|CHAPTER EIGHT|

The heart is a metaphor—but, you must know this already.

The literal heart is a muscle that harbors no emotion. It plugs along, pushing blood in an endless circuit around your body. It quits only when there is blockage, only when the brain cannot continue to order it otherwise.

Somehow, I think the literal heart is better at explaining love than the one you dot your i’s with.

Henry dropped me off at my mother’s house at the end of the weekend just like always, but there was something about this encounter that separates it from the rest.

When we pulled up in front of my mother’s house, he did not walk me to the door. It’s something he always did just so he could get a glimpse of my mother, to hear her monotonous tone of voice snap at him, to smell the orange of her perfume. This time, he put his vehicle in park and left it running. His seatbelt remained fastened.

I turned to him in surprise. “Aren’t you coming?”

His eyes were hard on the glass panels of the front door. A breath left his lungs heavily. “You’re capable of letting yourself in, aren’t you?”

I blinked once. “...Yes, but...”

I didn’t understand.

“I love you and I’ll see you next weekend.” He smiled softly at me, but the light didn’t quite reach his eyes.

When I arrived at his house that weekend, he asked the same question he always asked me when the door was safely shut between my mother and him.

“How’s Meredith?”

I replied the same way every weekend. “Nothing’s changed.”

Nothing’s changed.

Nothing had changed and nothing ever would. I hadn’t noticed it at first, but when reflecting upon it in the moments before I went to my front door—when I was seated beside my father with Johnny Cash singing in the silence between us—I realized the phrase had finally struck him.

The brain had stopped demanding that the heart continue to beat for it.

The naïve yearning I had always thought foolish in my father vanished right in front of me, and when I recognized it’s absence, I was angered. Angered and hurt. Empty and cold. Aching for a thread of hope I hadn’t realized I put so much faith in—even if it was just for comfort, even if it acted as a simple fairytale.

I vacated his car with the ring of a slamming door following me down the walk.

●════════●♥●════════●

My eyes were following the words across the page but not quite comprehending them when a knock on my bedroom door pulled me from my thoughts. Luis’s ears perked up, but he didn’t stir from my lap when the door slowly squeaked open.

“Just checking in,” her voice informed me bluntly.

I glanced up at my mother. We had always been so similar, even in looks. Since the day my features became distinguishable I had been told we looked identical. I guess it was another reason to align my goals with hers. Sometimes we appeared to be the same person. However, I couldn’t rationally explain the frustration I felt with her since this morning when Henry dropped me off, but it was a relentless pull and I couldn’t bear to look at her.

My eyes dropped to the floor.

“Jovie?” Her voice rose.

The questions that had been pestering me since morning escaped before I could grind them back. I never pried, never once had a conversation of depth with my mother. I treated her the way I saw others treat her—as if she wasn’t quite human, wasn’t quite approachable. It occurred to me then that I didn’t know the person I was becoming.

“Why do you punish him? Henry? Do you blame him? Are you ashamed?” My voice had an edge, and I regretted it immediately. It always sounded so foolish, the sound of words with emotion. Like you were giving too much of yourself away, like you had thrown down your shield and opened up an opportunity to face the blade. It terrified me.

Her eyebrows stitched together as examined me, head tilted in question to my sudden interest. In a flicker of fear that passed her stony expression so quickly I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t staring just as hard, she saw my shield was down. 

“Our time has passed,” she said in a voice that was oddly strained.

Then, in a hurried shuffle, she left my room.

●════════●♥●════════●

“We met at the best part of a person’s life, somewhere between young and dumb and quarter life crisis,” I read aloud, using the book to block my face from the sun.

“That’s an absolute gorgeous way to begin a novel,” Bash chirped from where he lay across my middle, staring up at the clouds with his book of pretentious words opened on his chest and pencil bouncing against his lips. “Simply splendiferous.”

I lowered the book and snorted. “Is that even a real word?”

He lifted his book of pretentious words and turned the pages until he was near the end. “Splendiferous,” he recited, “meaning splendid, magnificent, or fine.”

