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csacg · 3 years ago

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My heart is so broken and so full at the same time.

you and me,

—a the summer i turned pretty fic starring my first and favourite book boyfriend, jeremiah fisher ♡

「part forty, reader insert」

JEREMIAH

It’s quiet.

All around me, it’s quiet. No hum of the television, chirps of a bird, or the tune of a favourite song to signal an incoming phone call. Everything is quiet except the inside of my head.

For the last two days, quiet has been the general story of the atmosphere my body is stuffed in. Everyone in the house moves around like a ghost. We don’t say much of anything to each other except the common ‘dinner is in five minutes’ or ‘I’m going out.’

Belly cries nonstop. Usually, she does it behind the door of her bedroom, but because mine is right next to hers, I hear it through the walls, especially when I don’t want to. Because of that, I’ve taken to abusing my headphones and Spotify account. I play awful rock music or shitty rap to filter out other noises I don’t want to hear. I do it so much that my ears ring throughout the day.

Mom is the only person who smiles anymore. She smiles at breakfast, at lunch, and at dinner. She smiles when she paints or when she gardens. She smiles when Conrad tells her he doesn’t want to eat dinner and she smiles even more when Laurel tells her not to. I think the two of them are fighting, but I’m not too keen on figuring out if that’s true or not.

Today, my eyes are bound to the ceiling. I can’t look away even if I want to.

All my summers have been spent in this house. Mom inherited it from my grandparents who bought it back in the early seventies. Mom spent all of her summers here, too, with her parents and her friends, then eventually, with Laurel and with Dad and the rest of us. This house has all her love in it and it’s everywhere, inside every nook and cranny, splattered on every wall and floorboard.

I don’t wipe the fresh tears which begin to stream from the corner of my eyes. I’ve cried so much lately. It feels like it’s half of the only things I do at all now. I’ve gotten so good at it, too. I know when it’s okay to cry and when I should hide my tears away.

There is a knock at my door. Instead of telling the person to come in, I pull my blanket over my head and pretend no one is there at all. Maybe if I pretend enough, I can pretend away reality.

Someone comes in anyway.

Her presence is muted, though her steps are solid and precise. Although her figure is petite, her strides are long and in seconds flat, she is taking a seat on the corner of my bed. I hear her take in a short breath, preparing herself for what she wants to say to me.

“It’s almost noon,” she tries gently. “Aren’t you hungry?”

I count to five in my mind prior to answering her. I’m not sure why I do it. I just know that I need to. I need those few seconds to keep myself from exploding whenever anyone speaks to me.

“No.”

Her fingers latch onto the hem of my blanket and pull downwards. I don’t bother to struggle. If this is a war, she will find a way to win. She always does.

“Jere, you haven’t eaten since yesterday. You have to be hungry.”

I lick my lips and turn my body away from her. “Well, I’m not.”

“The Jeremiah I know can eat six times a day if he wants to, so how am I supposed to believe you when you say you’re not hungry?”

“Laurel…”

Her smile is infectious when she teases, “Yes, Jere-Bear?”

“Please go away.”

Although I’m not expecting her to listen to me, her hand on my face is startling. Laurel brushes my hair back, her smile dimming. Her eyes fill with tears but she doesn’t cry. “You kids grew up too fast,” she murmurs. Her hand is soft on my skin.

I rub my eye with the back of my hand. “What does that mean?”

“It means…” The shake of her head tells me she wants to keep the answer to herself. “Come down and eat, okay? Even if it’s just a chocolate bar.” Laurel hates sugary foods most of all because she claims it rots our teeth, so her willingly saying I can have some is a massive deal.

After she leaves, I sit up in bed a little then reach for my phone. It’s holding onto ten percent battery life because I haven’t charged it since yesterday morning. When the screen clicks on, text messages fill the area and so do missed calls. All from the one person I hate and miss, at the same time.

I click away the notifications without looking at them. I already know what they say. What I’m left with then is a picture. A picture I took of her in the driver’s seat of my car smiling at me like she was both a little bit annoyed and over the moon with happiness.

My thumb flows over the part of her cheek which shines under the sun. That’s when I notice she’s wearing my t-shirt, too. An old one I hadn’t even known was missing. There are probably a crazy number of my clothes in her closet which neither of us knows about.

