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“You built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence,” my therapist once said, and I enjoy the mental image of it. The idea of life as something I could choose, cultivate day by day, curate and nurture. Being mindful, instead of reactive.
Honestly, he’s not my type. Too overworked. Too incapable of letting go. Too single-minded. Too much of a dickhead. And for the last three years of my life, I’ve been in love with him.
“Scotland Maya is a bit of a pick-me.”
Alfie was my first long-term boyfriend, and one of the people who knows me best in the whole world, and it’s mortifying that one morning he woke up and decided that I wasn’t smart or funny or hot enough for him.
“Don’t,” he says. So sharp that my eyes let go of Antares to find his. “Don’t put yourself in the same category as Minami, or Avery, or Tamryn. You do not belong there.”
“Of course I fucking want you. You are stupidly beautiful, and too fucking smart for your own good, and I refuse to go there, Maya.”
Because one day, Conor Harkness decided that he wanted someone to know him. And he chose me.
“You okay?” I ask, cautious. “Yeah.” A deep inhale. “Yeah. I just wanted to listen to you exist.”
“I have never wanted anything as desperately, as ungovernably, as persistently as I want you. Not a single goddamn thing. Not my dead mother back. Not revenge. Not the well-being of the people I love. Not professional success, not even my own happiness. Absolutely nothing has consumed me as mercilessly as you have.”
“Do you want me to leave?” “It would be best if—” “Not the question I—” “No, Maya. I never want you to be anywhere but with me.”
“Since the first day I met you, you have been the best thing in my life. And you weren’t even in it.”
“I’m saying that I already know I’m in love with you, and that I have little interest in being apart from you. I don’t need you in small doses, because…I want it all.”
