The Break-Up Pact

by Emma Lord

“June Hart,” he says, half exasperated, half pleading. I turn back to him with a smirk, tilting my chin. “Levi Shaw,” I say back, taking my time with each syllable. I mean it as a challenge, but there’s this breathless moment when our eyes connect that feels entirely like something else. Less like a challenge, and more like an invitation.

I’ve always had this strange feeling of not being able to keep up. I can’t run headfirst toward something without knowing there’s a solid foundation under my feet, and judging from all my friends’ stories about the dating out in the wild, I worry there aren’t a lot of people willing to wait for me to find it.

It made me appreciate that life is both too short and too long for being something you’re not.

“I don’t think anyone ever gets to be settled in life. I think you just find people who weather it with you.”

“You’re okay?” he says. “I’m…” Everything, I want to say. I’m everything I’ve never been, everything I didn’t even know to ask for, because I didn’t know it existed. This feeling of completion. Of no longer knowing the beginning or the end of me, but not minding one bit, because at the borders of it there was still this: a person who knows me. Who looks at me like this. Who holds my face in his hands and stares at me with such unselfconscious, unselfish care that it suddenly feels absurd to me that I spent so much of my life without it. That I settled for the brief, cheap shine of any other kind of pleasure when Levi has brought me the sun.

It turns out there are some perks to having your ex-boyfriend humiliate you and make you a national laughingstock, because months after the fact, you might get a plate of free mini croissants and little strawberries cut into cute shapes next to a folded note that says Welcome to New York, June!!

As kids, it was easy for us to imagine that our woods had magic in them simply because it was ours.

“I know you think I didn’t put you in the story,” says Levi, his voice low and steady, “but that’s just it. You are the story. I started it for you. Before I wanted to be a writer. Before I wanted anything much at all. I just wanted to watch that look on your face whenever I told it.”

“If you win,” he says, his voice quiet and steady, “you marry me.”