“I don’t know, Lily, but while we were filming, everything was easy. We worked seamlessly together, and even the director commented on how smooth each take went. It all just felt oddly…normal. And fun.”
“And the problem?”
“The problem is that at some point during all of this, I forgot we were pretending to be a couple! I forgot, Lily! And Nathan was…” I sigh remembering the feel of all the little touches he constantly gave me. Remembering the way his hand splayed out firmly on my low back. Remembering how my whole nervous system hummed to life when he smiled at me like I was the only woman in the world for him. “It was nothing like I expected it to be. I don’t know…it was almost like he was feeling what I was feeling.”
She’s dead silent for a beat before she bursts out laughing. So loud. So over the top I have to pull my phone away from my ear. “OF COURSE HE WAS, YOU LOONEY TUNE, BECAUSE HE LIKES YOU TOO!”
“Okay, well name-calling is not nice.”
“Bree, I want to shake you right now. Have you truly never thought Nathan has feelings for you?”
“Never! But can you stop being so intense for a second, because I’m freaking out and you’re not helping.”
She sighs deeply. “Can’t we just skip this freak-out, you can run back over to his place and get it on, and then you can call me in the morning to tell me I’m right and you’ll listen to me from now on?”
“No,” I say firmly. “I’m not going over to his place and there will not be any getting it on. I won’t do a fling with Nathan.”
“Umm, I hate to break it to you, but you’re kind of in one now.”
“THE FAKE KIND!”
“Now you’re yelling. Just shush a little. So you don’t want a fling? Fine. But that doesn’t mean you have to freak out just because you think he might have feelings for you too. Maybe you can use this opportunity with Nathan to explore some of the boundaries you’ve put up in the past. Treat it like a real relationship starting from ground zero and see if something new develops between you two naturally.”
I sigh, mentally reciting a thousand reasons why that could go wrong. “Then I’ll be opening my heart up to hope, and that’s what I promised myself I wouldn’t let it have during all of this. It might end badly, and then I’ll be friendless.”
“Bree, hope is healthy. Even if you prepare yourself for the worst in life, it will never make the fall hurt less. So why not let yourself really and truly want this instead? And then, if things end badly, I’ll help you eat your feelings.”
I think back to Nathan today, and my skin lights up like a circuit board, zinging with energy in every single place he touched me. I want to give in to that hope Lily is talking about, but I’m too scared. I’d rather just wait until it’s a sure thing. You know, until he drops down on his knee and has a ring kind of sure thing?
“I think I need to do the opposite. I need to implement MORE rules until this is all over.”
She groans, deeply discouraged by me. “Why do you even call me about stuff like this? Next time just talk to your wall if you’re not going to listen to my advice.”
“Grumpy much?”
“Yes! Because you think you’re in such a good place right now. You tell me all the time how happy you are that the course of your life changed and you’re working in the studio now instead of dancing in a company, but you don’t see what I see.” I don’t like this shift. Lily is not teasing now.
“I am happy, Lily. I love being an instructor, and my life is more full than it used to be.”
“I know you’re happy at the studio and you’re making the most of how things turned out, but I also see something else. After the accident, you stopped letting yourself dream completely.” She pokes an old wound I didn’t know was still there. “You went to therapy, and you learned to grieve the future you planned for an
d that was all great and helpful, but then it’s like you learned to cope so well you completely stopped hoping for anything. You’re seriously the queen of making the most of what you have now, but I’m not sure that’s completely healthy. Not if it means never dreaming or striving for more.”
My instant reaction is to defend myself. After the car accident and my surgery, I shut down. Depression and anxiety were heavy, and even just getting out of bed in the morning was difficult. I pushed Nathan away completely, and then after he went off to college and everything felt even harder, my mom and dad got me into therapy. It was the best thing they could have done for me. I learned how to properly grieve ballet as I knew it, and little by little, my life got brighter. One day, I realized I was feeling happy again. I was doing the emotional work and the physical work to get my body moving again in a new way. Sure, I had limits, but I learned to work within them and appreciate what my body could do instead of focusing on what it couldn’t.
Bottom line, until ten seconds ago when my sister just dropped a bomb on my heart, I thought the wounds from my accident were healed. I thought my mental work was done. But is she right? Do I not let myself hope for more out of life?
My mind races not just to Nathan, but to the studio. I’ve been so unwilling to work toward making any dreams come true concerning it. Now that Lily has pointed it out, it’s almost as if I can hear my hope screaming from a locked closet in my heart. I want that non-profit space more than anything, but I’ve been terrified to hope for it. I want Nathan, but I’m petrified to lose him.
I can see that my sister is right, but I don’t know how to snap my fingers and change the way I feel. My scars remind me of that crushing disappointment I felt at seventeen and how hard it was to piece myself back together afterward. I don’t want to go through that again. So yeah, maybe I’m missing a little bit of hope, but to me, it’s a small price to pay to avoid shattering again.
As far as Nathan and I are concerned, I just need to hold on and get through this fake relationship until we go back to BFFs who don’t touch. Then, after that, I’ll be open to starting a new relationship with someone else where I won’t have so much to lose.
“Mr. Donelson!” A voice calls out to me when I get out of my truck. I turn toward Bree’s dance studio and see a teenage boy standing outside the door that leads to the pizza parlor’s kitchen below the studio.
“Who is that? Who’s yelling your name?” my mom asks from my phone, which I’ve been on for fifteen minutes now. I wouldn’t mind talking to her if she wanted to actually talk with me. Instead, it’s a long droning speech about all the ways she thinks I could enhance my image (I’ll give you a hint, a children’s golf day at her country club was mentioned) and then nitpicking every move of my last game. On the rare occasions when she does ask to hear about my week, I always get the feeling she’s really only fishing for ways she can comment on what I’m doing wrong. Bottom line, I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut about my private life, and I’ll give her about ten more seconds before I end the call and avoid her other attempts at communication for another week.
“Just a fan I think,” I tell her, squinting toward the teen about twenty yards away.