Jennifer leaves, and Sky rejoins me.
“You okay?” I ask.
She shakes her head, and a tear runs down her cheek.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Luke.” She takes a deep breath, and then fixes her eyes on me. “How are we going to give this up?”
Damn. I wonder if Sky’s having a similar mental journey to mine right now.
“Come here.”
I hug her.
She doesn’t say anything, so I just I squeeze her harder.
“I don’t know, Cielo.” I finally say, and that’s the honest truth. “I don’t know.”
She feels it too.
And that’s the moment when I realize we’re both completely, utterly in love.
And so fucked.
So very fucked.
23
Skylar
I wonder how real brides feel after their weddings.
For me, I’ve felt incredibly melancholy the past few days, like I’ve been carrying around a giant brick in my stomach.
The end of the wedding was the start of the troubles. Hearing Luke say those things about me, they’ll always be stuck in my mind. And where do we go from here?
Since the wedding, he’s been oddly distant. Although he said lots of sweet things in front of people about us, we haven’t even exchanged the ‘L-word’ between us.
It’s as though our life is this elaborate play, and I can no longer distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.
The way I feel when he kisses me? Real.
The words he says to me about how important our friendship is? They’re the truth from his lips.
But this isn’t forever. And role playing like it is despite the reality is taking its toll on me psychologically.
At night, I toss and turn in my bed. I wake up sweating, the sheets soaking wet, with my pulse speeding as if I’m running a race. And my dreams are strange.
In fact, a few days after our “marriage,” I have the strangest dream of all during an afternoon nap.
When it begins, I’m running forward with Luke on a boundless highway in the desert west. No end in sight. We’re laughing, playing, skipping as we smile along the carless wonder of a road. Excitement courses through me.
“You’re it.” He tags me and takes off running west. He’s fast, so I have to sprint hard to catch up with him.
Suddenly, I run face-first into a concrete wall, Wiley Coyote style, that springs up on the formerly boundless highway.
The wind is knocked out of me, and my phone is in my hand now as I feel the desert sand on my cheek.
I realize my Peace Corps Placement has been emailed to me (not sure how I know this in my dream but I do), and I pull up my phone to check it.
Before I can see which country I’ve been placed in, I wake up.
“Holy guac and chips,” I mutter when I wake up for real. The dream seemed so real, so life-like.
I pull up my phone in real life.
First I check my pulse.
110 resting heartrate.
Yikes. I’ve never had anxiety before, but I think this is it.
I pull up my email on my phone. My subconscious must have remembered the date I was going to get the intro email better than my conscious brain, because my heart pounds like crazy when I see the subject line of one of the emails I received today:
Subject: Congratulations, Skylar! Your Peace Corps placement has been finalized!
Nerves wash over me like nothing I’ve ever felt.
How crazy is it that my fate—the country I’ll spend the next two years of the prime of my life, lies in the email I’m about to open?
This is a huge moment in my life. I want to share it with someone. Instantly, I pick up the phone. I want to call Luke and have him be here when I open the email. This is the equivalent of draft day for him.
But a cloud of gloom forms above me, and suddenly I feel rancid. A host of emotions comes through me, including one that really scares me.
I think I’m…in love…with Luke.
My pulse continues to race along with my thoughts, which truck forward a mile a minute. I can’t stop them, even if I wanted to.
Luke is the one I want to share this moment with, yet…how evil is that of me to want to share in this moment with him?
Hey Luke, come celebrate how I’m moving abroad for two years and we’ll never see each other again.
My heart drops, feeling like it’s about at my feet.
I’ve got to talk with him. We’ve skirted around our real feelings under the guise of Operation Romper for too long.
I pull up my messages to text him and see he’s actually already sent me a text.
Luke: Wife. We need to talk. Meet me in the library basement at midnight tonight.
My gut clenches up.
The library basement…at midnight?
Why does this request seem so cryptic? I text him back that sure, I can be there, not addressing the fact that he just jokingly called me his ‘wife.’ We’ll have to talk about that another time.
I don’t open the email just yet.
At a quarter to twelve that night, I head to the library. It’s just a few blocks from the house, and I only have to cross one shady street to get there.
I finger my ring as I walk. I can’t help but reflect on how this has been the wildest half-year of my life, complete with a fake marriage, the realest feelings I’ve ever felt, and one of the biggest decisions I’ve ever made in my young life—to join the Peace Corps.
I still haven’t opened the email to find out which country I’ve been placed in. As much as it kills me, I want to talk to Luke first.
The library is basically empty at this point. It’s the week before finals, and in typical Greene State U fashion, no one is studying this week. It will be packed next week, though.
I head down the stairs to the infamous stacks, rows and rows of old books that no one hardly uses anymore because everything is easier to access online. Still, there’s something warm and cozy for me at least about being down in between a bunch of books.
It’s a maze down here, but I finally see him. He’s sitting at the end of a hidden row at one of those wood-stained desks in the library with his head in a book.
I grin and walk toward him slowly, silently on the carpet.
One of the things I love about Luke is that he’s always onto some new enthusiasm. I wonder what he’s looking at right now.
He turns—maybe he hears me—and I zig out of the row where he can see me. I don’t know why. Just to play a funny little game with him.
I catch a glimpse of myself now in a stained glass window that I pass, and have a strange, out of body experience looking at myself.
Who is that girl in the reflection?
She’s me, but she’s not. She looks the same as the girl I knew this winter, when I started the term in some ways.
But now I’m wearing a pleated skirt that falls to my knees.
And a white-button down blouse. For fun, I unbutton the top two, revealing the fact that I’ve got no bra on. I wonder if Luke will notice.
Who am I kidding? He’ll notice. Nothing slips by him. Least of all when it comes to me being sexy for him.
The biggest difference about me now, though, is the huge smile plastered on my face…
Wow.
I can’t remember smiling like I am right now, for no particular reason.