I laughed. “You made that up.”

“Jovie,” he argued with a definite sense of pompousness he knew would make me roll my eyes. “I only fill this notebook with words I’ve read, so of course it cannot be made up.”

“Of course,” I taunt.

He pinched my side, and I lightly let the book drop on his forehead. With that he rolled off of me and scooched up toward my face.

The summer was coming to a close. Already the unbearably hot days were tapering off to be pleasant. The park outside the library where we were lying on his break was quiet of children. Only the trickle of the stream was audible when neither Bash or I made a sound.

His shadowy face looked down at me past his long hair, a sneaky smile softening the sharp angles of his cheeks. When he looked at me this way, my limbs turned numb. I had learned to guess what followed.

Slowly, he lowered his lips to mine, and warmth incomparable to the sun spread from my chest.

I wasn’t ready to give this up when summer ended. It felt too abrupt, and he was so intoxicating.

Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.

His fingertips traced my jaw and I pulled away. He looked down at me with a hazy, half-lidded gaze.

His jaw clenched. “Summer” was all he said.

I let out a deep sigh of regret.

“I wish the summer was longer,” I admitted, and then squeezed my eyes shut because it sounded ridiculous out loud.

He didn’t say anything for a moment. “You said you will be different.”

“It’s true,” I tell him, and think of how my mother left my room so quickly I felt the wind of her stride. “I have a responsibility to myself.”

Bash rolls onto his side and catches a loose strand of my hair in the wind and tucks it behind my ear. “I want you to know that I meant what I said about being a haven. I can stand to be on the back burner. I will be at the tail-end of your affections. I will sit back and wait for you to want me—to want to escape all of those responsibilities. I can let go, but I am selfish, Jovie, and I’m not ready yet. You’re not ready either, I can tell. It’s okay to have this, to want this.”

I swallowed and averted my eyes. “The longer we do this—”

“Perhaps we will grow tired of each other.”

I turned to him. “And if we don’t?”

“Then break my heart, Jovial.” He sat up. “Whenever this ends, it’s up to you. A summer fling, a solid year, somewhere in between...it will all have the same effect.”

The thought of my parents flashed across my mind. I sat up to face him. “That’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t regret this, but I’m fearful...”

“That you’ve felt too much?”

“That I will make a mistake. One I won’t be able to face.”

Bash pulls at the grass beneath us, his eyes cast toward the ground, staring past the earth. “A person’s past is reflected in the decisions they make in the present and the way they interpret the future.” His eyes lifted to mine, his magnetic gaze holding tight, reassuring somehow. Each new word rang in my ear, his voice clearer than before. “You may never tell me about your past, and that’s okay. The mystery is part of your allure, and I never want to strip you of the quality that I found attractive in the first place. I just hope that one day you may recognize that you are not the mistakes of your past. You are the decisions you make for the future. You just need to have the courage to take the risk—to change the course if you aren’t satisfied.”

I kissed him, then.

I kissed him with a fierceness I didn’t know I possessed. He made me feel human, not like the algorithm machine everyone assumed me to be—what I assumed myself to be. He somehow unearthed emotions I had never felt before. I tasted freedom on his tongue and confidence on his lips. His grip on me was a stronghold of liberation. The hair tangled in my fists, an anchor of reassurance.

The human journey is an evolution. He urged me to take the plunge.

By god, if I knew what I was feeling at the time, I would have said it sooner.

I loved him, but I didn’t know how to articulate it, yet—and I wouldn’t for a long time.

Perhaps we fell too fast; perhaps I wasn’t brave enough to ride the inspiration out. If I knew how this would end, if I could have comprehended all of this sooner, I would have said something more profound than “summer isn’t long enough” against his lips. I would have said “I’m in love with you.” Because by the time it dawned on me that it was love, I was already too late. We were already saying goodbye, and I worry our time has passed, now.

His hands pushed my hair back. “There’s not a word in the universe to describe how I feel right now.”

“You could show me instead,” I breathed.

 And he did.