Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark (Magnolia Parks Universe, #5)

by Jessa Hastings

Remember those gasps of air I talked about? Where she gulps in pain like breath? One of those times. It’s the worst feeling in the world, having her whole body tremble in my arms and there not be a thing I can do to fix it. Just hold her. What the fuck else could I do? Cry with her a bit.

Only one thing she wants anyway, and it’s the only thing I can’t give to her.

Her sister back

And in a quick, unconscious second, I think about how I need to call my sister to talk my mind down from this ledge and I reach for my phone to text her—and then I remember. I’m hit by one of those trains.

“Not a day has gone by since I met you where I’ve not loved you.”

I can look back now over our life and see it in traces of everything. Good and bad. Great and terrible. Bit of a short straw to call it a disorder, I think. It’s a shit hat to make her wear all the time because she’s got the best brain in the world, I love how she looks at everything, how she sees it all—I don’t even mind the part where she just says whatever the fuck floats into her head at any given moment—the only part of it that I struggle with these day—all days, I s’pose—is the future myopia.

it?”

I love that BJ is getting help

I kiss his cheek and tell him I love him more than everything else in the world without telling him out loud, and he traces a heart on my upper thigh with his finger.

days I wasted with my sister, and I know days don’t sound like much but they do when you don’t have them anymore—and

He lets out my favourite laugh that feels like a cup of tea on a rainy day, and his face looks the kind of happy I always want it to with a smile that touches his eyes.

“How many loves do you get in a lifetime? That’s a question I’ve wondered before . . . If you ask The Sun, I’ve had far too many, and in some ways that’s true, I have. But actually, I’ve only had two great ones.”

“One sits here today, holding my grandmother’s hand, and the other is dead in a refrigerator on Weymouth Street

“You’re all here to bury the smartest girl, the sharpest shooter in the whole wide world. But I’m burying my guiding light.”

How many loves do you get in a lifetime? Fuck. It’s undeniable now, isn’t it—? I’ve had too many. None of them are the same, none have felt the same, and all of them I loved incredibly differently. BJ, I love in an unquestionable way. I love BJ like he’s the sun. Blinding, bright, unbridled, unavoidable. He’s the thing that sustains the galaxy of me. He drives the currents of me, he dictates the climates and the seasons. I feel his warmth on my face, and when he’s gone, it’s colder. He is the centre of everything, and the gravity of me is loyal to him above all.

He is a star. Not the shooting kind. Not some flash-in-the-pan meteorite that burns up on entry into the atmosphere. And stars, they’re undeniably beautiful, kind of magical. Only come out at the nighttime. Easy enough to ignore. In a sky full of them, a single star can be difficult to tell apart from the others. They don’t affect our day-to-day lives, really. You might see it one night and not the next, and it bears no real consequence other than perhaps the sky is a little less wonderful on that particular evening. A star is a star.

But you see, the thing about stars is that in another galaxy, that star is also a sun. “If it wasn’t him, it would be you,” I tell him, for better and for worse. He blows some more air out of his mouth and catches my eye. “In another life, yeah?” I nod and offer him a weak smile. “I’ll meet you there.”

“It’s not past tense, Tiges. It’s present.”

She’s the only home I’ve ever been interested in having. Her body is the walls, heart’s the ceiling. I’ll live here forever.

Eyes like rock pools at sunset. Soft and calm and a few different colours at once.

“How many loves do you get in a lifetime—” She gives me a quick smile. “That is a question I’ve pondered on for a lot of years now . . . And I’ve come up with varying degrees of the same answer. That there are lots of different kinds of love that life may afford you the chance to experience over the course of one’s life—some terrible, some misguided, some well-meaning, some dangerous, some wonderful but benign, some painful, some—when you lose them—are agony.” She sniffs and swallows. “If you’re lucky, you might get a great one, and I know I’m the luckiest, because I got two.”

