Magnolia Parks (The Magnolia Parks Universe Book 1)

I go to Paili’s room after that and cry in her bed for a couple of hours. She cries with me. She’s such a good friend. Patient. She’s one of those people who are so good at caring about the things the people they love care about. She cried with me the night BJ cheated on me. She cried with me the night I started dating Reid. She’s been here for all of it. She doesn’t say much.

But what could she say anyway?

I should have gone to her after Tom, not BJ, but I barely could even help it.

Truly, it wasn’t even really conscious, me going to BJ. I was lying awake, staring at the ceiling, my heart hammering, Tom peacefully asleep next to me—and I’ll say it here because it’s pertinent—that Tom England really is something akin to spectacular. Me thinking about BJ before, that’s not a commentary on Tom at all. That is the residue of a habit I’ve had for half my life that I don’t know how to break. I wish I thought of Tom. I should have thought of Tom. As he lay there next to me sleeping, I wondered whether I should wake him up to try again so I could only think of Tom this time, but instead I found myself walking to BJ and I guess that sort of says it all.

How stuck I am.

He’s the moon, and I’m the tides.

When the girl walked out of his room, it was low tide. Pushed me out and away.

He stared at me, his eyes a familiar roundness. The way they go every time we lose each other, which is I don’t know how many times at this point.

Too many.

Tom was asleep when I crept out to see BJ. He’s a heavy sleeper, I’ve worked out this trip. I knock over my water bottle all the time and he never wakes up, even though it sounds like a Chinese gong every time I do. He was still asleep when I crept back into our bed a few hours later. He kept sleeping for hours.

I kept not sleeping.

In the morning I take a long shower and scrub my skin hard all over, try to wash off all the mistakes I’m making, but it doesn’t work. I put on the comfiest clothes I have with me—the oversized Vetements, multi-button cardigan with the Loulou Studio ribbed. mélange cashmere shorts and crop top.

I order up some breakfast to the room for both of us and bring it out onto the balcony so I don’t wake him, but I do. His eyes blink awake and he gives me a tired half smile—and something punches me in the stomach. Surprises me. Some kind of want?

He rolls out of bed, walks out to me. He’s just in black Tom Ford boxer briefs and I have a brief and inexplicable desire to lick him but just for a second and then it’s gone because how unrefined.

My legs are resting up on the chair across from me and Tom picks them up, sits down and then rests them on himself.

And it’s a funny picture of familiarity, my legs stretched out over on top of him, mostly naked, him squinting at me in the Greek morning sun and another feeling in my stomach stirs, and I swallow as I worry that my cheeks might give away something I don’t even fully understand myself yet.

He stares across at me for a few seconds, all stoic and statuesque.

“You went to see him after,” he says eventually. Not a question, not an accusation. Just an observation.

My eyes fall from his, embarrassed. “Just for a minute.”

He nods, his eyes not meeting mine anymore either. “Why?”

I purse my lips. I wasn’t sure when this would come up but assumed it might have eventually, and I was quite sure that he’d not be thrilled about it either way. I take a breath, breathe it out through my nose. “I’ve never slept with anyone else, besides him.”

Tom blinks a couple of times as his head pulls back in surprise.

A few more blinks, then… “Fuck. Magnolia!”

I give him a tight smile and swat my hand. “It’s not a big deal.”

He grabs my legs, yanks me and the chair I’m sitting on over to him so we’re closer, my limbs now tossed all over him like a pile of pick-up sticks. I don’t shift. I’m happy to be a pile of pick-up sticks on him. He stares at me. “It is.”

It is. He’s right. But we already did it and now it’s done so I shrug.

“Yeah, well. I needed it not to be, so—”

Tom’s hands have found their way to my ankles and he squeezes them.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I hug my knees. “Because I knew you wouldn’t do it then.”

He gives me an unimpressed look that’s scolding-adjacent, which, for some reason I find very sexy. Father issues, probably.

“That’s being deceitful,” he tells me.

