Never Thought I'd End Up Here

by Ann Liang

“I tried to tell you in other ways,” he says, a pleading edge to his words. “I wanted to leave flowers in your locker for Valentine’s Day, but I was so allergic to them that I never got to properly place them inside, and all I’d managed to achieve was attracting bees. I would make up these ridiculous excuses just to talk to you, and I’d deliberately leave my homework unfinished so I could ask to look at yours. I would join in on your games, thinking I could impress you if I won them all. But I kept messing up, like always. Everything I did to pull you closer only ended up pushing you further away. And then you were gone—”

“You never apologized.” Now it’s his turn to blink in rapid confusion. “I did. I must have apologized thirty, forty times over in my letter … I wrote it so many times I ran out of ink.”

“Letter?” The ground seems to wobble beneath my feet, my mind racing faster and faster like a bullet train, threatening to throw me right off its tracks. “What letter?” “I wrote you a letter,”

“I know I won’t ever be able to make it up to you, no matter what I do, but I needed to tell you. I needed you to understand how I felt. How I feel.”

“But what about the wedding?” I demand. “You didn’t apologize then. You weren’t even being nice to me when you saw me there.” He huffs out a self-mocking laugh. “Do you know how nervous I was that day? It was all I could do to look you in the eye, Leah. I was so scared—scared you’d simply take one glance at me and leave before I had the chance to talk to you. Scared that if I came across as too nice all of a sudden, you’d assume I had some kind of evil plan or that I was playing another prank.

Imagine if I confessed to you then what I’m confessing to you now. You wouldn’t have believed me for a second and I’d have ruined any hopes of ever...

I twist around on my heel, breathing hard, and march away from him down the alley before I can do something stupid. Like throttle him. Or kiss him.

“You can’t, unless you’re absolutely certain you want to be with someone and you’re in love with them—” “I am.” The world freezes.

“You’re in love with me?” I whisper. “Since when?” His smile is wry. “Only the past seven years.”

“I … This whole time?” I ask him, almost afraid to believe it. “Of course,” he says, watching me intently, his dark eyes serious, his hair tousled and soft around the sharp lines of his face. “There’s never been anybody else for me. There never will be.”

“I can promise to never bring this up again. But I meant it when I said that I can be whatever you want me to be: whether that’s an enemy for you to curse and hold a grudge against for the rest of your life; a friend you can trust to accompany you anywhere and drive you safely back home, the one you can call at any hour of the night and tell all your secrets to; or the person you fall for, who will always wear a jacket so you don’t have to bring yours, who will be the first to find you when you’re lost and alone, who will remind you how heart-wrenchingly, unfathomably beautiful you are even on days when you don’t feel it.

The only thing I ask is that we don’t ever become strangers, because I really—” He breaks off. Clenches his jaw, fighting against some ineffable emotion. “I don’t think I could bear it, Leah. I don’t think my heart would be able to survive it.”

oh lord

when I open my mouth to deliver the fatal blow, nothing comes out. Nothing comes out, because his lips are on mine, crushing the distance between us, and instead of pushing him away like I should, like I’d planned to, I pull him closer,

And even though he’s far from the first boy I’ve kissed, it feels as if he is; the others simply don’t count compared to him. He kisses me not like he wants to own me, but like he’s mine, and he’s desperate to prove it.

“Qin ai de.” I recognize the words. “Did you just call me your worst enemy?” He smiles against my lips. “I was lying.” “What?” “Qin ai de doesn’t mean my worst enemy,” he says. “It means my love.”

“Let’s face it, bro, it’s not as if there was any chance you didn’t like her. Like, you can barely stand up when you’re in her presence. You look at her like you’re seeing the moon for the first time or some shit. It’s kind of disgustingly obvious.”

“I literally dream of doing my sister’s makeup,” I assure her, pulling her closer to the mirror and angling her face toward the vanity lights with my free hand. “You have a sister?” she says. “Not at all. Which is why this is a dream come true for me,”

“Why not? It’s very easy to fall in love with you, Leah. The easiest thing in the world.”

“I don’t think I even realized I liked you until later. I just knew that I noticed you a lot from the beginning. Like how you would wear a different scrunchie every day of the week, or how you’d always pick out the tomatoes from your sandwiches, or how you were far from a teacher’s pet, but you still made sure to thank the teachers at the end of the lesson. I found it fascinating, because you had this very intimidating face, but then you would laugh,” he says softly, “and it was like you were glowing.”

I hear it as clearly as if he had whispered it into my ear: I don’t love you in the darkness; I love you in the light.

