Page 74 of A World Without You
SIXTEEN
DREAM 6
Saturday, December 16th
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“WHAT’S ALL THIS?” Iask as I escape the bedroom and spot two large suitcases by the front door of the apartment.
“Our bags for the next few days,” he answers plainly, flipping an omelet that breaks and all of its delicious contents ooze out on the pan. “Shit. Guess we’re having a scramble.” He grins up at me over the kitchen island.
I slide onto an island stool and smile back. “That’s exactly what I wanted anyway.”
Colin scoops the steaming eggs onto a plate with a hesitant, almost embarrassed smile.
I remember when he first asked me out during our senior year of high school, he smiled this way. He glanced over his shoulder and rubbed his hands together before he asked if I wanted to go grab coffee and visit the gallery off Sixth Avenue. It was featuring a new local artist whose pictures “didn’t hold a candle to my photography, but maybe we could visit out of pity” which is entirely sweet to say to someone who is barely eighteen.
It wasn’t true, of course. The photographer was Antoinette Bordeaux, and she made a name for herself in two collections. I danced around the gallery with hardly any breath in my lungs. I was finally breathless when I stood at one piece of a young boy with haunting blue eyes and thick dark lashes covered in snowflakes. The frame was close, just the boy’s features, but I could see a lifetime etched in the freckles on his nose. I could see the pain that surrounded him and the hope in his heart. Colin said he wanted to buy it for me, but the gallerist came back and said it was $10,000.
That was when the embarrassed smile returned.
I reach out over the countertop and place my hand on Colin’s hand that’s still holding the spatula. “This is perfect, Colin.”
He takes my hand in his, lacing our fingers one by one. The warmth of his palm radiates against my skin, and I can feel the beginning and end of us flash before my eyes. I turn his hand over, exposing his palm. I kiss his love line. It’s the longest line on his palm, unbreakable and smooth from his pinky to his index finger. We’ve never really believed in palm readers, but we once visited a fortune teller in Pike Place Market who smelled like incense and looked like Betty White in a gold caftan who told us he was going to love me forever.
We laughed it off as a silly memory before grabbing a beer and heading back to my apartment.
I kiss the line again, unable to stop the memory that surfaces as fresh tears in my eyes.
“I’m still going to love you forever, Olivia. You know I will,” he says, knowing what I’m thinking—the memory as real for him as it is for me.
I look up at him through wet lashes, uncertainty covering my expression. “I don’t know that, though.”
He leans over the counter next to my cooling eggs. “We’re a forever love. The kind that stays right here,” he says, placing his hand over my pounding heart, “even when it doesn’t last out here.” He finishes by putting his finger on the countertop.
There’s a moment of ache in the air. I get how we got here, to this place of finding an end when nothing is inherently wrong.
Two practical humans who have loved each other for so long, both wanting the world for each other, deciding that letting each other go is the best decision.
