17
SHINE LIKE A DIAMOND (CLEO)
Is this still real life?
I’m not sure I’m awake.
I stop and question if the egg unleashed some weird spell that’s trapped me in this fantasy.
It’s been an entire week.
A whole freaking week of being someone else’s happy ending. Holden making me breakfast in the morning, helping me call museum curators on three different continents.
Spending evenings where I help Kit with her homework and her poetry. It takes me back to being her age, hacking out crappy emo haikus and free form sonnets.
Believe me, mine were actually crappy, but hers aregood.
She has a wonderful little mind, and she gets that art is just another way you distill the world until someone else can see how it makes sense through your eyes.
Right now, she’s experimenting with different forms, but I think she’ll settle for something modern and poignant.
Poetry that’s not inhibited by rules.
Not rhythm or meter or rhyme, just words on a page with a raw heart behind them. The best kind I relate to when I’ve always been more of a visual artist.
And in her poems, I see glimpses of the woman her mom could’ve been if she’d had a different life, a different soul.
Charli.
I don’t want to think about her, because then I think about Holden being sad. Begging her to give them a chance. Leaving them alone and miserable until she dragged herself back here to die.
Who even does that? What kind of defective person?
Holden reassures me that’s not how he sees me, but sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see my dad.
I’d like to think he’d never sink that low since he did raise me. Sort of.
Still, it’s too close to home.
How many times did Dad abandon me for briefer stretches?
Like it or not, I’m his daughter, and now I’m grown. Sometimes I wonder what that means.
Just like sometimes I look at the blue veins under my skin and wonder how far blood runs.
But mostly, I’m happy.
I’m incandescent.
Because my biggest problem during nights with Holden Verity is stuffing a gag in my mouth so I don’t wake the neighborhood.
From the first night we fucked, we both knew we didn’t want it to end. No wham-bam-awesome-ma’am or dine-and-dick.
Waking up beside him feels like New York. Except this time when I roll over to lie against him in the grey morning light or a golden splash of sun, there’s no hesitation.
No regret.
He pulls me against him like I’m right where I belong. Like I’ve found a home I didn’t even know I was looking for, and that’s heady.
