November 9: A Novel(66)

“Oh, it was still insta-love,” I tell her. “But ours is legit.”

She lifts up onto her elbow, staring down at me. “When did you know? Like which second did you know for sure you were in love with me?”

I don’t even hesitate. “Remember when we were kissing on the beach and I sat up and told you I wanted to get a tattoo?”

She smiles. “It was so random, how could I forget?”

“That’s why I got the tattoo. Because I knew in that moment that I had fallen in love with a girl for the first time. Like real love. Selfless love. And my mother told me once that I would know the second I found selfless love, and that I should do something to remember that moment because it doesn’t happen for everyone. So . . . yeah.”

She picks up my wrist and looks down at my tattoo. She traces it with her index finger. “You got this because of me?” she asks, glancing back up at me. “But what does it mean? Why did you choose the word poetic? And a music staff?”

I glance down at my tattoo and wonder if I should really go into detail with her about why I picked it. But that moment would darken this one, and I don’t want that. “Personal reasons,” I say, forcing a smile. “And I’ll tell you about them one day, but right now I kind of want you to kiss me again.”

It doesn’t take ten seconds before I have her on her back and I’m buried deep inside her. I make love to her slowly this time—not in a wild rush like we did twice before. I kiss her, from her mouth to her breasts and back up again, softy pressing my lips against every inch of skin that I have the privilege of touching.

And this time when we finish, we don’t talk afterward. We both close our eyes, and I know that when I wake up next to her tomorrow morning, I’m going to make it my mission to forgive myself for all the times I withheld the truth from her in the past.

After I make her breakfast.





Fallon


My stomach growls, reminding me that I never even ate dinner last night. I quietly roll out of bed and search for my clothes, but after locating my skirt, I come up empty. I don’t want to turn on the light to find my shirt, so I walk to Ben’s closet to search for a T-shirt or something to throw on while I go raid his refrigerator.

I feel like an idiot, searching blindly in his closet for a shirt with a smile on my face. But when I woke up this morning, I never expected the day to end this way. Absolutely perfect.

I decide to shut the door behind me and flip on the light so it doesn’t disturb him. I locate a thin, soft T-shirt and pull it off the hanger. After I get it over my head, I go to flip off the light, but something catches my eye.

On the top shelf, next to a shoebox, is a thick stack of pages. It looks like a manuscript.

Could it be . . .

My curiosity is piqued. I stretch on my tiptoes until I can reach it, but I only pull off the top page just to see what it is.





November 9



by

Benton James Kessler





I stare at the sheet for several seconds. Long enough to wage a full-on war with my conscience.



I shouldn’t read this. I should put it back.

But I have a right to read it. I think. I mean, it’s about my relationship with Ben. And I know he said he didn’t want me to read it until it was finished, but now that he’s no longer writing it, surely that cancels out his one and only rule.

I still haven’t decided what to do when I take the entire manuscript off the shelf. I’ll take it to the kitchen. I’ll get something to eat. And then I’ll decide what to do with it.

I flip off the light switch and slowly open the closet door. Ben is in the same position, breathing heavily, on the verge of what could be considered a snore.

I walk out of his bedroom and into his kitchen.

I carefully place the manuscript on the table in front of me. I don’t know why my hands are shaking. Maybe because his true thoughts about me and us and everything we’ve been through is all right here in front of me. And what if I don’t like his truth? People have a right to privacy, and what I’m about to do is violating every bit of his privacy. It’s not a good way to start out a relationship.

What if I just read one scene? Just a couple of pages and then I’ll put it back and he’ll never know.

I already know what I want to read about. Since the moment it happened, it’s been eating at me.

I want to know why Kyle punched him in the hallway during our second year together. It had nothing to do with me, so that should be a safe enough scene to read without feeling too guilty about it afterward.

I do my best to flip through the manuscript without absorbing any of the sentences. Ben makes it easy to find, considering he’s divided up the chapters by his age. The fight happened the second year we were together, so I find the chapter labeled, “Age Nineteen” and I pull it in front of me. I skip through his internal dialogue while he waited at the restaurant for me to show up. Hopefully one day he’ll let me read this, because I’m dying to know his true thoughts. But I refuse to read all of it. Compromising with my guilt by just reading a few pages still makes me feel like shit. I can imagine how I’d feel if I read the entire thing.

My eyes skim over the page until I see Kyle’s name. I pull the page in front of me and begin reading in the middle of a paragraph.