The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

Conscious feelings are present on the surface, and you make decisions around them, but subconscious feelings exist under the surface, and they dictate your decisions too, arguably even more so, but often you only realize that in retrospect.

The idea that it ends—that it all ends—that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath. It’s why people have children. To exist beyond their existence.

But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive. It hides under the pews in the back row of the church. It gets caught in a pile of sheets no one knew what to do with.

This one”—he points to a flower—“is a magnolia, because there’s a song that changed my life.

He’s self-aware. I didn’t realize that I thought that was a sexy thing till now, but it’s so sexy.

I don’t like my mom. I never really have, not for a long time, and you’ll get it eventually. It sounds callous to say it now out of context, but context is everything. I love her, sure—an abstract love that stems from a place sadder and deeper and more desperate for acceptance than I care to acknowledge exists within me, but I don’t particularly like her.

It’s a funny part of growing up, actually… Accepting that things that are better for you, healthier—they can still be painful. That the worst, most shameful day of my life to date would in turn become the most defining.

“You’ve got Catherine on your arm already, you don’t need a Georgia—” “I don’t know.” He shrugs, holding my gaze. “I could need a Georgia.” “Trust me.” I lift my eyebrows. “You don’t. They’re not worth it.”

And I swallow heavily. There is something about him, isn’t there? Like, beautiful and fascinating, and so much bigger than me.

It was crazy, actually. Behind them and beside them. It was this almost otherworldly feeling, where you’re so small, but not in a way that’s degrading or upsetting, but the fact that you’re on the planet at the same time as something so big and so significant,

I don’t know—it was strangely life-affirming? Like you’re not alone in the world.

He feels like the kind of memories I wish I had but don’t. He’s like déjà vu. And you know how when that happens, your brain is like, “Wait, we’ve been here before,” and you’re watching everything unfold and you’re waiting for the next thing to happen and you’re like, “I knew that,” and then the next thing happens and you’re like, “I knew that too,” and every time something happens that you’ve been waiting to happen because you feel like it’s already happened even though it hasn’t, you feel this floaty sense of delighted

satisfaction—that’s what it feels like to be near Sam Penny.

“Oh great,” sings Sam merrily as he walks away, just loud enough for my sister to hear. “Maybe we’ll have time for a quick fuck in the car after all.”

“When I like something, I just like it,” he says.

“Georgia, I want you to know,” he starts, swallowing heavily. “You are—easily!—the most complicated person I’ve ever met.” My face lights up, completely elated. “Thank you.”

There’s a prickle you get. You feel it on the back of your neck and your forearms, when you’re in danger.

In that moment, I was sure of two things. One, Oliver had snuck off again with the new guy in his class from New York, and two, I was about to have sex for the first time, and it wasn’t going to be my choice.

Beckett Lane raped me for a year, and my sister knew it too and did fuck-all to help me.

I begin to wonder whether perhaps Sam Penny isn’t “other people.” Maybe Sam Penny isn’t “people” to me at all.

need you to listen to me when I say this: I could not be more attracted to this man if I tried.

“It’s a fucking big smile…” “Nope.” I shake my head, stubbornly. “You have a big smile for me,” Sam says, way too pleased with himself. “Yeah, well.” I shrug a bit aggressively, because I’ve gone petulant now. “You lick your bottom lip every time you look at me, and your pupils are dilated, so—” “Yeah.” He nods, interrupting me again. “They are.”

“You’d be proud of her—I don’t know how much you talked. She’s pretty quiet about you. But she’s super smart…I mean, Cambridge-smart. And she’s a total knock-out,”

“Here’s what I think.” And I sit up to tell him. “People read the Bible wrong. It’s a diary of normal people, like us, from thousands of years ago, trying to make sense of the God they’d heard of from their ancestors. They didn’t write it for us to read it now. And I think people read it without the true social or historical context, and they bring their own instead.”

