Iris Kelly Doesn't Date (Bright Falls, #3)

by Ashley Herring Blake

Iris had never been that little girl who dreamed of her wedding day.

And while Iris prided herself on being the best kind of friend, she couldn’t help but feel a tiny swell of fear at how everything was changing. How her two best friends were experiencing something—and were going to continue to experience all sorts of things with marriage and family and kids—that Iris wasn’t going to be a part of. She was the single friend. And she always would be.

perfectly illustrates how you can be very happy for your friends but feel so lonely

part of the whole experience that left her feeling like there was something inherently wrong with her.

Throughout her sexual history, she’d always been the good lay, the one-night fuck. Even when she did date someone for a while, it always ended with very little fanfare, a ho-hum parting of the ways. Because Iris . . . well, she was good at sex. She wasn’t all that good at love.

but when it came down to it, Iris wasn’t marriage material.

she also didn’t want to risk getting all infatuated with someone who only saw her as a side piece of ass.

friends thought she was a little too free. A little too wild. That she wasn’t what a grown-ass adult of thirty-two should be.

She loved belonging to one person.

“I just wanted a minute to breathe. An hour, a day, where I wasn’t the pathetic ex slash best friend everyone was worried about.”

you you want to be isn’t the person anyone else wants?”

didn’t really understand I was bi until college.

“Anyway, New York is . . . I don’t know. It’s the only place I’ve ever been that felt exactly

like I expected it to, exactly like every story and movie and poem about it. Like magic and realism all twisted up together.”

She adored romance novels. Always had. She loved the grand gestures, the quirky towns, the haphazard heroines looking for true love. She craved the idea of herself caught up in romance, an Iris Kelly completely thrown over by love.

a hopeless romantic just like me

Softened. Changed.

That’s actually what I love most about romances,”

The feeling of finding someone who loves you for exactly who you are. No more, no less.”

Suddenly the fact that I liked sex became a huge moral failing. I was greedy. And, Jesus, the threesome requests. Not jokes, mind you, actual requests from guys who approached me in the student center, in the gym, in the middle of a fucking lecture hall, like I was nothing more than a business opportunity. And don’t you dare tell me everyone who’s bisexual deals with that—my best friend, Claire, came out in high school and never once got propositioned. Not once. And why? Because she’s sweet. She’s relationship material. I’m not serious, Stevie. I’m just the girl you fuck.”

They didn’t understand what it was like to realize the common denominator to all her shitty relationships was, in fact, her.

“Deep down inside, I think Iris really just wants to be swept off her feet, you know?”

But that was the tricky thing about love—it was selfless and also needy; generous, but greedy and desperate too. It was everything,

“Ever since we met, I thought I was the one who was scared,” Stevie said, her voice low and quiet. Steady. “I’m the one who needed confidence. I needed to take a chance. I needed to be brave. But really, all this time, it was you. You’re the real coward, Iris. Aren’t you?”

“You. Look, I know you all love me. I do. But sometimes . . . you assume you know what’s best for me before even giving me the space to figure it out myself.”

Because at the end of the day, it didn’t matter how scared Iris was. Stevie was scared all the fucking time, but she was ready to try. To take a chance with her career and her heart.

I am your happily ever after. The phrase came so easily, just a simply exchange of letters and words, but it fit. It was perfect. Cheesy and ridiculous and something right out of the romance section at River Wild.

Maybe Iris wasn’t broken after all. She was just . . . different. Changed by a person who’d finally gotten under her skin, under her heart, and made her so desperate to belong to someone, she barely recognized herself anymore. No, Iris wasn’t broken. Iris Kelly was in love.

Because Iris Kelly was worth loving.

And she always had been.

She freaked out sometimes, but she got through it, so even when tears did soak her pillow a little, she still felt . . . proud. That’s what it was. She was proud of herself, for leaping, for jumping, for taking the plunge, and every other cliché saying she could think of for how she’d changed her life.

She was learning not to brush off compliments—especially

She even opened her mouth, ready to take the chance, ready to try, ready to date, but all she could see in her mind—all she could feel, right there under her skin—was Iris.

She wished Iris wasn’t still with her, hovering like a phantom, making her unready for someone as great as Olivia.

Page after page, scene after scene, Stevie and Iris’s romance unfurled onto the page. Because it was a romance, colorful and wild and terrifying and beautiful, every moment pushing them to each other, the fabrication they both claimed in the beginning fading with every kiss, making way for something new and authentic and perfect.

Iris had drawn herself standing on a street in front of a red brick building, her back to the viewer. Her hair was dark in the dim light, long and wild, and she wore jeans and heeled brown boots, a grass-green pea coat. And in one hand, held loosely at her side, was a single yellow tulip.

“I didn’t want you to feel like you had to talk to me,” Iris said, stepping closer. “I wanted it to be your choice.”

Stevie could only stare at her, awed at the effort Iris had gone through, the time she’d spent, the things she’d created just to give Stevie a story. No. Not just a story. Their story.

“No, you don’t.” Iris shook her head and gripped Stevie’s wrists, her beautiful green eyes dark and shiny. “But I want you to. I want you to know that I love you. I do. I’m sorry I lied. You were right—I was a coward, but I was . . . god, Stevie, I was scared. So fucking scared, and I’m pretty sure I still am, and I might need you to be patient with me, but I can’t . . . I have to try. You were so brave for me, and I want to do the same. I want to be brave for you.”

“I spent a lot of time,” Iris went on, “convincing myself I wasn’t built to last, wasn’t built for romance, for love. But maybe . . .” Tears bloomed into her eyes. “Maybe I was just built for you.”

“I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest,”

Even six months after their reconciliation outside of Stevie’s apartment in Brooklyn, after the long discussion they had afterward about next steps, after two arduous months where they did long distance before Iris moved to New York, she still couldn’t believe she got to kiss this woman every day. Touch her, hold hands while walking down the street. Even more, she couldn’t believe how much she loved doing it—all the relationship things she’d convinced herself for too long she wasn’t built for, didn’t want.