A Novel Love Story

by Ashley Poston

“Love is neither late nor early, you know.”

Oh god, I still had student loans to pay off. I couldn’t go to jail yet.

It’s hard to explain that to someone who doesn’t read, or who has never felt their heart bend so strongly toward a story that it might just snap in two. Some books are a comfort, some a reprieve, others a vacation, a lesson, a heartbreak. I’d met countless stories by the time I read a book that changed my life.

Sometimes, that’s how it happens. Sometimes your favorite book just hits you out of the blue like a bolt of lightning.

So who could blame me for sinking into books, where I knew the people weren’t real, but they also never disappointed me? I knew everything would work out in the end. I knew happy endings were destined, ever afters fated, and no matter what trials and tribulations and, well, surprise fuckups happened, things would end up okay.

I just needed a story—or maybe a few hundred stories of happily ever after—to escape mine.

As we strolled, crammed under the small umbrella that Gail lent us, Junie and I talked like we’d known each other for decades. It felt like meeting a part of my heart that had broken off years ago, and remembering exactly how it beat.

He struck me as the kind of quiet and stoic character who crept into your heart the longer you spent with him, steadfast like a dictionary.

Every reader I’d ever known had wanted nothing more than to fall into the arms of a book boyfriend, some fictional Darcy, a shade of a Byronic hero, all their own. So I did.

I couldn’t remember the last time someone had kissed me that passionately—savored me, like I was the last sentence in his favorite book.

His mouth was addicting. I’d never been kissed like this before, practiced and hungry, like he had been thinking about how to kiss me better.

I’d actually kissed him, and it was one of those unforgettable sorts of kisses that even house wine couldn’t erase.

Then he took out a pair of round glasses from his pocket and put them on to read a document of numbers on the computer. I had a professor once in college who wore round glasses. Almost every girl in class—including Prudence—fawned over him. They said he looked distinguished and made tweed coats fuckable. I didn’t see it. Until now.

In the books, the way he called her sugar undid her a little more every time. It made her feel like a part of a recipe, an ingredient in a life that tasted sweet.

Sometimes all you need is to see life from a different angle, Will, to make it look new again.

“Time changes you. Stories change you. The people you meet change you.

“In my next life, I’d like to be a bookstore cat. Sunlight and books and naps.”

Lyssa is…like a moon you just want to be in the orbit of,

I wanted adventure, like my mom, but I always found excuses not to take them because I was afraid of getting hurt.

but I was being too generous, and clinging to the parts of him I still loved. Which were getting smaller by the day. And the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that eventually, as I tried to keep being the girl who had kissed him at midnight, I lost myself in the process. And lost what I really wanted—a partner, not someone I had to take care of. Liam was kind, but he rarely asked how I was. He gave great gifts, but never personal ones. We hiked together, and when I fell behind, he kept marching on. I used to think it was because he knew I’d catch up eventually, so he wasn’t worried, but maybe it was because he didn’t want to be bothered to slow down and take in the scenery together. It was the first sign, or maybe the fifth, but I hadn’t seen any of them.

“Hey,” he said gently, “you’re allowed to be cared for, too. You don’t have to do everything alone.”

Year after year after year, books that ferried me through heartbreak and hope and those terrible nights after Liam left. They were words that tucked me into bed at night when I was alone, they were words that played the soundtrack of my heartbreak, the what-ifs, the second-guesses, the nights I sat alone and wondered, Why not me? Those books were like arms I fell into, armor that protected me from the world when life got too hard.

“I could serenade you with words,” he supplied, taking my hand and kissing the palm of it, never letting his gaze leave mine. “If I was a poet, I could liken love to your eyes. If I was a gardener, I could plant a kiss on all the places you despise on yourself.” Slowly, he pulled me down on top of him, pressed against him. “If I was a writer, I could write epics to your lovely lips.” He kissed me again, and his words were hot against my mouth. “If I was a painter, I could explore every bend and curve so when my eyes failed me, I would paint you by memory.” His hands slid along the length of my sides, dusting softly against my thighs.

And like a painter, he explored every part of my body. Like a writer, he muttered manifestos to my elbows, my knees, my ankles. Like a gardener, he planted kisses on my stomach and under my chin, in all the places that the world told me I shouldn’t love. And if there was love in my eyes, he was a poet, too.

because that was what loss was in the end—breaking of a piece off yourself that you’d never get back.

“For so long, I just…existed. I just stayed where I was, and everything stayed, too. Exactly where she left us. My life became a memorial. It wasn’t mine anymore.”

I knew that feeling—being frozen because you hurt too much to move. Life just felt easier when nothing changed, but that was only because you’d grown numb to the world around you.

Art lived and breathed, like love, like friendship. Life—like works of art—was transformative. It persisted. And through them, so did we.

I was tired of being stagnant, I thought. I wanted to be a main character in my own life again.

“I’m just tired of sacrificing myself all the time,” I replied. “I sort of felt like the Giving Tree, chopping myself smaller and smaller, and I guess I finally realized, if I kept this up, I’d be nothing but a stump by the end.”

Love was a bunch of small things that added up to bigger things. Love was feeling valued. And accepted. Just the way you were.

No, love wasn’t a trap, something you had to crawl out of later. If you loved something—someone—sometimes you had to let them go. And if they loved you, too, they’d come back.

Love was patient and meticulous and it never ceased to surprise me. It wasn’t something that I needed, something that I deserved, that I was worthy of—love was what I wanted.

A story written in the language of kisses, and read to me in sweet, soft sighs.