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A NOTE FROM RYKE Fuck off.
I bounced between wanting to protect her and wanting to do crazy shit with her.
“I go two days without seeing you, Dais, and it fucking kills me. I never thought I’d love someone this way.” His hard eyes almost soften. “I never thought I could, but you’ve made me love my life more than I ever fucking have. I can’t even imagine spending the rest without you.”
He’s much older, my protector and my best friend. He’s my future and my happiness. He’s everything that I wasn’t sure he’d ever be, and I want him all, right now. Filling me. Loving me.
“I don’t ever want you to lie there in pain because you’re trying to make me happy—because you’re afraid of hurting my feelings. That’s not how this fucking works. You matter.” I hear him say a version of this to me at sixteen. At seventeen. At eighteen and nineteen and now at twenty. He has tried to make me feel worth more than I’ve allowed myself to be. All this time.
He still listened. And his response always had the same heartbeat. You matter.
“Don’t fall in love with people who are human. We’re going to disappoint you in the end.”
Frederick told me the mind is fragile. For as quickly as it can be broken, it can take a lifetime to be repaired.
Years ago, Lo couldn’t say one good thing about Ryke. Not out loud at least. Now he loves him enough to order his favorite breakfast foods. He knows him well enough to get it right. This means so much to Ryke. I can see it in his eyes, and he just nods at Lo, unable to speak.
“Look, love,” Lo says to Lily. “Two-thirds of us have sex tapes, and we’re not one of them.”
Not someone who’d start a donut war, bolster me to use my voice, and make love to me in a car. God. I love Ryke.
Happy. Why can’t I have that? Why can only certain girls be “meant” for something? It shouldn’t be bad to want to be a mom. It shouldn’t be bad to want to only have a career. It shouldn’t be bad to strive for both or nothing at all. We all should just be what we want to be.
We’re moving again. I smile. So wide. So alive. And then the crescendo hits. He dips me again, so low—this time holding on. And my lungs—my lungs burst inside of me, the world blind with love. I clutch his neck tightly. If I fall, he’ll come with me.
My everything. He’s a breath away from my lips as the song fades. And very softly, he says, “I’m so fucking in love with you.”
Do you want to know what love feels like for me? It’s breathing and suffocating. Sobbing and smiling. Yearning and fading. To ache that much harder. To live that much larger. It’s every moment. Every single, tiny one. I’ve felt it all with Ryke.
I whisper against his lips, “This moment is ours, isn’t it?”
I married the love of my life. I’m about to climb towards paradise. My gaze drifts towards the sun. I’m alive.
