Page 62 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
Daisy stares at me, stunned. Then, very slowly, she says, “Leah, have you never had a real friend before?”
A real friend. My mind browses through the years and comes back empty-handed.You have plenty of people you hang out with at school, I try to remind myself. Hundreds of numbers in your phone. People who compliment you all the time and invite you to things.But how many of them can I actually call? Someone like Cate would drop me in a heartbeat if I ever made a scene the way I did just now. With her, everything is conditional, transactional.
“No, not really,” I whisper. It’s so humiliating to admit that I can’t even look at her when I say it. The mirage is gone now, the beauty filter switched off, the makeup removed. It doesn’t matter how pretty or popular I make myself—I’m always going to be the girl nobody wanted to sit with at lunch.
“Okay, well, now you do,” Daisy says. She sounds more sure of herself than I’ve ever heard her, and I jerk my head up in surprise. “I don’t know exactly what you’ve experienced in the past,” she goes on, louder, raising her voice for the first time since we met at the airport, “and there are a lot of horrible people and horrible situations, but you can’t keep holding on to that for the rest of your life. You have to believe that there are people who will genuinely like you, and care about you, and worry over you when something’s wrong.”
I swallow thickly. “I … I’m just …” Bone-tired. Unbelievably, extraordinarily sad. Guilty. Betrayed. Heartbroken, heart-shattered, heartsick. All of the above, and yet, that still wouldn’t even begin to cover it. Every emotion I’ve ever pushed down in the past few years has reappeared, breaking past my ribs.
“Also, for what it’s worth,” Daisy adds, “Sean’s an asshole.”
“Sean?” I repeat, confused.
“He kept insisting that he recognized you from somewhere, and then he basically stalked you online for proof …”
I barely hear the rest of what she says. “Seanwas the one who found the photo shoot?” I ask, my pulse skipping.
She nods.
“Not Cyrus?”
“Cyrus?” Her brows scrunch. “No, I don’t think any of us have even spoken to him since lunch.”
“You’re certain?”
“Certain … that he didn’t find the photo shoot?” Daisy asks, looking bewildered that I’m even confirming this with her. “Of course he didn’t. You should’ve seen him after you ran off—he was … Well, let’s just say that I don’t think you should be worried about anyone spreading those photos around.”
The wasps in my head finally go still. It had been instinct to distrust him. Instinct to assume the worst. If you were to suffer a blow to your stomach every time you walked down a road, you would automatically start tensing before you’ve even taken the first step, bracing for the pain. You wouldn’t dare believe that one day, you’ll be able to walk right down, and someone will be waiting at the end of it, smiling gently up at you.
“I need to talk to him,” I say, but not before I pull Daisy into a tight hug. She’s so much shorter than I am that I’m scared of crushing her, but she hugs me back just as hard, pressing her head to my shoulder. “Thank you,” I whisper. “For coming after me. For being on my side.”
“I’ll always be on your side,” she says, and I believe it.
Our itinerary doesn’t really plan for private conversations after you dramatically run off into the night.
I’m forced to chew on my words all the way from the final scene of the performance to the bus ride back to the hotel. But instead of heading back to my room, I follow Cyrus to his.
“Yeah, I just remembered I needed to go … buy another winery,” Oliver says when he sees me enter, and he promptly disappears, leaving the two of us alone.
Cyrus stares at me in the silence, and I have no idea what he’s thinking, where or how this will end, so I speak first. “I made a snap assumption back there,” I begin, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “The wrong assumption. I—I didn’t even give you a chance to explain, and I should have.”
“Leah,” he says, so tenderly I think I might burst into tears again. “You’ve considered me your enemy for years, and I’ll never be able to make up for what happened. You thought what any person would have thought. I wouldn’t expect you to go from hating me to trusting me completely right away—I would want the chance to win your trust slowly, bit by bit, if I had the honor. I’m honestly …” He releases a shaky breath, and for the first time tonight, I see the rush of emotions in his eyes. “I’m honestly shocked that you came back. Shocked, and very, very glad. I didn’t think you ever would.”
It feels like someone’s grabbed hold of my heart and pulled.
Cyrus, who blamed himself for not recognizing a bad situation when he was in the thick of it, and then trained himself to assume the worst of every situation. Cyrus, who thinks that everything he touches will burn and fade to embers, who thinks that everyone is destined to leave him in the end. Cyrus, who always rejects people before they have the chance to reject him, who’s afraid to be happy for fear of the day the happiness is taken away from him, who doesn’t think he deserves happiness to begin with.
“Who else would I go to?” I say, smiling.
There’s a loud rumbling noise outside, followed by a hiss and sharp whistling. We both whirl toward it at the same time, and Cyrus yanks back the curtains right as a brilliant array of colors explode across the night.
Fireworks.
“Look,” Cyrus says, leading me forward by the wrist.
A breath of pure delighted laughter escapes my lips, and we almost trip over ourselves as we fumble with the lock on the balcony door, my hotel slippers shuffling against the carpet, and then we’re rushing out into the crisp, cold air, leaning over the railings to stare in wonder as anotherboomfills the sky with sound and bright, dazzling gold. More colors shower over the horizon: the most vivid pops of green and blazes of red and stars of silver, lighting up the city.
All around the hotel, for six floors down and as far as I can see, other travelers have hurried out onto their balconies to watch the fireworks too. Fathers balance their toddlers high up on their shoulders for a better view, happy couples wrap their arms around each other, mothers usher their children over from the bedroom. A gray-haired woman shakily retrieves her phone to start recording, maybe to send to her partner or her grandchildren. I don’t know any of them, and they might be traveling for a family holiday or a honeymoon or a business trip, and they could be from the neighboring town or halfway across the world, but we’re all standing here right now. And my heart swells at the silly, simple, human fact that when we stumble upon something beautiful, our first instinct is to show it to the people we love. It’s what we do with pretty seashells on a beach, a radiant sunset, a rare bird flitting through the trees, a herd of wild horses grazing in the countryside.Look, we say, saving these little pieces of beauty for each other.Do you see it too?Isn’t the world such a strange, lovely, breathtaking place?
