Magnolia Parks: The Long Way Home (Magnolia Parks Universe, #3)

by Jessa Hastings

We weren’t just in the foxhole. He was more like a shield and a security blanket and a pacifier and bandage and a stitch for my broken heart. I wore him like a flak jacket. He bore a lot for me, I can see it in retrospect. He took many, many bullets. Actually, I suspect that one of those bullets nicked his little heart too, the one that deserves so much more than I could ever give it.

poor tom

I know she knows my mouth better than anyone else ever has or ever will and I know she’d know from that photo I’d been kissing someone. I also know she’d know that I was fucked up. High as shit. Forget that Parks was on the cover of the magazine too, glistening away on the arm of Rush fucking Evans, forget that it made me sick to my stomach where his hand was on her waist; without even a word from her, I knew in the centre of myself how she would have felt when she saw me like that. I hated the feeling of her being ashamed of me, and I knew she would be. She would have looked at that article, swallowed heavy, then flipped it over and tossed it away. She probably piled it under a bunch of other magazines, trying to bury the truth of what I’d become because she’d be embarrassed to be associated with me when I was like that — and we’re always associated, even when we haven’t spoken in nearly a year. I stopped taking drugs after that photo ran.

omg

And the look Henry gives her… If I was a better boyfriend, I’d call him out on it. I mean, fuck, if someone ever looked at Parks like that I’d hit them. But Jordan’s not Parks, so I just give my brother a look.

omg

It was definitely Gucci — I shouldn’t know that but I do. Plus, felt like it might have been for me. Not for me, at me, maybe? A solid ‘fuck you’, red carpet edition. I miss all her chatter about clothes. How much she loves them made me love them. She looks good, she always does though. Sometimes her photos just pop up. Algorithms and shit, you know? Also, I love her, so sometimes I peek. Bit weird, probably shouldn’t, but her face is her face and it begs to be looked at. “People can be quite cruel to beautiful things. For no real reason at all.” My mum gives Jordan a thoughtful smile, but her face shifts and I can tell she’s missing the same girl I’m always missing even though I shouldn’t any more. Mum shakes her head, shakes it off like I should too.

OMG

I want to ask if she’s okay, but I can’t — can’t or shouldn’t? I don’t know — both, probably.

omg

Doesn’t know what we’re like if we’re in the same room. How we’re magnets, how we look at each other, how we find each other. She doesn’t know that I’m a wolf and Parks is the moon whose name I’ve howled since I was fifteen. Jordan doesn’t know how me and Parks are. Were. I mean were.

OMG

Don’t think of Parks when I sleep with Jordan either. Try not to, anyway. Harder to do sometimes than others — like now — when we’ve been talking about her.

oh

Nervous she’s going to fuck me up a bit. Don’t tell me she won’t, she always does — even if it’s in ways I like. It’s just easier dating someone who doesn’t rip your heart out of your chest all the fucking time. And Parks always will. She can’t help it. One look at her stupid eyes and I’m undone. Or I used to be — I shake my head at myself, staring at my girlfriend. Not any more. For fuck’s sake. Please, not any more.

AHH

because I couldn’t tell them that actually he is the drain in the centre of me where all the happy things fall through and that I feel his absence in everything. Everything. Breakfast time, cups of tea. Bumblebees. Honey. The stars. Gucci. The Discovery Channel. Long drives. Driving in general. Willow trees. Uno. Old Skool Vans. Tiffany’s. Maserati’s. Boys with tattoos. And now here I am, standing on the steps of St George’s with a thudding heart in my throat and eyes that don’t know where to look because I’m afraid they’ll find the thing they’re dying to see.

