To Catch a Firefly

by Emmy Sanders

For the little girl who always wanted to tell stories but was too afraid to use her voice.

He gets halfway to the house before pivoting. “Hey, Ellis? I’m glad you’re here. Maybe this won’t suck so bad after all.” My heart beats a little fast at that, but I couldn’t say why.

I wonder, when he’s done getting his picture, if he’ll be able to see the world spinning. I wonder how many more revolutions Lucky will be in mine.

Taking a step forward, I tip Lucky’s chin. His eyes catch mine and his lips pop open, and when I lean down to press my mouth to his, his fingertips dig into my arm. Not pushing, though, holding. I’ve never kissed before, either, but Lucky deserves a first with someone who loves him. At least I can give him that.

For a moment, with only Lucky’s hand in mine, I feel lost in the cosmos. Drifting, but not alone.

When Lucky turns his face up, putting us nearly nose to nose, I realize his eyes are wet, too. I rub my thumb underneath each, marveling at the color. I’ve never been able to find anything remotely close.

he collects glass in shades of blue trying to match his eyes?? omfg

I’ve always thought Lucky looks ethereal, like he was cut from glass and smoothed to a polish. But somewhere along the way, what was fascination for color and form became…something else entirely.

I don’t know when it happened, exactly. When I started dreaming about his lips and how they felt against my own.

It would only hurt more, in the end—having a taste, only to lose it. I’d rather never know.

“If you ever decide to love someone,” he says slowly, “they’ll be very lucky.” He already is.

“But we’re not done,” he says vehemently, stepping into my space. “We’ll never be done. Me and you, we don’t have an ending.”

“You wore a blue boutonniere,” he says quietly, his eyes dropping to my chest as if remembering. I tried to match the color to his eyes, but it wasn’t quite right. “You were really handsome that day. I never told you that.”

“Not everyone is going to understand you, Ellis. But it’s not your job to make them.”

“Me and you, right, El?” “Me and you,” I answer.

I was ten years old when I met Lucky. I knew it then, and I know it now. He’s a firefly. Luminous and wild. He was never meant to be trapped. Not here and not with me. And in a few days, I’ll finally watch him fly away.

Ellis, whose rumble of a voice is like distant thunder, so rarely there but impossible to ignore. Ellis, my…friend. Above all else, he’s my best friend. Still. Always.

It’s dangerous, letting my mind go there, but I can’t drum up the willpower to stop myself tonight. I think of him beside me, those deep, brown eyes of his soft as they gaze my way. I think of his big hands—God, those hands—and the massive breadth of his shoulders. I think of his jaw and his steady heartbeat and his arm slung across my chest. And with the last of my waking thoughts, I think about going home.

I think it was at thirteen that I first felt my heart beat for you. And break, just a little. Because I knew, like that tornado, you’d leave destruction in your path, and I’d be your willing victim. I’d do it again. I love you, my brilliant firefly.

“And high above, the moon sits round, and we, in its light. Waxing, waning, never gone. A gift to see the night.”

“I’m not hung up on Ellis. He’s just my friend.” The whisper in my heart tells me I’m a liar.

“Then there was Ellis, and he made me feel like everything was going to be okay. I was safe, and I had someone who was just mine, and…and he was always there for me. Even still, he’s always there for me.”

“He’s your anchor,” Danil says quietly. “No,” I whisper, my eyes lifting to the full moon. “He doesn’t fight the tide. He controls it.”

How would I explain my heart doesn’t know how to beat for anyone but him?

I forget, sometimes, when I can only hear his voice, exactly how big Ellis is. He is a mountain of a man but the gentlest soul I’ve ever met. And he’s… I blow out a slow breath. He’s beautiful; I can’t even deny that. He’s lovely in the way the natural world is lovely. Imperfect but vital. Roughly hewn and uniquely himself. He’s just… Ellis. He’s my Ellis.

Lucky is first up the steps, giving me a beaming smile that instantly transports me back to when we were sixteen. Or eleven or eighteen or twenty-two. It’s a million memories in one, that smile, and I’m swamped by them, overcome by the history we share. There are strings connecting us, so many of them. I don’t think we could ever be unraveled.