I used to leave a shirt or a crewneck in her bedroom as a kid on purpose, just to see what she would do with it. At first, she didn’t do anything but give them back. But around the time we were thirteen, she stopped. And then she started wearing them and pretending like they weren’t mine even though we both knew they were. I did a lot of stuff back then to get her to swing her gaze on me. I guess she was doing the same.

I enter my phone and head for my messages. There are more than a hundred from her from today alone. They seem to go on forever as I scroll through them, more or less saying – begging – for the same thing.

YN: please talk to me

YN: i’m so sorry, fishie

YN: please

YN: you have every right to be mad

YN: i know that

YN: i’m so so sorry

YN: i just want to know if you’re okay

YN: did you eat?

YN: you have to eat

YN: please eat

YN: i know you don’t want to see me or hear from me

YN: but just tell me once that you’re okay

YN: please

YN: i love you

YN: you can hate me all you want but just know that

YN: i love you and i’ll never stop

There were so many times this summer when I wanted to hear those three words from her so bad that I thought it would drive me crazy–both the want and the receiving. I had spent so many of my years of my childhood the exact same way, hoping and hoping she would feel the way about me that I felt about her.

Mom says me and YN are inevitable. From the moment we met, we were meant to be together. Even when I cried in her arms last night and told her how angry I was with YN, my mom said the same thing.

“You two you will find your way back to each other. I know it.”

And I believe her, too. I don’t want to, but I do. I’m just so mad. I feel so cheated. I never thought YN would lie to me. Not about anything. That isn’t how our friendship operated. But if I look back on this summer, I can see all the lies we did tell each other–the big and the small ones.

Is this who we are?

Liars?

My finger hovers above the text box. So much of me wants to text her back, to yell at her digitally like I can’t physically. But I don’t. I can’t. I put my phone in my pocket.

Exhausted despite having only just woken up, I slip out of bed wearing the shorts I never changed out of yesterday and pad my way to the door. When I open it, I’m greeted by the familiar scent of cheeseburgers and their presence in the doorway. I pick up a slightly greasy, brown paper bag and scoff, ripping off the note stapled to the top. I crumple it up and shove it in my pocket without reading it. It probably says the same thing as the one from yesterday.

I’m sorry. I love you.

A bedroom door down the hall cracks open. Steven walks out with his head bent over his phone. When he notices me, he starts to say something but then his gaze falls on the McDonald’s bag in my arms.

“You let her in again?”

His expression gives away his guilt, though he says nothing. I push the paper bag into his chest and tell him, “You eat that,” then I head downstairs with a pain akin to flashes of thunder in my chest.

Mom is in her garden. Her plants surround her as if she is in a forest of her own, and there is an easel set up in front of her. Her white overalls are covered in old paint marks, splashes of reds and blues and purples. Her hair is loose and every time the wind blows a little too hard, strands fall into her eyes and she pushes them away with the back of her hands. And she’s smiling. Happily. As if life is just so perfect.

Conrad walks in from the side with his boogie board. He stops by our Mom and she smiles even more. She reaches up to caress his face and he lets her even though Conrad usually hates it when people touch him. When we were kids, he told me I’m not allowed to hug him unless it’s for something really important. I didn’t care. I hugged him anyway.

I turn away from the scene. The middle of my chest burns with an oppressive weight. I busy myself with the kitchen cabinets so I don’t have to think about it. I search through two before I locate my old, blue tumbler. I need something to drink, preferably with ice and lots of sugar.

Conrad waddles in from the back door. He has a little smile on his face and it makes me sick. He drags murky water and wet sand inside and for once, he seems not to care about it so much. I would consider it a win that he’s not picking up a mop except I know why he isn’t, and the knowledge makes me even angrier.

“You’re tracking dirt into the house,” I tell him pointedly. “Who’s gonna clean it?”

Conrad raises a brow at me, and he looks a bit bemused. “Since when do you care about that?”

“Since now.”

He opens the storage closet and grabs a mop. He starts in on the mess then stops. Hesitation paints his features. He thinks for what feels like a whole minute before he finally speaks up again. “Can we talk?”

No.

“What’s there to talk about? The fact that you knew Mom was sick this whole time or that you fucking lied about it to my face for months?” I swig a big gulp of my lemon water for show. Mentally, I cringe from the taste. I don’t know why I expected mine to taste like hers. It’s missing her touch. “Take your pick, big brother.”

“Jere,” he sighs. He rubs his eyebrow frantically. “I had to.”

“No, you didn’t have to. You just did. Just like you always do, you did what you wanted and left me out.”

