“THIS WAS A MISTAKE.” Lily huffs behind me. “Can you please slow down?”
“We’re so close.” I pause long enough for Lily to catch up to me and then she lets me pull her down the path leading toward the Adonis Baths Waterfalls. Her hand in mine feels like second nature.
“Don’t rich people just helicopter themselves to wherever they need to go?” She releases her fingers from mine and rests both palms on her knees, bending over to catch her breath. Her braids snake down her back as sweat beads over her forehead.
We may have seen a lot of beauty around the world this summer, but nothing holds a candle to Lily.
“Maybe next time,” I say, knowing all too well that after last night, Lily’s started to pull away.
She fell asleep in my arms, and while her soft breath warmed my chest, I stared at the sky, waiting for a star to fall so I could make another wish to go with the one I made at the beginning of summer.
Cut Lily some slack.
Selfishly, I wanted to ask for her to have another moment with me. A lifetime of them.
“At least there’s no one here.” She stumbles over a steep rock, grabbing my shoulder for balance.
“Right? Yesterday was awful. People really go feral over a rock.”
We took a trip to Aphrodite’s birthplace, partially for sightseeing and partly because some local legend claims that if you swim around the giant boulder three times, you’ll find true love.
“I don’t blame them.” Lily wipes the sweat off her brow and looks back at me. “Besides, you were lapping the rock so many times, I was sure your arms were going to fall off.”
“You don’t want to mess with the mythical healing powers.” There’s got to be a picture of me next to the word foolish in the dictionary.
“True.” She nods. “I stayed in that water for an hour. My skin better be flawless for the rest of eternity. But something about Aphrodite being born from Uranus’s severed ballsack makes me wonder if I’ll wrinkle instead.”
“Lots of judgment coming from a woman who puts snail gunk on her face.”
“It’s hydrating,” she says defensively and swats me.
We walk through the final clutch of foliage, then stand speechless at the beautiful view. A pool of turquoise sits beneath a quiet waterfall. Trees and shrubbery wind over the edges of the rocky cliffs, and the sun dances along the leaves.
“Let’s get in.” I shrug off my backpack, strip off my shirt, and run into the water. I turn to Lily, who stands on the shoreline, eyeing me apprehensively.
“Is it cold?” “Not at all.”
Lily’s gaze narrows on me. She takes off her denim shorts and baggy T- shirt to reveal my favorite bikini, the same deep-red one she wore in Rio. The twirl of straps barely contains her body’s full, supple curves. She glows as if dropped here from heaven itself. All I want to do is reach her, help her burn brighter, and make her happy.
I’m so ridiculously in love with her.
“Come on, pretty girl, get over here.” I walk toward her, but she skips down the beach away from me. “Or I’ll have to carry you in like the goddess you are.”
“A mere mortal, carry me?” she taunts, dipping her feet into the water. “An honor.”
Lily walks deeper before plunging her head beneath the surface and floating over to me.
We swim for a few hours as though there’s no time limit on today or the rest of summer. As her laughter bounces against the cove, I tug her underneath one of the waterfalls, where there’s a small, private nook.
Lily smiles at me. I fall apart like I always do.
“I was reading that Aphrodite lost the love of her life here.” Her voice is a bright melody.
“Okay, morbid.”
“Love’s always a little morbid.” She runs her fingers beneath the stream, and my heart aches at her words.
“Have I hurt you, Lily?”
“Never, Nico. I don’t think you’d ever be capable of hurting me, but…” Her green eyes reflect the emerald of the water. She briefly turns away from me. “But I realize now the arrangement we made was a mistake.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” My brother was right. I need to tell her how I feel. Maybe it’ll be enough to make her understand we aren’t temporary. Or maybe I should finally show her the letters and lists I’ve been writing in her journal this summer. “Lily.” I reach for the soft tilt of her jaw, bringing her face close to mine. “It would destroy me to lose you.”
She blinks, likely sifting through the planned excuses she has stored away in her mind. “I don’t want to lose you either, but summer flings aren’t permanent.”
“You were never a summer fling.” My lips try to lift slightly, but gravity forces them into a straight line.
I sigh, doing my best to figure out how to break through the walls she’s put up between us.
“I think I knew we couldn’t truly be friends since last summer,” I say. “I didn’t know how long it would take for us to get here, but I’m done standing around. I’m done pretending this isn’t real.”
The words shoot out of the deepest pit in my chest. They’re anguished and reckless.
“It took ten days for the rules to stop mattering,” I continue. “Another couple of weeks for them to vanish altogether and—”
“You’re right.” She halts my landslide of emotions, and we stare at each other, water falling around us.
