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So, to avoid disappointment, you learned never to ask yourself what you truly wanted.
when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear.
(Oh, ’twas not I who called the constable! I am but a young woman of nine and twenty, not a crotchety old spinster who loathes laughter, fun, song, and dance!)
“Oh?” I said. “That’s too bad.” But it sounded more like Praise be to the Bluetooth Shmootooth!
“I don’t understand why there’d need to be a full genre that’s just books for women.” I scoffed. Here it was, that always-ready anger rising like it had been waiting for an excuse. “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who doesn’t understand it,” I said. “I know how to tell a story, Gus, and I know how to string a sentence together. If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do you know what you’d get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I’ve eliminated half the Earth’s population from my potential readers, and
...more
Coldly horny? No, Gus Everett had been all hot breath and sparking touches.
Like bulbous succulents of flesh and sinew. I never get to say bulbous succulents of flesh in my books.”
Mom’s first diagnosis taught me that love was an escape rope, but it was her second diagnosis that taught me love could be a life vest when you were drowning.
All these tiny orbs, January, like the whole world was made out of Dippin’ Dots. Pure sugar.
🥺
Maybe she, like her father, was incapable of the love she’d spent her life chasing. Or maybe that love simply didn’t exist.
But it was all of Gus’s minor imperfections—his scars and ridges, crooked lines and sharp edges—and how they added up that had always made it hard for me to stop looking at him, and made me want to see more.
Speaking of fire, sometimes his eyes seemed to be reflecting it, even though there wasn’t any. The car was nearly pitch-black, for God’s sake. His eyes shouldn’t be allowed, physically or morally, to glint like that. His pupils were disrespectful to the laws of nature. My skin started burning under them.
Gus’s dark gaze bored into me like a corkscrew:
The message was ironic. The butterflies in my chest were not.
Outwardly we were so different, but when it came down to it, we both wanted the same thing. A life cast in a magical glow, every moment bigger and brighter and tastier than the last.
Again and again he told me I wasn’t myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I’d always been. I’d just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.
He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.
I was fighting giggles as I drove. In general, I didn’t find phobias funny, but Gus was a former gravedigger turned suicide-cult investigator. Nothing Grace said in our interview had made him bat an eye, and yet cheap rides and puke had nearly bested him.
“You called from a party and dumped your girlfriend?” I cried. “Why would you do that?” He looked my way, eyes narrowed. “Why do you think, January?”
“You remember that?” It came out as a whisper. His eyes leapt toward me, and my heart rose in my throat. “It’s why I asked about them,” he said. “I thought it was the nicest dedication I’d ever read.”
I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.
His laugh vibrated through the table, and my insides started fizzing like champagne.
“It’s shit like this that makes it impossible for me to believe in happy endings. You never get the paper umbrellas you were promised in this world.” “Gus,” I said. “You must be the paper umbrellas you wish to see in this world.”
His rough fingertips tentatively touched my knee, slid up until he found my hand. Slowly, I turned my palm up to him, and his thumb drew heavy circles on it for a minute. When I slid it closer, he folded his fingers into mine, and we sat there, holding hands under the table, pretending we weren’t.
Happy endings don’t happen to everyone. There’s nothing you can do to make someone keep loving you.
My phone buzzed with his response: Come over. I tried not to notice what those words did to me, the full-body shiver, the heat.
“Look,” Gus said, and pointed up at the deep blue sky as two trails of silver light streaked through the stars. His eyes were doing the thing, the Gus thing, at the sight of them, and it made my chest flutter almost painfully. I loved that vulnerable excitement when he first caught sight of something that made him feel before he could cover it up.
I hoped I looked very pretty, for an overripe tomato.
“Whatever you are,” I said, “it’s better than a night-light. And for what it’s worth, as a former fairy princess and the ultimate secret soft-girl, I think you’re plenty gentle.”
“Your mother has been a lot of people in the twenty years I’ve known her, and I’ve had a chance to fall in love with every single one of them, Janie.
He coughed out a laugh. “Because you’re the bright light! Don’t you get it?” He shook his head. “It’s not about what’s happened. It’s about how you cope with things, who you are. You’ve always been this fierce fucking light, and even when you’re at your worst, when you feel angry and broken, you still know how to be a person. How to tell people you—you love them.” “Stop it,” I said. He started to walk away, but I grabbed him by the elbows and held him in front of me. “You’re not going to break me, Gus.”
The sun was low on the horizon, the thin blankets of clouds streaked a pale tangerine. They looked like melted Dreamsicles floating in a sea of denim blue.
It was a still, blue morning. If the sun had come up, it was caught behind a sheet of mist. As quietly as I could, I pulled the bag of ground coffee and the French press from the lazy Susan. The ritual felt different than it had that first morning, more ordinary and thus somehow more holy.
“I’ll come,” I said. “But I’m definitely bringing up rocks to Maggie.” “You’re sick and twisted, January Andrews,” Gus said. “That’s what I love about you.” My stomach dipped and rose higher than it had started out. “Oh, that’s what it is.” “Well,” he said. “One thing. It seemed too crass to invite you to my aunts’ house and then bring up your ass.”
the smell of the blue punch on his blue lips made my blood feel like it was spiked with Pop Rocks.
The intensity in his gaze settled, like he’d burned through every spark he had, and I loved his eyes like this too, all warm and raw and quiet.
“Then let me be happy with you, Gus,” I said and kissed him softly, like the rare and tender thing he was.
“January,” he whispered through the dark, like an incantation, like a prayer.
...
“When you love someone,” he said haltingly, “. . . you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning, and amplify the good. That’s what you do. For your readers. For me. You make beautiful things, because you love the world, and maybe the world doesn’t always look how it does in your books, but . . . I think putting them out there, that changes the world a little bit. And the world can’t afford to lose that.”
there’s a part of me that’s hoping I’m going to find something.” “Like what?” It came out as a whisper. He put his elbows on the table. “Like the kind of world you write about. Like proof. That it isn’t as bad as it looks. Or it’s more good than bad. Like if we added up all the—all the shit and all the wildflowers, the world would come out positive.”
No matter how much shit, there will always be wildflowers.
“If we drank green smoothies like we drink alcohol, we would live forever.” “If we drank green smoothies like we drink alcohol, we would never leave the toilet, and that would do nothing to help you right now,” Gus said.
Love, after all, was often made not of shiny things but practical ones. Ones that grew old and rusted only to be repaired and polished. Things that got lost and had to be replaced on a regular basis.
White flurries began to drift down around her, snagging in her hair and clothes. Eleanor looked up from the dusty road, marveling at the sudden snowfall. Of course it wasn’t snow. It was pollen. White wildflowers had sprung up on either side of the road, the wind shaking their buds out into itself. Eleanor wondered where she was going next, and what the flowers would look like there.
tumbleweeds were blowing through my desolate heart.
Sometimes I think about you as that lighthouse. Keep your eyes on January, I tell myself. She won’t lead you astray.
😭😭😭
