“Hey, hey.” I reached out for her, pulling her back into my embrace. “I was trying to forget you, okay? I was going insane, Soph. I wanted you so badly, so fucking badly, but I didn’t want to fuck up our friendship. I didn’t want to do something that would end up in the two of us never talking again. I was afraid of losing you, but I never realized how much I was hurting you.”
“I understand.” She sniffled. “It doesn’t make me feel any better, but I understand. I just wished we didn’t waste so much time hiding how we really felt.”
“Maybe we would never be able to get back what was lost, but we will always have now, Sophie.”
She nuzzled her face between my pecs, rubbing small circles over my back. “When did you become such a poet?”
“When I fell in love with you.”
My life before her felt like a black-and-white movie. I was going through the motions, but there was nothing extraordinary I would remember it by. But now that I had her, now that we could be honest about how we felt, it was as if a splash of color fell over me, and everything made sense.
I didn’t want to think about the impending doom waiting for us. I wanted to live in the moment, right here with her, with her arms wrapped around me.
“It’s getting late, Soph.”
“It’s only afternoon.”
“Yeah, but we promised your mom we will be back before four, and considering that you still wanna spend time by the willow tree, I say that we need to get moving.”
“Fine.” She huffed. “But you’re gonna carry me there.”
It took me a moment to realize what she meant, when she jumped up, wrapping her legs around my waist, holding on to me like a spider monkey.
“You know, this position could be used for other things as well,” I said, placing my hands on her ass. “You’re just giving me ideas now.”
“Hmmm, are you gonna tell me what those ideas are?”
“Later.” I bit her neck, earning a sudden moan from her. “It’s gonna take us quite some time to reenact all these fantasies I stored over the years.”
And while I loved doing this, carrying her, playing around, I knew the real reason why she wanted me to carry her. I knew without a doubt that she started feeling exhausted, but I didn’t comment on it.
I would let her have this. I would let her lie to both of us if that’s what she wanted. Sometimes, in order to survive, white lies were a necessary evil.
* * *
Years ago,after we just moved into the house next to Sophie’s, she woke me up at eight in the morning and dragged me out of the bed to “go and see her favorite place.” Truth be told, after my parents divorced and after they threw all the nasty words at each other, all I wanted to do was sleep for a year and forget that those months even happened.
But there she was, an angel in disguise, trying to cheer me up. Even back then I could never say no to her, and begrudgingly agreed to go out. It was the same period of the year, just how it was right now. Early April morning, still cold but not cold enough to wear a coat. Fresh morning air and the birds singing for the start of a new day.
Her small hand was tightly wrapped around mine, pulling me in the direction behind our houses, and if I wasn’t as sleepy and as cranky as I was back then, I would’ve been able to enjoy the sight in front of me a lot more than I did. But it didn’t take me long to realize why she loved it so much.
“Fairies are dancing here, but we can’t see them, Noah.”
Grass was still covered with a layer of frost, and the cool breeze kept sending chills over my body, but when she started dancing around me, pulling us closer and closer to the weeping willow, I started forgetting about what was happening.
There she was, this beautiful girl, my best friend, trying to cheer me up, and I almost told her to fuck off because I was too angry at the rest of the world. I was glad I didn’t let my mouth run free that day, because I would’ve never been able to share this imaginary world she created for herself.
The area looked like it came out of a fairy tale. The weeping willow stood all by itself in the middle of the meadow, overlooking a small pond that was there for as long as the people that lived here could remember. Nobody knew if it was man-made, or if it got created by nature itself, but Sophie loved thinking of it as a portal to another dimension.
“What if we jump in?” she asked me once, staring at the pond as if it could give her all the answers. “What if we jump and we go out to the other side, where elves and fairies ruled, and where people could live forever?”
Even as a child I could understand why she asked those questions. Her grandfather died and she couldn’t deal with the reality of the situation. The tears in her eyes as she asked all those questions stayed seared into my mind, and I hated that I couldn’t do anything to stop them.
“Noah?” She stirred in my arms just as I stepped beneath the tree. The swing we placed on one of the branches was still here after all these years, and as she slowly lowered her legs down my body, I helped her onto the swing. “What happened?”
“You dozed off.” I smiled, my chest constricting because the words I wanted to say out loud echoed loudly in my head.
You dozed off because you’re getting exhausted by a simple walk now.
