After anything

As I clumsily clambered out, I took a good look at her. She sat on the ledge, the sheen of her jet-black hair shimmering in the dim light of her room behind me, gripping the edge with both hands as her body shook silently. No longer straight up sobbing anymore, but very far from feeling better.

I took a deep breath, trying to prepare myself for this talk, as I slowly stepped up next to her. I stayed standing, though – still wary about what being too close to her could do to me, I suppose.

“…Charley?”

She quickly looked up once she heard my voice, before looking away again, wiping her tears for the umpteenth time. The sleeves of her shirt already looked soaked through. “I didn’t realize that’s how much you…” she sniffled, unable to finish her thought. “I can’t let you do that.”

“Let me do what?”

“I’m not an idiot, Luke. We both know you’re not considering working in Australia because you’ve suddenly developed a love for the great outdoors, or for whatever bullshit reasons you know Dad would want to hear. It’s because of me.”

I kind of wanted to make a snide comment about her sense of self-importance, but unfortunately what she had said was so obviously true it would just be a waste of breath.

“If anyone should leave, I should,” she continued. She sounded fully dejected. “I could … going back to the States shouldn’t be too difficult, I don’t think. I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Wait, what?” I was genuinely surprised by her suggestion. “What about your plan?”

“I really don’t give-” she stopped herself, groaning. “The past six months, with my plan, I was supposed to be back on track … but every day I’ve been waking up feeling like I have no idea where I’m going.”

“And so … what?” I muttered. “You think moving to America is gonna solve that?”

“No. It’s just the right thing for me to do, for us. I think.” Charley closed her eyes. “Ngh … I don’t know. I don’t want us to be apart,” she said under her breath, painfully soft. “I can’t bear it.”

My heart lurched. “Stop it.”

“Huh?”

“Stop it. You’re being a dick.”

Charley frowned up at me, a hurt look in her eyes. “How am I being a dick?”

“Have you even heard yourself recently? You ask if I’m still in love with you; you tell me you need me to be in your life; now you can’t bear us being apart?” I shook my head in disbelief. “You are … the most infuriating person I’ve ever met.”

“I’m supposed to just not say how I feel?” she choked, folding her arms.

“You cannot be serious,” I laughed in disbelief. “All I’ve ever wanted from you was to say how you really feel – not what you think Mum, Dad and your friends would want, or what checks the boxes in your almighty plan-”

“Fuck! I was wrong, okay? Is that what you wanna hear?” she cried out, interrupting me. I saw tears begin to well in her eyes again, which she wiped away angrily.

“What do you mean?” I muttered. “Wrong how?”

“I thought I’d be okay with giving up what we had last Summer,” she replied shakily. “I convinced myself that just meant we’d stop sleeping together but keep everything else. I know now that was stupid to believe. And I know how selfish it was to not consider whether you’d even want to do that after how I treated you when you told me you loved me.

“But more than any of that, I was scared.” I could see tears glistening in her eyes again, but this time she let them be. “Because you were right, of course you were. Before the end, our relationship was well past the point where it was just about the sex, or just about hanging out with my stepbrother. I tried to ignore it – my friends all grilling me, asking why I wasn’t letting them set me up, why I was ditching them to meet my secret boyfriend. I tried to ignore the way I just wanted to be with you all the time, the way you made me feel. No … I needed to ignore it, because to acknowledge any of that would be the same as acknowledging I didn’t want to follow my plan anymore. I was way over the line back then, but everything I said about how shitty and difficult it could get for everyone if two people in our situation got together was true.

“I know you think you understand what my plan was, but you don’t. It wasn’t just some neurotic way of keeping myself in line. It gave me clear goals I could strive for, a structure to my life that I could always fall back on. It was a way to make sure I was on track to help people like I always wanted to, and a way to stay connected to my dad, who I struggle to remember more and more with every year that passes.” She took a deep breath. “So, when you confessed to me, it felt like for the first time in my life that I might be setting myself up to spiral down a path that was doomed to fail. I panicked, and I lashed out.”

She sighed, tears now trickling freely down her face. “I told you it would be easy for you and I to forget it all. I told you I never felt the same way you did. And I was wrong.”

