Dreams of 18(60)

It exhausted me so I didn’t feel lonely. I didn’t feel aimless or angry at having a father who drank and a mother who didn’t care enough to stay.

“Dad?”

Brian brings me out of my thoughts. “She deserves someone who’s good. You’re right. Someone who won’t hurt her. Someone who’ll give her whatever her romantic heart wants. I’m not that person. I’ve never been that person, all right. And I’m not starting now. She probably never even had a heartbreak and I have no interest in being her first. So drop it.”

I have no interest in making her cry and leaving her like the people in my life have left me. I’ve no interest in breaking her heart and making her a cynic like me.

I have no interest in taking on that burden. That blame.

I’ve got enough blame to deal with. I’ve committed enough crimes.

Brian says that he doesn’t mean any of the things he said. That he was angry, he wanted to hurt me.

The reason those things hurt me was because they were true. Every single one of them. Even that article was true.

They called me a pervert, a sick, twisted individual. A danger to society.

I am all of that.

Because two years and ten months ago, I saw a sixteen-year-old girl climbing out of her window and I couldn’t look away. I didn’t want to look away.

It felt like someone had stabbed me in the chest.

Someone infected me and I lost my mind over her.





I’ve got a red dress on tonight.

And make-up.

It’s not much, really. Just some mascara and lipstick.

I’m not a dress girl or a make-up girl at all. In fact, I don’t even own a lot of dresses.

But I own this.

It’s red with flimsy spaghetti straps. It has frills along the hem that stops midthigh and along the neck that goes down to show a little bit of my cleavage.

I got it on my seventeenth birthday, a little present to myself. A dress in his favorite color.

I’ve hardly ever worn it, except for in the privacy of my room back in Connecticut.

When I was coming here, I didn’t know why I packed it. Or why I packed this little cherry-red lipstick and mascara.

You know what, scratch that.

I do know why.

I know why I packed these things.

I packed them because I love him. Because I was thinking about him and I was going to see him and even though I thought he hated me, I wanted to have this dress with me.

God, it’s so freeing to admit this.

To admit that I’m in love with him.

I’ve always, always been in love with him. Since the beginning. Since the very first moment. The very first sight.

Maybe it’s na?ve and romantic. But fuck it.

I am a romantic. I’m a dreamer. And I accept that now.

Acceptance is wonderful, isn’t it?

The most wonderful thing.

I’ve always felt ashamed of my feelings for him. Even before everything went down. I felt ashamed that I wanted my best friend’s dad. I wanted to move away so I could forget him. So I didn’t break any rules. So I could bury my dreams. I even thought that I’d find someone else, maybe. I’d find an appropriate guy to crush on.

Instead, I should’ve believed in my dreams, my desires. I should’ve believed in my heart.

It’s okay, though. It ends tonight.

All of this. This guilt, this shame, this anger. This whole fucked-up mess that started on my eighteenth birthday, that started with my poison kiss.

Only it wasn’t poison.

It was just that: a kiss. A lonely, filled with longing and overflowing with dreams kiss.

Besides, the timing wasn’t right then. I was too young, barely eighteen, but I’m not too young now. There’s no one in the world who can stop us.

No human, no law, not even God.

After I made Brian promise that he’d call his dad and fix things, we talked for hours. I told him not to tell his dad about my feelings and he agreed. He asked me if his dad was the reason why I wouldn’t come over to his house and I said yes. I told him how it all started and how guilty I felt for crushing on his dad.

He told me that he’d cut ties with everyone back in Connecticut. He’d blocked all the people on social media who’d message him about me and the kiss.

In fact, there were several people who messaged him about my breakdown too and for a second, I really got freaked out. I thought he knew, but as it turns out, he doesn’t. Because when he shared those things with Fiona, she wrote them off as rumors.

Thank God for her.

We even talked about all the stupid, nasty rumors about him and me. And for the first time ever, I laughed about them. It felt okay to laugh about him being my alleged fiancé.

It felt like old times.

Then, I did something important.

Something that has been missing in my life for months now. I got out a new diary from my fat hobo and I gave it a different name: The Diary of a Blooming Violet.

I wrote it with a red glitter pen, even.

To honor my new dreams and a certain someone who said I was beautiful.

The certain someone who came back from work a little while ago.

He took one look at me, my red dress, clenched his jaw in anger, shot me an almost accusing glare and disappeared down the hall like I set him on fire.

He’s in the bathroom now, taking a shower. I can hear the water as I walk toward him.