Heart the Lover

by Lily King

You knew I’d write a book about you someday.

‘The daisy? Please tell me not as in Daisy Buchanan.’ ‘In a good way,’ he says, and kisses me.

I’ve noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems.

Yash and I are shoulder to shoulder at the large cutting board with our knives. I want to give him a quick glance, but Sam in this twitchy mood might catch it. Instead I tap my knife two times without cutting anything. Yash taps twice back.

I’m glad you’re staying here,’ he says, not opening his eyes. ‘I’ll have one friend.’ ‘Me too.’ He bumps me with his shoulder again. ‘We’ll have our farewell to youth together.’

If Sam and I had this conversation, he’d ask for the check and not speak on the way home. But Yash looks up and grins and asks me if I like bread pudding.

‘I knew about the first note he wrote you.’ ‘Oh yeah?’ ‘I might have helped him a bit. At the end.’ ‘Heart the Lover?’ He smiles. Fuck. ‘That was the only good line,’ I say. ‘You were quite the puppet master.’

I’m not good at saying that I feel hurt or forgotten or rejected. There had been no room for that growing up. I’m more skilled at burying those emotions. Or hiding them in my fiction.

I look up at him and his mouth is twisted. ‘What’s the matter?’ He doesn’t answer. ‘You okay, Hink?’ He shakes his head. ‘It just hurts a little, to feel this good.’

In my head I call her Daisy. Sometimes she comes to me, more a feeling than a vision, a warmth, not a regret. I worry about many things, but I never worry about Daisy. Somehow I know she is well.

‘You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you’re reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.’

‘I think we desire unity because we have felt it before and we want to feel it again. It’s our natural state.’