Dreams of 18

Maybe it’s naïve and romantic. But fuck it.

I am a romantic. I’m a dreamer. And I accept that now.

Acceptance is wonderful, isn’t it?

The most wonderful thing.

I’ve always felt ashamed of my feelings for him. Even before everything went down. I felt ashamed that I wanted my best friend’s dad. I wanted to move away so I could forget him. So I didn’t break any rules. So I could bury my dreams. I even thought that I’d find someone else, maybe. I’d find an appropriate guy to crush on.

Instead, I should’ve believed in my dreams, my desires. I should’ve believed in my heart.

It’s okay, though. It ends tonight.

All of this. This guilt, this shame, this anger. This whole fucked-up mess that started on my eighteenth birthday, that started with my poison kiss.

Only it wasn’t poison.

It was just that: a kiss. A lonely, filled with longing and overflowing with dreams kiss.

Besides, the timing wasn’t right then. I was too young, barely eighteen, but I’m not too young now. There’s no one in the world who can stop us.

No human, no law, not even God.

After I made Brian promise that he’d call his dad and fix things, we talked for hours. I told him not to tell his dad about my feelings and he agreed. He asked me if his dad was the reason why I wouldn’t come over to his house and I said yes. I told him how it all started and how guilty I felt for crushing on his dad.

He told me that he’d cut ties with everyone back in Connecticut. He’d blocked all the people on social media who’d message him about me and the kiss.

In fact, there were several people who messaged him about my breakdown too and for a second, I really got freaked out. I thought he knew, but as it turns out, he doesn’t. Because when he shared those things with Fiona, she wrote them off as rumors.

Thank God for her.

We even talked about all the stupid, nasty rumors about him and me. And for the first time ever, I laughed about them. It felt okay to laugh about him being my alleged fiancé.

It felt like old times.

Then, I did something important.

Something that has been missing in my life for months now. I got out a new diary from my fat hobo and I gave it a different name: The Diary of a Blooming Violet.

I wrote it with a red glitter pen, even.

To honor my new dreams and a certain someone who said I was beautiful.

The certain someone who came back from work a little while ago.

He took one look at me, my red dress, clenched his jaw in anger, shot me an almost accusing glare and disappeared down the hall like I set him on fire.

He’s in the bathroom now, taking a shower. I can hear the water as I walk toward him.

With every step that I take, my heart grows bigger. Bigger and bigger until it’s like a balloon in my chest, so swollen that it’s painful to cage it in my ribs.

I reach the bathroom door after what seems like ages. I’m expecting it to be locked but it’s not. In fact, it’s not even closed the whole way. Like he just wanted to get out of my presence as fast as possible and didn’t care about locking doors or where he went.

The steam flows out of the ajar door like water, like something from a dream.

I know a normal, sane girl wouldn’t go in there and intrude on his privacy, but I’m not a normal girl.

I’m not sane either.

I’m crazy for him. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

And in love.

I’m in love with the man on the other side of the door and I’m going in. I push at it with my trembling fingers and it opens without a sound.

As soon as I enter, I’m hit by the misty quality of the air. Everything is foggy and thick and barely visible. Even so, I still make him out.

Just like I thought when I was sixteen, he still looks like the tallest and the broadest thing I’ve ever seen.

So tall that I have to stand on his feet to reach up to his mouth. So broad that when I hug him, I don’t think my arms will meet.

And he’s naked.

Oh God, he’s naked.

He is partially hidden by the shower curtain –stupid shower curtain –so I can only see the back of his body but gosh, do I see it.

His shoulders are corded. So corded. They are like heavy slabs of stone that slope down to his back. The back with all the grooves and the great plains and terrains that the water is sluicing down from.

But that’s not the shocking part.

I’ve seen his bare upper body before, back in Connecticut when he’d work in his yard during the summer. What I haven’t seen ever in my entire life is his… bare ass.