This Time It's Real

by Ann Liang

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

“You won’t fall,” he says, like the notion itself is ridiculous. “I won’t let you.”

Twice, Caz turns around, checking whether or not I’m okay.

We do need people. People who’ll laugh with us and cry with us and make the bad days bearable and the good days better; people who’ll remember what we forget and listen even when they don’t completely understand; people who’ll need us back. It has nothing to do with strength at all, and everything to do with being human.

I do have a bad tendency to avoid anything I find uncomfortable.

RELATABLE!!!

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

I’m forced to admit that what I wrote on those paper cranes wasn’t just my exhaustion talking.

I might actually be crushing on Caz Song. Like a total sucker.

But then he calls my name once, soft, and I lift my head in surprise. He looks so obviously, genuinely moved, all his gratitude just lying wide open in his gaze, that I can’t stand it. This intimacy. The way it makes my chest heat.

brown-sugar bubble tea cake,

sounds absolutely delightful

Caz releases an audible puff of laughter. I turn to glare at him, but when our gazes meet, he only laughs harder.

“Yeah, but we can see it in your eyes,” he says. “And that shit’s even more obvious than direct pickup lines.”

Then Daiki nods solemnly. “It’s a pressing issue, for sure.”

love him

all I can focus on is my own thudding heartbeat and pray Caz Song can’t tell it has nothing to do with the performance itself, and everything to do with him.

But I feel nothing, not until I get to school and catch sight of Caz laughing with his friends, where my pulse promptly skyrockets and my stomach somersaults ten times over.

The second I do, something inside me snaps into place, as if this one small action has already sealed my fate.

It takes so little for me to love someone, yet so long for me to move on.

Before I have time to compose my expression, the corner of his mouth tugs up in that crooked smile I secretly love so much, dimples and straight white teeth flashing.

“Mhm.” Suddenly he leans in, a glint in his eyes. “Wait—don’t tell me. This.” He gestures to himself, his costume, and I want to die. “This works for you?”

“Do you think it’d be too crass if I also mentioned how much I like his ass?”

MINGRI PLSSS

part of me still wants to see him again.

“I want to,” Caz says—then, maybe catching the surprise on my face, pauses. “I mean, I should.”

His gaze cuts to mine, black on brown, concern dancing over his features like light over water.

I care way too much about the stubborn boy on the other side of the door to go.

I stop abruptly when I see him smiling.

“Fine. It’s just cute that you’re so concerned, that’s all,” he says

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.

And then, since I’ve crossed the forbidden line already, I reach over impulsively and stroke his hair gently, with one hand.

There’s something strangely intimate about calling someone in the dark. It’s like listening to your favorite song in the middle of a crowded subway; the world narrows down to just you and this voice in your ear, while everyone else around you goes about their lives, completely oblivious. It feels sacred. Like a secret.

“I just wanted to talk to you.”

“You’re not—you’re not jealous?” Of course I am, I want to say.

“That thing about … being there for me. I want to be that for you too.”

He’s unreasonably beautiful and he’s so close it makes me ache and I want him closer still.

Caz responds by leaning in, and for one wild, beautiful, terrifying second, I think he’s going to press his lips to mine, and I can’t help it—I lean in too. But instead he merely smiles, as if he’s just proven something to both of us, and lowers his curved mouth to my ear. “Liar,” he whispers.

AHAHAHHHDSHSHDHHDUDB

“Look, would you rather stand out here bickering in the rain over your height—which definitely isn’t five foot three, by the way—or go somewhere warm and dry?”

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

AHAHHAHSGDVSHSBSJSVS

“I want this to be real.”

Romantic breakups are romanticized constantly, talked about everywhere by everyone, but platonic breakups are swept to the side, suffered in secret, as if they’re somehow less important.

Hope is such a terrible thing.

It’s actually funny, looking back at it. How writing has always been the string tying me to people.

It takes me too long to recover, to pick my heart up from where it’s fallen like shattered glass. By the time I do, Caz is already gone.

We’re standing so close, in fact, that I can feel the subtle change in his breathing when he looks at me.

But telling the truth—saying exactly what you mean, how you feel, to the people you care about most … That’s one of the hardest things in the world. Because you have to trust them. Trust that they won’t hurt you, even when they have the power to.

and tangible longing.

Hope is not weakness. It’s oxygen, a crack in the window, the pale slash of moonlight across a dusty room.