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And what was she supposed to do now?
How was she meant to cope, being all crushed down inside while this huge thing unfurled before her? She didn’t know. Allshe could do was read on feverishly. She saw a million things from a completely different angle—like the restaurant, all the way back at the beginning, when he’d hidden behind the plant. And he’d told her it was just coincidence, but it hadn’t been, it hadn’t been. He’d done it on purpose, and not for any reason she would ever have been able to fathom.
Her bloody bastard of an editor told me he’d gotten rid of her and that she was useless and they’d find me someone better. And all right, maybe I shouldn’t have reacted to this news by being furious and following him to dinner to make sure he listened when I said I wanted her treated right. But in my defense, I was already so far gone on her it made me fucking fume the moment anyone tried to do her wrong. So yes, it’s my fault he fled the country. And to be honest, I’d do it again.
I’d fight God if he got in her way.
And that wasn’t even the most extreme example.
No, the most was all the ways he’d carefully tried to describe the performance they’d put on, without really giving it all away.I told the truth about the extent of my feelings to everybody else, and then hid it all from her. Because it felt like I had to, to save face. Because it seemed like too much. Too loud for where we were—like a man yelling about his love before you’re even sure you’re friends, she read. Then thought of him bellowing at the paparazzi.
She’s my true love, he’d said.
And now had to contend with the fact that he’d just been honest.
In a moment of high tension, they’d forced him into saying his real feelings.
All of which he’d then tried to explain away and turn into something small. Just a game to cover up all the ways it was real. Because it had been real, of course it had. It was there on page 119—I wanted her so much I couldn’t speak about it—and 212—she kept trying to make her desire smaller, I could see it, and yet couldn’t stress to her just how little I wanted her to be smaller, how much I wanted her to be more, more, as much as she could stand—and finally there she was, just flipping as far forward as the book went, to see the end of her own fucking story.
Her ownlovestory. Her ownromantic comedy.
They say if you love something, let it go. Like letting go is as easy as opening your hands, so a thing that’s hardly there can leave them. Instead of what it really is: sawing off your own arm, one millimeter at a time, with a wooden spoon. Then just standing there and watching yourself bleed, because you’re too full of despair to do anything about it. Better, you think, that you let it happen.
Or at least, that was my thinking.
If I kept bleeding, I told myself, I could get all that useless love out of me.
But I realize now that the problem was and is: I don’twantit out of me. I don’t want to let out all the best parts and leave only the pain. To have the pressure, and not the diamond. It’s not even the pressure that makes you a diamond. It’s what she gave me: her seeing, her tenderness, her acceptance of everything everybody else finds foolish. And all the ways she helped me understand that it isn’t.
It’s not foolish to be who you truly are.
To not let yourself be crushed down into nothing.
Because it hurts when you try. But it’s also the very, very best.
I promise you, I promise. My dearest one, I promise—because you probably know I’m writing this all for you, by now—it’s better to be completely you, to dare and risk and take those chances, then to dwell in darkness. Go on, my love, and live your best life. Let it be beautiful, let it be glorious, let it be with someone who’s all the good things that you deserve. You know that you deserve them.
Don’t ever tell me otherwise.
And after she’d read those last lines, she couldn’t stop herself.
She just plunged into the party like a woman possessed. She searched for him in all the places she suspected he would be. And it didn’t take her long to do it. Of course it didn’t—she knew him well enough to know this, at least. He would be somewhere quiet, somewhere away from all these people, same as she would have been. So when she saw the closed curtains around what had to be doors out to the balcony attached to the master bedroom, she knew.
He was out there.
And he was.
She pushed the curtains aside and he was just standing there. Obvious fizzy apple juice in his hand, his back to all the festivities, every bit of him looking just as good as he had before. That curly hair, the curve of his cheek, the hint of those deep dark eyes,god. Then he turned, he turned.
And didn’t even have the decency to look abashed to see her. The minute she came into view actual happiness washed over his face in a great wave. Like there was nothing else he could do. She pulled a string in him and out popped joy, no matter what the circumstances happened to be.
And these circumstances sure were something.
They felt like a fucking volcano inside her.
She came very, very close to just flinging herself at him.
But managed to settle for just shaking his fucking book in his face.
