A Place in the Sun

by R.S. Grey

Technically, I was a lady by birth, but I’d die before telling them that. I decided to sidestep the question.

I knew it was loads easier to crumble under the weight of grief than it was to stand up with it on your back, but every day you carry it forward you get stronger and stronger, and eventually it doesn’t feel as heavy as it once did.

The day I got intimidated by another woman would be the day I was no longer Georgie Archibald.

Our lips melted together as he kissed me. Hard. Aggressive. Impatient. If kisses could kill, ours would have.

When she smiled, the world smiled with her, and more than once, I found myself wishing I was the man she deserved to be with, the one she had come to Italy to find.

There’s a difference between losing a loved one and losing a person you’re in love with. To be in love with someone is to live inside them. Allie’s breaths were my own and when she drew her last one, I was the one left gulping for air. I hadn’t breathed deeply in five years.

After all, it’d been five years since I’d felt a woman I loved on top of me.

“It’s astonishing, the things we do for love, yes?” Like completely redoing a bed and breakfast just to spend time with someone?

bella…tesoro…luce dei miei occhi…” He was coaxing me out of my sour mood, gently teasing me with Italian pet names. Lovely, darling… Before I could ask what the last phrase meant, he pulled back and met my gaze. “Light of my eyes.”

He hadn’t lied to me all those weeks ago when he’d told me he wasn’t ready for a relationship. The man was still completely in love with his wife. A ghost.

Witnessing his love for Allie was a good thing because it made me realize what I wanted: for someone to love me the way he still loved her.

“You’ll never have room for love as long as she’s there.” “If you’re asking me to choose you over her, I won’t do it, Georgie. I can’t do it.”

Sad, right? To still pine for a man who’d told me time and time again that he didn’t fancy me like that.

To have her love and attention was like standing beneath the scorching sun on a summer day: suffocating and sustaining all at once.

I knew I’d spend the rest of my life loving Georgie Archibald here, in our place in the sun.

but what else is left of a person on this earth after they’ve died except their old clothes, their memory, and the loose strings they leave the rest of us holding on to?