Page 37 of Gorgeous Misery

“Oh. Hm. Then no, I don’t feel regret about it.”

“But you just said you would do it differently.”

“I did say that. But I lied.”

Anyway.

It’s last Christmas.

I go home a day early.

I pay attention to everything.

The lane in the woods is covered in snow. Snow deep enough that my truck barely disturbs the almost peaceful, picture-postcard imagery when I look in my rearview.

I see smooth, white trunks of paper-white birches—their boughs heavy from last night’s storm, a smoky-gray sky thick with the threat of another storm off in the distance, and a rabbit scampering from one side of the woods to the other after the danger of me passes by.

It’s so perfect.

I miss this place so much. And even though Chek and I never really lived here for any continuous length of time, it was still home.

It doesn’t feel like home anymore. It feels like a waystation. I only come by here when I’m meeting up with Nick. Christmas and birthdays. Though we’ve been mad at each other for a couple years now, so there have been no Christmases and birthdays.

Until now.

Well, tomorrow.

If he comes.

I want to be here a day early to get things ready. I have presents this time. I think, after twenty-four years, I might be getting the hang of this holiday shit.

But when I come around the last bend, just before I get to the cabin, I see that Nick had the same idea. Because his black truck sits off to the left side of my little house. In his spot, I realize. He always parks there. I park on the other side. And that’s where I am when the front door opens and Nick Tate appears with a dish towel slung over his shoulder and a wide grin on his almost too-handsome face.

He still looks a little bit like the teenager I met when I was five. He’s not as lean as he was back then. He’s filled out a lot, his shoulders are wide and muscular. He’s taller too, and his hair is darker now. And his face—while perfectly proportioned with a square jaw and those brown eyes that look into my soul—his face is that of someone who knows things. Has seen things.

He is wise.

We’ve always been almost fourteen years apart in age, and of course that’s never going to change, but he’s gotten wiser over the years and I’ve only gotten more confused.

He makes me want to lean on him and that scares me.

I don’t get out of the truck. Not yet.

I just need a minute to enjoy him. Because these visits, they always end the same way. With a fight. With us mad at something. Each other, specifically. We’re like that scene in Ghostbusters. Don’t cross the streams—it would be bad. All life as we know it stops instantaneously when Nick and I are together. Every molecule in our bodies explodes at the speed of light when we are close.

That’s always how it ends.

And usually it’s me who causes this rift in the fabric of spacetime.

I love him. Like so much. After Chek, Nick has always been my number one. He’s my guy. He’s my go-to. He’s my best friend, and my only boyfriend—like ever. And my rock.

But sometimes I just want to kill him.

And that’s not like… a metaphor. I get urges when I’m with Nick and I don’t know what to do about them, so I start a fight to create the separation we seem to thrive on.

We have spent more time apart than we ever did together. And even though I lived with him on and off for almost six years back when I was a kid and he was raising Lauren, there is still so much empty space between us. Nineteen years. That’s how long we’ve been friends. And there are more angry phone calls, pissed-off voicemails, and fuck-you handwritten letters over that period of time than there will ever be soft, casual, intimate conversations.

And I hate that.