Previously: Tally goes to a party in LA and gets a call from her agent who tells her she got the role and she’s about to become a star.

Share damn season – the short story

She hears Eve shout Sam’s name, then sees the flare of her ginger hair storming into the bathroom.

“I think Sam heard that,” Eve says, contrite for all of one second before pulling Tally to her feet and clutching her shoulders into her signature iron embrace. “Tally, darling, babe, I always knew you’d be a star.”

She pecks Tally squarely on the lips. Tally is too stunned to move. Her mind has gone blank. The music roars senselessly in her eardrums, and Benjamin keeps cursing in a high-pitched voice and tries to call Tally’s mother, then his own, and all the sounds blur into one huge ocean wave rush until all thoughts are replaced by its image, open and still under the frosted sky.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Tally breathes out.

No one hears her.

She taps Benjamin’s shoulder, but his mom has picked up and he just brushes Tally’s arm vigorously to let her know he cares, while he screams the good news to another party in the Palisades.

“Really?” he says, his gaze stopping its excited flitting. He puts the phone’s mic against his chest to say to Eve: “Chrishell’s there.”

“Stause?” Eve fans herself with Tally’s purse like she’s minutes away from a seizure. “Shut up.”

Tally pulls on her hand. “I want to go to the beach,” she says.

“Of course darling-babe,” Eve says, patient and happy like a mother with strong positive-parenting beliefs. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

“No, come on.” Tally tugs on Eve’s elbow but she doesn’t yield. “Let’s go to the beach. It’ll be fun.”

Benjamin has ended his call and pries Tally’s fingers from Eve’s slender bones. “Babe we’re having fun here,” he kisses her. “This is amazing. You’re amazing. Let’s toast to you.”

“Oh yeah,” Sam says on her way out of the bathroom. It’s clear she’s been crying, but she’s not anymore. “Let’s.”

Tally recoils from Benjamin’s touch like a wild animal. “I’m not having fun,” she says icily.

Realising his mistake, his smile melts from his handsome face. “Okay, you wanna go home?”

She ignores his question:

“Did you realise I wasn’t?” she asks. She feels very sober now. “Having fun?”

“You said you were.”

“Yeah Ben, I say a lot of things. But can you tell when I don’t mean them? That’s what I wanna know.” She crosses her arms over her chest, partly to shield her heart from the annoyance she sees crossing his features, partly to hold herself together.

Benjamin scratches the side of his jaw wearily. “Tally.”

“Let’s try something shall we? I’ll smile, and you tell me if I’m faking it.”

Tally blinks, lets the muscles around her mouth relax, and a radiant grin lights up her face. A confused glance passes between him and Eve, and Tally feels her whole self clamp into a fist inside of her as her smile wanes. “You never could.”

What she doesn’t say: if she can’t be with the one person who does see when her heart is broken, she can’t be with anyone at all.

“Come on,” Benjamin protests. “Of course I can.” He reaches for her shoulder and she backs away against the wall.

“It’s fine,” she says, feeling light and crazed with sadness. “It’s not your fault.”

Someone reenters the room from a cigarette break and a flush of cold air rushes in. Ben lunges for her wrist but she swerves out of reach, grabs her purse from Eve’s hands, and escapes upstream through the gust.

***

Though the shock of the call has sobered her up, she doesn’t feel cold at all as she runs across the road to the parking lot. She gets hotter still when the huge Range Rover comes barreling out of the night, straight at Tally’s golden and defenseless frame, honking continuously for her to get out of its bonnet’s murderous track. She throws herself out of the way to evade it, scraping her knees and palms, but gets up instantly to find Ben’s car, whose keys are still in her purse.

She almost calls Nil, but remembers his words.

I need to move on.

And does he not deserve at least this?

She stabs the key in the ignition and drives off, her peeled hands screaming on the steering wheel, Nil’s last request echoing in her head.

On the Pacific Highway, the ocean is sparkling in the distance under the vast moon. Speeding up, the breeze from the open windows whipping up into a storm, she throws her phone into the black winds.

To Corral Beach, then.

The others won’t come after her, she is sure of it, and where else in the world can she go now?

The sand is so cold it makes her toes ache. With her stilettos hooked over her index fingers she sits down behind the curving line of water lapping the shore. She might be ruining her entire life, she thinks. The thought is strangely comforting. The ocean-kissed rocks glisten silver next to her, under the full moon’s dense, reassuring presence. She watches its beams break themselves apart on the gentle waves.

The thin veil mists her vision and lifts to reveal her future: Tally isn’t made for fame. And if she stays here, if she stays, she’ll become the person Benjamin thinks she is. A projection, an Instagram avatar, a dream. A nightmare.

There are only so many chances in life.

She pushes the straps of her dress off her shoulders, slips out of the satin. The crumpled dress falls on the hard sand and looks like the sloughed skin of some legendary snake. As she steps out of it she sheds the dreams too. Red carpets, Marvel contracts, designer gowns. They detach from her skin in big painless flakes and freed from their weight she feels light and new.

In her underwear, she steps towards the ocean, shivers when it touches her feet. The water rolls over her hips and she gasps just as the first trace of pink dust bleeds a new morning into the sky. What would Nil have said if she’d told him all of this? She is crying as she lowers herself under the waves. Though she loves him she cannot go back. LA may be wrong for her, but so is their small town.

It’s still too dark underwater for her to see, but she opens her eyes anyway and swims out into the open water, feeling lighter and lighter with each stroke, the invisible stones weighing her limbs dropping to the retreating sea bottom. All around her the ocean feels alive. Though she can’t see anything – no fish whose name she’s never learned, not a single weed – she can hear the crackling sand meters below and feels less alone. Swimming towards the bottom now, a current pushes through her legs and makes her roll around herself. That’s when she feels it again, the pond’s wind-polished clarity. The veil clouds her unseeing eyes and she sees, finally, the road she should have taken from the start. Another beach on the same coast, a small team, a tiny budget – Seattle.

Can she do it? Will they take her?

She remembers Luke’s mask – the gold and midnight blue, the empty gaze. How beautiful, how enticing. How heavy a thing to wear for the rest of one’s life.

She would try without one.

Kicking now, she breaks through the surface and faces the empty beach, on which daylight pours a warm, golden light – the almost empty beach.

From the shore, Nil watches her without moving. Her dress dangles from his fingertips. The glass-melting heat of his gaze thaws her sea-soaked face.

THE END

Acknowledgements:

This short story was made infinitely better by the generous and incredibly astute feedback I received from my beta reading group. Thank you to David, Iman, JV, and Michelle for these sessions, and to two of my very best friends in the world, Jessie and Lucy, for giving the final go-ahead on each chapter. I love you all so much!

Thank you to my boyfriend Alex for letting me believe Taylor and I might be friends one day, and for being very handsome. Thank you to my family, especially my aunt, my cousin and my mother for reading every single chapter even though they’re not in French and I like to use very long and confusing sentences! Thank you to my son, Lumi, during whose naps I wrote and edited most of this – you are the light of my days.

Thank you for reading <3

It’s the end of an era! If you have any thoughts on the story or the characters, write them in the comments, I’d love to chat about it with you.

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Share damn season – the short story

Previously: Tally and Nil spend one final night together and, ready to move on from each other, say goodbye for good.

If you like Tally and Nil’s story and want to support a swiftie-writer, the best way to do this right now is by sharing it with your readers <3 Thank you xx

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This damn season.

She can’t bear it anymore.

She keeps her window shut the whole way back. When the steward walks by her seat she asks for white wine. It doesn’t help, but she asks for another.

By the time the plane lands, her vision has taken on a pleasantly grainy texture that smoothes the edges of everything: the baggage claim area, the apex of the LAX sign, how much it hurt to leave Nil’s bed.

It was very late, or very early when she went home. Nil let his fingertips trail along the hot curve of her spine without trying to stop her, or realizing the movement felt like being skinned. She got in her car bloody and raw, like the anatomical drawing of a body’s musclescape. Unable to warm up – her tender shell left in the warmest bed she’d ever known.

Benjamin is waiting for her in the arrivals hall.

“Hey baby girl,” he says, tucking her in his arms. “Nice hair?” He says it like it’s a question.

Wondering about the optics, no doubt. She lets her body lean into his though below her surface everything grows hard and ridged like the faceted surface of a diamond.

“Hello there.”

She’s certain he’ll detect its cold glint behind her eyes when she looks up to kiss him, he must, how could he not, but no. He takes her suitcase, her bloodless palm, and leads her to the exit.

The ocean rolls past the window behind the palm trees, endless and forlorn. It’s a sunny day. She can’t decide if it’s better or worse to have landed in a world so unlike the one Nil sees through the cabin window. What is Nil doing? Moving on, he said. Nil is a man of his word. So she shuts her eyes against the sunlight’s rising glare and imagines him walking into the forest’s heart, on and on and on.

Manhattan Beach. The indicator gives brief, satisfying clicks as Benjamin turns on his parents’ street. He’s chatting about something or other, the party perhaps, or the movie. He’s all about that fucking movie.

“We’re going to your parents?” She interrupts.

She didn’t mean for her tone to be quite so sharp and he looks at her slightly hurt she might not like this plan.

“They’re not home.”

Inside the house, he punches the code in the security box by the door and a long beep resonates down the property’s sterile lines.

“Where’s my lab coat?” Tally joked the first time Benjamin brought her here. Except for the basement gym and the pool, everything here is in a shade of white.

“I brought your dresses.” Benjamin says, a little shy now, as if he’s sensed she hasn’t truly warmed to him.

“What dresses?”

“The ones you left at my place.”

Making an effort to be more agreeable, she says, “oh yeah,” though she has no idea which ones he means. “Thanks.”

In the morning her mother tiptoed into her bedroom, ostensibly to make sure she would wake on time to catch her plane, but in reality a little earlier than needed. She sat on the edge of Tally’s bed, far from Tally, curled into herself and keeping her breath deep and even as Delilah laid a hand on her arm and leaned to press her cheek lightly to hers.

“I love you,” she whispered. “Forever and ever.”

Tally stirred and Delilah backed away. “You’re awake?”

“You were squeezing my face.”

Delilah rubbed Tally’s arm in a more cordial manner. “It’s almost time to leave.”

“I know.”

Delilah seemed to hesitate.

“What?”

“You don’t need to be an actress, you know. If it’s making you sad.”

