The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

My mom’s a friend of your aunt’s. She’s letting me sublet the apartment for the summer, and she said I might have a visitor.”

This kind of magic is heartache, I warned myself, but it didn’t matter, because a soft, almost dead part of my heart that had bloomed every summer with adventure and wonder whispered back, What do you have to lose?

Your future is here, it read.

He had tattoos, all black linework in similar styles, sporadically across his body.

please tell me he gets a lemon

And he made me laugh over the rest of the lemon pie, and we drank wine, still with the taste of his lips on my tongue, the memory of the kisses that, for all intents and purposes, never were.

The job never changed, but I think what I enjoyed about it did. My job used to feel like chasing the moon, and now it just felt like planning out how to give it to other people.

“Would you have believed me, Lemon?”

That was love, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just a quick drop—it was falling, over and over again, for your person. It was falling as they became new people. It was learning how to exist with every new breath. It was uncertain and it was undeniably hard, and it wasn’t something you could plan for. Love was an invitation into the wild unknown, one step at a time together.