She glanced over at him. He was sprawled in his own chair, chatting easily with Matt and Lara, who were set up on the ground on a beanbag chair Matt had insisted on bringing along. I’d argued it’d get covered in mud and grass, but apparently it’d been a lifelong dream of Matt’s to watch a drive-in movie from a beanbag chair, so who was I to crush it? “Darnell’s supportive. He still doesn’t want to move there, but he said he’s happy to try long distance while we figure it out. So, I guess we’ll see.” Niamh gave a happy giggle, then wandered back over to join Darnell.
Who knew if they’d manage to make it work? But that wasn’t the point, was it? We had no way of knowing what the future held. People changed their minds, people passed away, people moved unexpectedly. The only thing we could ever really do was play it by ear. And if this was what Darnell and Niamh wanted right now, then I was totally on their team.
Back by my car, Will focused on trying to push our chairs closer together while I stood by with our blankets.
“Wait, are you two together?” asked an unfamiliar voice.
I thought the question was being directed at me, and I instinctively took a step closer to Will while I looked up. But the speaker was a blond guy I didn’t recognize, standing in front of Lara and Matt, who were technically sitting in the beanbag chair together, but really enough of Lara’s legs were over Matt’s that you could say she was using him for a chair.
“Yeah, we are,” Matt said. “Couple weeks.”
“I thought you were into girls now?” the guy asked Lara. He wasn’t giving her a hard time, exactly; he looked genuinely confused.
“I’m bi,” Lara said, before elegantly giving him both a sweet smile and the finger. “Not that it’s any of your business, is it, Xavier?”
Matt shrugged, beaming. “You heard the lady. Move along.”
The guy looked between Lara and Matt, and then his gaze trailed over the rest of the group, who were all watching him pointedly. He rolled his eyes. “I was just asking, chill. No need to be so sensitive.”
“Good-bye, Xavier,” Lara said firmly, and this time he walked off.
“Go Lara,” I said under my breath, and Will and I shared a secret smile while he took a blanket from me.
We tried a few different setups, but settled on loading both blankets on top of us, holding hands under them. Then, as the movie started playing, Will shifted and put his arm around my shoulders.
It was, I realized, the first time we’d sat like this in public since the lake.
So maybe I owed Disney an apology.
Maybe our Happily Ever After hadn’t worked on the first shot. And maybe Happily Ever Afters weren’t a singular event. Maybe they were something you had to work at, and build, and never give up on, as long as they were something you still wanted.
And, maybe they weren’t perfect. It wasn’t like having Will right here and right now somehow erased all of the terrible things that had happened this year. And it didn’t prevent terrible things from happening in the future. Sometimes in life, terrible things happened. And sometimes really, really amazing things happened. And sometimes, those things all kind of happened at once.
But screw tomorrow.
Even if no one could promise that everything would work out perfectly, right here and now, in this exact moment, it was perfect.
And right here and now was the only thing that ever mattered anyway.