Happy After All

by Maisey Yates

Don’t postpone joy. I was in pain, and I had every reason to wait until I healed to start enjoying sunsets and pie and new friends. I took it as a sign from the universe. To try to let the joy exist alongside grief.

I need his inciting incident. The thing that made him the way he is.

I don’t mind a rainstorm, but without the sun, I think I would perish.

drip feeding—that glorious authorial tool where you slowly weave your character’s backstory into the front story instead of dumping it all on the reader in a two-page barrage of word vomit.

It’s like I’m tiptoeing around land mines when I talk to him. It’s difficult.

It’s been so long since I’ve gone on a date, or really had to work at getting to know somebody, that I feel like I might be out of practice.

I say that like I don’t know he’s blowing me off. Because I hope it will make him feel bad. A little bit.

Something inside me breaks and drifts away. Like a piece of iceberg falling into the sea. Emotional climate change brought on by his presence that I can’t fight.

I’m not sure what hurts about this. I just know that it does. It isn’t regret. I don’t want Christopher. I don’t want his life. But it’s something. The feeling that I missed a step somewhere and I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to find it.

Now he knows not just my name but all these other things about me. I feel like I’ve lost whatever game we’ve been playing.

I doubt this man has ever had his heart broken. I bet he has broken hearts multiple times, but I bet he isn’t the one sitting around feeling sad.

Fake Dating—a trope found primarily in romance stories, where the main protagonists pretend to be in a relationship (for business, for the purposes of impressing nosy family members, to incite jealousy). The fake relationship eventually becomes real.

I think more people cheat than I realized.”

he was somebody I devoted a significant part of my life to.” “Not in any way that counts,” he says. “Or he never would have done that.”

Slow Burn—a term used in discourse, generally around romance novels, to describe a relationship that takes a very, very long time to go from spark to ignition.

I’m desperate for him to say more. Craving it now like cake or cocaine. I’ve never had cocaine, but I imagine wanting it feels like this.

He is my Everest. A mountain I feel I need to climb. Like I have to do it to get to the view I’m actually supposed to see. He is the summit.

My heart has been shattered in just so many pieces that what I managed to do when I moved to Rancho Encanto was take those pieces and put them back together. Like a stained-glass suncatcher you might find in any of the gift shops around town. Beautiful, but not in its original condition.

He kisses me like it’s his job. I kiss him back like I’ll die if I don’t.

Let’s Get It Out of Our System—when the protagonists in a romance novel agree to keep having sex until their desire burns itself out.

he has a pattern. Get close, pull away. Often aggressively,

I feel those walls starting to go up again.

I just need to relax and let him take the lead here. I’m not good at that. I want to control things. I recognize that.

When I decided I needed to heal. I needed to be in absolute and total control of all the things around me. I couldn’t help it. It’s who I am.

I need to let him be the one to take charge. Because he’s the one who knows what he’s thinking; I don’t.

I can respect his boundaries. The ones he throws up every time I get too close. But I need him to be up-front. This isn’t a book, and I can’t read his thoughts. I wish I could. I wish I could get a nice monologue about what exactly he’s thinking.

“Your feelings aren’t facts, Amelia. I don’t know if anyone has ever told you that before.” He says that in a totally teasing way, but honestly, he has no idea how well I know that.

There are moments when you can definitely feel that a phase of your life is over.

I want to believe in romance novels and friends to lovers and happily ever after.”

There are trails around some massive boulders that look like they were dropped there by a giant divine hand. I suppose that’s a testament to how I like to think about the world. But I don’t think of the minerals and scientific process by which rocks are formed. I prefer to think in terms of the fantastical. Because no matter what, I prefer to believe in a little bit of magic.

Whatever progress I thought I made with him, it wasn’t real. There’s really no such thing as progress to be made.

I know what it’s like to feel like you’re drowning and have nobody there to grab hold of.

The Dark Secret—one or both protagonists commonly have a deep wound that may be hidden from those around them. The revelation of the dark secret can bring the protagonists closer or tear them further apart.

There is a woman who loves that face. There is a woman who has experienced those green eyes lighting up when they look at her.

I already know that the void grief leaves is so vast and empty there are no incantations you can fling down into the pit that will begin to fill it.

I also know that grief goes in waves. That sometimes the tide rolls out and you can see all these beautiful things left behind. Sea glass and seashells on the seashore. That sometimes the waves come back in hard and leave you breathless, drowning.

I wrapped myself around Nathan Hart, and he wrapped himself around me, and it was like nothing else existed.

It doesn’t make my grief worse, though. I’m not scared of your grief either. I’ve already felt the worst . . . the most hopeless, dark feeling that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I get why people can’t handle it when they haven’t experienced that. Because they don’t want to know. They don’t want to know what you can go through and survive. They don’t want to know how horrible it can be. The stuff you have to keep on living with.

That’s the real tragedy of it. You go on.

I’ve learned that you can do things you aren’t suited to, and you can do things you don’t like. You can even become great at them. Even if it never really fits.”

Thinking that you might love somebody again after you got broken apart by another person really does feel like the riskiest thing imaginable.

Though I do think that sometimes in books, happy endings take a different shape than they do in real life. In books, they’re kind of a fixed state. But I think in real life . . . we continue to have conversations. We continue to change. We continue to live in the happy ending, even as life happens around us.

I think in books, the characters deal with all their issues, and that’s when they can be together. I think in real life it’s not that simple.”

You can lose anyone you love.

“We can always lose something. Hell, we can always lose everything. I think the truly miraculous thing about life is that we keep loving anyway.”

I think we both need to stop blaming ourselves for bullshit that stupid men put us through.”

I’ve been carrying around this feeling that I wasn’t enough.

He doesn’t get to decide how I feel about myself. He doesn’t get to keep being in my life when he is so resolutely out of it.

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