Conrad stares at me for a second. He looks at me like he pities me, feels sorry for me, and that makes me even more irate. He has no right. None. He’s known since fucking April. He had all this time to get used to it, to know it, to look at our mom and think about the future without her.

Dad says he’s my older brother so he’s responsible for taking care of me, and when our parents aren’t around, he has to give me everything I need. But what about everything he’s taken?

I start to walk past him when he says, “I was just trying to protect you.”

I flip around to growl at him. “From knowing something about our mom? I think you forget that she belongs to both of us.”

He doesn’t look at me when he whispers, “I never said she doesn’t.”

“You say a lot of stupid shit without saying it.”

My aggression seems not to phase him. Conrad goes back to cleaning up his mess then making more of it as he shuffles around. For some ridiculous reason, I don’t go back upstairs. I want to but I don’t. Whatever keeps me here, watching my brother with narrowed eyes, is the same thing which escalates the pressure in my chest.

I don’t know what comes over me when I blurt, “You still like her. Don’t you?”

The her in question is obvious. Conrad stops mopping to look at me. The two of us become encased in a room of silent explosives, and I’m buzzing to load one up for a massive show.

His pitiful expression returns and I step forward, ready to smack it off his face, when he tries, “Jere… come on, man. You know I don’t.” He swallows and looks away for half a second. Then he rubs his eyes. “Even if I did, it wouldn’t matter.”

I hate it. I hate when he gets like this. Like just because he’s older, he’s smarter and more mature and everything he says is better than anything I could ever say. When I’m mad, it ticks me off even more. He has no fucking right. Mom raised us as equals. He just thinks he’s better than me. He’s always thought that.

“Of course it fucking matters. You two kept Mom’s secret to yourselves all summer. Who knows what else you did behind my back.”

The hidden accusation in my words makes me cringe. I hate myself a little bit for suspecting anything romantic happened between them when I know, in my heart of hearts, that nothing did. That nothing will. YN wouldn’t do that to me.

…right?

Conrad sets the mop against a wall. He frowns at me. “You know what, Jere?

Maybe I could’ve been enough of an asshole to make a move on her. But her? You know she never would.”

“I don’t know anything since you two seem to keep everything from me.”

My brother rolls his eyes. “No one can talk to you when you’re being childish.”

This time, I don’t hold myself back. I let my innate desire push me into tackling him to the ground, like we used to when Dad made us wrestle each other after dinner. I hated wrestling Conrad because it was never about having fun. It was about showing Dad who was the best. Conrad always won. But not this time. Not ever again.

I throw my arms around his middle and drop us both to the ground in a whirlwind of body weight, flying limbs, and heavy breathing. He instantly responds, exactly like I knew he would–by shielding himself when I go to punch him. He tries to move out of the way but I’m relentless. I want this. I need this.

“We could have done something!” I shout, shoving him back with all the force I can muster. His head hits a wall and he groans. I go in for another punch. “All fucking summer, Conrad! You kept it to yourself! We could have done something to save her!” He pushes me in the chest but I hardly move an inch. He forgets that I still play football even if he doesn’t.

“Jere–”

I hit his jaw. “Shut the fuck up!”

Conrad groans again when I cram him up against the wall. I grab him by the neck of his shirt to force him to look at me. I get ready to say something, something to make him feel as shitty as I’m feeling, when I notice the small tears beginning to drip down his cheeks. I freeze. His eyes land on mine. “It’s aggressive,” he whispers, and I notice a thick bruise starting to form along his jawline. He looks like the fourteen year old he was when he got tackled in football for the first time. Dad told him he couldn’t cry and we spent the whole ride home in silence. “It’s spread to her liver. There’s nothing we can do.”

I stumble back, flinching as if he just punched me. My lips wobble as he cries. Conrad Fisher, my older brother who never cries. I think about how I don’t want to cry. I can’t. Not in front of him. “N-No. That’s not t-true. Mom isn’t–”

“Jere…” His voice chips off at the ends, then softens. He puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes. There’s no strength to it. None at all. “I’m sorry.”

I push him away and start to stand, only to end up on the floor again. I don’t look at him when I grumble, “You’re just like Dad.” Conrad makes a noise from the bottom of his throat. It rings heavily through the kitchen, leaving its mark upon the walls and on our skin. I look at him angrily. “All he does is take and take and you took this from me, you know that? You and YN.” I put all the pressure I can manage on my knees and stand up. My whole body trembles with pain. Everything around me spins, rings, and then blurs. It feels like sensory overload. My mouth twists in a snarl as I grouch, “Both of you can go to hell.”

