It Starts with Us (It Ends with Us #2)(81)

I shut it and flattened my back against the cold wall of your house, and I exhaled. My breath turned to fog, and I closed my eyes, and after the absolute worst eight hours of my life, I somehow cracked a smile.

I thought about love the rest of the morning. Even after you’d come back to get me once your parents were gone and I spent several more hours being sick at your house, I was thinking about love. When your Surprise Lily fingernails would flash across my line of sight every time you checked my temperature, I’d think about love. Every time you’d walk into your room and adjust the covers, tucking them under my chin, I’d think about love.

And then when I finally started to feel a little better around lunchtime, I stood in the shower, weak and dehydrated from being sick, yet I somehow felt like I was standing taller than I ever had before.

That whole morning and into the rest of the day, I knew something significant had happened. For the first time, I had felt a flicker of what I knew life could be. Before that moment, I never gave much thought to falling in love, or having a family someday, or even the idea of cultivating a successful career. Life to me had always felt like a burden I had to bear. Something heavy and murky that made waking up difficult and falling asleep a little bit scary. But that’s because I had gone eighteen years not knowing what it felt like to care about someone so much, you want them to be the first thing you see when you open your eyes. I even felt a desire to make something of myself because you were the first person I ever wanted to become something better for.

That was the day we laid on your couch together and you told me you wanted me to watch your favorite cartoon with you. It was the first time you had ever snuggled up to me, your back to my chest as we lay under the blanket with my arm wrapped over you. It was hard to focus on the television because the words I love you were still tickling their way up my throat, and I didn’t want to say it, couldn’t say it, because I didn’t want you to think it was too fast, or that those words held no weight for me. They were the heaviest damn thing I’d ever carried.

But I think about that day so much, Lily, and I have no idea if that’s what love feels like for everyone, like it’s an airplane that just fell from the sky and crashed right through you. Because most people, they have love seeping in and out their whole lives. They’re born being wrapped in it and they go their whole childhood being protected by it, and they have people in their lives that welcome their love in return, so I’m not sure it hits people like it hit me—in one small moment, in such a colossal way.

You were wearing this shirt I loved. It was too big for you, and the sleeve was always falling off your shoulder. I should have been watching the cartoon, but I couldn’t stop staring at that stretch of exposed skin between your neck and your shoulder. As I was looking at it, I once again felt that incredible pull to say I love you, and the words were there, right on the tip of my tongue, so I leaned forward and pressed them against your skin.

And that’s where they stayed, hidden and quiet, until I worked up the courage to speak them out loud to you six months later.

I had no idea you remembered that kiss, or all the times I kissed you in that spot after that day. Even when I read it in your journal, you rushed past it in a hurry to get to what you considered our actual first kiss, so I had no idea that it even meant anything to you until the moment I saw your tattoo. I can’t tell you what that means to me, knowing that you have our heart placed in the very spot where I once secretly buried the words I love you.

I want you to promise me something, Lily. When you look at that tattoo, I don’t want you to think about anything other than the words I’ve written in this letter. And every time I kiss you there, I want you to remember why I kissed you there the first time. Love. Discovering it, giving it, receiving it, falling in it, living in it, leaving for it.

I’m writing this letter while sitting on the floor of Josh’s bedroom. My experience with Josh tonight is kind of what sparked my memory. He’s sick with a stomach bug. Maybe not as sick as I was the day I first realized I loved you, but very, very sick nonetheless. He caught it from Theo, who had it a few days ago.

I’ve never taken care of a sick person before, so I have no medicine at all. I think I’m about to make a pharmacy run. I might slip this letter under your apartment door on my way there.

It isn’t fun taking care of a sick person. The sounds, the smell, the lack of sleep—it’s actually almost as bad for the person doing the caring. Every time I check his temperature or force him to drink water, I think about you and how you cared for me with such a gentle parental instinct. I’m trying to replicate that in my care for Josh, but I don’t think I’m as good at this as you were.

You were so young, just a few years older than Josh is now. But I’m sure you felt much older than you were. I know I did. We had been through things no kid should have to experience. It makes me wonder if Josh feels his age, or if he feels older than he should because of all he’s been through.

I want him to feel young for as long as he can. I want him to enjoy his time with me. I want him to know what love is long before I did. And I hope that love has been seeping slowly into him so that it doesn’t hit him all at once like it did me. I want him to grow up with it, wrapped in it, surrounded by it. I want him to witness it.

I want to be an example for him. I want us to be an example for him, and for Emerson. Me and you, Lily.

It’s been six months.