I stared down at her, the information dump I’d just experienced almost too much to handle. Hearing her side, hearing about her plan, after all this time. And more than anything else … I had been right. She’d had feelings for me too. Real feelings. The knowledge caused a conflicting mix of relief and frustration about everything that had happened.

But standing there on the balcony, I pushed it all back. That didn’t matter anymore. There was only one thing that did. “And now?” I asked softly. “How do you feel now?”

“Now? It doesn’t make a difference, does it?” she replied, looking away. “I don’t know.”

“Of course it does,” I said, thinking back to last September. “You couldn’t look me in the eyes last time either, you know. I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, you don’t?” she scoffed quietly. “Well … that’s great.”

“Uh huh.” I breathed in sharply. Something she had said stuck out to me. “Why are you talking about it in the past tense?”

Charley's eyes grew wide. “What?”

“Your plan. You said, ‘what my plan was.’”

“I didn’t … I don’t know, I…” She suddenly looked a little dazed, like she hadn’t even noticed she’d said it like that. But she quickly shook it off. And then she finally stood up to face me and look me in the eye with surprising determination. “Never mind that.”

“Seriously?”

She looked at me pointedly. “You didn’t answer me the other day, either.”

Ah, right. “You mean … am I still in love with you?” I knew the answer, even if yet again, I’d spent the last six months trying to forget it. Was it not obvious at this point? Was there any point in denying it to her, or more importantly, to myself? I thought back to what Max had said when we talked – no more skirting around. Point blank.

I shrugged helplessly. “Of course I am.”

She stared at me, still wide-eyed, for what seemed like an age. “You … after everything?”

I looked back at her, makeup smudged from crying and hair fluttering in the wind, standing in front of me on the balcony connecting our childhood bedrooms. The girl I had wanted since I was eight years old. For years now, I had tried again and again to move on from her, repress my feelings. To the extent I had just tried to convince myself it was a good idea to leave her behind forever. But it had never worked – because at the end of the day, no matter what direction our relationship took, she would always be the most incredible person I could ever hope to meet. The most important person to me in the world. One of one.

“After anything, Charley.”

She let out a shuddering breath. “Oh, man.” I watched, as entranced by her beauty as ever, as she wiped her eyes, before clenching both hands into fists, a pained smile growing on her face. “Oh, fuck. I don’t get it. How … why do you do this to me?”

My mouth felt incredibly dry. Like every other big development in our relationship, this was all happening so quickly. My head throbbed as it slowly dawned on me. Right here, right now – is she about to… “Do what?”

“You know what. You always knew, Luke.” She shook her head slowly, biting her lip. “God. What the hell do we do from here?”

I swallowed, trying to be braver. “How about whatever we want?”

“Oh … holy shit. We’re really gonna do this, aren’t we?” Charley glanced up at me, breathed out hard. She looked almost as nervous as I was. “When I heard you were coming back, I really convinced myself I could try and get you to just be my little brother again. And that it was something I wanted, too. But it’s never gonna happen, is it? I tried so hard to get over it, hammer home to myself all the ways this could be a stupid decision, but … we’re just too far gone.”

She took a step closer, and my heart leapt into my throat. “I think I never actually wanted to go back.” Her voice was barely louder than a whisper. “I think … to answer you from before – after all this time, I was able to realize deep down that it’s time for a change of plans. You matter to me more than any of it.”

With that, she jumped at me and threw her arms around my neck, coming in to kiss me for the first time in half a year.

But just before she could, I stopped her. Almost instinctively. I looked down at her, my heart pounding, holding out my hand to stop her coming any closer. She looked up, confusion but thankfully not hurt showing in her eyes.

“Wait," I breathed. "I … I need to know exactly what you’re thinking. What your plan is, what you actually want out of this. I need to hear you say it. I can’t jump into it blindly again.”

She gazed up at me, the corners of her mouth beginning to creep up into a smile again. “Okay, Luke.” She took a deep breath. “My plan is pretty simple – I want to be with you, all the way. And I don’t care that it’ll be difficult, and that I don’t know how it’s all going to go from here. Because I love you. I’m in love with you. And there is nothing that could ever change that fact.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

She beamed at me, her eyes sparkling. “So, can I kiss you now?”

I nodded. And she did.