The moment I turn on my heels to stalk away, Mom steps in from the backyard. The screen door is halfway open, a light breeze flowing in as summer welcomes the end of August. Mom has her arms full of paint supplies. When she looks at us, every part of her being seems to fall apart in front of me.

I suck in a breath, hating myself for letting her see us like this. I always promised her that I’d be good to my brother, that I wouldn’t fight with him about anything. But what am I supposed to do about this? This big, fat, ugly mess in our lives? This horrible thing I can’t fix?

I try to hold in the tears. I try and try but in the end, it doesn’t work. Not when Mom puts her things aside and quietly walks up to us, her paint speckled left hand finding my heated cheek. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, breaking at the seams.

Her arms fan out and I fall right in, covering her frail body with all my skin and bones. I’m so much bigger than she is but in her arms, I feel small. I feel like I’m eight years old, hiding behind her cotton housedress when I thought there were monsters under my bed because Conrad and Steven told me there were. Mom helped me look under there and showed me there was nothing, nothing except old plastic wrappers because I had a habit of sneaking candy into my room when I wasn’t supposed to. Mom didn’t even scold me for that. She scolded Conrad and Steven for scaring me instead. All my life, I knew I could count on her. All my life, I’ve known her love better than anything else.

“Mom,” I cry into her shoulder as she runs her hand down my back. “Please… tell me there’s something… something w-we can do. Please.”

“Oh, Jeremiah,” she whispers, her voice teetering on the edge of a sob. “Oh, my love. I wish there was. I wish for it everyday.” Her fingers sift through my hair. Then she urges me to lift my head so our eyes can meet. “I don’t want to leave my boys.” This time, she really does cry. Big, whimpery sobs which take me and Conrad by surprise. Mom isn’t a crier. Conrad gets that from her. Her eyes tear up all the time, but she never cries. Never like this.

From behind us, Conrad stumbles in. He wipes the blood from the corner of his lip where it split then slowly drops his own forehead on our Mom’s other shoulder. We encase her this way, as if shielding her from the inevitable, and then we just cry. Not one of us stops to think about how it looks or how Laurel, Steven, or Belly might see us, hear us. We don’t care about any of it.

After a while, the motion of Mom’s breathing slows, and reluctantly, me and Conrad pull away to give her space. Her eyes are bloodshot, the skin on her cheeks wet with teardrops. Conrad wipes them away as I sniffle.

Mom reaches out to hold both of us by one hand each. Her arms are so thin. I can’t believe I spent the whole summer without noticing how much the cancer has changed her.

Her gaze flows over our faces languidly, as if she is taking her time to sketch us to memory. She did that so much when we were kids, especially when she first got diagnosed. Whenever any of us was doing anything, anything at all, Mom would sit and tilt her head a little and just watch us with the fondest smile on her face, like what was happening in front of her – even if it was just a bunch of kids building a pillow fort in the living room – was the single greatest event to ever take place. Mom always says the small moments matter just as much as the big ones, and sometimes, you remember them more after time has passed.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, squeezing our hands. “I didn’t want you to know. Either of you. I wanted this summer to be perfect, just like all the ones before. I couldn’t forgive myself if my sickness took away your happy smiles.” Mom peers at Conrad, and something even gentler transforms her expression. “Connie, I should’ve known that you knew. I think…” Her tears start falling again. She takes a deep, albeit shaky breath. “I think I was scared to believe it. I thought I was hiding it well. I just wanted you both to be so h-happy. I’m so s-sorry.”

Conrad, who had previously been drilling holes into the ground with his intense stare, brings his eyes up to our mother. His lips wobble, too. “Mom, if there’s a way–”

Her lips dive inwards and she nods. “I don’t… if there was a way… God… if there was a way, I would do anything. I would do anything to stay with you both.” Her hand shakes in mine so I hold on tighter. Mom sets her eyes on me. “Forgive your mother this once for not knowing what to do.”

I take everyone by surprise when my incoming sob transforms into a hiccup. I feel every bit as childish as Conrad said I was.

Mom hugs me to her, and I let it happen. Then for the first time in my life, I whisper an honest prayer.

. . .

The next day leaves two more before the end of our summer in Cousins.

