The Seven Year Slip

by Ashley Poston

“Because some of my favorite things I haven’t even done yet.”

She pored over stories, drowned herself in words.

There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn’t like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever.

I didn’t need to be fixed. I just needed . . . to be reminded that I was human.

And there he went again, his passion for this art I had taken for granted turned into poetry. I would read encyclopedias if he wrote them with this sort of wonderlust.

He cupped my face with his hands, and drank me in.

He kissed like he wanted to savor me.

I felt starved—the wild girl I wanted to be but never quite was, the kind who yearned to devour the world, one sensation at a time. The softness of his lips, the hunger there.

I didn’t realize how hungry I was for touch, for something good, something warm and sweet, until I got a taste.

“You kiss like you dance,” he murmured against my mouth. I broke away, suddenly appalled. “Terribly?” He laughed, but it was low and deep in his throat, half a growl, as he stole another kiss again. “Like someone waiting to be asked. You can just dance, Lemon. You can take the lead.” “And you’ll follow?” “To the moon and back,” he replied,

I was broken, and I was alone, and I wished he had found me seven years ago, instead.

“You say that and yet you own four different editions of Lord of the Rings.” “I could have five,” I threatened, and she threw up her hands again.

They were warring with a new food truck on the block—a loud yellow fajita truck that had a line that snaked down the sidewalk, and it smelled ridiculously good. Probably not as good as the fajitas Iwan made me a few weeks ago, though.

By the time five o’clock rolled around, I’d plotted four different ways to kill James Ashton and make it look like an accident. I even had a spot on the Hudson saved in my phone as the perfect place to dump his body—not that I would. But thinking about it made me feel better as I gathered my purse to leave.

even the way he said my stupid nickname was different. Like it wasn’t a secret, but a sanctuary.

That was a lovely future he painted. I would’ve been enraptured by it, if it existed.

“Bon appétit, Lemon.” I hung on the way he said my name, like it was something tender. “Can you say it again?”

“Be merciless about your dreams, Iwan.”

He smelled like dish soap and lavender, and it took every willful bone in my body not to melt into him like ice cream on the pavement in summer.

“I don’t like it when we fight, Lemon,” and left me in the hall, the sound of his nickname for me like a piece of candy at the end of dinner, sweet and perfect,

Sometimes the people you love don’t leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.

The moon was round and large, framed perfectly between the buildings like the main character in her own film, reflecting off the windows, cascading silvery light into the warm orange of streetlights.

and it must have been the way New York City felt at night—the glow of possibility, shrugging off the heat of the day to bright, glittery evening—but I followed.

biting in a smile that was just a little bit crooked, and the hollow part of my chest ached—the part that had been carved out by grief. It ached for something warm. For something good. For something that maybe, just maybe, could stay. A smile and a bittersweet story over lemon pie.

“I think it was a little longer for me,” he said at last.

and it was a good night. The kind of good night that I hadn’t had in a while. The kind of good that stuck to your bones, thick and warm, and coated your soul in golden light.

the freckles across his nose speckling his skin like constellations.

“And she’s supremely off-limits,” he finished, his voice against my hair. My heart twisted in the ultimate betrayal. He stepped away from me, a pained look on his face. “Always the wrong time, isn’t it, Lemon?”

My aunt’s rule broken; my perfect plan shattered. I knew Iwan wouldn’t be a dishwasher forever, and even if he was, it wouldn’t have mattered—dishwasher or chef or lawyer or no one at all. It was the man with gemstone eyes and the crooked smile and the lovely banter that I felt my soul crushing for.

And the second he opened the door, he vanished, leaving only the warmth of his fingers through mine, and then even that faded, and I stood in my aunt’s dark apartment in the present, and looked at my empty hand.

There was never a rhyme or reason to it—even when she was healthy, she lived like she was dying, the taste of mortality on her tongue.

“Let’s go on an adventure, my darling,” she declared. And, oh, did I realize then, that I had the thirst for adventure sown into my very bones.

You have to try on a lot of shoes until you find some you like walking in. Never apologize for that.

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.

“You are going to travel the world,” I said. “You’re going to cook widely and you’re going to absorb cultures and foods and stories like a sunflower drinks in the sun.

He kissed the inside of my hand, and looked me over as if he wanted to commit me to memory.

I missed her every day. I missed her in ways I didn’t yet understand—in ways I wouldn’t find out for years to come.

Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye. And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next.

I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could.

She lived because she loved, and she lived because she was loved, and what a lovely lifetime she gave us.

“Clementine.” And the way he said my name just then felt like a promise, a vow against loneliness and heartache, and I could listen to the way his tongue wrapped around the letters of my name for the rest of my life,

He’d gotten a lemon flower tattooed over his heart.