OMG

And still, I can feel his eyes on me — he’s to the right of the church, not just because the right side is traditionally the groom’s side, but because I just know it. That pull we have, the undertow of the universe always dragging us back towards each other, it has to mean something, don’t you think? That great magnetic force I’ve spent the better (or worst) part of a year fighting and defying and I feel it still, my legs trying to walk me back into his orbit — I think it means something. Or maybe it doesn’t and I just want it to because that would give all our pain a purpose.

their bond is wild

We weren’t any of those things but don’t you for a second try to tell me we weren’t in love. I loved him more than anything and at the end of everything, it’s all we had and it did not persevere. It failed.

aw

I’m nervous to turn around but I do it anyway because I’m brave like that, but I should have known from the tap it wasn’t him. I’d feel it if it was.

omg

And then I feel a body saddle up next to me. Feel it. Even though he’s not touching me at all, I feel it in my bones. A curious, deep ache and a mild episode of SVT. He leans against the bar. “How’s the weather, Parks?”

AHHH

And his stupid pillow mouth rips at the seams of my resolve not to love him how I worry I always will, and my mind falls through an infinity of memories I’ve had with him and thought I’d have with him and worry I won’t ever have with him again.

oh no

He goes “hah” again and the years whistle around our ankles like leaves in the wind and we’re lovers in autumn under a tree raining orange and regret, and in that moment we’re still each other’s and time wraps around us in the infinity we thought we had but we don’t anymore because he broke us.

OMG

He laughs and for some reason it sounds like I’m ringing the doorbell of the home I grew up in.

AW

Have we lost touch? I wonder. The thought makes me feel panicky. Has a year apart changed our channels? I don’t think I can hear his thoughts anymore.

oh

as though I’m not hanging on to every word he’s saying.

OMG

And I can tell he’s lying — his mouth falls at a particular angle when he’s lying. I don’t even care that he is, I’m just glad I can still tell. Glad to have not lost him completely.

omg

I nod my chin towards it, which makes me feel strange because once upon a lifetime ago I would have reached over to touch him just so I could touch him. “Is that a tattoo of two dead bees?” He looks sprung and covers it with his over hand, flashing me an apologetic smile and my shields slide on up. “Yeah.” He shrugs like it’s silly and not callous. I nod once. “Right.” He peers down at it, mouth pulling a bit strangely. “Someone told me once that they’d never go extinct—” He looks over at me. “She lied.” I give him a curt smile. “She wasn’t the one who killed them.”

OH

maybe because even though he’s figuratively killed the metaphor of us and displayed it permanently on his body, I still don’t think I could bear the thought of him leaving me first.

omg

I haven’t missed this, the fishbowl effect — but I don’t care because it’s BJ and something about him will always be worth it.

aw

It’s like the morning sun when you forget to close the curtain — it’s my fault, I should have closed the curtain, I knew the sun was there, I knew the sun would eventually rise again, but I didn’t close the curtain and now this invasive, bright, shimmering light wakens me from the slumber I was using to avoid it. I still love him.

AHH

God, she’s beautiful — that’s all I keep thinking. Parks, not my girlfriend, unfortunately. And in the lilac? Fucking shit of her. Did that on purpose she did, I know it. Know her. That’s the kind of shit she’d do to pull the rug out from under me. I’m fine finally, I’m doing good, she comes back and wears fucking lilac, the twat.

LMFAO

That’s a lie and I know it because that bit of conversation with Parks was the most exhilarating thing I’ve done in the last ten months and it was about the literal colour purple.

omg

Fruit salad. Parks would never order that. Too many things touching each other.

omg

“I thought she was leaving?” “First week of December.” That’s another eyeball from her. Warranted, I guess. “You know her flight details now?” Yes. I pull a face. I do, but not for a reason I could explain to her. And you know what — I do feel for her. Jordan, I mean. She’s on the back foot here. All girls are on the back foot when it comes to me and Parks.

OMG

Don’t know why I’m defending her — habit, I guess.

aw

Jordan hasn’t seen me and Parks together, doesn’t get the connection we have… Wish I could say that in the past tense, but the wedding showed me that I can’t.

invisible string fr

There’s something about Magnolia — it’s as annoying as it is fascinating — even when you fucking hate her, even when she’s being the biggest twat in the world, you want to be in her good books. Like there’s something holy about being in her light or some shit.

god is a woman fr

She wears some black and white collared dress she got from Balmain that I know she loves. Feel sad she’s wearing it. Don’t know why. Her dressing to impress some girl she’s never met because of me. It’s fucked, but I do it too. Wear a denim jacket from Balmain that I reckon Parks would fancy me in.

