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How many loves do you get in a lifetime?
Some loves you pretend you don’t feel, even when you can, even when you know you do, even if he’s the first thing you think of in the morning, even if he’s like a match in the darkened room of your heart—because loving something how you love him is a painful love that puts rocks in your pockets and melancholy in your eyeballs and if time has taught you anything it’s that it doesn’t matter. You’ll love him forever anyway.
I don’t just hate his eyes but all of him for a second—for knowing me how he knows me, for seeing through everything I say, for doing that with anyone but me. He shrugs indifferently.
He, being BJ Ballentine, my first… everything, really. Love, time, heartbreak.
The physical distance between us is meagre, but somehow still a forest grows between. Pine trees of mistakes so tall we can’t see over them and rivers of things we didn’t say so wide we can’t get around.
“You had a boyfriend, Parks,” he tells me again, and I ignore him because that’s beside the point.
I want to make him laugh forever but I can’t because he broke forever and still I fight the urge to kiss him anyway.
He’s the only man I’ve ever grieved the loss of, the only love I’ve ever loved.
I have a handle on everything, absolutely everything, especially my heart. It just comes and goes in waves, the grief of losing him. Rears its head at funny times, in peculiar places.
but you can believe this: once upon a time, BJ Ballentine was the love of my life. He isn’t anymore. And right now, that’s all you need to know.
“Whoever she is, she couldn’t hold a candle to you—” I look away from her and back at my reflection. “Obviously,” I pout. “I practically have diamonds for eyes.”
And then I start laughing and she starts laughing, even though it’s not that funny because she hates it, so I hate it, but she dates and I fuck and this is what we do, so we laugh.
I think if we all could have peeked behind heaven’s curtains at that moment we’d have seen those old Fates knotting our threads together, me and Beej, in this pure, sunny, inexorable, undoable way. I said knotted, not tied. Because I don’t know whether we’ll ever come undone. Not easily, anyway.
Painful things can still be beautiful things, in case you didn’t know.
never in a million years did I maybe think that he’d be different for once, just once in his stupid lifetime, maybe he’d try to not swerve us off a cliff.
We’ve walked down this road before, a thousand times, we know it well. It’s dark and shadowy and one of us always emerges with an arm gnawed off or a broken bone or heart.
But I’ve never really liked it when he’s not here—we were together too long, loved each other in such an intertwined way that his absence makes me feel uneasy. And he can’t be alone, so I know if he’s not with me then he’s with someone else and that’s too heavy a thought for the morning time.
That’s what we do. Spend all our time together, get too close, get too scared. He’ll fuck around, I’ll get a boyfriend again soon. He’ll hate him, probably so will I, and BJ and I will be back to normal.
Normal is relative, I know. Normal for two broken hearts who can’t fit their pieces with anyone but each other.
It’s strange, actually. He has so much sex, so much—and he’ll bring it up whenever he pleases if it’ll get a rise out of me, but he doesn’t like it when I talk about it.
“I hate fighting with you, Parks,” he tells me. “Then don’t do it.”
“Yeah but—I don’t like making you sad.” I copy him, staring up. “I don’t like making you sad either.” I wish we could stop. I don’t know why we can’t seem to.
I was still broken, and I was still sad, and I still didn’t trust him how I used to trust him, but I think at one point, I loved him more than he hurt me, and it sort of began to feel stupid to me to love someone how I loved him and to throw it all away because he had sex with someone else one time.
It makes me feel sick to say it even now. It’s not that it didn’t matter. I think it’s just that how much I love him mattered more.
“That’s great, because I am great. With all of it. Because it’s great. Good for him. I’m happy for him, even.”
The most beautiful boy in every room, the great love of my life—how many loves do you get in a lifetime? I remember wondering that.
How many people will look at me like he does, not just like I’m the sun but like I’m the whole god damn universe.