“I love you, Lily.”
“Nico, I—” The edge of her bottom lip scrambles into her teeth. “I just
—”
My heart unravels in my chest. “There’s no ‘just,’ Lily.”
We stand in our private nook, watching each other. Lily’s bottom lip
hangs open. Every inch of me is consumed with anticipation of what she
might say next. The green of her eyes feels as cool as the basin of water we’re standing in.
A mist from the waterfall lingers around us. I helplessly reach for her, and she cups the palm of my hand to her face.
I kiss her desperately, longing for the most natural part of us to be enough to convince her to stop exactly where her excuses were forming. The water crashing down around us only amplifies the knots in my stomach.
Lily’s lips are a torrent on mine, a combination of her and me and our tongues until she pulls away.
No smile decorates her face the way it always does after we kiss. Instead, she stares back at me, almost empty and drained of fight. “Nico, I don’t know if I’m even capable of understanding what loving you back truly means. I have no idea how to take care of myself right now, let alone be in a relationship.”
The first time I fall in love, I find the kind of love I’m certain only comes once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky. And my love looks back at me, trying to convince herself that she can’t be with me.
My limbs feel frozen. “I mean, what’s a relationship if not two friends who care about each other and act the way we have all summer?”
Lily swipes away a strand of wet hair on her neck. “I don’t know, Nico.
I’ve never been in a healthy relationship before.”
“Me either, but I’ve never wanted to become a better man for someone. I’ve never wanted to keep my phone on me because I thought it was important to be present, but there is no present without you. You’ve made me responsible, and before you say anything, it’s not because I want to change just for you.” I catch my breath. “I want to change for me too. You’ve made me understand the value of having a best friend, of taking care of someone, a constant, someone I can share my adventures with, and someone to call me out on my bullshit.”
She pulls away from me, putting distance between us the way she always does. My heart aches.
Lily sighs. “But my life is an ugly mess right now.”
There she goes with the same vague responses she keeps using to protect herself.
I’m done accepting them.
I’m done throwing my heart out on the line just for her to tremble at the sight of it.
“Can you give me a clearer reason?” I press. “I deserve to understand why you don’t want to give us a real shot.”
Her nose wrinkles, but I can’t tell which emotion is glassing up her eyes. “I’m sorry, Nico. I can’t.”
“Try, Lily. Please. After everything that happened this summer, you owe me that much.”
She watches me for a few moments, then finally says, “When I was eighteen, I found my first and only boyfriend cheating on me.”
Fuck.
Her admission drops a heavy weight onto my chest, adding to the strain already nestled there.
“I’m sorry. I—I didn’t know.”
“How could you?” She frowns. “His name was Chuck, and we were together for three years. I was so helpless around him. I supported him while he went to college, and I did everything I could for him. I thought that’s what love was, unconditional and selfless.”
The name rings in my ears. Chuck. I can’t help the jealousy flooding my veins for the man who got to experience Lily’s love first.
“Love should be that.” I reach for her hand beneath the water, and she wraps her fingers in mine. “But only with the people who deserve it.”
“Maybe you’re right. Until you, I never thought that I’d fall in love again or be forced to understand what it truly means. But with Chuck…” She pauses, briefly chewing on the raw flesh of her lip. “I let myself ignore the times he wouldn’t spend the night in our bed, the times he’d keep his phone out of reach and wouldn’t answer when I called.” She cringes. “My parents weren’t planning to put me through college. I was a pretty crappy student with average grades and a short attention span, so Chuck and I made a plan. He would get his degree, and I’d get mine afterward.”
My free hand balls into a fist, suppressing the surge of anger pulsating in me. “I’m guessing that plan didn’t work out?”
“It did not.” Lily lets out a wry chuckle. “When his dick was inside the mouth of some girl from his accounting class on the night of our anniversary, the whole thing sort of fell apart.”
“What?”
“Not even the worst part.” Lily pulls her hand out of mine and uses it to toss her braids over her shoulders. “He was cheating on me for over a year with my own friends, women from his classes, and his professors. It was a disaster. His reason was plain and simple. It was my fault.” She looks away, her cheeks turning a bright pink.
“No.” The explanation is starting to help me piece together so much of her behavior, about her walls and her defense mechanisms. A deep part of me aches because I couldn’t be there to keep her safe.
“Yeah. Chuck explained he needed to be with an ambitious and intelligent girl. Not someone who sits around and writes silly stories.”
She finally pins me with her gaze. The sound of the waterfall fills the growing space between us.
This jerk is probably why Lily thinks her writing shouldn’t be taken seriously.
She explains more of the awful details of her only relationship, which turns my heartbreak into nausea.
