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I’m not too proud to admit that I can be bought with office supplies.
But I might as well find out what the full depth of my rock bottom looks like. Maybe there’s something interesting down here, like my dignity.
“You tinsel-bombed the St. Patrick’s Day Prince,” he says. “I have never been more proud of you in my life.”
“And send me that video. I’m going to put it in one of those digital photo frames and set it above my fireplace.” “Piss off.” “And I’ll engrave it to say Baby’s First Political Incident.”
“You don’t need to breathe,” Wren says. “It isn’t on the itinerary.”
“You’re lucky I do na make you get down on your knees and beg. Though you did call me hot, so would you enjoy that, hm?”
“Or should I go on about how all the rainbows in Ireland point to the pot of gold in your asshole?”
“Fuck me,” I groan to my plate. Loch doesn’t hesitate. “Only if you say please.”
It’s a heart. They have a heart buried in the walls. Loch went Edgar Allan Poe on this place and that’s sacrilege because Poe isn’t even one of his precious Irish authors.
I don’t want anyone else holding me like this.
His finger moves. Hooks with mine. Holy shit.
I’m Irish, boyo. Talking shite is how we flirt. Holy. Fuck. Has he been flirting with me this whole time? And. Oh my god. Have I been flirting back?
I work my hand under his and twine our fingers together. What am I doing.
Such potent, raging regret that I don’t know how I missed it before, glowing through the smallest cracks in his sarcastic, piss-taking exterior like molten embers burning him to ash.
Loch’s fingers follow the lines his smears of paint left yesterday, down the delicate skin on the back of my hand.
I know that his kiss tasted like all the dreams I waxed on about in the writing I don’t do anymore, the words I wove while trying to imagine Iris but all I imagined was a fantasy, an ending. He tasted like those fantasies. He felt like those endings. It’s him.
I altered my whole being into shapes that fit voids in everyone else’s lives so they’d stay, so my life would look perfect, so I wouldn’t be alone again. But I never asked myself what shape I wanted to take.
No matter what happens next, keep choosing yourself. Promise me you will.”
Maybe liking someone should be this caustic, a long, slow, silent death.
I would never dare part you from your emotional support boyfriend. Of course, bring him.
Oh, fuck him, fuck him and his empathy and his calm, steady presence.
That single kiss was more transformative, more vast, more excruciatingly important than anything that’s ever happened to me and you’re the most noble, caring person I’ve ever met, and it breaks my heart that you don’t see that what you’re doing is so spectacular.
and even sloppy, because there is poetry in mess, too.
You were right earlier. I am a mess. But you said you are too. It wouldn’t be easy, and I don’t think you want easy. Neither do I.
Goddamn those sweaters. Like he’s a sexy, mysterious lighthouse fisherman.
“You aren’t an awakening,” I whisper. “You’re the whole dawn. And I can’t believe I ever thought I’d seen the sun before you.”
don’t want better.” My thumbs dig circles into his hips, marking this spot, this moment. “I don’t want a fantasy. I don’t want sweetness. For once in my life, I want to be ruined.”
Maybe sometimes, a bad choice can result in goodness. Because sometimes, a good choice can result in pain.
He clings to me so tightly, so intently, that every piece of my soul remakes itself to fit the way he holds me. I shouldn’t want to conform to fit him, but it isn’t like the way I’d get with other people—this isn’t chipping away pieces of myself, it’s like all my pieces bloom even fuller, vines reaching for the sun.
You helped me realize how okay that is, sometimes, to do things for ourselves. There is selflessness in being selfish.”
I want to be able to track the differences like constellations. I want to know what it’s like to kiss this man at every stage of his life. Word by word. It’s too big to think of anything else. But I want his forever. I want it and I love him and I’m a goddamn moron.
I’m despairingly in love with you.
I’ve been so obsessed with various endings giving me closure or happiness that I’ve neglected the journey to get to any of them. Like putting words into a story, word by word.
“You’re worth staying for, Kristopher. You. Not what you have to offer people. You are worth it.”
“Well, if this isn’t the saddest friendship tradition ever: a relationship support group slash intervention. Remember when we used to go to bars?”
“Make your own story. You deserve this sort of ending, Kris.”
“Go get your guy in a sweeping, event-crashing declaration of how much you want to fuck his brains out.”
But all I can say, in the dimness of this starlit reality, is “I love you.”
A laugh cracks out of me and I arch down to kiss him, embracing a happiness so potent that it becomes an immediate counterweight to every dark cloud of anxiety or panic I’ve ever felt. Not erasing them, not numbing them; balancing, so I see myself in a full spectrum between the two extremes, darkness to light and everything in between. Iris told me I deserve this sort of ending. Right now, I finally believe I do.
there is no greater measure of value than what you give to a piece of art.
I’d still be all the parts of me that Loch painted in his studio, words and mess and color and chaos and, most important, loved.
A happy ever after that we make together.
