” He says that like it’s a hopeless thing. But he’s right. We are. “I can’t undo that—I’m not trying.” He shrugs. “I’m just telling you, so someone has—he’s going to hurt you again, and I don’t know that I’ll be here when he does.”

“You know, you’re going to have to choose to forgive him some days,” she tells me. “It’s not always a feeling, forgiveness.”

“It was you?” Parks says in a tiny voice and I’m already on my feet. Shit. Paili’s and my eyes catch. She’s panicked.

And you want to know the God-honest truth? I wasn’t thinking of Parks. All I was thinking about was that was what I wanted. It was what I wanted. I was choosing it. That was what I wanted to be doing and I was doing it, and I had a girl in my hands that I wanted there, and we were touching and kissing and that was what I wanted.

I am sick.

She looked down at me, a half-smile, half-frown on her face, and I reckon it’s important to say because it’s true, we could have stopped. Throughout. In every sexual encounter there are multiple organic checkpoints—breathing breaks, taking clothes off, kissing breaks, shifting positions—we could have stopped several times. We didn’t.

“Did you know?” Magnolia asks Jonah in a quiet voice. Jo nods. She turns to Perry. “And you?” she asks, throaty. He nods too. These bonus revelations crush her extra, I don’t know why.

My best friend? My best friend and my best friend. It’s worse. He’s right. It is worse. Knowing her face.

I shake my head, but I don’t fight him off because I don’t want to. It’s too hard. Counterintuitive. I love being touched by him; I want to be touched by him. And held by him and kissed by him and had by him and I haven’t been for nearly three years and I’ve had him for three days and now I’m losing him again and my skin feels like there’s acid on it with the betrayal—it took me so long to stave off the wildfire for him in my belly and now it’s back and it can’t be. But I’ll douse it out however I need to, because I’ll never have him again. This is the end.

He grabs me, pulls me in towards him, holds me tight against him and I tell myself to remember this. Remember how this feels. Being in here, in his arms. Remember how it feels to be folded up inside his chest, how it feels to have his arms pressed against my back, where my legs fit between his, how he ducked his chin a little so I can live under there, remember all of it because this is the last time. I breathe him in once more. And then I rip him off me. Do it quick, like a plaster.

“You’ll never touch me again,” I barely say out loud but he hears it. I pull the chain around my neck where his crest ring has lived for the better (and worst) part of a decade—snap it off my body, throwing it to the ground.

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.