Page 60 of The Last to Let Go
“You don’t have to whisper,” Dani tells me, her voice sounding extra loud. “It’s just us up here.” That’s true. Her parents are tucked away downstairs, fast asleep, no idea that after dinner we snuck a bottle of champagne up to Dani’s room and toasted everything we could think of—us, Tyler, Bonnie and Clyde the guinea pigs, New Year’s Eve itself. We even drank to a promise that since we were starting the new year together, we would end it together as well, and the year after that, and the year after that. We were laughing so loud for a while, her parents were probably downstairs wishing, hoping, pretending, we were giggling over boys and not each other.
But now we’re calm. Lying here, breathing together—her exhale is my inhale, my inhale her exhale—is so perfect I can almost pretend that I live here with Dani, that we have our own little loft apartment, that it’s two years from now and we’re both in college, living out life exactly as I’ve planned in my dreams. I can almost convince myself that I really belong here. That life is okay. Dani lifts her head from the pillow and looks at me. She traces the tip of her finger along the necklace she gave me for my birthday—a thin silver chain with a sparkly snowflake charm dangling from it—her touch sending shivers throughout my whole body.
“Why would this be crazy?” she asks, her voice strained from all the talking and laughing and champagne and kissing.
I shrug. “I don’t know,” I whisper again. “Just never thought...” I realize I’ve started this sentence without actually knowing the ending. I stop talking.
“Never thought what?”
I shake my head. “I’m not sure. I guess I never thought I...,” I try again, but still the ending isn’t there.
“Never thought you... were...gay?” her voice lifting on that last word. “Because you really,reallyare, Winters,” she says, losing the voice to a new bout of giggles.
I feel myself smile. “?‘Really,really’?” I repeat, raising my head to look at her. “Really?”
“Oh, big-time, yeah,” she tells me, still laughing as she pulls the covers up around us.
I kiss her cheek and lay my head back in its spot—that soft curve between her shoulder and her collarbone. Then I kiss her neck. And she kisses my forehead. “That wasn’t what I was going to say, though.” I take her hand in mine, and our fingers wrap around one another. “I was going to say I never thought I’d be this happy.”
This time she whispers, “Me neither.”
We listen to the microscopic symphony of snowflakes and silence. Neither of us speaking, neither of us sleeping. As if time is standing still once again. Only this time I never want it to pick back up. I want to stay just like this forever. I want to tell her I love her.Love.It’s so huge, so monstrous, so dangerous and unknowable. No.Not now, I tell myself,don’t ruin this moment. Her breath spaces out to an even, steady rhythm.
“You know,” she says, her voice sleepy and scratchy, “you still never said why this would be crazy.”
I close my eyes tighter and I wonder how much longer she’ll let me get away with not answering her questions.
“What’s it like?” she whispers, even though she just said we didn’t have to be so quiet.
“What’s what like?”
“What’slifelike? What’s life like for you, I mean? You realize you’re still frustratingly private, right?”
“I am not,” I lie.
“What?Please, you don’t talk about your family or what’s going on at home—you always say ‘family drama’ or ‘it’s complicated.’ I mean, I wanna know this stuff. I want to know what it’s like with your father being gone. That. What’s that like?” she asks. “I can’t imagine how I’d feel if my dad died. I’m not trying to pry; I just want you to know that I’m here.”
Being so close to her seems to loosen my grip on all those things that should never be said out loud. Or maybe it has something to do with the half bottle of champagne getting warm in my stomach. “You know those tightrope walkers you see, like at the circus or something?” I ask.
“I’m serious,” she says, exasperated, her whole body tensing.
“No, I am too.”
“Okay. Sorry, go ahead.”
“It’s like you’ve been walking along on this tightrope your whole life. And you always thought you were doing it all on your own. Keeping your balance, putting one foot in front of the other. You look down sometimes and see the ground, but you never really worried about it. One minute you’re walking along, same as always, and then the next it’s like suddenly you can’t find your footing and you realize that you weren’t doing it all alone like you thought. Something was there keeping you up—someone.” I stop and wonder if I’m telling the truth; sometimes it’s hard to tell.
“Keep going,” she whispers.
“But pretty soon you swing your weight an inch in the wrong direction, only to realize there’s nothing there anymore. You see yourself teetering from side to side, but there’s nothing you can do. And then, finally, you just fall. And it’s like you keep falling and falling through the air and there’s nothing to hold on to, and all you want is to hit the ground so you know where you are again, but you don’t—you can’t.” There’s this pang in my chest, interrupting the dull, steady ache that always seems to be there, making the words get caught in my throat. I swallow hard. “It’s sort of like that, I guess.”
“Brooke?” Dani pulls me closer and whispers into my hair. “You can hold on to me.”
So I do. I hold on, tighter and tighter.
“I used to think that if my dad died, I wouldn’t really care, I wouldn’t feel anything. It wouldn’t really be any big loss.” I volunteer this information, not so much because I want her to know, but because I need to say it. Out loud. Just once. Need to own it.
“Why?” she asks softly. I listen for it, but I don’t hear any hint of judgment behind her words.
