Lauren Gilley

She took a deep breath and it was her eighteenth birthday; it was Jess’s wedding and a summer evening at the pool; it was all those hundreds of times he’d been propped against her dorm building. And it was now, and she wanted to be this sophisticated, Audrey Hepburn-esque girl who gave him a coy smile and sauntered toward him, hips swinging. But this was Tam, and she wasn’t sophisticated for crap.

He knew he loved her in February: steam leaving the mug of coffee in her hands in thick curls; her hair a snarled mess around her shoulders; the morning on the other side of the window bitter and windswept; her face lovely, pale, and lonely in a way he didn’t understand. She sat in the chair in his bedroom, in his shirt and a pair of socks that went up to her knees, gooseflesh on her slender legs. A copy of Oliver Twist had been open across the arm of the chair. “I think it might snow today,” she’d said, and he’d been completely in love with her.

He thought she might have loved him back in March: in from the rain; his clothes stuck to his skin; the umbrella showering the hardwood of her entry hall; the dinner she’d planned forgotten when he’d helped her out of her jacket and she’d been shivering with cold. That day, when she’d pushed his wet shirt back off his shoulders and stretched up on her toes to kiss him, he was sure there was something new shining deep down in her coffee-colored eyes. “You’re so cute,” she’d said, and he’d known: she loved him.

She didn’t understand love, not the golden, shimmering, romance-novel stuff that existed between mates. She was skeptical of it, and had never been one to pretend that it existed just for the sake of excitement. She didn’t know what it looked like, what it felt like…at least, she hadn’t. But she realized, amid the dancing tendrils of ivy that climbed the gazebo, that love – that good, golden kind she’d always discounted – didn’t arrive with a blast of trumpets and an earth-shattering epiphany. It was earned, formed, created, day by day, a little at a time.

His voice was different in the small, intimate spaces that existed when they were pressed together like this; it was sweet with a familiar sort of sleepiness, a voice just for her that the rest of the world didn't get to hear.

For one perfect, precious moment, everything that ate at their sanity melted away into the shadows, and the crackling energy that arced between them was nothing but bright, sparkling memories of all their moments together in this car and all the things she'd let him teach her in it.

It was broken. It was haunted. Just like her.
But it had bones, and it had memories, and it had the ability to be something strong again. Just like her.

“How many times have you been slapped on dates?”

“Five,” he said as he checked over his shoulder and eased back out into traffic. “So hit my left side if you’re going to. The right’s my pretty side.”

“Which side is your modest side?”

“Don’t have one.”