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Too many heartbeats, too much air, red hot passion.
I shake my head instead. “I don’t… I can’t…” A deep breath. “I can’t love him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he, uh.” I sweep a few fly-away strands off my forehead. “Because I work for him. For his family.”
“So?”
“So it’s against the rules.”
“Love doesn’t care about rules.”
I shake my head. “He’s just visiting. And I don’t even know why. He’ll leave soon.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
I sigh with relief. She gets it now. She gets that I can’t love him. How unfair it would be.
“But that still doesn’t mean you can’t love him.”
Panic grips me for a second. That and anger, and I blurt out, “He doesn’t want to be loved.”
It’s true, isn’t it?
He hates love. Hates the very mention of it. I don’t even know if he can love.
Let me tell you something about love: it hurts.
I can’t love him. I’m not allowed to.
“Well, that’s not up to him, now, is it?”
“I’m sorry?”
The girl has a tender look on her face. “He owns your heart. He might even hold it in the palm of his hand. He might close that palm and crush it one day. But what he can’t do is force it to not beat for him. He doesn’t have that power. And neither do you, maybe. A heart can be a real pain in the ass. You never know where its loyalties lie. Hearts have their own kings and queens. Sorry. So, if your heart loves him, well then, it loves him. You can’t do anything about it. He definitely can’t do anything about it. You guys are just gonna have to suck it up.”
I emit a broken laugh.
I love him.
I love Zach.
That’s what this has been about, hasn’t it?
All this frustration and restlessness.
The fact that we’re a secret. The fact that he’ll leave me behind to rejoin his new life and I can’t go with him because I have a different goal. A goal I’m starting to resent more than anything in this world.
“Suck it up.” I look at the purple sky. “He’s not going to like it.”
“Big deal. Besides, he can’t take his eyes off you either. So I don’t know. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
I want to latch onto that hope.
I do.
But I know reality.