He loved me a dysfunctional amount, and love and dysfunction are a peculiar pairing that flavor everything with a specific brand of contradiction. See, Oliver loved me so much—too much, you might even say—that he’d rather leave me hurting if it meant it hurt me less at the time.

Sam slips his hand around my waist and jerks me quickly in toward him.

Contempt is funny like that. You can be resentful of something, hateful even—and still be jealous of it. I hated my dad for all the ways he wasn’t there for me and Oliver, but I still wanted him to want to be my dad.

All I know is I wanted to be wanted and I wasn’t and now he’s dead, so I’ll never be.

“Not a fucking thing,” he says as he licks away a smile.

It’s a closure thing, open caskets. People tend to find an open casket expedites the feeling of closure. A visual example aligning with the thing your brain was telling you already.

With everyone else, I like their silence because it talks to me. I trust people’s silences more than their words. I can read the world in silence. But Sam is different. Silence with him is silence. Silence with him is five fifteen in the morning before the sun’s up and it’s still dark but the birds are singing. He’s the heavy quilt you pull over your head when it’s too cold and too early to wake up. He’s the song no parent ever loved me enough to sing. He’s the way water runs and bubbles over stones in a stream. He’s a quiet mind.

“Fuck.” He sighs as his head falls back. “Would it be so fucked up if I kissed you right now?” I drop my chin a little and gnaw on my bottom lip. “No,”

because I think I’ve been waiting to know Sam Penny all my life.

“Are you going to take it back?” “No.” He sniffs a laugh and takes me by the waist. “I’m going to do it again.”

“Something happened with Julian’s sister.”

“It’s gonna feel for a minute like I went and broke your heart and fucked you up, but I swear to God, Gige—it’s the other way around. You’re going to fall in love in a few months with someone who’s not like me at all, and I’m going to fucking loathe you for it.” He chuckles. “But I need you to…to let me go, because I probably can’t let go of you. I love you more than I meant to. I really did just plan on shagging you that night,” he told me, and I laughed even though I was still crying. Then he pressed his mouth against mine, and he never spoke to me again.

Sam Penny doing any of those things would be poetry, but him like that on the bed with a book is Shakespeare.

He looks up, and the way his whole face lifts when he sees me makes me want to cry on the spot, because how many people just light up because you walk into the room? One in a lifetime, two maybe?

You know how there’s a good kind of hurting? Like rubbing out a cramp? Or great sex, sometimes? Being near him hurts me all over my body. I think it’s because he’s what all the songs are singing about. Every single fucking one of them, they’re singing about him.

“Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” I stare up at the big arch, which is my favorite part, I think. “Even though it’s broken?” “Yep,” he says quietly, and he’s looking just at me.

“My feelings for you are…strictly romantic.” Then he adds as an afterthought—“And often sexual.”

“Have mine,” he tells me, offering me his mug, but I don’t notice what’s in his hands because I’m distracted (always distracted) by his face. “Your what?” “I meant my coffee, but…” He smiles. “You can have my—fuck—have whatever you want. Have everything.” His tongue is pressed into his bottom lip, his pupils are dilated, and his gaze flickers from my eyes to my mouth to my eyes to my mouth to my eyes, and he swallows heavily.

“I wanna be here for you now too, though.”

I take a photo in my mind, let history rewrite itself for a second. It doesn’t erase it, but it scribbles over it a bit in a louder color.

He and his best friend had fallen in love with the same girl. I was the distraction, which was kind of sad, but the sex was good, and I wasn’t a whole enough person at the time to care that he was only with me because he couldn’t be with someone else.

Sam Penny is undoubtedly the greatest man I’ve ever met.

His kisses are commas.

“Of course we fucking need her.” Oliver rolls his eyes. “What skill set do you have?”

“Zero fucks.” I nod, resolute. This is mostly true. He tilts his head. “And what about you and me?” So many fucks. More fucks than I know what to do with.

“You get why it is I can’t tell you, right?” I nod once. “To death and for free.” “To death and for free.” She nods back. “I love you though.” She wraps her arms around me. “I love you too,” I tell her as she pets my hair.