Page 69 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
“You could’ve waited. Was I not worth waiting for?” It sounded so desperate, I know, but I’d waited for her for years, and she couldn’t do the same for me.
“You told me you were straight!” she blurted out. “You were always checking out cute guys and you had a crush on James…What would I have been waiting for? God, I was so mad at myself. Still am. How could I have fallen in love with a straight girl again? Especially after what happened back in Ohio? So fucking stupid.”
“I—I’m not—I don’t—” The words fought me all the way out. I’d never said them out loud, not even to myself. But I had to now. I had to tell her the truth. “I’m not straight.”
Ellery’s hand tightened around mine.
“I don’t know what I am. Up until I met you, I thought I was straight, but then we became close, and…”
“Yeah. But see, I didn’t know that back then, Tulip. I just thought you were only into guys, and I felt like the dumbest shit alive, and I just—I couldn’t stand the thought of being around you anymore. And having to watch you date guys, knowing I had no chance. I freaked out. I applied to London. What can I say? I was stupid and in love and so heartsick.”
The thought of past us broke my heart. Both of us so youngand foolish and so utterly in love with each other, and neither of us with the courage and wisdom required to tell the truth. We were best friends, closer to each other than anyone else could be, and still we managed to erect a giant wall between us. “How did we fuck things up so badly?” I whispered. The last decade unraveled before me, a never-ending series of what-ifs every step of the way.
What if we’d just been a little bit more honest with each other?
What if I’d told her how I felt?
What if she’d told me how she felt?
I knew, of course, what would’ve happened. We would’ve fallen into each other’s arms, laughing, crying, and I would never have left California. I wouldn’t have met Parker, wouldn’t be the trophy wife I was now. I would’ve stayed and done some internship after school, and maybe I would be a licensed therapist by now. Or maybe it would’ve been a disaster, and we would’ve crashed and burned because I was young, so young, and so was she, and we were just a beautiful mess with nowhere to go.
“Tulip,” she said before taking a deep breath. “I have something to tell you.”
I looked up at her, my mouth dry. What else could she possibly tell me right now that we hadn’t already said to each other?
“I moved back here because of you.”
“What? How—what?”
“Iris. She reached out to me online months before you came and asked me for my mailing address.”
Oh shit. Dread coiled in my stomach.
“She sent me a box of photocopied letters. Letters you’d written over the years to me.”
“Oh my god. No,” I gasped.
“Yep.” Ellery rubbed her hands up and down my arms. “Tulip. I can’t believe you did that. I read them all, I’ve read them multiple times, actually. And they were so sweet. I just—I was swept away by your words. The last ten years, I’d wondered so much about your life. I wanted to know so badly what you’ve been up to, but of course I was always too chickenshit to reach out. When I read your letters…god. I cried, I laughed. I fell in love with you all over again.”
My mind spun, scrambling through the years of unsent letters, each one raw, holding back nothing because I wrote them with the confidence that came with knowing they wouldn’t be read by anyone. And now I was finding out that Ellery had received them after all. Had read each and every single one. Jesus. Should I be horrified or glad or…?
“Are you mortified?”
“Uh, yeah? No shit!”
She laughed and pulled me into her arms, and I let her. I rested my cheek on her chest, and slowly, my mind went from its frantic spin—ohmygodwhatishappeningohgod—to a slow quiet. I could feel Ellery’s heartbeat under my cheek, and it was fast too, as fast as mine was.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “I loved them. I love you. Only you.”
I refused to believe her, even then. It was too good to be true. Too much. Too unreal. I buried my face in her chest and squeezed my eyes shut.
“Remember when you asked why I was still single?” she said.
I could only nod. Her hand came up to the side of my face, her fingertips brushing back my hair before going down to mychin and tilting my head up. Our eyes met, and I knew she wasn’t lying. This was true. Everything else was noise, and nothing made much sense anymore, but this moment was pure.
“Because this whole time, I couldn’t find anyone like you,” she murmured. “God knows I’ve tried.”
And because it was so raw and so heavy, I couldn’t help but make a joke out of it. “I raised the bar too high.”
