Page 56 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
“No, no,” she says quickly. “It’s my problem; I tend to assume that everyone hates me. There might be some deep-seated childhood trauma there, but what I’m getting at is, you have this … this cold, unapproachable aura—”
“Like an icicle,” I put in. “Or an abandoned house.”
“Like the green-tongue Popsicles I’ve always loved.”
I set the blush back down by the sink and cast her a bemused look. “The what?”
“Lü she tou,” she says. “It looks like a regular green Popsicle, but it’s made of jelly, so when it melts, it turns soft. Sorry, I know that doesn’t sound super appealing, but I promise it’s amazing. Anyone who’s ever given it a try ends up coming back for more.”
“That was probably the strangest and nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten,” I say, my laughter bouncing off the gilded bathroom walls, all my discarded hopes finding their way back to me. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.”
From morning all the way to the evening, I contemplate the great Cyrus dilemma.
The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. How could he have been in love with me this entire time? It feels like a fabricated tale, a myth on par with Santa or unicorns—or worse, like a practical joke.
And yes, sure, he’d looked and sounded sincere when he was making his sweet declarations. Maybe evenhebelieves he means it. But the same thing has happened with a lot of guys in the past, and without exception, they turned around and proved themselves to be liars, or changed their minds about me. How can I trust Cyrus not to do the same?
I’m so distracted that I can’t even bring myself to admire the scenery. I know, objectively, that it’s gorgeous: the Sun and Moon Pagodas shine side by side over the waters, glowing gold and silver, perfect twins in structure. But there’s a difference between knowing something and caring about it, and right now, I could hardly care less where we are, if we were in a literal empty room or standing before one of the Wonders of the World. All my thoughts are narrowed in on the boy beside me.
“Why?” I ask Cyrus as we stroll along the lakeside. It’s the first time we’ve been alone since the kiss in the alley, and during that time, I’ve created a questionnaire to help determine if his feelings are real. It’d be preferable if I could inspect his thoughts with a microscope, but until technology catches up, this will have to do.
He looks over at me, the waters glittering behind him. “Hm?”
“Why do you even like me?” I ask him, striving to keep my voice light, cool, nonchalant. It’s just a question. Just something that’s been eating away at me for the past, oh, I don’t know, six and a half hours. No big deal.
Cyrus’s voice is serious and deep as gravity when he slides his long fingers through mine, intertwining them like a vow, and says, “Why not? It’s very easy to fall in love with you, Leah. The easiest thing in the world.”
I feel the throb of my heart, the movement reverberating throughout my whole body. How desperately I want to believe him. To accept the words without hesitation.
“I’m not really sure when, exactly, it clicked,” he continues, his thumb grazing over the underside of my wrist, gently leading me around a crack in the pavement. “I don’t think I even realized I liked you until later. I just knew that I noticed you a lot from the beginning. Like how you would wear a different scrunchie every day of the week, or how you’d always pick out the tomatoes from your sandwiches, or how you were far from a teacher’s pet, but you still made sure to thank the teachers at the end of the lesson. I found it fascinating, because you had this very intimidating face, but then you would laugh,” he says softly, “and it was like you were glowing.”
I bite my tongue, overwhelmed by a riot of sensation, inside me and all around me: the breeze riffling my hair, the distant laughter eddying around the banks, the firs bathed in green lights, the bright smattering of stars in the sky above. Every word he’s saying.
“You really mean that?” I ask him, searching his face carefully for lies, warning signs, any damning evidence that might suggest otherwise.
“Yes,” he says, with infinite patience. “Of course.”
“You actually like me?” I confirm again, just in case. I’m aware that I’m being annoying now, but I can’t help myself. “As a person.”
“I do. Why is that so hard to believe?”
“I mean, it wouldn’t be, if you said you were attracted to me. I’d totally get it. But you’re saying you had this huge crush on me,” I emphasize, raising my brows with incredulity. “Sinceseven years ago.”
He shakes his head, and my heart stops.I knew it, the cruel, ever-present voice in my head declares at once, the voice that sounds like every kid who’s ever bullied me.I knew it was a lie. He doesn’t love you after all. Nobody ever will.
But as tourists squeeze forward to take photos of the shining lake, he turns away from the scenery to face me. “Do you know the Mandarin word forcrush?”
I frown. “No. What?”
“Anlian,”he says. “Anfor ‘darkness.’Lianfor ‘love.’ I always thought it was poetic—that when you secretly have feelings for someone, you love them in the darkness. But there’s this other word.Minglian. Mingfor—”
“‘Light,’” I finish for him, recognizing the character. It’s the same word for bright, or luminous, the way the twin pagodas glow against the night sky.
“So it’s not anlian,” he says, his eyes dark and intent on me, and though the rest of his sentence goes unspoken, I hear it as clearly as if he had whispered it into my ear:I don’t love you in the darkness; I love you in the light.
It feels like there’s light in my very veins, blazing through my chest and burning away all the years of loneliness before him. And for just a few seconds, my skepticism takes a break, and the voices in my head go quiet.
