This Time It's Real

by Ann Liang

He pauses. Stares at me. “Oh, look,” he says finally, his mouth curving into something too muted to qualify as a smile. “It’s my nonfan.”

I guess my point is that I do believe in love. Really. I’m just not convinced that kind of love could ever happen to me.

“Of course. Anything for my nonfan.” My face heats. “When are you going to let that go?” “When you join my fan club.” “So: never,” I say flatly.

“It’s the smile,” he says, eyes flickering to me. “You two have the same smile.”

Whatever his reasons, an unexpected gust of warmth fills my chest seeing them together like this, blows all the locked doors and windows inside me wide open.

“Eliza. If it weren’t for the matter of practicality, you could literally come dressed in a trash bag and I wouldn’t care.”

I hope you remember to miss me when all this is over.

But aren’t small things exactly what friendships are made up of? Frayed string bracelets and late-night texts and compilations of your favorite songs?

And this, I think, is my ultimate fatal flaw. Missing people who don’t miss me back. Clinging on to strands of string that shouldn’t mean half as much as they do. It takes so little for me to love someone, yet so long for me to move on.

When you care about someone, you want to be inconvenienced—you wouldn’t mind being inconvenienced by them every day for the rest of your life. That’s what love is. That’s all love really is.”

Whatever this is lies well beyond the realms of our arrangement. But god help me, I care way too much about the stubborn boy on the other side of the door to go.

“There’s a better way to say thank you, you know,” I tell him, hoping to keep things light. To hide the warm, exquisite ache blooming inside me, the forbidden impulse to set the porridge bowl back down and wrap my arms tight around him, hold him, have him hold me too. To offer him the whole world, protect him from everything that could potentially hurt him.

“You’re not—you’re not jealous?” Of course I am, I want to say. I want to hang up the phone and go find him in person and shake him. I’m so jealous it’s embarrassing. It makes me sick, even though I don’t really have a right to be jealous in the first place. There’s nothing in our agreement that forbids him from kissing other people. Especially considering how it’s part of his job.

She wants to leave now. And I don’t know how to make people stay; I never have.

“You,” he says quietly. “I want you, Eliza.”

“I want this to be real.”

It doesn’t matter that he’s more or less rejected me already, that this could very well end badly. I just need to see him, to be there for him, confirm for myself that he’s okay. No matter how much it hurts.

we end up sneaking into a cleaning closet on the far corner of the second floor. “Feels like home,” Caz remarks as I push him gently against a cabinet of disinfectants and shut the door behind us.

“Hey, your face isn’t injured or anything, right?” He stills, confused. “No, why—” “Good,” I tell him, smiling, and I press my lips to his.

“Caz, I’d love to be inconvenienced by you. I wouldn’t mind being inconvenienced by you for the rest of my life.”