Page 68 of Later Bloom

“And all he knows is that in all the years you’ve spent on this earth, you never once felt romantic feelings strong enough to actually be with anyone. And it’s fine! But you can’t really blame him for assuming he wouldn’t be the exception to the rule.”

Aubrey shifts so she doesn’t face Maggie anymore. She plops her feet on the coffee table, rests her head against the couch, and stares at the Christmas tree next to the TV, on the wall opposite from her. She can’t tell now if she’s exhausted because of her flight or because she’s spent every waking moment thinking of Arthur—they feel indiscernible and intertwined and tiring in different, complementary ways.

“Fine, yeah. I guess he doesn’t know.”

“So you’ll have to tell him,” Maggie says, with a gentle nudge of Aubrey’s arm.

It’s impressive how quickly it feels overwhelming, all of it. Thoughts of Arthur and their conversations, and how they haven’t talked in a while, how maybe she’s imagined things, how she might be wrong. How when she sits there and tries to picture events unfolding in the way she hopes, she fails, like she can’t imagine there’d ever be a way this would work out.

But surely it could, or how would people ever fall in love? Sometimes things must align and work out. Out loud, Aubrey says, “Isn’t it so weird to think about, that two people can grow similar feelings at the very same time? And it just works out?”

“What do you mean?”

“It just sounds so unlikely. That I would like someone, and they’d just so happen to like me as well. Right? Maybe it’s because I’ve gone so long without it ever happening. Maybe because I missed it by that much, so many times. It’s like I’ve been so desperate for this, and now that I’m here and it could be within reach, I can’t believe it would ever be real at all. That someone would like me. That we would be together.”

For a moment, neither of them says anything. Maggie has pulled her knees up to her chest and is resting her chin on her corduroy pants. She says, “You’re so nearly there. I promise it’s real.”

“Yeah. I’m just trying to make sense of this, I guess. It’s very new. Very strange.”

“It won’t feel like that forever.” Maggie sounds a little distant, like she doesn’t quite believe herself. Her tone changes when she adds, “I’m very happy for you, you know. We ought to celebrate.”

Aubrey huffs. Her ears are warm. “We don’t have to celebrate.”

“Well, I have to celebrate. I certainly didn’t sit through all these years waiting for someone to catch your eye only to brush it aside now as if it’s nothing. You’ve done it, for fuck’s sake. This is it. Will you rejoice even a little, or do I have to do all the work?”

“I’m rejoicing.”

“You’re lying, is what you’re doing.”

“Fine. I’m trembling in terror—is that better? I’m fucking terrified. I feel like it might slip through my fingers at any moment, maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and I won’t feel this way anymore, or maybe he doesn’t have the same feelings at all, or maybe he does and we’ll give it a go and after a month, or a year, it’ll fall apart, and I’ll have to do it all over again. And I can’t imagine losing this now—losing him, though that sounds ridiculous, because we have nothing, and we’re not even in the same city at the moment, and he’s probably not even thinking of me, but that’s how I feel—like I want to cling onto this and make sure it’s real and soak it into my bones.” When Aubrey stops talking, she realizes she’s forgotten to breathe. With an inhale, she adds, “Or whatever,” because the way she hears herself—she’s gone and lost her mind.

“Well that’s very intense.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“But it’s how things go, yeah? They’re very intense. It’s not like you don’t know that—I’ve rambled on about how this new guy I met at the bar was the love of my life, and I dissected a two-word text until it lost all meaning, and I cried because I got ghosted by a guy who exclusively wore mismatched socks. It’s intense, all of it.” Maggie leans over to rest her hand on Aubrey’s arm. Her eyes are wide, like she’s desperate for her point to be heard. She says earnestly, “That’s the best part.”

Aubrey concedes, “Fine, okay. Let’s celebrate.”

Her bags sit by the door for the rest of the evening. They open a bottle of white and order too much Thai food that pairs horribly with the wine but they don’t care. They sit on the couch and Maggie lets Aubrey talk about Arthur for too long, rambling about things he’s said that Maggie can’t possibly care about, looks they shared, how she likes the way he says her name, his hair. Maggie is the best sport about it, a seasoned expert. She sits there and nods and says, “Oh, my god, really?” many times.

They go to bed too late, but tomorrow there’s nothing planned anyway. Nothing but more overthinking, maybe some Christmas shopping.

At some point late in the evening Maggie’s brother comes home and asks Aubrey, “So I guess you’re back, then?” He doesn’t wait for her answer before he heads back to his room. Some things refuse to change.

Aubrey tries to sleep on the couch. For a while she lies there in the dark apartment with the moonlight filtering in, soaking everything in blue. She checks her phone, again and again, until she falls asleep with it in her hand, her message thread with Arthur open on the screen.

Chapter Nineteen

Christmas dinner is at Aubrey’s childhood home again this year. As usual, this doesn’t make sense, because the house is small and crowded and her mother is terrible at hosting. Marie gets much too stressed in the hours leading up to the event, and Aubrey’s father has yet to care enough to lend a hand—or maybe he’s protecting his peace, it’s hard to say. He stands there and asks what he should do, and Marie says there isn’t anything, that she prefers to do it on her own, though she starts vacuuming and gets distracted by the pillows, and the oven beeps, and nothing really gets finished until the very last minute.

Aubrey used to offer to get there early to help. Now she doesn’t—mostly because it allows for too much questioning and not enough of the nostalgic, childlike time at home she hoped to endulge in, and also because her mother refuses to delegate, even now that Aubrey is grown. It made her very sad to realize maybe she and her parents would be better off seeing a little less of each other as they grew older. Then she noticed that most of her friends felt similarly about their parents to some degree, and seeing less of her mom and dad also allowed her to miss them more. To appreciate their flaws a bit more, in a homesick sort of way.

So instead, she spends the afternoon wrapping her hastily purchased presents and getting ready with Maggie, who’s heading to her father’s place for the evening. They cramp in Maggie’s narrow bathroom and put mascara on over the sink, like they’re nineteen again, which is nice.

Maggie doesn’t bring up Arthur, at least not by name. Sometimes she asks, “So, any news?” and then Aubrey delivers the tiniest updates she’s managed to rack up, like how she’d forwarded him a video yesterday and he’d replied, “Haha!”

Earlier this week he’d sent her a picture of the harbour, and sometimes he’ll share news from Lunenburg, but Aubrey isn’t very good at coming up with responses. It feels foreign, chatting with him. They were never lengthy texters to begin with, and Aubrey is self-conscious of everything she writes now, wondering if it’s funny enough, smart enough, witty enough, and also because something has shifted. It’s obvious and tense and left painfully unsaid.