Page 65 of Later Bloom

This time, his agreement is slower, calmer. “Okay. That’s how I feel, too.”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

It doesn’t feel okay, or good, but for now it has to be, she thinks, quietly, to herself. Out loud, she says, “Can we hug?”

They’ve never really hugged. It’s not a thing they do. But right now she wants that, and everything already feels so close to shattering, even though they’re trying very hard to keep it all intact.

She’ll risk the hug.

He doesn’t answer but closes the distance between them in a few steps. He wraps his arms over her, and she holds her breath and counts the seconds, one, two, three, four, but then she stops. She doesn’t want to think about anything. She just wants things to be fine. Suddenly she feels sixteen, maybe fifteen, unsteady on her feet and choked up by the mindfuck of human emotions. There are so many wrinkles in this scene.

She wants to exhale and say, “fuck,” and she wants to laugh at how absurd all of this is. How movies got it all so right and so wrong all at once—because movies aren’t real life, not even a little, but in this moment Aubrey knows she’s acting as infuriatingly dense and witless as the characters she grew up watching. But it’s so hard. What is she possibly missing? What can she do any different? She wishes so desperately she’d just know.

The hug lasts too long. She knows it, and he must know it, too. When they finally pull apart, she steps back and says, “Merry Christmas, if I don’t get to tell you until then.”

“Merry Christmas,” he echoes. “Happy new year.”

Aubrey says, “You too.”

And she walks home, and he gets in his car.

Chapter Eighteen

The morning after Florence’s party, the light is hazy through Aubrey’s bedroom window. When she wakes she’s exactly the same, but also, entirely different.

Her bed is the same. Her hair curls against her temples as usual. She must look unchanged. To the outside world, nothing has shifted at all.

Yet nestled deep in the cracks of her chest, with roots tangled all the way to the pit of her gut, sit feelings for Arthur. Fierce, and breathtaking. They’ve bloomed under the moon and crash over her now, not like a wave but like a bucket of ice-cold water.

Aubrey lies there staring at the ceiling. “Fuck,” she says very quietly.

Downstairs, Louise is rummaging around. Through the floral curtains the world is white and bright, and the comforter is heavy and stifling on Aubrey’s chest. “Fuck,” she exhales again.

There’s nothing she can pinpoint that would explain this. But she lies there soaked in the certainty that she has feelings for him, and that were he there now, she would press her mouth to his, this very second, and then again, and again. She would run her fingers through his hair, and she would listen to him talk, and she would make him soup, should he suddenly crave some soup. She blushes at the thought of his eyes on her, and all she wants, to her dismay, is for him to care. For her, only her. To reciprocate the way she feels for him.

She’s so stunned by this, in the nest of her mattress, but it also feels embarrassingly obvious, as if it’s smashed through the back of her mind and washed over her as it was always meant to. She wants to tell Maggie and maybe Louise and maybe Florence, but she also thinks no one should know, because how shameful it is that it took her so long to see it, after she’d insisted the opposite for so long. What would they think of her? Of this? What an impossible task to admit they were right.

Fuck.

She disappears under the weight of the blanket.

Over the next few days, she tells no one but herself, quietly in her mind, as she gets ready to head home for the holidays. She feels the taste of it on her tongue, on her fingertips, as she packs, and she cleans, and she helps Louise close down the inn until the new year. She tries to wrap her heart around this new reality she’d waited so long for that she’d feared it would never come. And now it’s here, and it makes her breath short, makes her feel nauseous.

She doesn’t text Arthur, though she wants to. She doesn’t know what to say to him. She can’t think of a normal thing to message him, especially after their last conversation, and even more so now. Even “hello” feels strange, too formal, too generic. She’s never thought as much about word choice and punctuation as she does then, staring at their past conversation, wondering if she’ll ever talk to him again now.

On the plane home, she sits and thinks over their last talk—her feet in the snow and his face in shadow—and looks for the moment it clicked. She doesn’t find it, but she finds something else. Something crushing in the way he said he didn’t want anything to change, didn’t want to discuss feelings or the possibility of ever liking her.

Surely he knows too much about her. How she’s yet to be enough for anyone, how there might just be something wrong with her. Maybe something is missing for him, as it was missing for her. So they can only ever be this, friends who drink tea in the kitchen and share cheesy advice and tell each other it’s all going to be okay even though it’s not really true.

Next to Aubrey, Louise is sleeping. Aubrey opens her email and reads through the messy thoughts she’s collected over the past few months. They read a little better than she remembered. In the dim light of the dark plane, she starts a new draft and writes about Arthur in ways she’s yet to let herself speak of him, think of him. She writes about his face, his hands, the things he’s said. How she pictures their days together, rising in the morning, a domestic rhythm of clothes hanging off chairs and slow kisses in doorways, on their way somewhere. The taste of a reality Aubrey’s yet to even graze, how painfully she aches for it now that the image is so clear. It’s a good thing she’s off the surface of the earth. Nothing about this feels real. Everything about this feels intoxicating. The draft is twice as long as the others.

She takes a taxi to Maggie’s apartment. She’d packed all of her stuff before leaving Lunenburg—she’s yet to book a return ticket and didn’t want to leave anything behind, just in case. It felt too scary, leaving her things in a future so unsure. A superstition of sorts, as if her luggage could directly impact Arthur’s thoughts and feelings a world away.

Now, with her luggage in the trunk of the car, Aubrey thinks she’s left the most important behind.

When she nudges open the door to apartment 4E, she’s greeted by music and Maggie’s smile from across the room. She’s wiping down the kitchen island and she exclaims very loudly, “Finally!”