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She wanders off in the vague direction of a stream as I turn the prickly cucumber between my fingers. Love is stronger than fear, huh?
That really does sound fake.
Sometimes I’m so scared one wrong move will make the people I love hate me that I lose the feeling of love entirely beneath the tides of my terror.
If I have to pick between one or the other, do I even know what I want?
And if what I want hurts anyone, will I ever be able to act on it?
I exist in a perpetual trolley problem. The guilt of being responsible for pain, time and again, condemns me to inaction that likely causes more damage. Nevertheless, I can’t find it in myself to pull the trigger with my own two hands.
Setting the cucumber beside the tomato, I stand, head toward the cottage door, and knock. No response.
Ollie walked in without knocking, but I’ve not known Willow and Zy as long as he has. She implied that she wanted me to go in and ask him about the zucchini, but is that enough of an invitation?
I toss a look back at Pila, find her absorbed in a zucchini as large as my arm, and make an early executive decision on Ollie and I only needing one. The way I see it, that there is a two-man lift just to get it back home, and I do not have an army to feed.
Relying on perceived permission, I force myself to crack open the door and slip inside.
The living room is empty. Down one short hall, the dulcet sounds of an acoustic guitar emanate. Locking my fingers together, I tiptoe over, find the door ajar, and see Ollie sitting on a small daybed covered by a lace canopy.
Expression stern, he strums, finger picks, sighs, and closes his eyes. “Sunshine, I can hear your heartbeat and your breaths.”
I wince and slip inside. “Sorry. I was just trying to eavesdrop.” It happens all the time in fanfiction. Don’t blame me for trying to listen in on the one secret song that changes everything. I need that kind of cosmic direction right now… “Is this where you do all your recording?” I let my attention drift over the equipment lining the opposite wall and the backdrop I’m familiar with from every video. It’s almost like a dream come true to see it all in person.
Ollie rests his elbow on the body of his guitar. “Yeah. Willoughby kind of built the entire room for me so I could do this…”
I must not have heard him correctly. “What?”
“She said it was because she needed a place for the extra bed, but you know humans.” He nudges his chin toward the back of the door, and I turn, finding a sign that looks like it was made by a three-year-old. In all caps, it says OLLIE’S ROOM. There is a lot of glitter.
My heart swells and twinges all at once.
Rolling my lips into my mouth, I say, “May I sit?”
He scoots over, and I take the place beside him, trying to line up my words so they don’t come off as harsh as I think they sound in my head. “How can you sit in a room that your friend built for you and not think you’re worthy of love?”
He strums a chord. “Should I lie down? That feels like a therapy question. How does that joke go? It all started when I was young…”
“Ollie.” I look at him. “I’m serious.”
His shoulders droop. “Self-worth isn’t something anyone can impose on you no matter what they do. Even though, logically, I know I am surrounded by people who care deeply about me, I can’t…” His jaw locks. “There are so many words in my head working against me, telling me it’s a fluke, telling me I have to make myself useful, telling me I’m a burden, telling me I need to give them more space before I become a nuisance. It’s wrong and selfish if I don’t make myself more tolerable somehow. I can’t just take advantage of the people I care about and who I’ve somehow convinced to care about me. In the past, all those feelings resulted in embracing my role as comic relief.” The insurmountable bleakness in his eyes softens when he looks at me. “You’ve overturned all the things I use to cope with the less-than-shining picture I have of myself. For you, I want to be more than tolerated. I don’t know how to do right by you, Brittny. I just know that I’m scared I’ll become something you regret if I let you isolate yourself from everything else you’ve known. Even if the world I know is where you belong, the world you’ve known—however alien—is the one you’ve learned to navigate. Better things don’t always feel better if you’re used to worse.”
“It sounds like you’ve thought all of this through for a long time, and I ruined everything.”
“You could never ruin anything. I was raised to overthink every detail in order to protect the pack. Unfortunately, I don’t have the same disposition as my brothers, and my ideas have long been treated as wrong or inferior to theirs. It makes second guessing second nature.” Covering his face with a hand, he swears. “If someday you pick me and learn you don’t want me then blame me for taking you away from a family that isn’t perfect but does love you so much, I…I think it would kill me.” A broken laugh leaves him. “I mean, come on? You already have everything I’ve ever wanted. Why would I ruin that? How can I even entertain an idea of ruining that?”
I touch his hand, find it trembling around the slick dark neck of his guitar.
When he looks at me, tears that have yet to fall glass his eyes.
“Just look at me, Brittny,” he whispers. “I’m pathetic. You would have been better off mated to one of my brothers. You deserve one of them. You wouldn’t have to worry about leaving anyone behind if it were one of them.”
I squeeze his hand. “I really don’t think I like them, Ollie. Not if they’ve made you feel this unwanted.”
A bitter smile touches the corner of his mouth. It falls after a moment. Tilting his head back, he looks at the ceiling and forces a deep breath into his lungs. Swearing, he fights to keep from crying and fails. “Sorry,” he hisses, hoarse, as droplets run down his cheeks.
“It’s okay.”