When I wake up, it’s to the sound of muffled voices outside my bedroom door. All night, I sat on the sofa with Mom and Laurel watching musicals. From Moulin Rouge to The Sound of Music.

Mom was so excited when I offered to watch them with her. Back at home, I actively avoided being roped into musical nights, pretending I had homework or that I was sleepy. Now, I want to do everything I can to make her happy. Even if that means sitting through God-awful music films that make my ears pop (although, admittedly, Bugsy Malone wasn’t so bad).

Tiredly, I sit up in my bed and use a pillow to keep myself propped up. I can see two pairs of feet under the thick strip of space under my door. It doesn’t take much guessing to comprehend who they belong to, and once I understand, I am up on my own feet and shuffling to open the door.

Mom’s lips part as she takes me in, apparently not expecting me to be there, while the girl beside her stares at me with shocked, watery eyes. I barely glance at her even though all I want to do is stare. I haven’t seen her in days. I didn’t know missing her and hating her at the same time could hurt so much.

“Why are you here?” I spit, adding as much rage as I can to my voice. I notice a familiar McDonald’s bag in her arms and a packet of Skittles. I swallow the lump in my throat. “Get out of my house.”

Mom snaps her head towards me and gasps. “Jeremiah!”

“Mom, make her leave. I don’t want to see her face.”

But I miss it.

I miss her.

I look at her again. I don’t want to, but I do. And then I wish I hadn’t.

Her face is wrought with emotion. Every sad, pathetic, pleading emotion under the sun, and when I look at her, I feel them. I feel all of them, as if everything in her heart races to find mine.

Body frozen, lips timidly parted, and splotchy skinned, YN appears every bit as grieved as the rest of us are. The colour of her dark brown eyes is veiled by the misery of my mother’s situation with old and fresh tears springing to the surface. Each time a tear threatens to spill out, she sharply inhales through her nose. I take it to mean exactly what she wants it to–this isn’t about me.

Her body language tells me wretched stories of days past when all she did was cry. Half of me thinks good, she deserves it while the other vehemently scorns the part of me that is okay with hurting her in any capacity.

Even when I hate her, I love her.

Mom slides her arm around YN’s shoulders determinedly. YN stifles a cry while she seems to hold her up. And it kills me.

“That is no way to speak to your girlfriend, Jeremiah Fisher,” my mother argues, enunciating my full name with particular fervency. “Apologize to YN right now.”

YN cranes her head to shoot her down but I beat her to it. “I’m not apologizing to someone who lied to me all summer.”

Mom sighs and drops her arms to her sides. She looks at me the same way Conrad did yesterday–with pity and shades of remorse. “Your brother and I asked her to keep it a secret. YN did nothing wrong.”

The truth hits me square in the chest. It wraps its arms around the pain there, the pain which has bled my heart dry for days, and forces me to acknowledge it, to sit with it in my head and figure this out.

I clench my fist and shake my head. Then I push down the new lump in my throat. “That doesn’t change anything.”

Except it should. It should.

So why doesn’t it? Why am I still so hurt?

I don’t wait for either of them to respond, to add something new to the mix. I walk past them, down the stairs, and out the front door. I run down the porch steps then sprint as fast as I possibly can towards the beach. All the while, hot tears drip down my cheeks, and I don’t bother wiping them away. What was the point–of doing that or anything else when my Mom is dying and there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening.

The moment I drop down on the stretch of land that had belonged to our family forever, the sky begins to crackle and hefty, grey clouds float in. It takes all of twenty seconds for the first few raindrops to make their descent downwards, meeting my bare skin as I stretch my head back towards the gloomy weather.

All around me, sand grains bead up and roll off, the ocean roars with furor as it laps against the shore, reaching for me and I think about it, I think about letting it take me away.

The rain on my skin soaks me from top to bottom as I sit out there. A few times, I think I hear someone calling my name, asking me to come back. But then it goes silent and all I hear is the Earth and my own heart.

It doesn’t last long, the rain, and by the time it leaves, so much of me is begging for it to come back. When it rains, I don’t have to think. I don’t have to worry or stress or wonder. I can just be.

I push my hair back, sniffling to myself and start to draw shapes in the sand–squares, triangles, hearts, flowers. Everything which comes to mind in this moment, I draw into the wet sand beneath my feet.