omg

It’s the worst feeling. When she’s not talking to you, it’s like living in the shade.

oh wow

She’s so fucking hot I want to neck myself. It’s so Magnolia, everything about it. If I let myself be caught off guard here I reckon I could choke up.

omg

Focus on my girlfriend, not on what Parks is saying to Jonah.

omg

Watching him here, I want to punch a fucking wall because his hands fall down her in a way that would have made her skittish before but now she’s just letting him feel his way down her body all playful and shit and I wonder how many ways New York’s changed Parks and if all of them are going to make me feel like dying.

omg

I look over at her more tenderly than I should, feel an old kind of missing her in my chest that I wish would just die but it can’t seem to take its last breath. Every time it takes one it takes another and another, and it’s never a last breath. Loving her like this is a kind of breathing that feels like dying. “You could probably be better if you wanted to be,” I tell her. I shouldn’t have because that was a deep cut. Parks’s eyes go round. She looks just like the four-year-old she was the day we met twenty years ago and I feel it in my chest — old flames that never died anyway, the kind that have never needed stoking a day in their life. The over-the- shoulder restraints lower down over me and I’m locked in. I’m on the ride whether I want to be or not.

OMG

The wheel of the ship’s spinning out of control and why the fuck is it that when Magnolia Parks is in my life I am all riddles and nautical metaphors?

omg

I think he might tell me he still loves me… Right? Surely. After how he was watching me at Christian’s bar launch — I knew he was. I was his eye kink for the entire afternoon. I felt high from it. I’ve missed the feeling of being his focus. There’s nothing quite like it in the world, that’s my conclusion at this point. And I can be angry at him, I can be hurt by him, I can be scared of him, and even with all of that still, I can want all of his attention. Which I do. All of it. I want all his attention, all his time, all his wandering eyes and lip bites. I don’t want to share those things with that Australian girl, I want them all. I wonder if we’ll kiss. Would he kiss me? Would I let him? Of course I’d let him. I hate that about myself a bit, but I would. The butterflies in my stomach at the thought of being somewhere alone with him, being at Dunstan’s with him, they’re prehistoric in size. Like bats flying around in there. Ill with jitters and nerves.

AHH

I suppose he’s always towering over me in some way or another. Is that a good thing?

power imbalance?

It rolls through my mind like a thundercloud how in another lifetime I could have just walked over to her, slipped my hand behind her head, and kissed her real good up against the wall. But in this lifetime I just give her a little nod.

aw

— I love it when she yells at me.

LMFAO

She’s crying for me in a way I’ve never done for myself and I love her for it.

omg

She looks around frantically like she’s lost something, but she hasn’t — just me, maybe.

oh

New York’s undone her a bit. Unrefined her or something — or maybe not? Maybe it’s me. Me undoing her, because we do that to each other.

omg

Her eyes don’t move from me. It’s just me and her alone in the universe, how it used to be, how it’s supposed to be in all the lifetimes. Maybe even this one.

AW

I wouldn’t have gone if the note wasn’t attached. ‘Or lose her forever.’ Wasn’t going to chance it. Glad I didn’t.

omg

play with the smokey quartz ring from Tom Wood. Parks got it for me a while back. I wear it all the time still. Mostly because it’s sick. A bit because I just want to.

aw

We have a whole language between us in the things we don’t say. Don’t need her to say a fucking thing to know what she means.

OMG

“Me and Parks…” I sigh. “It’s a different beast.” “‘Beast’ is an interesting way to put it.” “Is it?” I frown. “Isn’t it?” I shrug. “It’s wild, untamable. Kind of amazing. Kind of terrifying. It hides in your closet, under your bed. It’s bigger than you are, you can’t outrun it—”

A

“BJ, you can love someone and not have it rule you, not have it dictate your every waking thought and decision. You can love someone and still retain your power and autonomy. You can love someone and have it just be there, a part of you, and still have a completely functional life—” She pauses and gives me a long look. “Even if it’s a life without them.” Doesn’t sound much like any life I’m interested in, actually.

AW