It was about the last thing Tally wanted to discuss at 5am. She pushed her fists into her eye sockets. “What else should I be, then?”

“Nothing in particular. Whatever you like. It doesn’t matter.”

Nothing in particular. Maybe the same nothing Delilah had chosen to be. A doll, trapped in her dollhouse. Tally couldn’t trust herself not to say something mean so she bit her tongue.

“All I mean is,” Delilah continued, “is that you may achieve your dreams, but as long as you don’t learn to be happy without it you won’t be happy when you have it either.”

Tally’s mother is more astute than Tally gives her credit for, but 5am was too early to really consider her words.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Benjamin is in charge of sourcing the crudité cups and the cocktail popsicles, so Tally helps him load the back of his car with coolers, though she declines to come along with him on his shopping run.

“I’m gonna sleep. I couldn’t do it on the flight.”

Benjamin is a lovely, unsuspicious man. He kisses her forehead like a well-meaning parent and waves her goodbye.

Once the car rolls away, she goes out to the lounging deck by the pool to lie in a chair. A thin wisp of clouds is drifting away behind the amber lens of her shades. She tries to find a pattern in their shape, but the sky is too bright to look at.

…

They have sex before the party.

As soon as it’s over Tally goes to the bathroom, thinking her rock-solid insides will have ripped through her skin at some point: they have not. Her body is tanned and soft as if made of silk; Nil’s signature, though scrawled in every place and in every font across it, remains invisible to Benjamin’s inattentive eye, trained on her as she crosses the room to open the closet.

“What should I wear?”

They settle on the golden dress – the satin one with the spaghetti straps – and drive to the dance studio where the party is held.

Most of her friends coming tonight have taken dance lessons or learned to belt a song there at some point, including Tally. One of the walls is covered in mirrors and split by a ballet bar. After subtly checking themselves in the one directly facing the door as they enter, Tally watches her double wordlessly collect Benjamin’s car keys from his entrusting hand before dropping them, along with her phone, in her clutch embroidered with fake rubies. To their right, the bare wall is crowded with catering tables. Gourmet flatbread pizzas dotted with dried figs, jackfruit tacos, tiramisu shots, and mini truffle-and-chilli popcorn cones peaceably await their depredation. So does the boatload of booze tucked under the cream tablecloth.

Tally says hello to Sam, Eve, and Joe, already chatting in the corner.

“Nice party,” she tells Sam, who organized it, in an attempt to be nice.

“Thanks,” Sam said with a smile that does not reach her eyes. She probably would have preferred it if Tally hadn’t come, but it would have been weird not to invite her since this is meant to be a sort of reunion after their graduation in the summer.

Tally excuses herself to go help Benjamin set the crudites cups and the popsicle-filled coolers by the final table where a portion of the alcohol is presented.

Something cold and dense unfurls from her chest into her stomach as she takes in the people in the room. Maybe nothing more than good old competitiveness: everyone here looks like the Next Big Thing. It is seeping from their pores, this desperate fame-attracting energy, potential swirling around them like individual vortexes of providence. Of course, they’d be lucky if even a single one of them becomes a C -list celebrity. Maybe her shark’s instinct kicking in then, yes, why not, though it does not usually feel this heavy.

Eve kisses Tally’s neck.

“You’re the belle of the ball,” she says, handing her a martini.

Because she knows Eve, Tally knows she’ll have said the exact same thing to Sam and the French girl no one understands whose name Tally can never remember. She presses the top of her friend’s arm and takes the drink, but Benjamin dives towards her hand.

“Try the popsicles!” He said, plucking the glass from her fingertips and replacing it with a stick of frozen mojito.

At the very last beat, Tally holds back an eye roll. “Actually, I’d rather drink my wine first. Where’s the bottle?”

She made Benjamin stop at four different shops on the way here to find a bottle of peach wine.

“Babe, you can’t be serious. That drink is literal crap. I thought you were joking.”

“What drink?” Eve asks, eyes widening and focusing at the same time, in the way they do when she is writing something in her head, or trying to remember real people’s idiosyncrasies to give to her characters later.

“Peach wine,” Benjamin says. “Not even a nice brand”

“Rosé?” Eve asks, eyes still widening. Tally is her favorite muse. Everything she does, every habit she has somehow finds its way into Eve’s stories, and Eve has already convinced Tally to let her write her memoirs if she ever makes it. “White?”

Tally bites into the popsicle and hands it back to Benjamin. “There. I tried it. Happy?”

Benjamin looks at her like she just spat the frozen rum in his face, but tries to smile anyway: “Yeah. Thanks.”

Unfortunately for him, he’s a much less gifted actor than Tally. “I’m gonna get my wine now.”

Tally finds the bottle in the last cooler against the wall. When the screw top doesn’t yield to the twist of her wrist, she cracks it with her teeth. From the corner of her eye, she sees Sam approaching, her skin sparkling under the dim lights as she walks from the glitters inside her fate-boosting bath bombs, or whatever.

“You look nervous.” Sam says, delighted.

Tally takes a swig of wine, and the sweetness and artificial peach flavor slap her in the face: the taste of her sacrificed life. She drinks more.

“I’m not.”

As if they’re friends, Sam leans against the wall next to Tally and scans the crowd. “You were always so cocky.”

“I don’t care about the role,” Tally says, the floor starting to sway pleasantly under her heels as the alcohol is absorbed by her empty stomach.

“Sure. Me neither.” Sam smiles bitterly inside her popcorn cone. “That’s why we auditioned.”

From up close, her skin has a purple, alien sheen. “When do you think we’ll hear back?”

Who is she, the casting manager? Sam knows as well as Tally there’s never any point in guessing.

Undeterred by Tally’s silence, Sam continues: “So what is it then? You’re having a teenager crisis?”

“Fuck off.”

“I mean that hair.” She takes a popcorn from the cone and flings it expertly to the back of her pink mouth. “Wow,” she says, crunching.

Tally takes another swing from the now half-empty bottle.

“May the best woman win,” Sam shouts as Tally walks away.

…

She tries to dance. She has, after all, taken dance classes before. It’s written on her resume. But she’s quite drunk now; the peach wine bottle is empty, and she sampled two more flavors of the popsicles though she can’t remember which.

In the middle of the dance floor, she sways limply and haphazardly to the beat, her golden dress catching the light. She catches her reflection in the mirrors and thinks: there should be some kind of rule against looking so great when you feel so shit. An arm closes around her waist.

Benjamin’s cleanly shaven cheek brushes her jaw when he kisses her neck in the exact same spot as Eve.

“You look so amazing,” he whispers, and she closes her eyes to smile dumbly at the ceiling.

“Have you eaten anything?” He asks. “I liked the pizzas.”

“Yeah,” she says, though the only thing that’s made it past her lips besides the popsicles is the peach wine bottle’s long and lukewarm neck. “It’s all delicious.”

He nestles his chin in the hollow between her neck and shoulder and she is patting his cheek when the scent of his cologne assaults the back of her throat and lifts her stomach.

She jerks upright, announces, “I think I’m gonna barf,” and rushes to the swinging bathroom door next to the sound system.

But Benjamin still holds on to her hand and slows her down. He’s staring at his phone. “It’s Naomi,” he says, showing her the screen. “Has she tried to call you?”

The last place she saw the fake rubies guarding her phone was on the edge of the gourmet tacos table where she abandoned them many hours ago, but she doesn’t have time to say it. A wave of nausea rips through her chest and she lunges for the door.

“Nil, let go!” she gasps, trying to shake off Benjamin’s grip.

He goes rigid behind her. “My name is Benjamin, actually,” he says, releasing her.

It’s too late to save this. She spares him a desperate glance and rams her shoulder into the door to throw up in the sink. He does not follow her. When she’s done she drinks out of the tap and dabs her forehead with a soaked tissue from the dispenser like he would have done.

“Oh mon Dieu,” the French girl says when she exits one of the cubicles and finds Tally here, holding on to the edge of the sink as if it were a life raft. “You okay?”

She helps Tally to her feet and Tally looks into her deep blue eyes made even more striking by her dark fringe. “What’s your name again?” She slurs.

The French girl smiles. “Brigitte Bardot.”

Tally laughs. She lets Brigitte Bardot steer her back outside with her long white hands in Tally’s shoulder blades. Not even two steps away from the door, blocking the entry, Eve and Benjamin stare at her with high expectations. Eve grins at her with all her crazy Canadian teeth, and Tally spots her studded purse in her hands. She looks at Benjamin for a sign he’s mad about being called by someone else’s name, but if he is he gives nothing away. The news must be too good. A narrow spike of dread grates Tally’s spine.

“I was sick, so what?” she says, batting them away.

Eve pushes Tally’s clutch into her hands. “Call Naomi back right now.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know,” Benjamin says, “but she keeps calling.”

People are starting to push through the group to get to the bathroom, so Benjamin extends one arm like a wing and pushes the three of them to the side. Remembering the French girl, Tally looks above his shoulder to thank her but she’s already gone. Benjamin groans a complaint and takes the clutch from Eve’s hands – despite her haze, Tally notices one of the rubies has come undone and dangles from a cheap red thread:

“Come on,” he moans. “She said it was urgent.”

He pulls Tally’s phone out, presses his thumb to the screen to unlock it – a bilateral privilege she, unlike him, never uses – and returns Naomi’s call: “Take the damn phone Tally,” he commands, putting it inside her palm.

She obeys and folds herself into the nearest corner to hear the ringtone over the music. Naomi picks up on the second ring.

“Tally?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sitting?”

Tally scans the room behind her. “There aren’t that many seats here actually, but I can try.” Better to think of the presence or absence of specific furniture items in the room, of the physical act of bending one’s knees when she crouches in the corner than of why she needs to do so. Her foot hits glass: the empty bottle of peach wine. It has rolled all the way from the dance floor where she abandoned it to this little trap, as if to find her, like a supportive pet.

“Tally,” Naomi says with the tone of someone who can’t hold it in any longer: “You got the part.”

“What?”

“The Marvel role. You got it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“What is she saying?” Benjamin asks, towering over her.

Tally focuses on Naomi’s voice on the other end of the line: “How do you know? It’s like, Christmas. You said we wouldn’t hear until at least the end of Jan.”

