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.

“I’m kidding, by the way,” he says evenly. “You’re still way hotter than my manager.”

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

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.”

“Because no matter what happens … we’re friends now, right? I want to be the person you know you can turn to. The place where you feel safe. I want you to feel like you can just be—human, in front of me. Like you don’t have to always show your best side. Okay?”

He only seems to relax when I scoot forward, bring my hand lower down to his arm, and tell him what I’ve wanted someone to say to me for as long as I can remember. What I’m still waiting for someone to say. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

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

“What—what do you care about, then?” “You,” he says quietly. “I want you, Eliza.”

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