I smile. “It’s not weird. I had fun today.”
I want to spend every day with him. Every night. I want to share all the bits and pieces of myself, good, bad, indifferent. It doesn’t matter. He sees the best possible version of me.
What a notion, to be understood and accepted, exactly as I am.
And then the ground drops out from under me.
Holy shit.
I love him.
Chapter Nineteen
I should have seen this coming. I’m in love with Alex. This isn’t a crush. This isn’t my normal, anxiety-prone obsession. This isn’t lust. I mean, it’s not only lust.
I love him.
This should be an overwhelming discovery. A breathtaking adventure. A remarkable revelation. But it’s not.
The psychic child told me I could get through with love. Well, here I am in love, but it’s not getting me to the next day.
Frustration is my constant companion. It itches at me, pokes me in the sides, stabs me in the heart. It never stops.
Time passes, and I’m still in love, and I’m still stuck on Monday, June seventh.
Love is not all rainbows and flowers and unicorns.
It’s agonizing. Hellish. Horrific.
I love someone and can never be with him. Not really. There is no happily ever after. There isn’t even a tomorrow.
My heart, the blasted overreacting organ, it’s broken. Hurting. My chest aches. How is this even a thing?
Grasping for something, anything positive about this situation, I make a list.
Maybe I should just be happy he likes me. Great. He’ll never move beyond like.
I can get to know him a little better every day, but I can’t have those future moments, the little quirks and foibles that only come out when you’ve known someone forever and are truly comfortable because they know you too.
I want to know if he squeezes the toothpaste from the bottom. I want to know if he’s cranky when he’s sick. I want to do boring things with him, like sit on the couch after a long day and watch movies. I want our own secret language, a lexicon of words and gestures that only we understand. I want to have entire conversation with a single look—one that isn’t one-sided because I’m the only one who knows we’ve discussed something before a hundred times.
With Alex, I can have an endless string of these same twenty-four hours, but it’s not enough. It’s a slog every time to get to the ever-briefer moments of new, shiny stuff. I want it all to be brand new. I want all the hours. I want all the days. I want a future, the highs and lows and everything in between.
Maybe I’m selfish.
How many people out there would love an endless day with their person?
But even trying to hold on to gratitude doesn’t stop the hurt. He will never love me back. He can’t.
He won’t ever have the time to get to know me and fall in love with me. I have all this time with him, but for him, it’s just one day.
This is the worst unrequited love ever, because even if he likes me a lot, there’s no path forward.
My natural proclivity for avoidance returns with a fiery hot vengeance. If I stay isolated, I can’t be hurt. But I’m already hurt, so that doesn’t even make sense. More hurt. I can’t be more hurt.
I leave the apartment each day only to give Hugo his outfit—I can’t totally let him down. Even if it doesn’t fix everything, I’m not a monster.
I also try to find the Druid’s Stone, again, so I can tell the teenage psychic she’s wrong. I’m in love and I’m still here and she’s full of shit. But I don’t get the satisfaction because it’s still gone. It’s like it never existed. I even ask the lady working in the Thai food place next door, but she shakes her head and smiles and feeds me curry puffs.
I’m home every day at 3:07 when Eloise sticks the note under the door. Every day, when she doesn’t bother to knock and just slips me a note.
Alex said I was brave, and yet I’m still not facing the music with Eloise. Or anyone or anything else right now.
Was he wrong about me? Maybe he only thinks he likes me, or he likes some false version of me, and if the days move forward and he discovers what a true coward I am, his feelings will change.
I can’t have that. I will face this final hurdle, but not for Alex. For me.
Eloise was . . . is my closest friend. Even though we are nothing alike, and we fight sometimes, we’ve always had each other’s backs.
Until we didn’t.
We moved to the West Coast together five years ago. We lived together, shared an apartment. But then Eloise was going to LA all the time for auditions and eventually moved down there. Then she got her big break, a starring role in a Netflix dramedy.
Everything changed. She stopped calling. Stopped texting. Our conversations went from daily to weekly to once a month. But I just wrote it off. She was busy. Too busy for me, and I got it. I was fine with it, or I thought I was. I had other things to worry about too. And she would come up and visit during breaks in production and regale me with all kinds of funny stories. She was so happy. So successful.
I wasn’t. But I pretended I was.
Then she called me on it.
“Are you sure you’re happy here?” she asked the last time we spoke. We were in my apartment, eating Chinese takeout and watching Grey’s Anatomy.
I grabbed the last crab rangoon from the box. “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Her tone was soft, but her gaze was pitying. “I don’t know. The job at Blue Wave sounds fine, it just doesn’t seem like . . . you.”
“Why not? What’s wrong with me?” Defensiveness sent the pitch of my voice three octaves higher.
Eloise’s voice was