“You didn’t deserve any of that, Lily. I hope you understand that the scumbag who had the chance to cherish you but broke you instead isn’t worth spending a minute of your time on.”
She lifts her thumb between her teeth, chewing at a stray cuticle. I reach for her hand, wanting to stop the spell of self-inflicted torture, and clasp it in mine.
“I know that now,” she says, “but that breakup is how Zoe Mona was born. I wanted to become the kind of person who would never allow someone to run over my heart the way he did. To become the kind of girl who didn’t let love get in the way.”
I open my mouth to give her some kind of assurance, but I let her go on instead.
Her shoulders slump. “Figuring out how to close this loop in my life is what I need right now, Nico. No more getting revenge on Chuck or myself, no more letting him affect me after all these years.”
“I support you, my girl. I really do. But you don’t have to be on your own.” I take a step closer and lean my forehead to hers. “I didn’t get the privilege of being your first love, of showing you exactly how you should’ve been treated, but I want to be your last.”
“I believe you, Nico. I really do.”
“Then what are you so afraid of? I’d never hurt you that way. I’d never break your heart or disrespect you.”
Lily folds her bottom lip between her teeth again, her brows creasing slightly. “I’m just afraid of being in a relationship right now. I need to go home, back to the safety of my routine, so that I can attempt to process the past few months. It wouldn’t feel right committing to you without gaining some more footing in my life first.”
“I would never let you lose yourself.”
It’s not fair to be upset because I know that sometimes you need to put yourself first. I understand that better than almost anyone. I naively thought love would be the exception to that rule. Despite the mess and liabilities, I’d hoped Lily would want to work through it together.
Lily pulls away from me and takes a short step back. “Nico, please understand. I don’t want to repeat the mistake I made with Chuck. I put my love for him before myself. Until I can have a breath of reality and some time to piece myself back together, I won’t be able to give us a shot.”
A deep part of me resonates with the way she described the desperation of her first love; the all-consuming nature of it is a foreign feeling.
If this is what she wants, then it’s what I have to let her do. However much it pains me to imagine a world where she isn’t in my life every day.
It would be foolish of me to not honor the one request she’s made since the summer took a turn.
“Okay. But what’s the plan now?”
She pulls away from me. The late-afternoon sun peeks through the waterfall, shimmering across her solemn face.
“I—I know I can’t tell you to not be with anyone else—”
A strain worms its way into my jaw. “I don’t want anyone else, Lil.”
“Me neither. But I don’t know how much time I’m going to need and if you want to…”
“Stop.” I fail to tame the unnecessary bite in my voice. “I just need to understand what’s happening with you and us from now on.”
“I don’t have a plan, and I truly can’t tell you how long I’ll need. All I know is I need to get help, real help. Like therapy and consistency.”
That’s not the answer I was hoping for. “I don’t think it’s fair for me to wait for you for an indeterminate amount of time.” My words catch in my throat.
“No. I know it isn’t—”
My ego is too bruised to let her continue. “What do we tell Luca and Avery?”
Her lip quivers slightly, a stray tear rushing down her cheek, and I ache to swipe it away, to erase any of the pain she’s feeling, but I can’t.
I can’t reach for her.
I can’t keep trying to latch myself onto her in the hopes that she’ll ditch the idea that working on herself while being with me is impossible.
“We can tell them the truth,” she answers. “Everything that happened between us. We care for each other, but the timing—at least right now— may not work to give this a real shot.”
My timing is perfectly fine.
I struggle to brush away my prickling resentment to focus on making the best decision for us both. “So, you go back to New York, and I’ll go back to California alone?”
She nods. “Yes.”
“Are we trying to stay in touch? You’ve mentioned being afraid of us
ceasing to exist if we’re not in each other’s lives every day.”
“You’re right. I am afraid of that.” The right corner of her mouth droops down. “I’m afraid that we’ll be away from each other, and this summer will fall into the back of our minds like some dream.”
That’s definitely not fucking happening to me. I know what I feel for her is real.
She blows out a breath. “But I don’t think it’ll help me prioritize my space if we do. I hope you’ll accept me reaching out when I’m ready.”
I stare at her for a long moment.
Remembering each freckle painting her nose and cheeks.
Memorizing the specks of forest green in her eyes, which stare at me with such potent sadness.
I force my mind away from everything that could’ve gone differently today.
What if I didn’t bring up my feelings for her? What if I just pretended everything was fine?
What if I made an effort to fight harder right now? Would she take the chance on our future?
But it’s pointless.
Every single spiraling what-if means nothing if she’s made up her mind.
“Okay. Let’s change our flights and get you home.”
