“Ione,” he says.
I lean up.
“I never stopped loving you,” he says. Against the low hum of the engine, his words seem to fill the car. They’re big and lofty and my immediate instinct is to buck against them, to fight them, and to run. But I don’t.
“I’m crazy about you, Wes,” I say. “I love you.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever said it.
In all the time that we were together, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him how I felt. Of course, I loved him. But there was something—someone—holding me back. And now, I was free of him. And I never wanted to be anything like the monster that Tom became. I didn’t want to hide behind my false bravado anymore. I wanted to be in love, and I wanted a partner by my side.
“I’ll love you ‘til the day I die,” he says.
And we make love again.
Wes spends the night, and, in the morning, I make coffee for us. We have sex again, twice. And it’s sometime around noon when we finally drag ourselves out of bed. We make huevos rancheros together.
He sits across the dining room table from me. It’s an antique relic that my grandma found once upon a time. The chairs are dark wood and creak with every movement. And somehow, Wes looks perfectly at home sitting here.
I watch him as he eats his late breakfast. He looks out the window into the vast backyard that I’ve allowed to be re-taken by nature.
“I could get that fixed up for you,” he says between bites.
It’s something he offered in the past. The idea then of him entrenching himself so deeply in my life that he was helping me fix up my grandparents’ old house was too much. It was too close to intimacy.
I look at him and I’m silent for a moment. A smile creeps across my lips.
“I’d love that,” I say.
Afterword
I often joke on the podcast that the things I write about are a direct reflection of my own trauma and anxieties. While I have fortunately never been in a new age cult, I have had my heart broken. I think sometimes we have to write about our experiences in a larger-than-life kind of way. Things that aren’t necessarily life or death in reality certainly seem that way as we’re living them.
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Thank you so much for reading THE WAY IT ENDS.
ALSO BY MARNIE VINGE
Eerie Okie Short Reads: Vol. 1
WRITING AS DALLAS BLAKE
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