“Like?” Curiosity and amusement sparkle in eyes as he regards me, his hand resting on his chin.
“Like… on the first day of fall I sit outside with a cup of tea and startDracula,” I inform him, raising my eyebrows for dramatic effect.
“Dracula?”
“Ben. I’m obviously a vampire girl, please don’t pretend to be shocked.”
“I guess your first words to me were pretty venomous,” he smirks, his eyes pools of laughter, and I roll my eyes with a smirk of my own.
“In December, I usually pick one Saturday where I’m not obligated to be anywhere, and I go to the holiday market by myself. I always get a countdown calendar, and I almost always have to open the first ten boxes and eat them as soon as I get home because the month’s already started.”
“Is the ‘by yourself’ part of the tradition, or is that flexible?”
I sigh, pretending his question is inconvenient and not heartwarming. “IguessI can make room for you. But you have to get your own countdown calendar,” I warn him.
“Noted. In return, I’ll let you summer with me in the Hamptons until we’re gray and old.”
The thought of summering in the Hamptons reminds me of Lily, and it feels like a rain cloud attempts to settle above me, but it’s cleared away by the thought of Ben and I, old and happy, strolling along the shoreline.
“Who says I can’t just summer there on my own?” I ask him, a silent challenge in my eyes. He’s saying more than I could hope for, and still, I demand this validation from him, but I can’t help myself.
“Do you want to be alone, Olivia?” His gaze rests on me intently as he throws the ball back in my court. Instead of blind validation, he’s giving me space to choose, and I don’t know why I’m surprised.
Contentment floods me once more as I answer him. “No, I don’t think I do.”
“Good. Because I was already adding museum sex to our growing list of traditions.” Leaning back to avoid the playful smack I’m attempting to plant on his arm, he throws me a subtle wink.
“What am I going to do with you, Ben Cabot?” I shake my head, my nose wrinkling as I try to hide my flustered smile.
“I keep asking myself the same question.”
I bite my lip at his answer and say nothing else; I just look at him and wonder if this is what it feels like when you’ve met your soulmate.
Is it this easy? Do you feel like you’ve known them your whole life but there still won’t ever be enough time to know them completely? Does it feel like your entire self is being pulled under, and instead of suffocating angst you feel relief? Likeyou’re coming back to a place you’ve been before, the feeling so familiar but you can’t put your finger on why?
It must be what this feels like, because every instinct in my body is telling me yes: I’ve never felt this way before for a reason.
25
Olivia
It feels like an eternity since Ben dropped me off at home. I roll over and look at the clock, for what feels like the hundredth time, and see it’s nearly 1:30 a.m. I feel hyper and giddy, my mind full of excitement, the way I used to after an amazing date. Like this burst of adrenaline is streaming through me and I just want to talk to someone who will examine the evening I had with Ben in thirty different ways without batting an eye. In the past, on nights like tonight I’d talk to Lily, force her to wake up and let me rant about every thought swirling in my brain.
I scroll through my contacts, quickly remembering I have no one.
Over the years I’ve learned these are the moments you take for granted after losing your best friend. The times she’d help scrutinize a reply I was sending a boy for over an hour. How she would watch me try on twelve different outfits before my college interviews to find one that was stylish yet professional. All the coffee runs in our pajamas or dinners in our favorite booth at our favorite restaurant, drinking Diet Cokes and talking about every detail of our lives. The silence used to be deafening in my room on nights like this, but tonight it’s something softer and for the first time since Lily’s death I don’t pull away.
I roll out of bed, my socks sinking into the plush, thickly padded rug on the floor. I’ve decided I’m giving up on sleep. Putting my kettle on the stove, I sit at the counter looking at the one photo of Lily and I that I have framed in my home. The one I’ve kept out just in case the day arrived that I wanted to remember, that I wanted to see my best friend. I stare at it for a long second, allowing myself to start to feel the precipice of things I have been actively avoiding for the past few years. My grief is like a storm, quiet but strong, begging to be let out, and for once I decide to feel a grain of what she meant to me— nothing more, nothing less. It’s so small, the emotion I allow to seep into myself, and yet I see how the longer I’ve kept this sadness inside me the more it’s grown.
In some ways, I’ve always known this. I’ve felt it in the shadows of everything I do. Even now with Ben, it’s here: that unbearable want for everything to go back to how it was before. I close my eyes breathing in through my nose, trying to will myself not to find a distraction but to allow this brief intermission of Lily into my thoughts.
My kettle begins to whistle so I take it off the burner and go toward the pantry, looking for the right herbal remedy to calm the inner plight inside me, when a box crashes to the ground as I open the closet sliding door. I freeze, my hand still clenching the door. I know exactly what it is before I even look down. My Lily box. I haven’t looked at the contents in years and yet here it is, crashing down in front of me like she’s here egging me on. I gravitate toward it. I quickly pick it up and dump the contents on the kitchen table.
Tears prick my eyes as the memories flood my table’s surface. Photos of two smiling girls getting ready for their debutante ball; another of us as toddlers with giant rollers in our hair and makeup that we clearly did with no supervision; pages of old journals we passed between ourselves with lists of crushesand gossip about the girls we didn’t like. Lily’s whimsical handwriting in the margins that are filled with quotes, lyrics, and all sorts of her favorite symbols from her favorite number thirty-two to her horoscope, Gemini.
I touch my fingertips together as everything starts rushing back, all the emotions I tend to clamp down with an iron like grip bubbling up. I push back against the wave swelling inside me.This is too much, too fast, I hear that inner voice, begging me to forget. I push it down and begin moving through the different items. It’s interesting what you deem worthy to save in those moments right after someone you love dies. These inanimate objects that make up who they were, all of them a reflection of how you interpreted their life to be.
My fingers trail a light pink measuring tape as I think back to the summer that Lily and I measured our bodies, comparing the inches to those of Victoria Secret models.
