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 does that when he’s annoyed and I can tell he’s annoyed, but it’s just for a second because then his eyes soften like they always do for me.

I miss you, I blink in Morse code. I still love you, say the turned-down edges of his perfect mouth. Fairly top heavy, like somehow it always manages to get stung by bees. Once upon a time, he balanced my whole heart atop that lip.

The physical distance between us is meagre, but somehow still a forest grows between. Pine trees of mistakes so tall we can’t see over them and rivers of things we didn’t say so wide we can’t get around. We’re nowhere near where we thought we’d be, we’re completely off grid, and I feel lost and alone for a minute, but I’m lost and alone with him.

He laughs from the back of his throat and I love it when he laughs at the things I say, I want to make him laugh forever but I can’t because he broke forever and still I fight the urge to kiss him anyway.

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

“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.” “Oh,” Brooks nods coolly. “So you’re her bitch.”

“How many fights do you need to get into before you understand that it’s too late. You lost Magnolia a long time ago.”

We walk through those heavy black front doors I’ve kissed her up against a million times and I can’t help it—what this house does to me—I’ve loved her in every corner of it. Undressed her in every room. The house turns me to fucking mush. Nostalgia on steroids with a shit-ton of oxytocin whenever I stand in this foyer—a lifetime worth of memories watching her walk down this curving marble staircase, heart in my throat, her in my hands… Loving someone like I love her fucks you up a bit. Fucking up how I fucked up also fucks you up a bit.

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 ...

Plus, he had these bedroom eyes that look at you like he’s undressing you on the spot and I know that sounds so inappropriate, but that’s just because he’s never done it to you, because if he had, you’d know and you’d live your life waiting for him to look at you like that again.

I said knotted, not tied. Because I don’t know whether we’ll ever come undone. Not easily, anyway.

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

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.

Taura Sax is also who he cheated on me with, by the way. That’s what I’ve concluded. The second worst night of my life floats to the surface of my consciousness—orange blossoms. There was something else…what was it? Think, Magnolia, think. I stomp out those thoughts like a fire in my mind.

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.

I wonder whether we’re going to kiss. I always wonder whether we’re going to kiss. We never do. Nor should we. Our eyes hold like our hands won’t.

With anything to do with him, my heart’s logic is as blurry as the lines we pretend we don’t cross.

That’s how I needed it to be for us to get back together, but Marsaili helped me see that’s not how infidelity happens. 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.

I still haven’t quite shaken the feeling from that day. It’s made me not trust blue skies, because the sky was so blue that morning, and as Jonah swerved through traffic down Piccadilly Circus I remember thinking that how the sky had looked that morning was a lie, like it had lulled me into a false sense of safety. It made me feel like that day was going to be a good day, but it was unfolding in front of me to be the worst. I felt like I was driving to my doom. I felt like I was on my way to finding the love of my life dead. I remember gripping the chair of Jo’s car so tightly my nails tore the leather. I remember Henry reaching around to me from the backseat behind and holding my arm, steadying me. I remember at a stoplight Jonah turning to me and wiping tears from my face I didn’t know I was crying. And I remember, viscerally, the feeling that my chest had been sawed wide open and the nerve endings of my heart were exposed.

I remember wondering if this was it, if that was the last time I’d ever see him. Him with the starry eyes and the hair I loved to knot my hands up in. 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. I remember hating him for doing this to us. I remember hating him for dying before we had a chance to be okay again, because I always thought we would be. I thought we’d be fine, I thought one day we’d sort our shit out and I’d forgive him for everything he’s done, and we’d grow old together and we’d finally get that house in Tobermory, but then he was dying of a coke overdose because I looked happy the night before with another man I don’t give a fucking shit about. I remember resentment pounding through my body and then I remember it, like a physical punch in the gut, how much I loved him. Really loved him. To the bone, loved him. Cut me and I’d bleed him. How much I needed him, still needed him, would forever, always, never couldn’t even if I tried, needed him. And I remember being deeply afraid of what my life would be like without him in it.

his chest rising and falling in a rhythm that was the soundtrack of my youth and I’d never been more grateful to hear it.

My heart surged at him waking. His voice, I remember it sounding like Christmas morning and my birthday and Valentine’s Day and home and I loved him.

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.

She doesn’t look like Parks. No one does. That’s the interminable problem of my existence post Magnolia Parks. She’s the only one. Only one whose shit I’ll put up with, the only one who fucks me over and around and who I’ll stick around for, the only person who’s ever had my heart in a headlock.

I was a wreck when Beej and I ended. Not one of those wrecks you slow down to peer at, just…pure carnage, keep driving, cover-the-eyes-of-the-children kind of wreck.

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.

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.

And it would be BJ who would make me fearless and safe and hopeful all at once, and it would eventually be BJ who would strip me of those things one day when he came home smelling like musk and orange blossom.

We were just babies, really. Doing grown-up things with hearts the size of Texas and a lust as deep as the Mariana Trench.

I 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. 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.

She looks over at me and I know she knows. She picks up my phone from my lap and changes the song to “I’ll Be Seeing You” and looks out the window. 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?

“She told me something once.” “And what happened?” She looks over at me, eyes all round and teary. “I listened.”

Maybe there was no storm with BJ. Maybe all the ways he’s hurt me till now are because I hurt him, and maybe now it’ll be different because I can trust him?

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.

The trick shot fails. The disaster of what we’ve become blitzes right past what we were, circles the drain of what we could be a couple of times before it teeters off to the side and lands smack bang right where we don’t want to be. I fucked my Hail Mary. And this has not worked at all.

I do know, though, that I feel safer in his arms than I do out of them. 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.

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? I really don’t know anymore—my

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. Maybe the ship’s not still sinking, maybe it’s sunk. Maybe we’re on the seabed now. Maybe the ship’s wood is starting to rot and all the anchors in the world can’t save us anymore.

She blinks a few times and her eyes remind me of raindrops on leaves on cold mornings.

Our eyes catch and the edges of her face go sad. Or soft? Shit. I hope it’s sad. I want to fight with her, feel the closeness I feel when we do—when we say things we shouldn’t and go too far and the other night when she shoved my face away it broke me and made me fly at the same time, because she can only hate me how she hates me because she loves me how she loves me.

Her mouth twitches and the glassiness of her eyes spills over a little. Fucks me up worse than it does her because she can’t see her own face when she’s crying but I can. Those fucking emerald eyes. I’d sell my liver on the black market to stop her from crying, sell everything I own, rip my heart out of my own chest—but I think I’ve already done that.

“I’ve never been under any illusion of what I am to you—I’m the girl you’re fucking while you’re thinking of your best friend’s girlfriend.”

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.

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.

How many loves, I wonder again? 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. He’s leaving what we had behind, like he should. Like I should have let him so long ago. But I’ll miss him on my rainy days.