Page 8 of I Love a Good Challenge

“I’m going home,” I murmur into the air between us. My body wants to lean into his warmth, but the weight of my pain constricts my lungs. The outline of a ring presses through the pocket of his coat. I try my best to pretend I haven’t seen it, that I don’t know the question he is about to ask. My heart screams and revolts, and I nearly jolt when I feel the fear win. It’s the only way I’m able to say the words that are pure poison.

“Graham, this has been a great distraction. But the level you love me . . . it’s one-sided.”

He winces, and I know he notices the way my hands are shaking. “You don’t mean that,” he pleads.

“I do.”

But instead of calling me on my lie, he reaches toward me, his arms outstretched. Despite my declaration, he is still waiting for me to walk right into them . . .

“Ahh!” I yell, catapulting from my mattress. I stare up at my comfy bed through sleepy eyes as I am sprawled on the floor like a starfish. The sad part is this has happened more than once. The scene is always the same. Except, in my dreams, instead of LA, we are in front of a castle, and instead of his suit and my high-top sneakers, we’re wearing clothes from another era. My brain loves to reenact the night I crushed Graham’s heart, and I hate it. I hate it so much.

I groan and roll to my side. I’m a roadblock in the middle of the bedroom-slash-living-room floor of my studio apartment and nothing more. To accommodate the weird layout of my apartment, I put my bed in the “living room,” which is separated by a hallway and wall from the kitchen and bathroom. I made a makeshift dining and living space in what I think would’ve been a dining room and pantry. The birds chirp their tunes through the window, and while I know that Sparrow would be smiling at the sight of them, I want to throw a rock out the window (not to hurt them, of course . . . just to startle them enough to sing on someone else’s tree branches). I love birds, but I’m not in the mood for a princess-and-her-animal-sidekick kind of morning.

“I need coffee,” I mumble to no one but myself. “And chocolate.”

I push myself up to a seated position and pull my hair into a high ponytail with a hair tie abandoned under my bed, which I’ve only now seen because of my position on the floor. I feel like it’s a metaphor for something . . . I’m just not sure I like what it means.

“Ugh! Graham. Winnings. Why?” I yell toward the ceiling. Mr. Crumbs (yes, that’s really his name) is the landlord of this building. He responds by tapping what I can only imagine is a broom handle on the floor beneath me.

“It’s too early for your shenanigans, young lady!” I hear him yell through the wooden floor. “And Graham is a lovely man!”

I manage to stifle an eye roll that I feel from my soul. Of all the men who have come through my life, Graham was the loveliest. He even beats Sparrow’s fiancé, Rafe, when it comes to swoon-worthy men (not that I could ever tell her that). But Graham is also more frustrating because he never leaves me, even when I’m nowhere near him. And I don’t know whether I’m angrier at myself for letting him go or at the fact that I have to constantly be reminded of my mistake with every day that passes.

Unfortunately, we’ve been thrown together a lot lately because of Sparrow and Rafe’s epic love fest, and each time, I’ve spent every moment trying to pretend that I’m not affected by him, that he doesn’t shake me like an earthquake in my soul. Most women would faint if they knew they could have had not only Graham’s affection but his commitment as well.

Even now, considering that I once held his love, instead of being angry or yelling at me or telling me off, he’s done the most devastating thing he could do to me by being polite but distant. He’s a shadow of the man I once knew, and it makes me so angry I can’t see straight. And now, we both live in the same small town, and I’m learning some top-tier avoidance skills to cope with potential Graham sightings.

I’m not like Sparrow. Before Graham, I didn’t believe in the love-at-first-sight-and-till-death-do-us-part type of relationship. Even now, after my horrific reunion with him, I’m dating on the level of purgatory that is modern dating apps. I’m still trying to forget him. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t work.) I know I destroyed Graham’s love for me that day nearly two years ago when I rejected his almost-proposal.

The whole town has felt our animosity since he arrived in Birch Borough last summer when the air was sticky with humidity and the need for the sweet relief of ice cream was high. It seems like the world has me stuck on the bottom of its shoe lately because my Graham decided to move to my small town, and even after our encounter, he decided to stay. And what’s worse—if one really wants their idea of fated connections to explode—it turns out that he is the best friend of my best friend’s (now) fiancé. When Rafe took a break from living in LA and came to stay at Graham’s place here in town, Sparrow and Rafe fell in love (because of course they did). Rafe is Graham’s best friend. Graham and Rafe met in LA. Graham and I met in LA. It’s a whole freaking party of people who were fated to cross paths.

They say the world is small, but I say it’s downright claustrophobic. It seems I had talked up my hometown enough that it made quite the impression on Graham. Telling him it’s the place to go when you’re heartbroken probably didn’t help. After watching Rafe break through the castle Sparrow had built around her heart, I’ve now made sure to bury my own heart and pour piles of dirt over it. Mud, if you will.