“No,” I correct him. “That’s being withholding.” I annunciate the last word.

He rolls his eyes, a little amused, then nods his chin at me. “So you went to see him?”

I nod a few times and I find myself unable to hold his eyes again. He knows I love BJ. He knows more about me and Beej than most people at this point so why am I so embarrassed about Tom knowing I went to see him? “Yeah,” I nod. “Yeah, and he was with someone else.”

Maybe that’s why.

“Fuck.” Tom’s head falls back in exasperation, but his grip around my ankles tighten. “You two are—”

“—Fucked.” I nod. “Yes, I know.”

He stares over at me, trying to dissect what Beej and I—an impossible task, I can assure him here and now that he—like the countless number of people before him—will fail miserably. Because BJ and I are unquantifiable. It’s the nuances of all the ways we love each other and have loved each other and keep on accidentally loving each other and it’s the intricacies of our threads we’ve knotted together and it’s the secrets we know about each other and it’s that one broken heart we share.

“Why”—he asks eventually, squinting—“are you like this?”

And I’d love to tell him, I’d love to tell him so it makes sense, but I can’t, so it won’t.

Instead, I offer him a weak shrug. “I—we just, fell in love too young, I think… and we don’t know how to be without each other now.”

BJ and I—I think we’re like a fine-chain gold necklace all tangled. Not impossible to undo but it feels like it is. You can sometimes manoeuvre the chain free of itself but not very often. Most of the time you have to undo it at the clasp or break it completely for the knots to come undone.

“You’re like Sam and Closs.” Tom nods to himself and he looks a bit sad. “Fuck,” he adds as an afterthought, mostly under his breath.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, and I feel as though I could cry.

“No.” He shakes his head, rubbing my ankle mindlessly. “I’m sorry—if I could unstick you I would.”

My heart slumps in my chest and I sigh instead of formulating a sentence. There are things to say, many actually. But all of them are contradictory.

Yes, I love BJ. And no, I don’t know how to make myself stop. But please don’t leave me. I don’t want you to leave me. I’d be afraid without you. You make me not lonely. And I’m worried that maybe Gus was right.

They’re the things I’d say if I could, but they’re stuck inside my throat.

He takes my coffee from my hands and has a big sip.

“So,” Tom says, brows furrowed as he stares at me. “Where does this leave us?”

“Pertaining to foxholes you mean?” I clarify, as I reach over and wipe a rogue bit of cappuccino foam from his top lip. My hand hovers. His cheeks go pink.

Tom clears his throat. “Yeah—”

“I don’t know,” I say and shrug, mostly with my eyebrows. “Where do you want it to leave us?”

“Well, I still need a foxhole.” He looks over at me. “You still need a foxhole. We’re both still waiting out for our feelings to pass.” He shrugs. “Might as well wait them out together.”

I nod and feel a strange rush of endorphins. A little giddy that I can keep pretending to be Tom’s. Giddier still that I don’t have to face BJ without my own version of an AK-47.

Tom nods his head back towards the bed. “We probably shouldn’t do that again though…”

“Oh.” I nod. I don’t think my face conceals my disappointment well at all. “No, no, I guess not—”

He squints at me playfully and his face fights off a smile. He’s a bit pleased.

I put my nose in the air and peer over at him. “Wouldn’t be the end of the world if we did though,” I add as a caveat because something pangs inside of me at the thought of that being completely off the table.

His eyes soften and he nods once, leaning in. “Listen—we can do it again, any time you want. I just—I don’t think you wanted to last night. I think you think you had to.” He shakes his head. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know,” I tell him, my nose in the air.

“You look so sad,” he tells me with a bit of a confused and feeble laugh, then his face changes a tiny bit. “I don’t want to make you sad.”

“You didn’t,” I tell him.

“I know!” He blinks. “You did. But you made me an accessory.”

I nod. “I’m sorry.”

He squints at me, a bit playful. “This is a prime example of you being a handful.”