Naomi chuckles like an evil mastermind: “Well, actually, I know Kate Alkins. I didn’t want to say anything because I wasn’t sure she would share anything and I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“The casting director?”

“Yeah. They had already narrowed it down to just five of you, including Sam, actually, but you knocked it out of the park. That’s what she said. ‘Knocked it out of the park.’” She says, imitating the director’s British accent pretty well.

Tally can’t think of anything to say so she stares at the ground between her feet, focusing on the rising sharp pain in the sides of her knees. They’re not, she knows they’re not, but it looks very much like the floorboards are spreading apart, revealing a yawning black hole that Tally will never be able to find her way out of once it swallows her. Nil flares in her mind and torches her thoughts like wildfire. His ghostly silhouette retreating away from her in the cabin, his fingerprints sizzling all over her iced limbs.

“So? What are we thinking? You heard me, right?” Naomi asks, alarmed.

“That’s great. Great. Amazing news indeed. I have to go.”

Benjamin, who had leaned all the way to the side of her mouth, springs back to his full size like a jack-in-a-box:

“Oh my God,” he says. “Jesus fucking Christ, she got it. She actually got it.”

Thank you for reading <3

Any thoughts or questions on the story, the characters or how I wrote it? Leave a comment, I read every single one!

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If you like Tally and Nil’s story and want to support a Swiftie who loves writing stories, the best way to do this right now is by sharing it with your readers <3 Thank you!

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Final chapter

Previously: In a desperate attempt to reconnect one last time with Nil and the Tally she used to be before heading back to LA for good, Tally goes in search of him and finds him at the cabin in the woods.

He parts her lips with his tongue. Licks the sharp edge of her incisors. She moans as her ribs liquify against his, feels herself go weak between his body and the door, go unbearably heavy.

“Fuck”, he gasps over her mouth before he peels her from the wooden door. Though it’s dark she tracks the minute pinpricks of stubble that cover his jawline in the ambient glow of the moonlit snow outside. He unzips her jacket, rips her out of her thermal tops as she tugs, breathlessly, on his sweatpants; the exposed bulge of his biceps as he cradles her head is so hot against the cold side of her face it burns. With her index she passes the elastic border of his boxers, overcomes the gentle ridge of his hip, caresses the supple triangle of muscle that leads to his pubic bone, grazes her way down, down, d—

He catches her hand.

“Not yet.” He says, holding her wrist away from them both like it’s a dangerous object. “I’ve been thinking about this too much.”

She shakes him off and gathers her hands over the nape of his neck, scrapes gently upward with her nails to grab locks of his hair. She hooks her legs around his lower back, her breath crashing, crashing, crashing all over his skin, etching enchantments into his flesh to bind him to her.

“About me?” She whispers teasingly.

His eyes find hers.

“Huh,” he breathes, because Nil knows, of course, Nil has always known the dark magic Tally likes to weave around him.

He looks down shyly at her body. Slowly bows to kiss the long, undulating bone holding her ribcage together, though she wishes he would just snap it in half, crack her open and eat her alive, but no – for mending broken bones is Nil’s magic.

“Yeah,” he says, leaving a sizzling trail of kisses between her breasts and taking them down, down, down. “Yeah, about you.”

…

They don’t speak for so long afterwards, and his chest rises and falls with such deep, even breathing against her back she thinks he’s fallen asleep.

Her plane leaves in the morning and she cannot close her eyes. But she feels good. A gap in her filled: the vortex created by the Nil-shaped puzzle piece that sucked all the other pieces of her life. Peace, for an instant. Folded into him like a secret origami compartment.

She relaxes deeper into his chest, into the ripples of his heartbeat that softly shake her spine. His lips brush the back of her head.

“I thought you were asleep,” she says.

“I thought you were asleep.”

She rolls over and wraps her arms around him.

“I saw Jake, by the way. When I was looking for you. How did the work go?”

He buries his face in her neck so his words come out muffled: “Some guy shot a wolf. He confused the forest with his ranch, as one does.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“Yeah,” he says sourly. “Are you thirsty?”

Her nose pressed against his collarbone she nods and he gets up. She admires his naked body from the end of the bed, his slick frame moving through faint pools of light as he passes the windows. A ghost, flickering out of a dream.

Which he will be soon.

A waft of cold air blows under the covers as he reenters the warm shelter of their bed and gives her the glass. She takes a small sip and holds it for a long time in her mouth until it goes warm.

“What?” he says.

“Can it be enough?” she says, away from him. “Being yours for the weekend.”

He stiffens. “Tally.”

“What? I’m wondering”

“It’s not enough for me. Is it for you?”

“Maybe”

“Maybe” he repeats, the word like a foreign object on his tongue.

“No. ” she admits. “It’s not”

“Then we should stop doing this.”

“Why?”

“Salt in wound, etc. etc.”

It’s not like they hadn’t recognised the impasse when they entered it. Her phone lights up on the nightstand and, without looking at the screen, she rustles the dust in the air caught by its diffuse beam. Her fingers grow instantly cold. She shelters her hand between her thighs, shivering, suddenly frightened like a little girl at the thought of being alone.

The top half of his face is submerged in shadows when she looks up again.

“Come with me,” she whispers.

“Where?”

“To California”

She can’t see his eyes but his mouth twists with something like disgust, and it hurts more than if he’d just said no.

“Why not? They have nature reserves.”

“I don’t want to go to California. I have a life here.”

“Barely,” she mumbles, her voice brimming with teenage petulance.

“All that glitters ain’t gold, Tally. And all that’s quiet isn’t dead. Maybe it’s too out there for someone like you to understand.”

She lifts her chin, confrontationally. “What do you mean someone like me?”

She wants him to be mean, to hurt her, but his gaze is still and calm when he dips his head to meet her imperious gaze.

“I don’t want to live a life that’s always happening beyond the horizon of what I can see and feel right now,” he says evenly.

“It’s not a dream. I’ll make it.”

“I hope you do. All I’m saying is I like my life, even if it’s small and doesn’t shimmer.”

She scoffs but she knows exactly what he means. How often does she inhabit her body, taste, really taste, what she brings to her mouth when she’s out there, feel the purple heat of the California sun when it drips from her shoulder blades?

He traces the curve between her neck and her shoulder. “When do you fly out?”

“In the morning.”

“Anything nice planned?”

He is always so polite. It makes her want to cry.

“A party,” she says.

“Is that the event you liked on Instagram?”

She arches an eyebrow, amused. “Is that what you were doing when I knocked? You were stalking me?”

“Maybe,” he chuckles and kisses her temple.

She nestles deeper into his arms. “I don’t really want to go.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Maybe we’ll go to the beach afterwards, though. That would be nice.”

She can almost hear him racking his brain in search of something relevant to say. “Malibu?”

“No,” she smiles. “It’s called Corral Beach.”

“Never heard of it.” A pause. “Do you have any pictures?”

“Not sure,” she says. “Why?”

He brushes his nose against her hair. “I just want to imagine you out there.”

She reaches for her phone on the nightstand and, too moved to say a word, opens the location’s page on Google Maps to hand it to him. He swipes through the few pictures people have shared of it, the 15 reviews, then clicks out onto the map. Unlike popular beaches like Paradise Cove or Malibu Beach, its name doesn’t pop up unless you zoom right into it.

“Pretty private,” Nil remarks.

“That’s why it’s my favorite.”

He locks the screen.

“It’s your forest,” he says, understanding.

“It’s my forest.”

He kisses her forehead. There is nothing left to say. The seconds tick underneath her skin and pull the night away from them. It seems almost physically impossible for her to leave his bed, to take the plane, to go back to her life.

“Why did you take me back?” She asks without looking at him, her voice small.

He doesn’t respond right away. “You didn’t mean to hurt me.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

“I think it is.”

“What if I haven’t changed?”

“I’m not saying you have. I’m kinda glad you haven’t, actually.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that back then I didn’t think the person you had to be, in order to be okay in LA, was who you really were, and that I still think this today.”

“So you’re saying going back is a mistake.”

“I’m saying I’m still in love with you.”

Her heart almost caves in on itself. Swallowing back her tears, she asks, hopeful and frightened like a small child though she already knows what his answer will be. “Will you wait?”

His nose still against her hair, he breathes her in deeply, as if for the last time. “I don’t think I can do this again, Tally.”

“Why not?”

He seems reluctant to say it, but he does: “I need to move on.”

“With Piper,” she spits out.

“Not with Piper,” he says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “With myself.”

“Are you really gonna stay here forever?”

He seems to consider her question. “Maybe not,” he concedes. “I’d have to think about it. I don’t know where else I’d go.”

With me, she wants to say. Come with me. But she could not ask him to do what she would not.

“Olympia Park?” She suggests instead.

He chuckles softly. “Maybe.”

A long silence stretches between them. With a small, tear-filled throat she states the inescapable truth: “So this is goodbye.”

“I guess so,” he whispers.

One last time, she tries to tie herself to him, clutches his chest, weaves her legs through his as if she could fuse their bodies with her despair. He doesn’t move. In fact, she thinks he doesn’t seem moved at all, but she doesn’t care anymore, she stays here, wordlessly breaking apart. She wants to protest it’s not decent to have already moved on from her, from them, but when she opens her mouth and lifts her face to say so, she is stopped by the feel of her temple sliding against his neck, and the salted bite of his tears on her lips.

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Previously: Cast away by Nil, Tally spends Christmas Day with her family. She remembers her last day in Roses and the third path she could have pursued then, that of small-scale, independent filmmaking in Seattle, wondering if she chose wrong.

“Well hello, there. You a big star yet?”

Jake stares down at her from the doorstep with the same ironic grin he’s always had.

“Is Nil here?” Tally says, pushing hair out of her face with frostbitten fingers. She forgot her gloves at home and hurriedly scraped the flaky ice on her windshield with her nails before anyone could catch her mid-flight.

His brother crosses his arms and leans sideways against the doorframe. “Nah.”

“Where is he?”

In the distance, Nil’s mom shouts at someone on the phone, and Tally wonders whether his grandma’s here too. What would she say if she came to the door now, saw Tally behind the brittle border of her grandson’s childhood home?

“Our sweet Peach has been called away,” Jake says.

“When is he coming back?” Tally says in an even tone, ignoring the rusty jab.

