Page 96 of Near Miss

He presses his lips to my neck lightly before he follows it with a more purposeful brush, and I squeeze my eyes shut tighter.

My brain whispers to me and I think it’s telling me my heart can’t live outside my body with him, I need to keep what’s left of me so I can stay alive.

My shoulders tense, and I’m about to pull back, but he speaks again. “You don’t want to be another thing I take on because I think that’s who I am. But it’s not carrying a heavy thing, to know you.”

The symphony swells in my chest. There’s a clash of cymbals and this sort of crescendo you’d only see in the movies, every instrument starting at once. It reverberates and those beautiful pieces of Beckett, planted in the soil of all those empty places, stretch and grow and they sing, too, and it’s all so loud I think my brain might shut up forever.

Beckett’s lips move along my neck, pausing at my jaw, before he pulls back and drops his forehead to mine. “Would you be interested in taking a break with me? A break from being just friends? From the expectations and everything that goes on up there.” He taps his index finger to my temple. “Just me and you until Wednesday. And if it still doesn’t feel right, I promise that—”

I can’t really hear anything other than him, and I hold my pinky finger up.

Promise me you’ll only do what’s right for you.

I’m not sure anything has ever really felt right at all before him.

This grin that’s not quite like anything I’ve ever seen stretches across his face when he hooks his finger with mine.

This is the one people should want in photos and on TV. But I don’t want anyone else to ever see it because I think it belongs to me.

Beckett

There are a lot of places to take a break, or to play pretend, because that’s really what this feels like.

Just a little kid playing make believe but instead of Dungeons and Dragons—not that I spent much time on that as a kid anyway, I was probably dreaming about a whole healthy and healed family—it’s me, watching her walk through the door of my cottage, arms crossed and eyes assessing, taking in the swirls of burnt-orange, yellow, and red covering the trees through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, pretending that she loves me back.

She didn’t say anything, but I think she traded a shift or took an extra home call later in the month to come with me.

She held up her pinky, eyes soft, droplets of water tracking across the lines of her shoulders, over the curve of her chest just visible above the bath, and bubbles dotting her clavicle—and I don’t think I noticed much after that.

Greer turns, looking back over her shoulder and the early-morning sunlight hits the planes of her face in a way that’s likeanother football to the stomach, but one I won’t recover from. Her voice rings out, rasps filling this place up, too. She sounds good here. “What made you buy a place in the Kawarthas? The Muskokas are right there.”

I shrug, dropping the bags and kicking the door shut behind me. “This place is converted shipping containers.” I gesture across the open kitchen, where an island not unlike the one in my apartment spans the room in front of slate-grey cupboards and one of those designer fridges that cost way too much, to the sectional taking up residence in the living room in front of a gas fireplace in the wall, and the wooden slats hiding the stairs to the bedrooms. “I thought it was cool, and you know me. Thought maybe I’d find out they were containers with historical significance. Maybe they carried something important across the Channel during the rise of the British Empire.”

Her eyes glimmer. “And?”

I grin, grabbing the bags of groceries and bringing them into the kitchen. “Turns out they’re just metal.”

She tips her head back, hair tumbling off her shoulders and revealing the jut of her collarbone where her sweater slouches down.

She laughs, standing there in the sunlight, taking up all this space in another place I used to come to be alone, and I can’t breathe again.

Scrubbing my jaw, I tip my chin towards the chairs lining the island. My sister picked those out—she said they were something called boucle, and they’d match the couch.

She also said they’d be a hit with any girl I brought here.

The first one to ever cross the threshold doesn’t really seem to care much about them as she folds herself into one, brings a knee to her chest, dropping her chin to it.

I clear my throat. “Coffee? I can make you a latte?”

Greer nods, and she gives me this look I haven’t quite figured out—mouth soft, eyes even more so, her head tipping from side to side like she’s assessing.

I’m never quite sure what, but she doesn’t look disappointed in her findings.

I give my head a shake and force myself to turn around—I’d probably spend all morning staring at her sitting there in the sunlight if she let me—and look at the espresso machine taking up a stretch of counter. It’s another Sarah touch, and she spent hours teaching me how to use it properly.

“I know you told me that lattes weren’t friendly, but we’re not friends these next two nights, right?” I swallow, staring at the chrome adornments, hoping I didn’t imagine the whole fucking thing.

She doesn’t answer right away, and I imagine she’s doing that same thing—eyes curious, head angled to the side as she studies for answers in the set of my shoulders. When she does speak, her voice is soft, but her words are firm. “I don’t think so.”

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