The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

Every smile is laced with heartache; every blink is edged with loneliness.

“I don’t know.” He shrugs, holding my gaze. “I could need a Georgia.”

“No.” Sam shakes his head. “Complicated, that’s all. You’re a puzzle, and I don’t have all the pieces yet.”

Then he pauses and glances down at me, each of us still frozen in our dance stances, and I hope the universes freezes and I’m forever stuck in the arms of the world’s hottest alcoholic, dancing on the grave of a bigot.

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

“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.

I square my shoulders and look him straight in the eye. “Sam Penny, do you have romantic feelings for me?” He thinks for a second, and the way his mouth is pursed makes me nervous for the splittest of seconds. “My feelings for you are…strictly romantic.” Then he adds as an afterthought—“And often sexual.”

“They’re talking about church, not God,” I clarify. “And actually, I said I like Jesus.”

When I was twenty, I started using La Mer’s Crème de la Mer. Before then, my skin was fine, good even…but once I started using that, it became great. And now I can’t unknow how great my skin can be. And this is how I feel about Sam.

We don’t need them. But we would like them.

It’s not about the money. I don’t care about the money. It’s about it being written down for all the world to see that my dad loves me and my brother less than the other two.

And it occurs to me just then, that my dad died thinking I slept with Maryanne’s boyfriend. He’ll never know I didn’t. I’ll always be a slut to him.

“Loving someone’s an obsession—and being in love, even fucking—you get that high.”

Sam’s face softens. “You asking me to fall in love with you?” I smile coyly. “Maybe.” “Maybe I will.” He shrugs. And then he looks serious. “You’ll watch me?” I nod. I’d swear to forever if he asked me to, here and now.

Okay, now, my basest instincts would have me look at Sam. That’s what I naturally want to do for more reasons than just because I love him now. Loving him now is peripheral. You look at the things you want to protect, and you look at the person you’re caught in a lie with, and these things would give me away.

The nicest thing you can ever do for another human being is see them, and really see them, at that. To be understood is one of most base desires we as people have, and it was one that Oliver wasn’t only deprived of, but often quite deliberately denied. All our lives he wanted our dad to see him and to care what he saw, and I think just now my brother got a glimpse that our dad did.

Staying up all night talking. Getting hooked on a Netflix show together. Going to the grocery store. Getting into bed and having a fight about who should get up to turn off the lights. Getting caught in the rain. Watching him fill up the gas tank. Reading a book next to him—

“So be selfish!” he yells as he shakes his head again, wildly now. AU1—he’s nervous, or afraid. “Please! Please, be selfish. For me.”

“We were right,” I tell Tennyson. “Alexis Beauchêne and Dad were having an affair.” I look back at Oliver as I point to our father’s lover on the porch. “And that man is Alexis Beauchêne.”

“Sam—” He starts shaking his head. “Georgia, don’t—” “Penny, this has to end!” “No,” he says loudly as he rushes toward me. “Yes,” I say louder back. “No! We’re not doing anything wrong.” He says that slow and steady, but also annoyed.

“This’ll kill me!” he snaps accidentally, and his eyes go wide after he’s said it. He presses his hand into his mouth and steadies his breathing. Four breaths in and out of his nose. “Georgia—fuck.” He swallows heavily. “Please don’t do this. Please.”

“I love you,” he tells me, resolute. “I’m in love with you.”

“So don’t pull this shit with me, Gige—there’s no failsafe for loving you. Once you’re in, you’re in, and I’m in.”

“I am an addict,” he tells me, sure. “You’re not meant to be addicted to me.” “I’m not addicted to you, I’m in love with you,” he says matter-of-factly. “I don’t need you, I want you. And I want you because I know you.” He searches for my eyes. “I know you, Georgia, and I know you’ve spent your whole life shouldering other people’s pain and their secrets, usually at a massive cost to yourself, and now I’m here, and I’ll help you shoulder some of it, but because I love you, I’m also going to help you draw some lines, because for a psychology major you have some real fucking shit boundaries with your brother.”

sincerity. “I’m in love with her, Oliver—I’ve been into her since the second I first saw her when she felt me up because she thought I was your boyfriend, and I’ve been in love with her since the morning after when we went to the beach and she wouldn’t take my jumper.”

People who aren’t self-aware, people who haven’t lived their lives in the pursuit of truth, find that the truth is confronting if you don’t want to hear it.

“Lust is a feeling and awe is a feeling, and both things I have for you at the minute in fucking spades, but I’m self-aware enough to know they’ll probably go away at some point or another—”