A few minutes later, the presence of someone else joins me. He says nothing, does nothing except stare out at the waves, and we sit there, in cloves of silence. And it’s silence I’m not good with, which is what pushes me to lure his thoughts out with a long inhale.

“I don’t need babysitting.”

“I’m not here to babysit,” he explains, chucking a little. Every little thing makes him laugh, even the hard stuff. Whenever the moms scolded him as a kid, he would laugh about it way before he cried. Like a nervous habit to shield his feelings. “Even though you are acting like a big, dumb baby.”

I roll my eyes with a quiet scoff. “Whatever.”

He crosses his legs beneath him then swings forward to draw a cat in the sand. Like YN, he has always been exceptionally good at art. He ignores that part of him, but it’s there; an innate talent. “How long are you gonna stay mad at her?”

“Forever.” He stops drawing to stare at my side profile. It becomes suffocating after he doesn’t say anything for a short while. I look at him. “What, Steven?”

He shrugs and goes back to his drawing. He gives the cat a bushy tail. “I don’t know, man. I don’t get why you’re mad at her. Not anymore, anyway.”

“What the hell do you know?”

Again, he shrugs. This time, he stops drawing altogether. He stares out at the ocean again. “I think you’re dumb as fuck.”

“Bro, you don’t–”

“Don’t ‘bro,’ me,” he instantly argues back. “She was just trying to protect you. You’re gonna throw away being happy with her because she made a mistake?”

“She lied to me.”

“To protect you. Jere, it’s YN. She’s not just some girl you hooked up with this summer. She’s…” Steven folds his lips in. He seems to lose himself in a myriad of thoughts for a second. “Don’t do what I did and fuck this up. There’s no guarantee you can take it back.”

For a moment, I let his words wash over me. I try to make sense of them in my head, but my heart is unrelenting. It wants to scream and shout and beg for things to be different even though I know they can’t be anything other than what they are.

Steven keeps talking. His voice is softer now, less harsh. “And you’re gonna need her.” He pauses to swallow and I know he’s close to crying. “We’re all gonna need each other.” He sets a firm but comforting hand on my back. “I know you’re pissed, and that’s your right. But don’t shut her out. What you have with YN… that’s once in a lifetime. And you got damn lucky to have it in this lifetime. No one loves you like she does. All the stuff she kept from you was to protect you. No matter what, she didn’t do it for any other reason. You gotta know that.”

We spend a good portion of the morning there, me and my oldest friend in the world. We sit there and look out over the horizon, making silent wishes until it’s time to go back into the house.

On the way back, I see her in the backyard with my Mom. Mom has her easel set up again, rain droplets all around, and she’s laughing, painting an image of YN with daisies in her hair. And for the first time in days, I smile.

. . .

Toward the end of the morning, Susannah finally finishes her portrait of me. She refuses to let me see it because she wants to do a big unveiling on our last day in Cousins. Then she says she will hang them all up in the family room amongst her other prized art pieces, like the original photography by Cindy Sherman of 1950s America.

Jeremiah is playing video games with Steven and Conrad in the living room when I walk back into the house. I stand by the entryway to the living room for a while, pretending like I am interested in what Laurel and Susannah start to talk about, just so I can sneak glances at him. Belly notices and shakes her head at me.

She is furious with me, too, but she is better about it than anyone else. She says she can understand why I kept everything a secret because it’s hard to say “no” to Susannah when she asks something of you.

When Jeremiah turns around to look at me, finally noticing my presence, I hurriedly walk towards the front door. I shout, “I’m gonna head home!” to anyone who is listening then hightail it out of there. I race home as quickly as possible, my lungs on fire as I reach my porch. When I get to my bedroom, I fall face first into my bed and allow the mattress to pull me into its arms.

I stay like that all day. Hours pass and I don’t do anything except stay in bed and cry and cry until there are no tears left. Even though more still come. It feels like I could cry for an eternity and not run out of tears to shed.

My mother comes by twice to check on me. The third time, she forces herself into my bedroom and tuts at me for letting my dinner go cold. When I tell her I don’t want food even though she has cooked my favourite, my mother sits down beside me and pushes my hair back with her palm. Her smile is sweet, albeit a little pensive.

“He’ll come around,” she promises. “He loves you.”

I breathe in slowly, avoiding more tears, but they keep coming. “I don’t think love is enough to fix this.”

My mother shakes her head and smiles a little brighter and says, with all the hope I lack, “Love is always enough.”