The birds continue singing as I roll across the floor, closer to my bed. I think back to seeing Graham on the street earlier this week. To my surprise, he waved at me, but I pretended I didn’t see. Oh, I saw, though. And I know if I’m ever going to forget the man who now lives three-and-a-half streets away from me (again, I have only myself to blame for painting Birch Borough as the darling town it is), who has robbed me of my beauty sleep for the past twenty-four months, I’m going to have to do my best to continue avoiding him. Oh, I’ll be civil (possibly), but I’m not going to be happy about it. Especially because he still haunts my dreams.

Graham is one of those people I immediately knew I wouldn’t be able to forget. There’s nothing about him that’s ordinary. It’s as if everything I’ve ever thought a man should be is found in him. During our brief time together, he never intentionally said anything off-color. He always made me feel important, was ever the gentleman, and, in the end, told me clearly that he wanted us to last. My experience in LA felt like an anomaly, light years away from the person who has a track record of ghastly dating. Going back home seemed like the perfect excuse to end what was surely bound to fail. But that’s what it was—an excuse. Months later, I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter if he lives in the same town or across the world. My heart still wants him.

I take a deep breath and shake out the tension from my neck. My eyes catch on a picture of my parents and me on my bookshelf from an Easter production when I was nine. I’m wearing a ridiculous bunny costume, my blonde hair piled high on my head, and my nose painted pink with face paint. Sparrow (not pictured) was the carrot.

Planting my elbows on the bed for leverage, I catch a glimpse of myself in the vanity mirror on top of my dresser. The image I see is a mess. I’m exhausted from the façade I’m desperately holding onto.

When I look in the mirror, I see a woman who let the love of her life think he meant less to her than she ever did to him. A woman who told him, to his face, that she wanted nothing to do with him. A woman who has regretted those words ever since.

∞∞∞

I wipe rogue pain au chocolat crumbs from the large, handmade, soft white counter in Sparrow’s Beret, which is Sparrow’s namesake boulangerie. We’ve been besties since the first grade. Her mother was French, and her father was American, and the result of their meeting was an epic love story and a local favorite. Sparrow and I have owned it together ever since her father died a couple of years ago. I’ve never held another job. We both worked in the boulangerie after school growing up, mostly so I could hang out with her and feel a sense of belonging, but also because I adore the work.

There may be traces of Sparrow everywhere, from the sparrows on the plates to the very name of our shop, but this place also now has my presence ingrained into every nook and cranny. It’s how Sparrow wanted it, especially after she was left alone in this world. And I think we’ve built something to be proud of, even when the realities of owning a business set in.

While we’ll always be a single-location bakery (at least, I think so), we did start to expand to online orders. Sparrow is also working on a book to honor her mother with stories and recipes. I think, someday soon, even accounting for the help of the pastry assistants we’ve hired, we’ll need more space to accommodate it all. But everything about our future plans both excites and grounds me.

The shop is my haven, the place I fight with all things chocolate and chat with everyone in town. It’s the place where I first learned that chocolate and I have a love-hate relationship (I love it; it hates me). Here, I learned the meaning of being a sister and family to people who choose you and are not genetically related to you at all. Sparrow and I have tattoos on our wrists—hers of a lily and mine of a sparrow. We’re bonded for life. She’s the one person who has never made me question if I’m worthy of her love.

I was having an existential crisis when I flopped down on a beanbag in our elementary school over twenty years ago after Tommy, an obnoxious troublemaker at that time in my life, pulled my ponytail and ran. It’d been a rough time for me. My snarky manner and my spunkiness haven’t always been welcome everywhere. As I retreated to a corner of a classroom, I came across Sparrow, reading a book with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on it. She asked me if I wanted her to read aloud, and I did. At home, my parents were focused on planning their trips abroad, already gearing up to be the humanitarian workers they now are. I wanted to know if I could create my own adventure, even if only through a book in a corner that overwhelmingly smelled like Play-Doh.

The year before I went to LA, Sparrow’s father received a diagnosis that meant he wouldn’t be with us much longer. After he passed that fall, she fell deeply into grief. Looking back, I realize we both did, and when she insisted that I move forward with my plans to attend the chocolatier-intensive course, falling in love with Graham was healing. When I returned home, Sparrow was still moving through her valley of grief, and I didn’t want to add to it. My red-stained eyes were for her as much as they were for the loss of Graham’s love. Taking over the shop after her father’s passing amidst the aftermath of Graham, I chose to stay close to Sparrow rather than flit off to Europe. I haven’t regretted that decision in the least.

There has always been a fire in me—something deep in my bones that feels like if I don’t get it out, it may burn me alive. Dramatic? Possibly, but that fire has served me well most days. Occasionally, it overrides my sense of worry—the deep dread that sometimes pulls at my sleep and disintegrates my ability to see clearly. One of those days it took over was the day I met Graham. But then the worry comes back. That was the day I left Graham.

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