Getting over your first crush seems impossible - especially when he's the star of the world's biggest movie franchise.
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Jess Wheeler is happily single and perfectly content with her simple life in Hemlock Landing, South Carolina, where all she kn...
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Once upon a time, there was a young girl and a young boy, and they had the same dream: to escape their dreadful lives.
To be fair, not everything about their lives were dreadful. The girl had a loving mother and a big, old house that creaked during all hours of the day and smelled like dust and magic. And the boy had the girl.
They played through the halls of that house, filling it with their joyful noise, and for a moment they felt as if they had the very world in their grasp. The girl forgot that she had a daddy that didn't want her. The boy forgot that his mother didn't feed him the night before because she was too busy working to save their home.
In the secret, in-between moments, when she knew the boy wasn't paying attention, the girl gazed upon him like he was her sun. Which he was. And she thought to herself that her life would always be a livable one if he was in it.
But much later, when the boy wasn't so young anymore, his dream came true: he escaped. And the girl realized that he'd taken her dream with him.
Now, for the first time in too many years to count, that same girl remembers exactly how it feels to love Bay Connor: like hurtling towards the edge of a cliff, knowing that all that's left is the fall and the devastating impact at the bottom.
"Here we are." Bay has no idea how my entire worldview has shifted in the seconds that it takes for us to emerge onto a wooden pier that juts into a lake. And, fool that I am, I push everything down, down, down to the place that I only examine when I'm alone and in my feelings.
"Wow, this is kind of cool," I say, trying my best not to sound like a video game NPC. How do you speak to someone that you just realized you love? These are the moments when I wish Teresa was here, to give me her cool and collected science-brain opinion. But Teresa isn't here, and I better start to do my best damn impression of a normal person.
"Let's rest that ankle." Bay leads me over to the end of the dock. He helps me down, and we let our legs dangle off of the edge. All there is to see are more trees and the setting sun.
"This is beautiful," I say quietly, keeping my gaze carefully trained away from his.
"When was the last time you did something like this?"
I shrug. "I honestly can't remember. Maybe never."
"Because you're always at the Magnolia?" He asks. I know that it's a harmless question, but all the same I feel it get my back up. I finally turn and look at Bay.
"Why does everybody in the world ask me that?"
His brows furrow. "Ask you what?"
"'Oh, you don't have a life because you work with your mom, right? Oh, you're too busy to have fun, right?' Like, Jesus." Bay's watching me like he's afraid of what I might say next, but I'm too messed up right now to give a shit.