She would probably slap Tally in the face for having broken her favorite grandson’s heart. She’d be right to. Suddenly, Tally hopes she will come, hopes she will get her punishment from the woman who, as she told Tally many times, guarded the gentleness apparent in Nil as soon as he was born against his family’s loud, brutish ways. But if she’s here, she’s staying inside.

“I don’t know,” Jake says. “Can’t you just call him?”

Jake is very tall: he likes this about himself. He doesn’t try to hunch though his head touches the top of the door frame and he has to crane his neck slightly to fit inside it, because being crammed into small places makes him look bigger.

“He isn’t picking up,” she lies. “No signal I guess.”

Jake doesn’t look dubious, which means Nil must be in the forest, where the signal is indeed patchy.

“So,” he says, tilting his head further. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“A big star?”

“No.”

He grins at her again and licks his teeth. Classic Jake: suggestive, but also amused, as if she’s the one coming on to him.

Not returning his smile she asks if there’s been a problem at work and he rolls his eyes.

“Some dead wolves, apparently.”

He says this like he believes Nil used this as an excuse to get away from them. Jake kicks the door behind him to open it wider and winks:

“Wanna come in?”

The thought of Nil’s face crumbling if he saw her there, tucked on the couch between his grandma and a bowl of cookies, makes her take an inadvertent step back.

“No, thanks.”

Slowly, he looks her up and down, no doubt enjoying the sight of her squirming on the doorstep. “Suit yourself, superstar.”

…

Snow falls rapidly and without sound in the cones of her headlights. She drives fast, blood pumping painfully back into her fingers. In the twilight the concrete glows faintly with snow where the deserted school is. Haunted grounds. She reaches the final street on the edge of town, where little houses perspire amber lights, their unlit back gardens looking out onto the woods, and finally, she sees it: the little bridge over the creek that will lead her where she needs to be.

Her wheels crack through the crust but only just: fresh tires have already carved a path. A turn deep into the black forest, and then—

Nil’s truck parked in the makeshift driveway.

All the lights in the cabin off.

She lets the engine run and watches it for a sign of life. A minute, all night. If Nil is inside, he must be asleep because he’s not coming out. Or – or – he has seen her through the window, his body protected from her sight by the surrounding darkness, and decided: no, not you, not anymore.

I’m done.

In the silence her head throbs with the submarine pulse of her drowning heart. All she hears is his name, and all she sees is his face and the melting fire of his eyes and so she turns off her car and her boots crack through the scintillating ice gathering over the pine needles and she is in the dark now, in the dense forest’s pitch blackness, the hurried snow clawing at her cheeks as multiple scenarios unfold in her mind’s eye.

He’s not here.

He’ll say no.

He will strike her body with a single deserting glance and she will die.

Her right foot finds the first porch step, the second, her fist the wooden door where she knocks softly at first, shyly, her chest thudding with fear, and when he still doesn’t come she hammers it with her knuckles, bang bang bang, and though the thin, iced skin complains it will tear, she can’t stop, it’s too late, he will open the door or she will topple, she will let her gentle body give in, forsake her dreams, forsake herself.

No one comes.

She leans against the door, tired, cold. Her phone buzzes and she lets it. Suddenly, she hears something on the other side of the door and a new thought crosses her mind: the girl might be here.

It all falls into place: the darkness, the silence. His hands are on her body, and he doesn’t hear Tally over her moans.

Disgusted, her stomach leaping to her throat, she jerks away from the door as if burnt by it just as it opens. On the other side: Nil. His face lit from below by the arctic glow of his iPhone, he pulls an airpod out of his ear. They both stare at each other, then she stutters:

“Nil, I—”

“Shush.” He grabs her wrist, takes a fistful of her hair. “Don’t talk.”

His breath over her lips, her hips pressed into his.

A beat, a pull, and the click of the door.

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Previously: Full of a newfound resolve to go after the Marvel role that will bring her career to new heights since her argument with Nil, Tally sends her final audition tape and gives her relationship with Benjamin another try.

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The sound of a scream.

The bedside lamp is still on and the room is bright, though outside the night lingers, the window frosted and damp as if coated in ink.

She didn’t want to be in the dark as she fell asleep; she kept believing Nil was beside her, searched for his chest with her unconscious fingertips. She didn’t want to see the Christmas lights through the curtains either, red and green and gold, reminding her of how one should feel at this time but doesn’t, in a house full of people she loves, in the warmth of their presence, the warmth of this cold time of year.

How cold indeed, the road she’s chosen.

And the one she’s forsaken.

Again: the scream.

It’s only Victoria on the stairs, having spotted the presents stacked at the foot of the Christmas tree. Her elementary school-aged cousins have taken over Tally’s sister’s bedroom in her absence and slept in a heap on top of the queen-sized bed. Now they storm the landing past Tally’s bedroom and zoom downstairs: Boom boom boom.

Tally turns the light off, throws a pillow at the half-opened door of her room to shut it. Pressing her eyelids together hard against the incessant merriness crowding her windows, she ignores her mother when she enters to demand Tally come down with everyone, and falls asleep again.

“Tally!” Luke jumps on her bed what feels like a minute later, his voice accompanied by a crackling sound. “Your presents!”

In his hands is a flat rectangular box, and a bulging stocking from which a number of individually wrapped chocolates have spilled out onto her covers.

“Hey little one,” Tally yawns. She tries to make herself sound cheerful, as if refusing to go down for the present-opening ceremony earlier had been an accident.

Bitch smile, she tells herself. Smile.

“Are you sick?”

She ignores the question. “What’s that?”

He gives her the box, glistening red from the shiny wrapping paper. “A surprise.”

“From you?” She says, arching an eyebrow. “I hope you didn’t spend money on me.”

Luke shakes his head. “I made it in art class.”

She rips up the paper and unglues the repurposed Amazon cardboard sleeve. Something hard and curved is nestled inside. Grazing it she feels a rough layer of glitter on its surface.

“It’s a Venetian mask”, Luke explains as she pulls it out.

Curved in a half-moon shape covering the right side of the face, the eyes and the nose, a blue ribbon has been tied to each temple to secure it around a skull. The cheekbone is shiny with galaxy-colored glitter, the eyes unevenly cat-lined with blood-red and silver crystals riding the backs of thick drops of hardened glue; the nose, spray-painted in midnight blue, is framed by whiskers made of stiff fake feathers.

“Wow,” she says, actually touched.

“Do you like it? I wore it for the school carnival. Mrs Libek said it was her favourite thing I’d done this year.”

“I love it. It’s too much.”

He shrugs. “I’m not gonna wear it anymore. It was for actors in Italy in the Middle Ages. Or maybe prehistoric times, I’m not sure. Anyway, you’re the actress, I just like painting them.”

From downstairs, Victoria calls him for a Just Dance tournament.

“You’re coming?” He asks with the polite air of someone who already knows the answer will be negative.

But Tally balls up the wrapping paper and ties the mask around head.

“In a minute. How do I look?”

He laughs. “Like an actress. It matches your hair.”

She had forgotten about her hair and the memory of Nil’s fingers around her ears instantly punctures the brittle bubble of calm Luke put her in.

Once he’s gone Tally shuffles to the long mirror leaning against the corner of the room to inspect herself. She looks garish and beautiful, she thinks. And funny, and wounded. With her messy purple roots, in her underwear. It’s nice, this hiding place: behind the haunting, empty eyeholes, no one can see her cry.

…

Eventually she does go down. Apologizes and makes hot chocolate on the stove and heats up plates of leftovers for everyone at lunch.

Just one more day of this, she tells herself.

Tomorrow at this exact hour, she will be back in LA, on her way to a party with her so-called friends, and her life will carry on as if none of this had happened.

One more day.

After lunch, they play a never ending game of the newest version of Monopoly Daisy got for Christmas and eat more food until everyone’s so full and worn out they all topple over the long corner couch in the living room, having only enough energy left to passively absorb the images on the flat screen. Clicking from one streaming platform to the next with the remote, Tally’s dad flicks through the list of Christmas movies.

“Love, Actually?” He suggests.

Tally’s heart squeezes painfully. She snaps: “No.”

He arches an eyebrow. “Hello there, princess. Nice of you to join us. Why not?”

“I saw it recently,” she lies. “Like, last week. Besides, it’s not for the children.”

But the real reason is she knows it’s what Nil will be doing right now only a few miles away from her, stuck between his mom and his grandma on the small couch, hating the movie and especially Hugh Grant but going along without saying so because it’s his mother’s favorite.

Victoria suggests The Grinch; Daisy retorts it’s too old and too scary and they should watch Home Alone instead.

“That’s just as old.” Victoria says, pinching Daisy, at which points Tally loses track of the fight.

With her eyes she follows her aunts and mother as they slip out to admire the snow as it falls and chain smoke on the tiled terrace, gripped by a vicious urge to snatch their cigarettes and smoke them herself. But there is a little one on either side of her, plump hands firmly slotted inside hers, large eyes checking she is watching the movie with them though she is distracted by the clouds outside, their colors of ripe bruising.

Like the last time she was here. Her last day in Roses.

August sipped away in an almost manic frenzy by Tally and her friends: all of them eager, all of them terrified to find themselves at the starting line of the beginning of their lives, for one last moment enjoying the vertigo of standing on its threshold.

It was dusk and the sun cast its dying beams at a low angle through the leaves. The sounds of their high school end-of-summer party were audible in their backs as Tally pulled Nil deeper into the woods, her other hand on a half-full bottle of peach wine. She wore a denim skirt and a silk blouse, and in the purple evening her skin was awash with goosebumps. Stopping by a tree she dropped the bottle to the soft ground, pressed her back against its trunk and pulled Nil to her, guiding his fingers to the buttons of her shirts while her mouth searched for his. He laughed against her lips.

“What?” She asked.

“You’re drunk.”

“So?”

“I don’t want to take advantage of you,” he said, a wink in his amber eyes.

“Oh my God,” she exhaled, full of longing for the weight of his body on hers. “Please do.”

She brought her half-opened blouse to his chest, parted his lips with her tongue. A point deep in the cup of her hips throbbed with a dark, hungry heat as she tasted him. Pressing herself against his crotch, she knew: he wanted it too. She let go of his neck to hitch up her skirt, her body warmed by lust. He pulled away, breathless, licking his lips.

“Nil,” she moaned. “Please.”

“Don’t you want to enjoy the party?”

“No.”

He smiled, picked up the bottle from the ground. “You’ll regret it.”

