Somebody Else's Sky (Something in the Way, #2)

by Jessica Hawkins

What was wrong was that I was in love with someone who might never be mine.

She didn’t know she was tempting a dangerous man,

And so was this, my girlfriend stripping down to her black lingerie while I thought about her seventeen-year-old sister.

Could I deny it? I wanted Lake. I wanted her bad.

For dinner, she’d worn tattered jeans and a t-shirt but why, why the fuck did she still look like the sexiest thing I’d ever seen?

All the times I’d fantasized about Lake inside, and when she was standing right in front of me, I couldn’t even speak to her. What was there to say? I’d wanted to fall to my knees and pay homage. To overwhelm myself in her. Soak my senses with her. Touch her body, smell her neck, taste her mouth, hear her moan, feel her relief that I was home.

He looked at me like he owned part of my soul.

“I don’t want to be taken care of. I want to be loved the way you love me.”

“That you’re not the girl you were when I went away. That you still are. That I could,” he squeezed my middle, “ruin you in one stroke.

I woke up next to my girlfriend, and there was nothing strange about that. Except that the night before, I’d just about lost my control to the urge to taste watermelon again, just once before I died.

She was eighteen. Fuck. Never had there been a greater test of my will.

Because whether I wanted to or not, I did love Lake. Like my cigarette craving, it lived in me. I couldn’t cut that cancer out, couldn’t quit this addiction. It would’ve been easier to swim across the ocean.

“You’re my best friend. My right to judge you was automatically revoked when you earned that title.”

“If he’s your soul mate, then he’s yours. He can’t have two soul mates—it’s a fact. You deserve a happy ending, even if it means you have to be selfish and greedy.”

“I can’t just sit back and watch. I have to say something.” Her face, open and sweet, pleaded with me. “You know it’s true, Manning, you have to. You’ve always known that my heart doesn’t function right without you, that food doesn’t taste the same and air is too thick, and my mind is always wandering back to that night on the lake, because I’m all wrong without you, because I’m in love with you.”

“You think I don’t know how you feel? You think I don’t carry the burden of our love on my shoulders just to keep it from crashing down onto you?”

“You should have the world. Fuck the world—you should have the universe, the sky, and every star in it.”

“If you ask me to choose you, I will—even if it could ultimately destroy me.”

Manning had once told me you couldn’t move the stars. I’d thought that meant our love was predestined, written in the night sky, sure as death. Behind my lids, I pictured the two stars and realized for the first time the permanent distance between them. And I accepted that there was, and always had been, a third star. You can’t move the stars. I had tried, and I had failed.

my delicate birdy heart, ripped right down the middle by a great bear.

My love for him spanned the ocean, the sky over our heads, an infinite universe of stars. I could do this to Tiffany, but I couldn’t do it to him. I sealed my words inside along with a great love that somehow fit inside me. Maybe one day, Manning and I would challenge fate, defy gravity, and move the stars ourselves.