But a new, exhilarating thought pushes up in resistance: It’s not for them to decide. I could be a model, but I could be a thousand other things, lead other lives, follow new paths and find my way forward. I can’t know exactly where I’ll end up, but I don’t have to let them choose for me.

But I still didn’t have that mainstream appeal they were after, and it took me forever to figure out what they actually meant by mainstream.” Because it was also what the boys who dated me really wanted, even if they didn’t directly admit it. They’d whisper things like, You’re the first Asian girl I’ve ever been with, or, You’re so gorgeous—I can’t believe you’re Chinese, as if I was meant to feel special or grateful to be some kind of exception, and once their interest in me fizzled out, they would turn their attention back to the gorgeous blonde girls in our class. I looked nothing like them, and I never would.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “For coming after me. For being on my side.” “I’ll always be on your side,” she says, and I believe it.

“I’m honestly shocked that you came back. Shocked, and very, very glad. I didn’t think you ever would.” It feels like someone’s grabbed hold of my heart and pulled. Cyrus, who blamed himself for not recognizing a bad situation when he was in the thick of it, and then trained himself to assume the worst of every situation. Cyrus, who thinks that everything he touches will burn and fade to embers, who thinks that everyone is destined to leave him in the end. Cyrus, who always rejects people before they have the chance to reject him, who’s afraid to be happy for fear of the day the happiness is taken away from him, who doesn’t think he deserves happiness to begin with.

“Who else would I go to?” I say, smiling.

I don’t know any of them, and they might be traveling for a family holiday or a honeymoon or a business trip, and they could be from the neighboring town or halfway across the world, but we’re all standing here right now. And my heart swells at the silly, simple, human fact that when we stumble upon something beautiful, our first instinct is to show it to the people we love. It’s what we do with pretty seashells on a beach, a radiant sunset, a rare bird flitting through the trees, a herd of wild horses grazing in the countryside. Look, we say, saving these little pieces of beauty for each other. Do you see it too? Isn’t the world such a strange, lovely, breathtaking place?

You remind me of the greatest sculptors, who can turn marble into the impression of billowing silk, the coldest stone into something soft. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that everything you touch turns beautiful. The world becomes beautiful, as long as there’s you. It really is beautiful, I think to myself as I lean in to kiss him.

“About you,” he says, swallowing. “About being next to you.”

“No fantasy could ever live up to you,” he whispers. “Nothing can compare to how it feels to look up and see you there. Even though I thought of you every day after you left, my imagination has proven to be painfully inadequate when it comes to the sound of your laughter, or how your brows furrow when you’re focused, or the way you steady yourself before entering a room.

It does feel like there’s magic here, in the whispers of the Osmanthus trees and the rose light curving over the tiled roofs. But there’s no way to separate it from the boy standing at the end of the bridge with me as the sun climbs up, who’s now watching me with a tenderness I wouldn’t have believed existed before him.

I could love him anywhere, in any city, any season, I think to myself. I can easily envision us coming back together, maybe a year or two from now, strolling down the Bund at night, lost in Shanghai’s brilliant array of lights, or taking photos in the ancient water towns, his hand intertwined with mine. Just as I can envision us in LA, riding our bikes along the coast, packing strawberries and croissants into picnic baskets, lounging on the couch at his house. The only thing I can’t envision is no longer wanting him.

“There is a nice restaurant I’ve always wanted to try down the street from my house …” “Let’s go there,” he says instantly. “Cyrus, you don’t even know what restaurant it is—” “Doesn’t matter,” he tells me, “as long as I’m going with you.”

“Like, what are the chances?” Cyrus hesitates. “I … have a confession to make,” he says.

“I wasn’t actually meant to sit next to you on the plane ride to Shanghai,” he says. “My original seat was four rows away, and I had to bribe this extremely disgruntled college student into swapping with me. Also … I was hoping you would be at your cousin’s wedding. I did plan to find Dr. Linda Shen, of course—that letter of recommendation is really important to me. But when I said there was someone I needed to see, I was talking about you.”

“None of it was an accident.” “You did all that … for me?” I whisper. My heart leans all the way forward, close to toppling right out my chest. “Of course,” he says.

There’s so much sunlight in every photo I take of him. Like the sun is all I can see when he’s with me.

“How did you know I was freezing?” I ask, turning to him in wonder. “Because I know you,” he says simply.

“You love me,” I say. I can’t pinpoint when it stopped being a question, and when it started to feel like a simple fact. There are 6,479 miles between Shanghai and Los Angeles. The sun will come up tomorrow. You can never go wrong with a well-fitted black dress. And he loves me.