He wasn’t wrong. She had already planned on going back to his place early to soak up every ounce of him before her early flight the next morning. But that was also the thing: she was on the verge of getting everything she’d ever wanted and the prospect was so exhilarating she couldn’t just sit on one of the camping chairs to watch the boys play at jumping over the bonfire. She needed to put all this heightened energy somewhere, and where better than in the enjoyment of Nil’s body, which she would not be able to do again until she came back at the end of the semester, months from now?

He took a sip of wine and she hugged his chest. Smelled him: pine trees, warm stones. Heard his heartbeat slowing down after the rush of making out with her. His body, steady and calm, always. There he was: the only thing in the world that could have made her stay all her days if only he’d asked, which he would never do.

“I love you,” she said, her mouth pressed against his shirt.

“I love you too.”

“No, Nil. I mean I love you.”

He ran his free hand through her hair, tangled around small shreds of bark.

“I know.”

They stayed like this for a while, not talking. Her mind took her to the following morning. She would sit on the plane, alone, put many miles between them. She had established during their year together that a week was the maximum she could go without seeing him if she wanted to stay sane. Now her next flight home wasn’t until Christmas – three months away.

“You won’t forget me will you?” She asked, suddenly anxious.

“I should be asking you.”

She scoffed. LA was exciting, yes, but it could not compare. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

He planted a kiss on top of her head. “Well you don’t need to either.”

In the distance, she heard laughter and happy shrieks as friends enjoyed their last moments together.

“Do you think I’m making the right decision?” She said, hoping against hope that, this close to her departure, Nil would give her a straight yes or no, which of course he didn’t:

“Do you not?”

“Yeah, no. I want to go.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

For a flickering moment before UCLA offered her a space on their program she had turned over another option in her mind at night, Nil curved around her in his sleep.

“Nothing.”

Her drama teacher, who had convinced Tally she should ignore her father pressuring her to study engineering to pursue a career in acting instead, had told her of the small groups of independent filmmakers in Seattle shooting ocean-lashed DIY movies on the coast, and Tally had felt more than intrigued by the prospect; small budgets requiring her to be many things, director, writer, actor, sometimes not acting at all, just unrolling cables, loading up trucks, doing her own makeup, surrounded by people happy to be only one of many cogs in this absurd art machine – making movies for no reason but the pure love of it.

But when the UCLA offer came it was too good to resist. Tally could multiply the pleasures of her high school fame by hundreds if she made it in Hollywood. And though her teacher, who so believed in the alternate path, warned Tally she might burn her wings out there, like she herself had done once upon a time, Tally knew it was only because she was not made for it like Tally was.

Tally loved her teacher, but she could see her armor was frail, her ability to fake emotions in order to be liked nonexistent. Tally, on the other hand, had captured the essence of her assured, magnetic persona and could deploy it at will, so well and for so long she sometimes lost touch with how she truly felt.

In her final year she had many times been ambushed in the corridors by other students wanting to tell her how much they loved her; she stayed every time, and she smiled, and she remembered their names, even those of the ones so eager to get close to her they were almost rude, even when it made her late to class, even on days she felt bone-tired and anxious and all she wanted was to go home and lie down next to Nil in complete silence until she fell asleep.

Tally could fake it in a way her teacher, who often cried in class over obscure matters, could not. But equally, her teacher, with her emotions so raw, so unmistakably themselves as they pulsed right beneath her skin, was perhaps better suited than Tally to work on these independent sets, where it mattered how deeply and truly you felt things. In comparison,Tally needed to work hard to find in her the authentic strain these places required.

And sometimes she worried: what if it wasn’t there at all?

She spent another moment picturing her life in LA – the ocean, the glimmer, the unending sets.

It was the right call.

She lifted her head and Nil dipped his to kiss her, then she took his hand: “Let’s go back to the party.”

Tally’s dad exclaims he wants more Yule log, and where are the women anyway, chatting as usual, a bunch of smoking songbirds, and the little ones agree they are hungry and call for turkey.

The movie is paused and Daisy, her hand damp and hot inside Tally’s, pulls her to the kitchen:

“I wish you were my twin,” she says, casting provocative glances over her shoulder at her sister following behind.

Tally scrapes the last morsels of flesh from the bird’s carcass and makes a pile on a plate for the kids to fight over. With a ring of finality, the words “one more day” echo over and over in her mind. After this day she will step back into her golden cage and shut its door on herself one last time.

Never again will she be the girl she was with Nil.

“Have some!” Daisy shouts to Tally, batting Luke’s hand away as it descends upon a juicy-looking leg.

Inside Tally’s chest, her heart begins to pound with rapid, suffocating beats. Imperceptibly to a child’s hungry, distracted eye, she begins to back out of the room:

“I need to pee,” she apologizes, entering the hallway now, where the door is so near and Nil is somewhere in the world behind it.

When Daisy looks away, Tally snatches her car keys from the rose-shaped bowl. In the same sweeping movement she swings the door open and throws herself out into the wintry air, her heart pounding, aching, splitting.

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Previously: Tally and Nil argue about the choices they’ve made, and Nil asks Tally to leave.

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With her hair still icy and wet, he parks by the church, turns the engine off.

“I don’t think we should do this again,” he says, eyes fixed to the school ahead.

She thinks of the audition she must pass, pictures it with a sharp, clinical focus, long enough to be sure her voice is steady when she answers: “You’re right.”

The drive back home right after a kaleidoscopic nightmare of irreconcilable images: a camera’s eye, Nil’s toothbrush, brittle Californian brush, the zip of an opening tent and Nil emerging in the green air, a mic, blank faces in a casting agency, a blue pill in the palm of her hand, Nil pushing her against a tree after school to breathe her breath and steal it, Nil and Nil and Nil.

Two lives she never managed to hold together.

The gravel driveway crunches under her feet as she walks from her car to her house and she looks up at the lit window in her mother’s study, a lonely bright rectangle in the suffocating night.

Tally wants to shower, but it would mean rubbing off his scent from her skin, and then how will she know it actually happened? She turns on the space heater in her bedroom instead, undresses, goes to bed.

A long line of notifications crowd her screen as she plugs in her phone. Eve wants to know if she’s had time to read her draft. Her manager wants to know if she’s sent her tape. Benjamin wants to know why she hasn’t texted at all. She hides the phone under her pillow. Mentally rehearses lines for her upcoming audition to fall asleep:

You can’t do this. Tally will say to the handsome demigod about to plunge into an inferno of impossible dangers. I won’t let you.

The handsome demigod will wink through his handsomely dishevelled hair: Watch me .

So fucking boring.

But it works: she’s about to fall asleep. Senseless images fuse and break apart before her fluttering eyelids, but she’s pulled from them by the click of her door.

“Tally?”

Her mother.

“Yeah?”

Delilah stands with one foot in, her backlit silhouette looking taller than in daylight.

“Where have you been?”

“Around.”

Her mother shifts her weight from one leg to the other. “Your dad is sad he doesn’t see you more.”

“Dad can tell me about his feelings himself.”

Ignoring the jab, Delilah comes to sit on the edge of Tally’s bed. “You went to see someone, didn’t you?”

“No,” Tally says, rolling away from her. “I was just around. I haven’t been home in a long time.”

Delilah says nothing and Tally almost believes she will leave, but instead she asks:

“Was it Nil?”

“Mother.”

Tally’s voice is imperious, making her feel even more like a teenager, which in a way she is: pursuing big-shot dreams of fame and fortune while remaining painfully, defeatedly in love with the boy back home.

Delilah does not push. She rests her hand on Tally’s back, and the feel of her mother’s perpetually cold palm through the fabric of her top makes Tally feel worse. If Tally admits to the fresh splinters in her heart, Delilah will say what she has always said. You don’t have to go back.

Little does Delilah know the example set by her life – small, stunted by marriage and domesticity – is one of the ghosts keeping Tally from ever truly coming back.

“Have you eaten?”

“Yes,” Tally says. A giant Lindt Santa in Nil’s car, but still.

“Good. You’re getting too skinny.”

“I’m eating, mom.”

“Good.” Delilah’s answer to everything: pretend it’s okay, for if your ears are shut to the noise of a complaint does it make a sound? “Your aunts will be here before breakfast. Do you think you can get up early?”

She used to love hanging out with her younger cousins, who must all be nearing the end of elementary school by now, but the thought of putting on a fake cheerful Christmas persona makes her want to be sick. “Yes,” she says.

Whether her mother does not notice Tally’s aversion to the prospect or is only pretending not to is impossible to tell.

…

Tally rises with the sun and sets up her camera on its legs in front of a white wall to tape her lines. She does this fifteen, twenty times. Bites off the inside of her cheek by accident during one, tears it with a disgusting crunch. Then she loads the recordings on her laptop and spends another hour pondering their merit, her heartbeat loud and steady in her chest, her fingers moving with icy determination over the trackpad.

What happened with Nil should not have happened, but it has, and now she must make an opportunity out of the fresh wound it has carved in her, deep in the pine’s shadow; she must remember why she left and why she’s not coming back.

Her phone buzzes in her back pocket. A text from Benjamin.

Why are you ignoring me?

She doesn’t answer. When the doorbell rings downstairs she has just uploaded her best take to Casting Networks. Her tongue slides over the gash in her cheek, the taste of blood bright like she’s just made a kill.

…

It is late in the afternoon when they go to church for the Christmas Service. A faint but persistent headache rings in the back of Tally’s sleep-deprived brain, and she braces herself against the music played by the brass band as they enter. Its echo throughout the hall is almost as painful as the lighting, coming from everywhere to pierce the stuffy air: the instruments glinting hard as knives, the candles’ fire soaring around the pews, the blinding chandeliers above the chatty heads, the spotlighting in the corner of Tally’s eyes wherever she looks – shining on the pulpit, shining on Jesus who dies over and over on his cross, shining on the Nativity scene cradled in a nest of golden gift wrap by the huge Christmas Tree. All this light rising into the vaulted ceiling to touch the stained glass windows as they watch the congregation from the church’s highest corners, mute, red, dripping like wounds.

All this light: Tally’s skull is on the verge of splitting.

“I’ll be right back,” she whispers to her mother who hears nothing above the noise.

