Page 48 of The Last Kind of Kiss
“Do you want to split the garden sandwich?” she asks.
I haven’t even looked at the menu. “Not really hungry.”
Aeris folds her menu and sets it aside, a frown denting those rose-dusted cheeks of hers. “Li, you can’t keep beating yourself up over this. Brist—He Who Must Not Be Named—made his decision the moment he ghosted you. He was the one who fucked you over. He promised to change, and his actions didn’t reflect that.”
Nausea plugs my throat, exacerbated by the musty, half-baked smell of coffee beans and lukewarm BLTs. There’snothing in my stomach except for acid, but it still manages to seethe like an incensed ocean. “I’m aware. I was there.”
She cringes. “Sorry. I just…I hate seeing you like this. I hate him for what he did to you. You didn’t deserve any of that. God, he had no right to treat you that way! He’s even worse than your textbook asshole. He’s…he’s…he’s a prolapsed anus with impressively good hair!” she half-shouts, and the mother seated a few feet away glowers at us while she covers her kid’s ears.
I can’t even bring myself to laugh. All I do is sigh, think back to the feeling of how soft his hair felt between my fingers, and nearly burst into tears. “He does have good hair,” I sniffle, shrinking into my seat and letting my oversized hoodie swallow me.
“No, Lila! No! I bet all his hair will fall out before he’s forty! You’ve always been out of his league. And there’s so many fish in the sea, you know? Your person is still out there waiting for you.”
My heart hurts. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to…exist. It feels like there’s an iron maiden clenched around my body, spearing rusty spikes into flesh and tendon, and jamming broken shards of my rib into the weakly pulsing organ in my chest.
“I just thought…” I try to squeeze the words from my trachea, but to little avail. They fight for freedom around my swollen tongue. “I just thought hewasmy person.”
“Oh, Li.” Aeris scoots her chair out from the table and comes over to bear-hug me, the comforting scent of lavender and strawberries embracing me as tightly as her arms. Her shoulder’s looking like cushy real estate to start crying on, but I’m in public, and I don’t need bloodshot eyes to go with my already disheveled appearance. I bury my face in her cable-knit sweater, trying to hide from the grief closing in on me, trying to run from a past that continues to follow me.
“I’m so sorry everything went down like this. But you have to know that it’s his loss, okay? Any guy would be lucky toknowyou, let alone have you in his life. You’re not just an incredible person, but you’re an incredible best friend, and you’re going to be an incredible wife one day. If some immature dickwad can’t see that, then he doesn’t deserve a second of your time.”
I squeeze fistfuls of the textured fabric between my fingers, as if the pressure will nullify the pain. “Why do I scare everyone away, Aeris? Why does everyone always leave?” I ask quietly, muzzling my lips when a long-buried wail flies up from the depths of my chest. My head immediately spins a self-deprecating web, the constant reminder of my dad’s absence clinging to me like spider silk swathing a helpless fly.
Aeris’ words splinter apart in her throat, sympathy a burden she carries on the flat plateaus of her shoulders. “You’re talking about your dad, aren’t you?”
“Fathers are supposed to love their daughters. What’s so wrong with me that my own flesh and blood disappeared off the face of the earth just to get away from me? Why…why am I not lovable? What did I do to drive him away?”
It’s your fault he left, Lila. Bristol knew that. It’s why he left too. Come on, we both know you were never cut out for love. You never loved any man you slept with in college. They never loved you back—not that that’s much of a surprise. You make up for your emotional immaturity by hypersexualizing yourself. And when guys realize how shallow you are, they take advantage of the only thing that you’re good for, which is sex.
“I pity your father, Li. I pity him because he’ll never get to know the wonderful, kind, selfless, ambitious woman you’ve become. It’s not your fault he disappeared.Youdidn’t do anything wrong.Heran at the first sign of hardship, and I hope he regrets it for the rest of his miserable life. He wasn’t ready to know you, and he will neverdeserveto know you.”
Aeris pets the back of my head in a way that reminds me so much of my mother. “I’m still here. I’llalwaysbe here.”
Loneliness is a curse. It curses me even when I have people in my life who’ve stayed by my side for years. So no, I’m not completely alone, but there’s a hole in my heart that yearns to be filled by romance, adventure, devotion…unconditional love. You could be on top of the world, rolling in fame and fortune, and still find loneliness waiting amongst dark corners.
I appreciate Aeris’ sentiment, I do, but it’s not the same. She’s found her soulmate. She’s found the person she wants to spend the rest of her life with—the person who’ll love her on her good days and love her even more on her bad ones.
I always dreamed of finding that for myself, but I was afraid it would never happen until Bristol showed me what I was missing. And once I’d been inducted into a world full of forehead kisses, discreet handholding, and longing stares, it was the only thing that mattered to me. But I don’t belong in that world. He reconfirmed that I never did.
When I pull back from Aeris, sadness wades in the brown of her irises, a gorge carved between her eyebrows. I hate seeing her upset. I hate dumping my problems on her. I wish I could skip the five stages of grief and just FastPass to overbearing numbness. I’m done feeling. I don’t want to feel anymore.
I don’t bother with wiping away the moisture waterlogging my eyes. “I’m always enough for sex, but never enough for love.”
“That’s not true,” she insists. “You’re more than enough. I know I’m not wise like you—nor am I great at talking half the time—but there’s so much of you to be loved. So much, and that scares people. Don’t try and dim your light because others are so used to living in the dark. Don’t think you’re worthy of anything less than love. I envy whoever gets to have you for the rest of their life, because just knowing you for a quarter of mine has already been the best gift I could’ve ever asked for.”
It's hard to accept yourself when you’ve been told your whole life that you’re too outspoken, too high maintenance, toodomineering, too emotional. It gets so tiring, and in the end, it’s just easier to change yourself than live with the fact that you’re unlikeable. All I’ve ever wanted in life is validation—validation from the world, from men, from my dad. I’ve tried to be less opinionated. I’ve tried to be less career driven. I’ve tried to be less superficial. And every time I think I’ve gotten better, people give me a reason to doubt myself.
I hate myself. I hate who I’ve become. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to change, no matter how hard I try. I’m afraid that after my mom passes, I’ll be all alone. Maybe I deserve it.
If there’s one thing I like about modeling, it’s pretending.
Pretending to be a different person.
A person I don’t hate.
“Aeris…”
“No, Lila. I’m not going to sit here and listen to you blame yourself for something that wasn’t your fault. This is on Bristol and whatever the fuck is going on in his life. He should’ve figured his shit out before dragging you into this situation again,” she snaps, her tone rife with an iciness that preliminarily burns.
