The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

There’s a certain brand of crazy that’s reserved special for the American South, and people who aren’t from there just won’t get it.

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. And I get that same feeling when I’m near Sam Penny.

He looks at me, but I mean, really looks at me—like there’s subtext. “When I like something, I just like it,” he says. And it’s me. I’m the subtext.

Childish. I know. So, so childish. But there’s something about being around your siblings that makes you regress.

Sometimes it’s easier to play the characters we’ve been assigned.

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.

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

“Are you up for a bit of a drive?” “With you?” He blinks a couple of times, then smiles. “Yeah, I’ll take the long road.”

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.

His kisses are commas.

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,

He gets more beautiful when he’s sad, how is that fair? That’s some fucking bullshit, that’s what that is.

“I shouldn’t have let it—that was so selfish—” “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.”

“So, fuck it. It’s okay to be selfish sometimes!” I pull a face. “I don’t think that’s true. I don’t even think you think that’s true!” “I do now.” Sam nods, decidedly. “For you, I don’t care.”

“And I don’t know whether you’ve been someone’s priority before,” he says as he reaches over and gently uncrosses my arms. “Maybe the mercenary’s, but then, maybe not—I don’t know. Doesn’t matter though. You’re mine now.”

“I’ve met you, and I’m different now.”