Outside, the winter air slams into her. She retreats to the back of the church, taking care to avoid the path by the parking lot that would lead her to her old school. Her heart pulses steadily in the dip below her sternum, as loud as it was last night in Nil’s arms. His skin’s heat. His molten eyes. His lips damp from kissing her.

She shakes off the memory and calls Benjamin, who picks up on the first dial to say nothing.

“Hey,” she whispers.

In the ensuing silence, she lights the cigarette she stole from her aunt’s purse.

“Sorry,” she continues. “It’s been a bit hectic here. My family has arrived. I was baking with the kids if you can believe it.”

“Have you sent your tape yet?”

Anger rises in her throat like bile. But she does not hang up on him. Does not throw her phone in the hedge so she doesn’t have to read a single one of his vapid texts ever again. She brings the cigarette to her lips. Even its dim red glow is painful in her sleep-deprived haze.

“Yes.”

Benjamin sighs, relieved. “Can I see it?”

“I’m not at home. Later though.”

“Sam sent me hers. Just to be perfectly transparent, I think she has a very good shot at it. But my money’s still on you because—”

“I know,” Tally interrupts. Snow starts to fall again as she breathes in her smoke and she tightens her coat around her. “Thanks.” Relaxing the muscles of her jaw, she changes the subject: “How’s home?”

“Nice. I went surfing with my dad this morning.”

“It wasn’t freezing?” She asks, though it must have been a lot warmer than the pond she’s just been in.

“We had our wetsuits.”

It’s always been so easy with him, keeping to the surface of things. She used to like that about their relationship.

“Cool,” she says. She wants him to know just by the sound of her voice that she feels alone. But he does not.

He never does.

“And you? How is home?” He asks.

Nil blazes again in her mind. Hits her like a sucker punch, takes her breath away – his sunset eyes, his irises of melted glass – but she answers: “Good.”

“You sound tired.”

I’m not tired, she wants to say, I’m lonely.

“Really?” Easily, she modulates her voice, as a test. “I’ve slept so well recently.”

How much can she lie without him knowing? How many more years can she pretend to be someone else – the girl Benjamin knows, the girl Nil doesn’t recognize – before the real Tally disappears beyond reach?

“Nice!” He sounds only happy for her. “That’s unlike you.”

“Strange, right?”

From somewhere in the distance, his mother calls his name.

“Okay babe,” he says. “I gotta go. Don’t forget to send me the tape when you get home.”

“I won’t.”

She is suddenly struck by the realization she’s been with him for much longer than she was with Nil. Four years is a long time to spend with someone who doesn’t know you at all. And this she deserves. Another drag, breathing through the next painful thought: Nil is wrong.

Willingly or not, Tally has made her choices, and their silken webs tighten around her lungs as she smokes. For the first time ever she would cut them, right now, if only she could find a blade. But her bindings are too thick, and if the knife ever existed she threw it a long time ago, somewhere she can’t touch or even remember.

It’s too late.

She opens her fingers and the cigarette bud dies in the snow with a hiss.

“I’m glad you’re doing good. I love you,” Benjamin says, and waits for her to say it back.

It’s too late not to.

So she does. Of course she does.

Thank you for reading <3 If you have any thoughts or questions on the story, the characters or how I wrote it, please leave a comment, I read every single one <3

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Previously: Tally and Nil wander around the forest like they used to, and Tally feels more torn than ever between the two lives she could live.

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    The girl keeps calling his phone. 

    “Her name is Piper,” Nil corrects Tally. 

    But who cares, really? With his hands zipping down her fleece when they penetrate the shrouded cabin, his fingertips cupping the back of her head to bring their parted, famished mouths together, before turning his phone face down on the nightstand – he can’t well pretend.

    Afterwards it is night and they drive to the next town. He rolls the windows down and she weaves her left hand through the one resting on his lap. They breathe in the icy air, their bodies warm and slick as ripe fruits against the wind’s blade as it storms through the car. Is he more quiet now or is it in her mind? 

    The radio plays a Taylor Swift song, Down Bad. Unbothered by its message Tally sings along with her trained voice and Nil listens pensively, strokes the back of her hand at red lights. They are vibrant and lustful; a sad song is just what they need to polish the moment so it rings in their minds, crystal-like.

    The big 24-hour store is empty, but not as empty as one would expect. The people they cross paths with in the neon-sanitized aisles carry a mix of alcohol and second-thought stocking stuffers in their carts. 

    “Did you know there are more suicides and accidents around Christmas than at any other point in the year?” Tally whispers to Nil as they pass another. 

    He says he knows. 

    “I learned that in Grey's Anatomy.”

    He knows this as well: she made him watch all nine seasons with her until Lexie’s death, which upset her so much she vowed never to watch a single minute of the show again. 

    They grab snacks, peach wine. They didn’t have to come on this errand but it feels better than the unbearable pressure that laid over them when they faced each other in Nil’s bed, their naked bodies pale in the moonlight after they came together, the girl’s silver dress sparkling dimly on the nearby chair.
He is definitely quieter since getting the call, Tally thinks as she tucks one large Lindt Santa under each arm.

    “They’re gonna melt,” he observes. 

    She sticks her tongue out, then, looking around and seeing no one, licks his bottom lip with the tip of her tongue, like a cat. 

    He wipes his mouth with his sleeve, smiling, but from a distance now, his demeanour suddenly reserved. “Ew?”

    She laughs. Her mouth is still sore from how hard they kissed in the cabin. She wants it to hurt even more. 

    On their way to check out they cross the hair product aisle and he stops to point at a bottle of lavender-colored dye. “Look.” 

    “I still have a bottle at home somewhere,” she says. “Do you have gloves?” 

    Nil smirks. “Garden gloves, yeah.”

    “These come with them anyway,” she shrugs, and in a desperate attempt to get back the sliver of normalcy they had just found again, to warm his cold, to keep the ghost of her LA life at bay, she takes the bottle from the shelf. “Let’s go.”

    “It's not gonna be a problem for your job?”

    Grinning with more mischief than she feels over her shoulder, she says: “What job?” 


  

    But back at the cabin, they’re silent again. She sits on a pillow by the coffee table and wraps the towel he hands her around her shoulders to protect her top from the dye. 

    “The usual?” He whispers.

    She nods. 

    He mixes the dye in a bowl and dips his brush with confidence in it, muscle memory taking over in the rotations of his wrist. The dye is cool and tingles as he rubs it into the roots of her blond hair with the crinkling plastic gloves. His body stings hers at all points of contact. She wants to know what is on his mind but is too afraid of the answer. She keeps her pale gaze on the window opposite her, where the black outlines of the trees shiver against the high moon and snow falls fast and oblique against the glass. All around, the wind roars and makes the wooden cabin creak.

    The forest is a different kind of loud. No endless stream of cars. No click of heels, no drunken shouts. No beeps, no construction drills, no blaring news, no gossip, no phone calls. Just this cabin. Just this moon. 

    Just Nil. 

    “Are you tired?” He asks.

    “No. Are you?”

    He ignores her question. “You seem sad.”

    “You seem sad,” she retorts, though she is not certain ‘sad’ is the right word. 

    He doesn’t answer. Trying to keep her head still, she hugs her knees tight against her chest, feeling suddenly cold and overly spacious. 

    “Do you have any friends there?” He asks after a while, his hands moving confidently over her scalp as he applies the dye. 

    “Of course.”

    “I mean real friends.”

    Defensiveness rising inside her, she says: “Can we not?”

    He pauses, then continues: 

    “It doesn’t seem like you do.” 

    She stifles a sigh. “Well, I do.”

    “How do you know them?” 

    “Similar circles, I guess. Some writers. Some actors. Some performance artists.”

    “I don’t even know what that means.”

    Moving her head slightly to look at him from the corner of her eye without disturbing his fingers, she asks: “Are you sure you’re okay? You seem pissed off.” 

    His phone buzzes on the coffee table again and lights up with the girl’s name. His thumbs pause behind her ears, then continue with their mission. 

    Frustrated by his silence, she says: 

    “You should pick up, you know.” 

    “Why?”

    “It’s disrespectful," she says, only because it's the first thing that comes to mind. 

    He scoffs. “And you know all about respect.”

    When her entire hair is tangled with dye and the air is burnished by its chemical smell, he removes his hands and doesn’t say “there you go, madame,” like he used to, so she knows she is right: he is angry. She uncrosses her legs, rises from the pillow, then leads herself to the bathroom, the foretaste of a fight on her tongue, sharp as blood. 

    “You want me to leave,” she says bluntly when she comes back, her clean hair inside a towel on top of her head. 

    It’s not a question.

    Nil has started tidying the room, picking up their clothes from the floor, making the bed. “No, Tally,” he says, not turning. “I don’t.”

    Not pushing him for an answer would be best, she knows. They have done this many times. Bickering in clipped consonants, restraining from saying the mean and true things that come to mind – his passivity, her selfishness – but that their bodies say anyway, ignoring each other until the energy to fight has left them. 

    It would be easy. She pushes anyway: 

    “You seem like you do.”

    He stares at her, confused. “What are you doing? You made your terms clear last night, and I agreed to them. Why are you trying to pick a fight?”

    Maybe because it will be easier to leave if she can make him hate her. Maybe because she is a shark out for her own wretched blood. Maybe because she wants everything or nothing at all.

    Instead, she says: “I just want to know why you’re acting weird.”

    As if weighing the pros and cons of answering her, Nil does not answer straight away. 

    “I went to the airport, you know?” He finally says. “That Christmas. Before I went to LA. No one told me you wouldn’t be on the plane.” His jaw sets. “You never told me you weren’t coming back.”

    A drop of cold water snakes out of the towel along the nape of her neck. 

    “Why didn’t you?”

    “I don’t know.”

    But she does. 

    He turns to face her. “And why did you come back this time?” 

    “I don’t know,” she repeats. 

    Another lie. She couldn’t begin to explain what she’d felt when her agent called to tell her she’d landed a final audition for Marvel, how it had seemed like a vortex opened under the desk chair she was sitting on, ready to suck her into its black mouth. How could she explain this to Nil, when she forsook a life with him in the hope she might one day get that exact phone call?

    “You don’t seem happy about your life there.”

    “I am.”

    “But you’re here aren’t you? For the first time in, what, four years? And you don’t know why, though clearly, clearly, whatever you have over there, all that glitter and gold, it’s not doing it for you anymore, if it ever did.”