It was us against the world, Luck. The two of us, always. Me and you. We’ve grown. Of course we have. But still, always, I love you. Don’t stay away too long this time, my darling firefly.

And yes, somewhere along the way—maybe because of those two damn blue boutonnieres—my feelings grew. But that doesn’t make my past with Ellis into something it never was.

“Your Ellis could rip me in half. I’m not a small guy, Lucky-boy. But that man scares me.” “He’s a teddy bear,” I say, mind skipping back to that day at school, when Ellis took down Brandon like it was nothing. “Mostly.”

Lucky’s gaze lowers to me slowly. “They’re beautiful.” They’re you. The closest I could ever come to capturing you.

“You say so little,” he nearly whispers. “But then, sometimes…” He grabs my hand, and I swallow, tingles chasing one another up my arm. “You won’t lose me, El,” he says. “Not ever.”

“We’ll never be done. Me and you, we don’t have an ending.”

I remember, without my permission, the feel of his skin underneath my palms when we were seventeen. When Ellis kissed me beneath a waterfall. My first kiss. My first love.

I was seventeen when I kissed you at Smith Falls. I didn’t understand then what I was feeling, but I knew, in a way I hadn’t before, that I wanted to follow you. I wanted to go with you. It would have been worth it just to be near. Me and you, we could take on anything.

“Have you ever wanted someone so much,” I say slowly, “that it feels like your atoms are vibrating when you’re away from them? Like you’re half of a whole, and your body knows it. And until you’re in their arms again, every single piece of you is straining toward them because…because they’re your home. They’re part of you. Your beginning and your never-ending. How? How do I move on from that?”

I almost expect to hear a boom of thunder, but there’s only Lucky’s sound of desperation and the feel of his lips on mine. Like softness. Like surrender. Like every whisper of home I’ve ever heard.

“No, I wouldn’t do that. You’re not nothing, El. You’re the person I know most in this world. This”—he presses his lips softly to the corner of mine—“isn’t meaningless.”

As a tornado rages somewhere overhead, that leash around my heart snaps, and I give in to the thing I want above all else. I lunge forward and kiss my best friend.

I’m not about to waste any more time away from the one person who has always felt like my port. The person I return to, time and time again. The one I come home to. Because he is. Ellis is home to me.

His hands tangle in my hair as he kisses me. Once, twice, longer. He doesn’t stop. His mouth is persistent and hot and familiar, even though this is entirely new. He kisses me as if he’s trying to memorize me by touch, his lips mapping my own. He kisses as if he wants to consume.

He’s always preferred physical communication anyway, and I’m not about to ask him to change, not when his hands are holding me as if I’m precious cargo. Not when his lips are telling me I’m the very air he needs to breathe.

I should have known kissing Ellis would rearrange my world.

I want to give him what he needs, want to be what he needs, what he wants, what he craves with every fiber of his being because he’s that for me. He’s not just a crush. He never was. He’s the man no one else has ever measured up to.

My mountain of a man, breathing me in, his lips pressed lightly to my skin.

I’m not entirely sure when the turning point was or if I was always on a slow path toward falling in love with Lucky. Not that he’s asking about love, exactly. But it was always love when it came to him. That I know for certain.

He’s gorgeous, every inch of him. I could stare for hours, days, a lifetime, and never get bored.

It’s always been him and me, from the very beginning, it seems. Lucky was right about that. Him coming into my life was a starting point. It was defining, and all that’s come after has revolved around him. How couldn’t it?

“This is real, El. Me and you, it’s real.”

With the moon lending its soft glow through the window, Lucky falls asleep. And I learn what it is to cradle a firefly in my palms.

“What is it?” I ask. The softness in his gaze floors me, as does his answer. “Looking.” “You’ve seen me a million times,” I point out, heart pounding. His expression manages to convey how much of an idiot I am, while also weakening my knees. “Never enough.”

The sheer size of him towering above me is enough to have me squirming and breathless, knowing he would never harm me, never hurt me. Only protect. My Ellis.