Finding Gene Kelly

by Torie Jean

“Let yourself fall, Peaches. It’s okay. I’ll catch you,” he says with an unfamiliar softness.

Nobody else looks at me as intensely as you do.” “I look at you how you should be looked at.” He shrugs.

And as he wiped some tears from his eyes, a terrifying realization slammed into me while a wide uncontained smile simultaneously took real estate on my face. I would do just about anything to make him laugh like that again. Unguarded. Joyful. Sunshine.

“Then what do you want, Liam? Help me out. Whatever it is, I’ll do it.” “I want you.” The words rip out of him in a brief low-pitched growl.

“The backstory was real, Evie. I’m in love with you. I always have been,”

“No one else elicits the kind of feelings in me that you do, the desire, the passion, the overwhelming need to smash your face with both my fist and my lips at the same time. How every time you touch me, I run the risk of being putty in your hands. I’ve tried to keep my heart safe from you, but you had it in a death grip before I knew I’d given it to you, and I don’t know that I want it back anymore—because I think, for the first time in maybe ever, I like that I’m in love with you.

I dreamt about being on the receiving end of that face. Of having someone so far gone, they’d look at me with that soft admiration, and I’d just know that at least one person on this earth thought I was worth something.

“I like making your heart happy,”

My heart has found its home. I just never imagined home would be a person.

I want all of you, Peaches. I want the chance for this to be something great.”