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“You come here right now and tell me the L word if you want to be my awful-wedded husband.”
He made me weak in the knees. And I knew, impossibly, that this was the way it was going to be until my last day. My heart would always miss a beat the first time he entered the room—no matter how many times I’d seen him.
I recognized it immediately. It had belonged to Rosie.
“I know I have been a terrible boyfriend. I know we’re not together anymore. I know you deserve much, much better than what I’ve given you so far as a lover, not as a friend—other than the sex part. The sex part was…”
“I mean, let’s admit it, Moonshine. We’re the shit in bed, okay? No point denying it.”
“Anyway, to your request—your quite reasonable request, milady—I assure you, I love you. I’m in love with you. I’m crazy about you. Have been since age four. It was always you. Never someone else. Not even for a fleeting moment. Not even when I dreamed of moving on from you. Even when I hated you—or when I thought I did—I knew we’d be together. I knew. Our love always had a pulse. Sometimes it was faint. Sometimes it was beating so hard I couldn’t hear anything else. But it would never die. It can’t. I won’t let it.”
“I spent the night at Dixie’s, trying to come up with a way for you to know I will never repeat my mistakes. I will never give in to alcohol and drugs again. Never self-destruct that way. But the only thing I could come up with was for you to give me a chance not to fuck up. Because if we’re apart—how would you be able to know? I decided I’m coming to North Carolina, babe. You gave up so much for me, and I am happy to do the same for you.”
“No, we won’t be going back to Boon. Boon changed me in so many ways, and I will forever be grateful for the journey, but my home is here. You’re here. Our families are here. Some people can go to an out-of-state college and do their own thing. Not us. We’d be leaving too much behind. No, babe. We’re staying. We’ll study here. We’ll overcome your addiction, and my inhibitions, here. We’ll stay close to the street we grew up on. Where we fell in love. Where we fell apart. Where we broke and pieced ourselves back together.”
“So…is that a yes or a no? Because Dixie’s been filming this whole thing outside, and I don’t know how much memory her phone has.”
“Yes!” I shouted. “Yes, I’d love to be Luna Cole!”
“Always. Whenever. Forever,” he mouthed, his lips still on mine.
“I choose you.”
The moon peeks at us from the curtain of our beach house, smiling. You made it, it says. We did.
Pregnant ladies are batshit crazy.
“I don’t wanna hurt the baby,” I moan, trying to keep it PG-13 somehow.
“What if I hurt her?” “You’re not going to hurt her.” “How do you know?” “You’re not that big!” she exclaims, exasperated. I pause, mid-thrust, staring at her with horror.
I love the hustle and bustle outside, though. It reminds me how lucky I am, and that I chose well—staying with the quietest person I know.
Only Dixie is not the same woman I resented. Maybe she never was. Maybe sometimes we make people monsters in our heads because we can’t understand them. Maybe we don’t understand them because we don’t try to. And maybe we don’t try to because we’re scared.
“It started with an abandoned toddler in a soiled diaper, but the plot twist was a boy with busted knuckles and a heart of gold…”