I remember resentment pounding through my body and then I remember it, like a physical punch in the gut, how much I loved him. Really loved him. To the bone, loved him. Cut me and I’d bleed him. How much I needed him, still needed him, would forever, always, never couldn’t even if I tried, needed him. And I remember being deeply afraid of what my life would be like without him in it.
He’s a time bomb for me, do you see now? That he’ll hurt me. He’ll always hurt me. I’ll never be safe with him, even if I’m always safe next to him.
Because loving him is the same thing as tossing the keys to my heart to a valet without a driver’s license. He’ll drive me off a cliff.
This isn’t new. He fucks around. That’s what he does. It’s why we’re not together, he’s done this before, he’s done this a million times—in front of me—and it never feels good, and I usually feel like I’m dying some,
What a mind fuck it is to comfort the person who just blew your whole heart open with a rifle. Carnage everywhere, men down, blood spilled.
But the truth is, when you love someone how we were in love, it didn’t matter what he’d do to me—he could have hit me with a bus, kind of he did—I innately still would have done everything I could to make him not feel what he was feeling.
Too much of my life, maybe even too much of who I am entirely can be traced back to him or us. Everything wonderful, everything magical, everything painful, everything beautiful and spectacular and wretched and defining that has happened to me happened with him. And I hate him for that.
Holding her by the waist, gripping her stupid thighs. Is this what he’s like when I’m not around? Is this what he was like the night he broke us?
Our faces are frozen in what feels like hopeless love but couldn’t be, because I don’t love him anymore. I cannot.
“Those first few weeks after what happened and we were over, every time I closed my eyes I saw you with another girl. Every girl. Every girl in the world
it was a supercut of you and them in every way and position my mind could come up with, trying to imagine what the fuck they did for you that I couldn’t do. Because I would have done anything for you—”
“All this time I thought it was me, something wrong with me, some deficiency in me, something I couldn’t give you, but now, having seen you, seen what you’re like when I’m not there—it’s not.” Her voice goes soft. “It’s not me, it’s you. You’re just…a slut.”
“What are you going to do? Fuck someone else? Fuck me over? Make me look like a fucking, goddamn fool?” She swallows, composes herself. “You’ve already done that.”
“No one needs as much sex as you have, and even if they do, which they don’t, by the way, because if they needed it, they’d be an addict. Are you an addict?”
“But let’s say, for shits and giggles, you did need it—you don’t need to tell her every time you have it. You tell her to hurt her.”
I’ve dated lots of boys since BJ. But I just never felt like that was the right thing for me. I never wanted to do it with anyone else. I haven’t figured out how to get past that feeling yet either. Feeling like it’s just something for me and him.
And it would be BJ who would make me fearless and safe and hopeful all at once, and it would eventually be BJ who would strip me of those things
We were just babies, really. Doing grown-up things with hearts the size of Texas and a lust as deep as the Mariana Trench. We were too young, I think. When I think about it now.
Me and Beej, we’re all bridled passion and conscious choices, trying to preserve the tiny bit of us we still have left. We’re wild horses running down a cliff face. There’s no cantering, no gentle trot into love. We are The Man from Snowy River galloping down that cliff face, tumbling towards the inevitable. We can’t go slow. The weight of us is too heavy. Gravity calls us, conspires against us…
The wheels are falling off. We’ve gone like this before once or twice, when we’re at our worst. When I found out about Taura. When he found out about Christian. When all that’s left of loving each other is hating each other.
“I don’t want anything to do with you,” I call to him. It’s a lie. “Back at you,” he slurs. “Perfect.” A lie.
Echoes all through the ancient mountains around us and the Greek philosophers who waxed lyrical about true-love and soulmates roll in their graves as I try for the billionth time to sever myself from mine.
BJ has probably at this point, done it with a hundred girls? Hundreds? I don’t know. And here I am, saving myself still, for… him? Maybe? But for what? To change? I think maybe, he changed already, and I think maybe, I don’t like it.
