“Okay, well…then, I guess I’ll move in.”
Emma shrugs like it’s no big deal to her. “I can help you start packing up the rest of your stuff after school.”
I nod, then look to Jesse. He’s grinning wide, eyes shining, joy emanating from him, and I know I just made the right decision.
BREAK TK
Over the next few days, Emma helps me box up my things, and the Thursday before Wren’s spring festival, knowing we have a busy weekend of helping her out ahead of us, Jesse helps us bring the last of my things to his house.
“What are these?” Emma asks, lifting a familiar pink box. I catch Jesse’s eyes across the room, and an entertained look spreads over his face, but I no longer feel the need to hide them away.
Hell, he already knows all of my secrets, after all.
“Those are all of my vision boards since Wren and I started making them.”
Emma’s eyes go wide with excitement, and she sits on the edge of my bed before removing the lid and taking out the stack of papers. Carefully, she starts to flip through them, each a time capsule of sorts for a year in my life.
“How many of these have you done?” she asks, looking at me.
I shrug, sifting through the pages. Some of them have handwritten lists of the items I wanted to do that year on the back, and I scan them.
“I did that,” I say, pointing to the one from last year that said to get three more clients.
“And I guess you’vealmostdone that,” she says with a laugh, showing me one that saysMrs. King.
Just like last time, a deep blush burns on my cheeks.
“I always had a crush on your dad, even when I was totally invisible to him.”
“And let’s be grateful for that, yeah? When you made that, you were, what? Fourteen? That would have made me nineteen. Pretty happy I didn’t notice you then.”
I let out a laugh and shake my head, but nod all the same. He lifts some and sifts through them, the same as Emma is doing. I’ve never shared these with anyone other than Wren and Nat, and whenever someone has tried to dig through them, an acute sense of panic and a need to hide them has washed over me. But now, I don’t feel that. Instead, they feel more like an artifact from my childhood, a bit of nostalgia I’m happy to share with these two.
“Learn to surf?” he asks, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Wren and I watched that movieBlue Crushand thought it sounded so fun.”
“Go to the Bahamas, go to Paris, go to London, go to Rome,” Jesse reads on the back of one, and I laugh, grabbing it from his hands and flipping it over. It’s one of the very first vision boards I made with Wren, and the front is mostly cut-out photos of movie covers of all of the Mary-Kate and Ashley movies we watched and loved.
“You really wanted to do a lot and go everywhere, didn’t you?” he asks, voice soft.
I smile up at him and shrug.
“There was a long time when I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. If you don’t have a place you belong, I think inherently, you want to wander to try and find it, even if you don’t realize that’s why.” He continues to flip through vision boards where travels and career goals, and personal desires are all laid out. All of my hopes and dreams were glued to 8.5 x 11 pieces of cardstock. I reach out my hand, grab his, and his head lifts to look at me. “I found that place, finally.”
His eyes warm, and his smile softens as his hand squeezes mine, and we sit like that for long moments before Emma breaks into our bubble.
“I love the ooey gooey, but I’m also starving,” she says, and I snap my head to her to see that while I was distracted, shestacked up all of my vision boards and slid them back into the box. The only one left is the one in Jesse’s hands. He stares at it one last time before handing it to Emma and standing.
“Well, that sounds like my cue to get these in the truck so I can get my girls fed.”
“Prima?” Emma asks, placing the lid on the box and standing. Jesse agrees, then lifts the boxes and heads out the door.
Later that night, when the three of us are sitting on the couch watchingHoliday in the Sun, which is arguably one of the best of the Mary-Kate and Ashley films, it clicks that for the first time in my life, I feel settled.
I spent so much of my life trying to think of things to fill a void in my soul. New hobbies, picking up odd jobs, and visions of travel and far-off accomplishments, but even when I did manage to cross things off, it didn’t fix it, didn’t fill that spot inside of me, never made me feel settled.
But here on the couch, watching a nostalgic movie and listening to Jesse and Emma jokingly tear apart its admitted plot holes, I feel whole.
