If It Makes You Happy

by Julie Olivia

He’s so different from me. If I’m autumn, he’s spring. He’s all smiles and glowing warmth. His blue eyes are so deep, like the first beautiful clear sky of the season. He likes to rest them on my breeze-blown hair, drift them down to my painted lips or to the cardigan falling off my shoulder.

I sheepishly confess, “Men don’t want women like me.” “Like what?” Unfun, too serious, workaholics. “I don’t know,” I mumble. He gives a devilish, absolutely wicked smile. “I think men secretly want women just like you,” he growls, leaning even closer. “And the men who don’t are cowards.”

The world tilts. It suddenly feels like I’m falling through the ground, straight to the center of the earth. God, she’s breathtaking.

Then she sat me down one day and said she didn’t like me anymore. Not love—I distinctly remember that. She didn’t like me. I asked how long she knew she didn’t like me, and she said maybe she never did.”

“I hate it when teenagers whisper,” Cliff murmurs. “I feel like I’m getting bullied.”

“Don’t do something you think you’ll regret,” I whisper. He shakes his head without hesitation. “I wouldn’t regret this.”

And that—that right there—is the exact moment I know I need to kiss him. Because, despite Cliff taking a risk, he immediately backtracks when he thinks I’m uncomfortable. Because he’s that kind of friend. He’s that kind of man.

It’s like how, one day, the leaves are bright and green, and then, suddenly, they’re flittering to the ground in dull browns and oranges. The seasons of our relationship changed without my consent.

I have to forget the kiss if it means I get to keep her. And I need to keep her while I can.

“Question for you now, Clifford,” she says, mocking my tone from earlier. I chuckle and raise my glass. “Shoot.” “Do you know you’re in love with my sister?”

“He didn’t look at your sparkly boobs?”

“That man would jump off a bridge if you told him to, except, whoops, he’s already jumped, and he’s now down the river, waiting for you to tell him what to do next.”

I don’t want to go on more dates. I want Michelle. Not as a friend. Not as a fling. I want her.

“I want you to be happy and—” His next words almost come out in a whisper. “Have you ever thought I might be happy with you?” I tense, taking in a shaky breath. “You can’t mean that.” “I almost wish I didn’t.” “But you said—” “I say so many things that I don’t know what comes out of my mouth half the time,” he says. “But you do…you make me happy. So, there. I’m stuck in my own damn head with thoughts of you that I can’t get rid of. So,

“I like you because you’re Michelle. And that’s enough.”

And it hits me. I love this woman. I don’t know when it happened. It slipped over me so softly, like the changing of seasons. The seeping scent of baked bread first thing in the morning. A wistful sigh on a perfect fall day.

“I know you blame me for…why you had to stay here,” Emily says. “I didn’t ask to be born though, and you don’t get to treat me how you do.”