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She took a deep breath and tried to let herself actually listen to the constant maelstrom of thoughts she usually kept tightly muted. “I’m afraid that I’ll give myself to him completely and he’ll realize this placeistruly toxic to him and he has to leave forever, and I won’t be able to follow him, and I won’t ever be okay again.”
She reached behind her to grab the end of her braid to chew, before realizing it was gone, and ended up chewing on her thumb instead.
Next to her, Miriam drew a sketch of a broken Hannah and Levi on a plane.
“I’m afraid that I never got to choose my life, that I got so swept away by being in love with him from the start I never got to see what my life would be like if I’d gotten another choice.”
“Wouldn’t you probably still be at Carrigan’s, but single?” Noelle asked.
Hannah huffed. “Maybe I would have fallen for someone easy, uncomplicated. Someone who didn’t challenge me and make my life harder every day!”
Noelle barked out a laugh. “You would not. You would have been bored out of your mind. Lots of people have that kind of love, but you would have chosen someone else like Levi.”
“Except no one’s like Levi,” Miriam said quietly, shading in a sketch of Hannah wrapped up in one of Levi’s scarves. “It’s not as if you fell in love with some guy and let your life run away with you. You fell in love with the Legendary Levi Blue…and then youdidn’tlet it run away with your life. Youdidn’tlet it overwhelm you. You still chose the life you wanted.”
“I never said my fears made sense,” Hannah argued, although she’d never looked at it quite the way Miriam just put it.
“Okay, fair,” Miriam said, “but I do have a question. Nan, you’re afraid of him leaving you and you’re also afraid of him staying and being too much. Those seem…”She trailed off.
“Contradictory?” Hannah finished for her, and Miriam nodded.
Hannah laughed a little. “I think all of it is just being afraid of loving him too much, and it manifests in whatever way it can fuck with me best, on any given day.”
Miriam drew a giant human heart with a tiny Hannah underneath it, carrying her away like the house inUp.
“So we know what you’re afraid of. What do you want? Do you want him to love your haircut? Do you want him to walk away?” Noelle asked.
Hannah groaned. “How do I know what I want? All the things my heart wants, my head tells me are wildly unsafe.”
“I don’t want to tell you how to feel,” Noelle said, which was patently absurd because Noelle had been trying to tell her how to feel for their entire friendship, “but are you open to the possibility that maybe you could be together in a way that didn’t fit into your very narrow specifications of safe but still worked?”
“Or was even more wonderful?” Miriam added.
“That makes me hyperventilate,” Hannah said honestly.
Noelle chuckled. “Okay, let’s start with a different question. You said you’re afraid because you didn’t choose him, but now you have a choice. You might not be able to stop loving him, but in terms of your future, he’s put it in your hands. If you could choose, of all the people in the world, would you fall in love with the exasperating, angry, egocentric, beautiful man with the unholy culinary talent?”
She’d told Noelle that if she could choose to do it over again, she wouldn’t love him, but that had been because she was desperate to stop being in pain. When she thought about all the people she could have loved, and him, there was no contest. She nodded. “I want him to like my haircut. I wanthim.”
“Well,” Levi said when she walked through the kitchen door, “I can tell what you did today.” He was smiling a little, the smile that used to mean he’d been surprised by her and was pleased, and she thought she saw a flash of heat in his eyes.
He put down his knife and looked at her a long time.
“I was going to ask how you feel,” he said, “but I can tell by the look on your face that you love it.”
“Do you…like it?” she asked, more nervous than she wanted to be.
He cocked his head, still smiling. “Do you want me to?”
She shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant.
His smile grew into a grin. “I would like anything that made you glow like that, because I love how you look when you know you’re fucking hot. Also, I’m super impressed by you, as usual.”
Hannah’s shoulders crept up. “All I did was get a haircut, Blue.”
He shook his head. “Our hair is a big part of our identity, and you’ve been living with the kind of hair that people often see, then never see the rest of you. Letting people see all of you is pretty brave.”
She teared up a little, because of course he got it. Levi, more than maybe anyone she’d ever known, played with how his outward presentation affected the way people treated him. He was never not aware of what people were thinking about his hair, his clothes, his projected self-image. It was his armor and also his defiance.