    Stranded in the middle of the room, she finds herself unable to formulate a convincing rebuke. He scoffs and continues to tidy. For the first time ever, she wishes Nil was Benjamin, who can never tell when she lies, can never hold his own in a fight.  
	
    “Okay and why are you here?” She asks, defiant. “If your life is so much better than mine, if you’re so content with your nice hometown, your nice girlfriend, driving around the same forest you’ve been wandering in your whole life?”
	
    He casts her a dangerous look over his shoulder. “You don’t know anything about my life.”
	
    “I know who you’re with right now. Why is that? Happy people don’t go fooling around with their ex. Maybe Roses isn’t right for you either.”
	
    He cocks his head. “And where else would I go, huh?”
	
    “Wherever you want. Olympic National Park? That was your dream, wasn’t it?”

    “It was.”

    “So?”

    The look he gives her is loaded with meaning. “I don’t let myself dream too big anymore.”

    His words drop like stones inside her chest and scrape against her ribcage. 

    “Not everything is my fault.”

    “No. I guess not. But I made my choices. I’m not sure you’ve made yours.” 

    An endless silence stretches between them. She turns away from him, looks at the window where her reflection, thin and watery in the glass blacked-out by the surrounding night, watches her back. Waiting to see what she will do next. 

    This was a mistake. 

    She should never have messaged him again, never entered this cabin, never let her hands find their way back to his skin. She had wanted to forget about LA, to be held by the only soul who made her feel more than the sum of her parts – not just pretty, not just talented, not just another piece of merch to be sold on the world’s stage – to feel real, maybe for the last time.  

    But her plan has not changed. It can’t. She has come too far. She must go back to LA. 

    She must get the life she sacrificed everything for. 

    His steps make the wooden floors vibrate as he crosses the room until he stands right behind her: “What is it you want Tally?” 

    The plan has not changed, she repeats to herself over and over, a helpless rage rising in her chest, catching fire in her throat. All seeing him has done is make it even harder for her to go through with it. All it has done is ensure that for months his cold ghost will haunt her mind, shackling it back to this goddamn place just as she needs to be freed from it the most. 

    “To be rid of you!” She whips around to face him – Nil, the one holding her back, the jailer to her old dreary life. “To be rid of you.” 

    She stares at him, breathless. They are so near each other that in an alternate reality they could have kissed, and she hates him for the way the deepest parts of her twist with desire at the thought. 

    The way he looks at her down the length of his nose, eyes heavy with longing but also wary, like she is an addiction he must not fall back into: she knows he feels the same. 

    But his gaze hardens with resolve: “Same.” 

    On the table, his phone lights up again. 

Thank you for reading <3

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Previously: The memory of how Tally chose career over love and broke up with Nil one fateful night in LA haunts them as they grapple with their desire for each other.

    It’s the afternoon when they wake up. They opened an eye earlier, at the same time and of the same accord, and, without speaking a word, decided to close them again, for old times’ sake.

    Her body now is lithe and almost fever-hot. His arm is tight around her ribcage. But inside she is smooth and soft, relaxed like after a long bath, a dreamless sleep, a walk by the sea in the rain. She stretches inside his embrace. 

    “What should we do?”

    “The forest, of course,” he says. 

    Oh why, but of course. The forest.

                                                                 ...

    Tally’s feet are exactly the same size as Pauline’s, Nil’s 70-something mentor, so they go into the field station next door – enter the dark blue glow of sleeping monitors, the gray crunch of the VHF telemetry receivers tracking wildlife, the smell of cold cheap coffee – and borrow her walking boots.

    The low-lying canopy of clouds is full of ice. The bendy tips of evergreens seem to touch them like brushes dipped in milk. As she follows Nil along the needle-cushioned paths, Tally has the same mixed sense of familiarity and strangeness she got yesterday, like when one wanders through one’s home in a dream.

    Nil speaks about his brother, who has a baby he hasn’t seen since his girlfriend decided she had enough to do with a child and a job and a self to take care of and couldn’t do all the doing his adult’s life required and all the thinking about said life his brain couldn’t be fucked to do. And Tally listens because she is afraid of letting her mouth speak too much. 

    What if her tongue slips and all the words she keeps safely locked behind the supple flesh lining the back of her throat spill out? She might say all the things that cross her mind when she’s with him, which are all the things she sees for them – sparkling, iridescent pearls of future memories – and also when she isn’t with him – the crystalline web of a shared life drawn over her eyes; endless dreams of him, of them together, that she makes up behind her closed eyelids in the waiting room of casting agencies, her palms sweating, her pulse quick and even and professional – she knows how to act, even drunk, even lightning-whipped by nerves she knows, and Ben says it all the time that Tally, well, Tally’s a born shark – she might say of all this and then what will be there for him to ask, in that case but: why, Tally, why?

    A grumble in the sky. Tally looks up, thinks: if it snows now, I will go, if it doesn’t, I will stay. 

    Nil stops walking, extends a palm: “It’s raining.” 

    “Oh yeah,” she says, a cold drop landing hard on her cheekbone.

                                                                  ...

    “I want to show you something.” 

    “What?” 

    “Wait. It’s right here.”

    “I hate surprises.”

    “I know Tally, I know.”

    They veer off a half-drawn path in the moss to march through a wall of bushes. 

    “It better be a good surprise,” Tally groans, plucking a nettle from her fleece. 
    
    Nil laughs. He accelerates ahead, at ease in the brambles, and disappears. 

    “Nil?” 

    “Keep going!” He shouts from the other side of a wide oak.					

    She emerges from the understory. An oval pond, smooth and flat like a polished stone, offers its white face to the sky. Drifting on its surface, a pair of common goldeneyes create ripples that shoot beams of refracted light through the surrounding leaves. When their feet settle, clouds glide across the still water before losing their reflection in the curved edges of its even shore.				

    “I had no idea,” Tally murmurs. 				

    “Me neither. I can’t believe it’s been here the entire time and we’ve never found it.”				

    They sit over a flat rock overhanging the water. It’s smooth against Tally’s palm, eroded by thousands of years of wind and snow and rain. Surrounded by these ancient things, the traces of countless lives that have come and gone, cradled by their conscious but thoughtless existence, she feels suddenly more relaxed than she has in months, like she could forget the stories she tries so hard to write about herself too.

    Nil, crouching with the backpack between his knees, forages for the thermos they prepared before leaving. Cross-legged on the rock, thighs touching, they drink their coffee in silence and contemplate the goldeneyes which have stopped caring about them and prune each other’s ruffled feathers as if the humans aren’t here at all. In her head she writes a story about them, sees where she would position a camera on this exact rock to tell it.					

    Then she says:

    “I’m going in.”

    Nil arches an eyebrow above his red-brown irises, which are luminous like something molten. “Are you sure?”

    His gaze makes her feel bold.

    “Why? You scared?” she whispers, her nose a millimetre away from his.

     He grins and lunges, teeth out, to catch her mouth, but she jerks back to her feet and undresses in the silver air. 

    A breeze she hadn’t noticed before sends goosebumps rippling over her collarbone as she climbs down the rock to dip her toes into the frigid waters. Its sharpness rings painfully through her flesh and makes her bones ache but she moves on, undeterred. The mushy bed houses dark red algae that weave themselves around her ankles and reveal from time to time the elusive flash of a fish’s scales.				

    She gasps when the water reaches her waist, and her teeth shatter by the time it touches her shoulder blades. Nil, now standing on the rock, casts a solid shadow next to her:

    “Tally.”

    She dives.

    The pond rushes into her ears, through her hair, makes the blood rush and pulse in her skull, her head throb, but although her body feels on the verge of disintegration her spirit feels sharp and awake, an arrow tearing through a hurricane, and everything becomes clear for a second, clear who she should be, clear who she’s always been, clear where true freedom lies; her heart boom boom booms its telegraphic codes and she thinks yes, of course, this is it. 

    She swims upward to tell Nil, but by the time her shoulders rip out of the surface she’s trembling so hard and so deep she can no longer think and the certainty she thought she’d found is returned to the pond. For a minute, she stares back at Nil’s watchful, concerned frown, dumbfounded.

    “Come in,” she gasps finally. “It’s good.”

                                                                       ...

    Their fingers touch. 

    An invisible current moves their bodies apart. 

    The cluck of a goldeneye.

    It’s been no more than a minute. Maybe two. But haven’t they always been there, suspended between water and air, preserved in ice? 

    Tally closes her eyes when it lands, softly, on her face: snow.    

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Previously: Tally and Nil meet up at the Methodist church, then drive around. A near accident brings them in physical contact, sparking memories. Nil drives her back to the church, and at the last moment invites her to his place. 

    It’s barely warmer inside the cabin. A coat of shadows slowly envelops the frosted giants standing guard outside and gives them a dark blue glow.

    She can’t breathe.

    Each of her steps on the wood resounds like a shot. Nil stands aside, watches her take in his home. As her eyes get used to the obscurity, the objects of his life slowly emerge, as if from the black pool of a developing polaroid: a small room, the metallic glint of a laptop on a couch, a bookcase, a guitar. A double bed. A chair.

    On the chair, a dress. A party dress. Silver, long sleeves.

    Tally lifts it carefully in a pinch. “She always seemed nice. Is she?”

    “Of course.”

    “Cool,” she replies, a smile audible in her voice.

    “What?”

    “I didn’t think you liked ‘nice’.”

    She feels him behind her getting closer. “I don’t know what I like anymore,” he says, and his breath caresses the nape of her neck.

    She turns to face him. Their bodies almost touch now, but don’t. He is so close, so very, very far. She sees it in his clouded eyes and standing between them, the memory of how he’d watched her leave.


    He’d driven her to the airport in his muddy pickup truck. 5am. Behind them, the forest was still and submerged in darkness.

    “Don’t wait for me,” she said in the check-in hall as he helped her lift her suitcase on the scales. “I won’t resent you. I understand. It’s far away.”

    “I do what I want. Captain of my own ship, etc.”

    She tried to smile.

    “Will you come back?” A trace of worry in his voice. He didn’t mean to their hometown. Always, she wanted to reply. Across the earth. Across time. The shreds of his broken heart had swum up to his eyes and caught the pink morning light. Tally began to cry.

    “Of course,” she said, choked at the thought he could believe otherwise.

