Lana snorts. “Oh, I’m sure.”
I kiss her head and tilt my head back, looking up at the stars. Lana rests her head on my shoulder, hugging my arm and nestling closer and closer into me.
I think that if I were normal, we could do this with a bottle of wine instead of a milkshake and pass it back and forth like lots of other normal people do. Laugh and look up at the stars with a little buzz that makes us bold enough to say anything.
But I’m not normal. At least not by definition. By Lana’s definition? I’m not normal either, she makes me feelextraordinary. Like I’m more than all of this.
I’m more than alcohol and everything else. I don’t need any of that to be normal.
“Christian,” Lana breathes. “Hey, stop thinking so much up there.”
“I’m thinking about you,” I say. “Just…how you make me feel.”
“Yeah?” She smiles up at me. “How do I make you feel?”
“Special,” I breathe.
“You are,” she huffs, smiling. “Always have been.”
I smile and wrap my arm around her to pull her into me. “Can we look up at the stars like normal people?”
“There is no such thing as normal, Christian,” Lana says. “Normal is just a concept made to keep us contained. And you are the best thing far from normal.”
Her words wrap around my heart like a warm hug.
“Lana,” I breathe.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I rasp, smiling.
I’ve done things, tried things. Different drinks, different drugs. And I’ll just say this: love is onehellof a drug once you try the real stuff. Becausethisis euphoria. This is the highest I’ve ever been, staring into her eyes and being next to her, and I don’t ever want to come down from this.
I’m a junkie for this.
But I got clean for this. I worked hard to wash away the ugliness that Lana loved me through despite it all, and it’s mostly gone. As I was washing it away, I wondered how she saw past it, how she loved me even with all of that.
She nestles closer than she already is, like she wants to be on my lap.
I hold her close and pull her legs across my lap. “What’s wrong?”
She shrugs. “I’m just missing my mom.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she rasps. “It’s just the diner and the date. You’ve taken a lot of sad things in my life and turned them into happy things, Christian. This diner is one of them.”
“Your mom would be proud of you, Lana,” I tell her. “Sheis. Wherever she is.”
“I like to think she’s started her next life,” she murmurs. “That right now she’s a young girl. She hasn’t met my fatheryet or anything. But she’s waiting for me to join her over there. Inmynext life.”
“I think that’s a beautiful thought, Lana.”
“I’ve been on my own since I was twenty, Christian,” Lana says quietly.
“No,” I say. “You’ve had me.”
“I know,” she whispers. “But then you were gone… And I didn’t know how to do anything without you. Or my mom.”