“There’s been so much history and space and time that has run through us over the course of our relationship, and I know there’s an air of mystery to us; to how we love each other. I know people often don’t understand it, and I’m sorry for them—” She says with a tiny shrug. “Because getting to love you has been the most wonderfully human thing I’ve ever had the privilege of doing in my life”—that makes me smile and she keeps going—“and I know that people look at us, look at what’s happened between us and with us, and wonder how we are the way we are, and sure—trauma bonds”—she flicks me a look—“but also, mostly, primarily you. We are the way we are because of you. Because you didn’t give up. Because you loved me first and you loved me better and you loved me braver, and”—fuck, she’s going to make me cry—“so I guess what I’m trying to say is, thank you?”

“And also, that if space and time and history has taught me anything, it’s you are the love of a lifetime.” She says that very decidedly. “You are the thing that the poets wrote about, you are what the choir of angels is singing about, you are the thing that clouds part above and the sun beams down upon. You’re every butterfly, in every stomach. You’re my every tender thought. “You’re a warm towel when you get out of the shower on a cold night. You’re the tea you hold to your chest when you need a minute to yourself. You’re the feeling you get when you’re inside and safe and dry and it’s dark grey outside and it’s teeming down.”

“Loving you is the thing I grab first when the house is on fire, and the house has been on fire before”—she gives me a look—“and it might even catch on fire again. I really hope not, but if it does—how much I love you will forever and ever be the first thing I reach for.”

“I have loved you in many iterations over the course of our—”

“I was six when I fell in love with you, everyone knows that, I bang on about it all the time”—I shrug—“but no one bangs on about the math of it,” I tell her, and her face falters a bit. “That’s twenty-one years of loving you.” I nod. “252 months, 1,095 weeks, 7,665 days, 183,960 hours and 11,037,600 minutes where I have loved you and if that can translate into anything, please let it speak to the depth of my commitment to you, Parks, because it’s yours.”

“I think of you when I wake up, like a habit. I open my eyes and then I think of you”—I tell her with a shrug because it’s just fact—“not necessarily in some great, profound, Shakespearean way but in the way where you are my very first thought and have been for”—I gesture with my hands—“evidently, for a long time now.” “And I know when I say it like that it can sound a bit like an enslavement or an obligatory responsibility, but it’s not, even if it is.” I shrug haphazardly. “No one feels sorry for monks—well, I do a bit because sex is awesome, but we’re all fine with it because it’s a noble, worthy cause,” I say before I nod my chin over at her. “You are my noble, worthy cause.”

“Parksy, you’re not just my first thought, you’re willfully my second one and my third one and every one thereafter, because when I am dead”—grimace over at her for saying the D-word—“Sorry. But when I am, that’s what they’ll say about me. That I loved you. That I still love you. That even if I die, when I die, and I’m old and I’m ready and god willing you’ve died first because otherwise—up front,” I turn to our friends and family. “—sorry to everyone.” I turn back to her. “If I die, when I die—it will echo through space and through time, and it’ll brush up against the edge of this universe and press into the next one that I loved you more than anything.”

“I have, in our time, been a bit partial to a maritime metaphor. Don’t know why—” I shrug as I think about it. “There is some gravitas to boats, I think. And there’s some truth in the simile of tides and shores, and you and me and how we always come back, washing up on the shores of one another. Probably fairly apt as well because you have undoubtedly”—give her a bit of a look—“been the face of nearly every storm I’ve weathered in my life. Not saying it’s your fault, just saying that—” I shrug. “You are the force that I have reckoned with and will continue to reckon with every day of my life.”

“If you all wouldn’t mind raising your glasses—” I raise my invisible glass into the air. “—to my sister and my first kiss.” I laugh and a few more tears slip out. “To my sister,” I say, reaching for BJ’s hand. He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses it as he smiles all tender and lovely. “To my sister too. And—” He pulls an uncomfortable face. “To definitely not my first kiss.”

“I’m a sucker for a Parks girl.” He shrugs. “Never met one I haven’t loved.”