Never (Never, #1)

by Jessa Hastings

Because beautiful doesn’t necessarily always mean good, and just because something doesn’t make you happy doesn’t preclude it from being beautiful either.

He’s not making me feel good inside myself, yet I so desperately want his approval, and I’ve never wanted the approval of a man before.

Do Americans know everything?” I roll my eyes. “I mean, they think they do.”

As though I wouldn’t—from now on, for the rest of my stupid life—be in one way or another either enraptured or tortured by him.

It would take me a very long time to learn that there are many different kinds of men in this world (and all the other worlds like ours) but a surefire, quick, and easy way to discern a true man among men is how much of yourself he allows you to be in his presence. A real man will allow you to be your whole entire self, with breathing room and space to change your mind and even evolve it. A mere boy might let you be yourself just an eighth of the way, if you’re lucky.

I realize that I’m not flying—I’m falling. Funny, don’t you think, how similar those two things can feel at the start?

Strange, this terrible awe I have for the man who’s frowning down at me with the most serious pair of eyes I’ve ever seen. I swallow heavy at the sight of them. Something a bit like home in them.

I am not the only person Peter Pan sees, but right now, in this moment, I know I am, and I feel myself grow a centimeter taller because that’s what happens when Peter Pan looks at you.

feel a pull backwards and one forward—to grow up and to grow down. A leaning towards responsibility and a nervous panic within me to run from it.

“You’re not half as bad as he says you are,” I tell him. Jamison’s head tilts, and his brow furrows. “And yer twice as brave and beautiful than he lets ye think y’are.”

He’s strangely grounding to be near. The feeling you get when you’re near a giant calm lake or when you’re sitting by a fire outside on a cold night or when you’re watching a big storm roll in from the safety of under a blanket and behind a window. That’s what it’s like to be next to him, and that’s what I’m thinking about as I’m looking up at him and he’s staring back at me, jaw tight, kind of frowning.*

“She’s just going to grow up and get old, and he’ll get bored of her how he gets bored of all of them, and then he’ll take her back and she’ll spend her whole sad life wishing she was still with a boy who has forgotten all about her.”

That sort of thing can do a number on your thinking when you watch him so easily touch someone else.

It’s just a strange feeling to be in a foreign place, almost entirely dependent on an undependable person. It feels like you’re playing a game of chess for the first time in your life against a master, in the dark, and only his pieces glow. That’s what it feels like to be with him.

I tell myself that I’m not even remotely unnerved by how quickly the tides of him can change. Because the ocean changes quickly too, and it’s fine and safe and people hardly ever die in it.

It’s horrible to be made to feel small, and while he is good at nearly most things, he is ever so good at that in particular.

He laughs and I like the sound so much. Like you’re sitting by a fire with a drink in your hand that you love, that’s how his laugh feels when it hits you—it warms you up from the inside out. And even though I’m trying my best to appear as apathetic towards him as I can muster, his laugh unfurls me a tiny bit, and another peculiar confession escapes me.

Parents come with invisible strings and ties that pull them and fasten them to things besides their children. Sometimes they let you see them. Sometimes they don’t.

Every time I’m with him and he’s good to me, it’s akin to successfully petting a lion. I’m immensely proud and relieved and delighted that the lion’s decided not to bite me, but he can bite me, and when he does, it can be quite severe.

When he is petulant, my god, he is hateful, but when he is sweet, he is the human embodiment of birds landing on your fingers and deer feeding freely from your bare hands. So then, I reason, that one doesn’t just simply hate the weather entirely because sometimes it, occasionally, behaves a tiny bit cruelly.

Destiny and fate, you think you can interchange them, but you can’t. Destiny is—I believe—impacted by you and your choices and what you choose, but fate is not. It’s concrete. It’s the occurrence of events beyond a person’s control, as though determined almost by a supernatural power.

“Never mind the decade or the planet, but what won’t man do for power?”

But silence has a downfall. Silence is when the thoughts come. Accidental thoughts, ones you’re not even trying to think of but there they are, growling away all the same from deep inside your monster of a conscience, ones you’ve been ignoring all day because if you don’t ignore them—if you were, perhaps, to ponder such things—the very fabric of everything as we know it might pull and fray, and then what? But that is the question, isn’t it? And then what? And actually, really, and then even what?

“Who the fuck is leaving ye behind if they have a choice?”

It began to feel less bad; time can do that—lessen things, make them more bearable, dull the sharpness of truth till it’s something you can swallow. It doesn’t hurt me like it did before. I’m not angry like I was; it’s all muted now.

Thoughts are like helium balloons—someone said that to me once. They drift into your mind, and you can choose to grab the string—hold on to the thought tightly, think of it, dwell on it, mull it over—or you can let it go.

Being with him can be scary and uncomfortable, but god, the view on the way down, the rush you get when he remembers you—it’s intoxicating. And there are worse things than being forgotten accidentally. Say, someone choosing to forget you, someone choosing to hurt you because you accidentally hurt them? That’s worse.

Have you ever been caught in an emotion? Where you’ve been feeling something so heavily and so intensely, and then there’s a sudden change in the emotional atmosphere, and you feel your face, feel the way you’re holding yourself change, feel the smile fall off you like old fruit on a tree that’s past its picking day?