Lovelight Farms (Lovelight, #1)

by B.K. Borison

I bend down and pick up an air freshener, tossing it in the bottom drawer of my desk with all of the rest. A big ol’ mess of tangled strings, stale pine, and unrequited feelings. A single pine tree for every time Luka has been home, starting back when we were twenty-one and stupid. I typically find them a week or two after he’s left - tucked away in some hidden spot. Beneath my snowglobe, under my keyboard.

I’ve thought about that a time or two in the stillness of night. How his hand feels against my skin, his palm gently cupping the back of my head, the move both possessive and reverent. I’ve thought about what it might feel like for his fingers to tighten, to sift up into my hair, to pull and angle me until his mouth finds mine. I’ve thought about a lot of things when it comes to Luka. Things you shouldn’t think about your best friend.

Luka filled the empty places in my life slowly, carefully, with his easy smile and stupid jokes. He brought me back to myself.

But it does feel a little like crossing a line we’ve both been careful to hold. A line I have been absolutely meticulous in my desire to hold. Luka is the very first person in my life who hasn’t disappeared. He’s more than my best friend - he’s tradition and familiarity. He is homemade pop tarts on the first Saturday of the month. He is late-night viewings of Die Hard in the sticky summer heat, both of our phones propped up on our respective coffee tables. He is pizza with extra mushrooms and light sauce, a crust that has to be perfect. The relationship I have with him is the closest thing I have to family. I can’t - I wouldn’t - risk that for a chance to see what we could be.

There’s a special kind of magic on nights like this, a certain sort of nostalgia when the past intermingles with the present and flirts with the future.

I laugh and his smile tips up into something beautiful. It’s a moment I want to stamp into my soul for the nights when I feel a little bit lonely and a lot bit sad. I take in a deep breath and hold onto the moment. The pinks and purples that cast his face half in shadow, the pull of his sweatshirt across his chest, his socked feet creaking the aged wood of my front porch. The magic is in the details, my mom always used to say. And these details are perfect.

And isn’t it silly, to love the way someone’s things look like next to yours? Little bits and pieces of a life lived in parallel.

He’s looking for something in my expression and when he finds it, the right side of his mouth hitches up in a smile, a smooth pull of his lips. It’s my smile - this one. I hoard it like all the others, bundle them up and put them in the same drawer as my cardboard pine trees.

Close like this, with his bottom lip just barely brushing mine, I can count every individual freckle on his nose. A burst of them on the bridge, less as they fan out below his eyes. Once when we were younger, we got drunk off tequila and I drew constellations on his skin, hovering over him with my hair curtained around us. I remember the weight of his eyes on me, sprawled across my living room floor, how he curled his fingers around my ankle like he was holding himself steady.

He looks like sugar and spice and everything not so nice, sleep rumpled and flushed in my bed.

There’s no jolt of electricity when our skin touches, just the sweet, settling warmth I always feel. Like the first bite of pie after waiting for it to cool on the racks next to the oven, tart and delicious. Or clothes fresh out of the dryer in the middle of winter. Steady and sure. A familiar comfort.

Luka’s hand slips up my spine and curls over my shoulder. “No matter where you go, you will always end up at home.”

“I’ve been thinking about kissing you all week,” I feel him say against my lips. That’s nice. I’ve been thinking about kissing him since I was twenty-three.

It’s a heady feeling, to know that I’m not the only one who wants to possess every moment of happiness. Collect every laugh and pocket it, hoard them like tiny treasures. I beam at him. His greed has me bursting at the seams.

He’s got his little duckling socks on tonight, one foot propped on the arm of the couch, the other flat on the floor with his knee bent. There’s a book folded open across his chest, some ancient science fiction novel he found in my tv stand. He looks obscene.

“My mom had just died and I was - sort of floating along. I stumbled off that step and he caught me, made sure I had my footing. He’s sort of been holding me steady ever since.”

I don’t believe in fate, or kismet, or any rule or reason to the universe and all its random, wonderful, terrible happenings. But I do believe I found Luka when I needed him the most, and I like to think my mom played a part in that. It’s a comfort. Like she’s still looking out for me. Still holding my hand.

Wishing I had the words to tell him how it feels like I’m breaking apart into tiny bits of stardust. I feel incandescent, iridescent, every fucking light on the Christmas tree blown out.

It’s hard to love someone without restraint. To give yourself over to the swell and pull of it without fear of what might happen. I think it’s only natural to hold a part of yourself back and protect what you can.

When he kisses me it tastes like hazelnut lattes, the edge of a mini pine tree digging into my knee.

I’m going to love her in all the quiet ways, the slow ways, the loud and obnoxious ways.