Close to midnight, when the space inside my room is so quiet you could tell it every secret in the world, the legs of my bedside table begin to shake as a result of the crude vibrations exiting my phone. I try to ignore it at first because the last thing I want to do is talk to Shayla or Steven or Belly or even Conrad. I don’t want to talk to anyone I know besides the one person who refuses to speak to me. Though, eventually, ignoring my phone becomes almost impossible.

I sniffle as I go to pick up my phone. When the screen clicks on, it shines too bright and in the darkness encasing me, I very nearly blind myself. I dim the screen before attending to the incoming notifications. A few of them are from TikTok, a few from Instagram, two texts from Shayla saying goodbye because she’s leaving Cousins earlier than planned, a text from Belly wondering if I’ll go into town with her for muffins tomorrow, and finally, a single text from Jeremiah.

I leap out of bed to read it.

Jeremy: don’t fall asleep

The beat of my heart gains new purpose as it wistfully springs back to life. It feels as though someone has brought me back into the world after I spent days lost and lonely in space.

I rush to the balcony and push the doors open inward. Gerald’s trunk shakes bluntly. I hold my breath. I count to five in my head. I pinch my thigh. And when he finally falls into my view, I take a nervous step back.

All I wanted ever since the night of the debutante ball was to see him again. For it to be just us two with no distance in between. I wanted to hold him and explain myself and tell him he means the universe and more to me over and over until he knew it. And I wanted him to understand, above everything else, that I would never leave him, I would never stop loving him with every part of me.

Jeremiah crosses into my room and shakes his hair out before he turns back to shut the balcony door. Then he makes a joke and it feels like everything is fine when it isn’t. When it will never truly be again. Not when Susannah is sick.

“I think Gerald’s getting old. He shakes like a leaf when I climb him.”

I hesitate, and then, “Jeremiah…”

The boy in front of me closes his eyes for a second, and then tardidly and gorgeous, his mouth rises up in a smile. “I missed that,” he says, opening his eyes again, “hearing you say my name.”

My lips tremble. I try again and fail at holding my tears back. The emotions pour out of me in dense, broken sobs. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

He takes a step towards me. I stay rooted where I am. His scent wafts into my house and I try so hard not to let it affect me even though it does so easily. He licks his lips. His eyes are a chaos; the blues of them as lost and lonely as me. “Do you know how impossible it is not to love you?” His eyes start to shimmer, and I really think he might cry. “Even when I was so pissed off at you… I still missed you.”

“I’m sorry–”

He shakes his head and takes another step closer. We are almost chest-to-chest now. “I don’t want to hear that anymore. I don’t want you to be sorry.”

“Then…?”

He bites his bottom lip then pulls it into his mouth. Tears loosen from his eyes and cascade down, leaving a moistened trail of his woe upon the red pudginess of his cheek. His Adam’s apple bobs, up and down, while he swallows then looks away. And I recognize it. After all our years together, I know him.

I take back the steps I took away from him and reach for his hand. I interlace our fingers, mine wrapped with his, and bring it between our chests. I hold us here, in this imperfect space in time, watching him take tiny breaths, little gasps almost, as he cries.

“I’m here,” I whisper, my thumb settling over his as it gently moves back and forth. I peck the back of his hand. “I won’t ever leave.”

He breathes out, so slow and laboured that it seems to go on forever and ever. Then he falls into me, his tall, heavier frame over mine and I hold him to my chest with all the love I carry for him inside me. His body seems to go limp, and I keep holding him up.

On my shoulder, he whispers, “I don’t wanna think about life without her.” I wind both arms around him and hold on tighter. He brings himself higher and fixes his face into the space between my neck and shoulder. I pile my fingers in his hair, tangling them with his curly, blond locks.

I kiss the side of his face, stumbling over my own tears, “I love you.”

His own arms wrap around me, our hearts and souls grim with thoughts of the future. I take him to my bed, depositing him on his favourite side, then sliding in, too. I let my fingers rest in his hair again, pushing strands back and forth until the slow, dreamy motion sends us to sleep.

. . .

author's note: oh my god. i cannot believe this is real and we're at the end of you and me. thank you for taking this journey through yn and jeremiah's love story with me. i had the time of my life writing this fic for myself, for you, and for these beautiful characters. thank you times infinity 💘 i’ll see you in the epilogues next! 🤟

#the summer i turned pretty #jeremiah fisher #you and me #fan fiction #jeremiah x reader

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