You Deserve Each Other

by Sarah Hogle

My bedroom floor is a mess of soft pullover sweaters that make me feel like a sea captain, knee-high boots, and infinity scarves. Every meal contains some hint of pumpkin spice. If I’m not ingesting pumpkin, I’m breathing it in like an addict, lining every available surface of my home with candles that smell like food. Apple pie, pumpkin pie, pumpkin spice, apple pumpkin.

Being in love is frantic. Fluttery. Falling. It’s nervous sweats and pounding heartbeats and a feeling of tremendous rightness, or so I hear.

I’m a miserable cynic (a newer development) and a dreamy romantic (always have been), and it’s such a terrible combination that I don’t know how to tolerate myself.

I try to remember what falling in love felt like and can’t recall. It must have been over with very quickly.

“Did I do that right? Are those the words you’d like to put in my mouth?”

he ate

I am learning at this very moment in time that tormented English literature professor who’s just hit rock bottom is my specific type.

real.

He’s never going to belong to me. He’s never going to want to stay with me. I’m never going to be enough.

I turn to see what he’s watching on TV, and do a double take. The television is turned off. He’s watching me in the black screen.

AH

There’s a nutcracker on the mantel.

shut up

“You deserve each other.”

It’s how he knows me better than anyone else, and I never meant for him to.

One morning after Nicholas’s shower, I draw a heart in the steamy bathroom mirror. He ducks back into the bathroom to brush his teeth and after he’s left it again I find another heart he’s drawn, interlocked in mine. It’s the world’s smallest start.

She’s worth the pain of trying, is how he put it. Worth the risk of failing.”

“You missed me.” “You came home because I missed you?” He’s got his elbow bent on the pillow, palm under the back of his head, watching me fathomlessly. His other hand drapes across his stomach. “Yes.”

“Relearning you has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

What are the chances? Two people from Morris, meeting in Eau Claire? And the very one I wanted to meet.”

“For the first time,” he finishes, “I’ve gotten my wish.”

He places his hand over my thumping, traitorous heart, commanding every nerve ending, every desire. I am wide, wide awake. He shudders an exhale and his face descends so close that I think it must end with a kiss, which is why I close my eyes. “Your heart is mine,” he says.

“If I make this shot . . .” I think of the craziest outcome to all this I can come up with. It makes perfect sense. “You have to marry me. Not someday, and not maybe. We do this now.” I swing my arm back and am about to let it go when Nicholas catches my wrist. He plucks the invitation from my fingers, slips down off the car, and walks over to the dumpster. He very deliberately drops it inside. I raise an eyebrow at him when he walks back to me. He stops a foot away, hands sliding into his pockets. His eyes are no longer teasing. “I’m not leaving you and me up to chance.”

“But you still haven’t said you love me.” “That’s not true.” “You haven’t.” “I say it all the time, I just say it very, very quietly. I tell you when you’re in another room, or right after we hang up the phone. I tell you when you’ve got headphones on. I say it after you shut the door behind you. I say it in my head every time you look at me.”

“Of course I love you, Naomi. I never stopped.”

Rosefield.

How did Nicholas and I meet? We met in a house called Ever After, the second time we were strangers. And I am one hundred percent in love with the transformation of us.