    He kissed her forehead. “Christmas isn’t that far away,” he whispered as if to reassure them both. The afterimage of his lips prickled near her hairline as she pressed her mouth to his shirt.


    In the cabin, she takes his hands and he lets her.


    At UCLA, the pressure ramped up quickly. She was not as good as she had been in Roses. She was not noticed as people in her class began to get cast. In ads, as extras in plotless sitcoms that would never air, but whatever, they were hungry, they were ravenous, and the empty pit of their stomach could only be satisfied by the large, unblinking camera’s eye.

    She began to fear she was not as talented as she had once thought. She began to fear she could not reach her dreams.


    In the cabin, his heart booms all the way to the rough surface of his palms.


    Benjamin was a man well-versed in the art of getting what he wanted, and what he wanted was Tally. His icy beauty – the cutting cheekbones, the azurean gaze, the golden buzzcut – left her cold, but he smiled and waited for her to change her mind. Class after class he circled her in ever-narrowing laps with his self -deprecation, his easy charm. His kindness, too, though he was not as kind as the boy back home whom she called every night as soon as the door to her dorm room closed. On their way to the studio one morning, he concluded:

    “Your head isn’t in the game.”

    His square mouth was solemn. He said this with the tone of someone diagnosing cancer to a child – the tragedy of scythed potential.

    He was right.

    Her heart was in Nil’s truck. Her heart was in the forest after he took off her raincoat and laid her down on the moss-filled ground. Though it was his first time and not hers, when he slid her long-sleeved top over her hair he did so with hands so delicate, so tender, yet so precise she felt like he’d known her all along. Like he knew what her body wanted. He would give it to her, he whispered as his mouth tracked the curve of her thigh. Her heart sped like it had never done under other boys’ touch, beat breathlessly in her chest as if she were not a cat after all but a frightened bird.

    He took his time with her, God did he take his time.


    In the cabin, the smell of him is dizzying. His breath crashes on her collarbone.


    Benjamin was right. As long as her heart was with Nil she couldn’t really be in LA.

    For the first time she did not pick up his call like she usually did after class. She said by text she was seeing a play. The next night she said she had an audition to prepare. Before he called the third night she said she had the flu, and wouldn’t be able to speak for some time.

    Was it by chance that she entered the right audition at the right time that week, the pain of having abandoned him that made her so haunting in the audition room as she spoke her lines, landing her her first role and an agent just days apart?

    No.

    It was the other Tally, emerging from the carcass of her lovesick heart, desiccated and blood-thirsty.

    She had made it happen.


    In the cabin, she lifts herself to her tiptoes, brings her face close to his until he is out of focus and they are eye to eye.


    She could not call home and end it with Nil by pretending she no longer loved him, because if there was one person in the world who could tell when she lied it was him. But she could not find in her the decency to be truthful either. There were no words to explain. So she didn’t.

    She watched herself get increasingly involved with Benjamin as if it were happening to someone else, until he made it official by kissing her in the parking lot in broad daylight. It seemed more work to resist than to give in. She saw, too, what others did when they looked at them together, the glamour of their romance in Hollywood’s shadow. But Tally would have preferred to say nothing. She would have preferred not to say a single word ever again. She would have preferred to melt inside the characters she played, moving without pause from one to the next until she disappeared.

    Two months passed. She cancelled her flight home for Christmas.


    In the cabin, several lifetimes later, she opens her mouth to break their hearts and save them from themselves:

    “I won’t ask you to wait, if you don’t ask me to stay.”


    The bodies. The beat. The bar.

    The infinity pool glowed on the terrace beyond the glass doors, which had been opened to let the breeze relieve the muggy heat produced by the crowd on the dance floor. The pool was empty, too cold to swim in. Tally was attracted to it like a moth to flame. But she couldn’t move easily through the glutinous mass of people dancing in drunken stupor to the Christmas remixes played by the hired DJ.

    The cheesy tunes bounced with an awful echo against the sleek walls, but Tally had let herself get drunk too and was, for once, almost having fun. The semester was over; her career glimmered full of promise in the near distance.  She wanted to jump fully clothed into the cold pool. Nil lurked within her, of course, haunted the hollow pits of her bones, but it was the price to pay: the veil descended upon her mind’s eye over and over since she’d let him go, showing her glimpses of her future on a red carpet, on a stage, marching across the sprawling set of a prestige HBO show.

    When she finally did see him again it was because he came to find her.

    It’d been a month since she’d ghosted him, but maybe he had warned her of his imminent arrival in one of the messages she had stopped opening. The blue sting of the pool, the throbbing beat, the bodies compressed around the bar. Benjamin’s territorial hands on her hips in the skinny dress, bending over to line her ears with kisses as she weaved through the crowd for her cold plunge, when she saw him standing by the door, looking dishevelled like after a long flight, anxiously scanning the gleaming faces. The love of her life. Coming to find her. Finding, instead, a girl who only looked like her. Mascara smudged in the corner of her lashes, another man’s hands snaking lazily up her shoulder, looking indistinguishable from the greedy, fame-starved crowd she was surrounded by.

    “Tally?” He said as if he wasn’t sure it was in fact her.

    “And you are?” Benjamin slurred, taking a step forward, offering his palm. She saw Nil take him in – his TAG Heuer watch, his whitened teeth, the luxury Tom Ford cologne emanating from his skin in a dense cloud – and reach the same conclusion he must have done when he first saw her there, that the person he had in front of him could not be Tally, because Tally would never go for a guy as obviously depthless as Benjamin.

    Tally stepped sideways to move Benjamin’s unrequited handshake out of the way. “What are you doing here?”

    “I tried to tell you I was coming, but you don’t exactly respond to my texts anymore.”

    Despite his anger, she felt the magnetic string between them straining to bring them together, to pluck her free of Benjamin’s hands, free of the pretensions of the wannabes around her, and she took a step forward without thinking. But just as she did she saw, hidden behind Nil’s frame, the ghost of the life she did not want either, its grasping hands, her town a locked room in which she would turn, slowly, into her subservient, horizonless mother.

    A sharp cackle resounded behind Tally. Straining to see above Benjamin’s broad shoulders, Samantha, her rival since Tally overtook her lead in the program after giving up on Nil, was grinning.

    “The boy from back home, I bet,” she said, her green eyes shining with malevolent delight.

    Benjamin’s face fell. “I thought you’d broken up.”

    A grimace of pain twists Nil’s mouth. “Is that what you told them?” 

    Around her the music seemed suddenly distorted, the bodies slow and limp when they bumped against her on their way to the smoking area while the eyes on her – Samantha’s, Benjamin’s, Nil’s – grew more intent, waiting for her answer, waiting to see which of the opposing paths she would go down.

    Inside her chest, her heart splintered with a distinct crack.

    “Yes,” she said, her voice even and determined and as cruel as an axe. “Yes we have.”

    Nil stared at her, dumbfounded but refusing to let her look away like the coward she wanted him to, before nodding slowly.

    “Sorry I was so slow to get it,” he said. “I won’t bother you again.”

    Without another glance in her direction he walked out of the house. She did not follow. Benjamin’s grip slackened with relief. Disgusted by his touch, she turned on her heels and walked away, ignoring his calls, not seeing where she was going except for the pool that glowed, deserted and spectral, on the edge of her tear-blurred sight.


    In the cabin, she breathes over his full lips. She waits for his answer. Will you take it, this morsel of me?

    He nods, once.

    God, the scent of his skin.

    Pierced by longing she releases a trembling breath as he takes a fistful of her hair and brings her mouth to his. His lips part and find her tongue while he backs her against the edge of the bed. His hands decisive as they glide down her waist, grab her thigh, lower her on the mattress. His chest against her heaving breasts as she tumbles, and there he is over her, filling her horizon, his tongue and his jawline and his eyes, Nil, not a boy anymore but a man, and she can no longer speak but it doesn’t matter, he understands her body saying yes, please, do it, do it all, all at once.

Thank you for reading. Did you enjoy finding out about their breakup and their… hm… reunion? Let me know in the comments!

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New here? Start with chapter 1, or find your chapter in the table of contents

Previously: Tally sends a message to Nil hoping to meet up again, but he is conflicted.

Nil’s reply holds a single word:

Okay

Suddenly in a rush, Tally steps over the zipped suitcase on the ground and rummages through her closet for something to wear, things so old they almost belong to someone else. An oversized blood red sweater she used to love, a pair of khaki cargo pants, boots. Everything’s too big apart from the shoes: California has scraped her clean of fat. So much so that in certain angles she actually looks malnourished, though this is more than compensated for by the fact in most others she looks amazing and kinetic, an elastic ready to snap.

Moving in the dark, she frees the peach wine from the cold, geometric glow of the freezer’s light, takes a mint from the rose-shaped bowl by the door, car keys, and she is off again: her long, exhausted body cutting through the swift night air.

The car glides down the deserted streets. Past the diner and the bowling alley and the flower shop, past the sparkling red and green decorations, past the paper snowflakes taped to dark, silent windows. She didn’t ask him where to meet and he didn’t need to say. The heater blasts air so dry on her face it almost burns.

She leaves it on.

In the quiet in the dark, on her way to the same place she has gone a million times, the Hollywood lights haunting her life sink into a distant haze and here she is again, speeding down the streets of a long-gone life.

Two months after they met – two months during which Tally’s attraction towards Nil kept growing for unfathomable reasons, at unfathomable speed – their biology teacher assigned a field project Tally no longer remembers and the light iridescent veil descended upon her mind’s eye, telling her the occasion was not to be missed:

“Let’s do it together,” she whispered to Nil. “We’ll go to the forest. Wait, I have an even better idea. We’ll camp.”

Nil looked her up and down with a smirk. “Have you ever gone camping before?”

She tutted, elbowed him in the rib, and the sensation of his hard side left a tickling imprint on her bone. “No,” she admitted. “But you have.”

“How do you know?”

“You told me.”

He took a pencil from his case and began to take notes on the assignment. “So you listen to anything I say?” He glanced at her, a humorous smile lifting the corner of his pink mouth.

I remember every single thing that comes out of your mouth, she thought. That his grandmother was called Dolly, and that she lived with him and his brother at their mother’s house despite the fact she was actually his dad’s mom. That he decided he’d work in conservation the day he’d found a bobcat trapped for its fur deep in the woods. That he was tone deaf but nonetheless liked to badly play the guitar in his spare time. Instead, she flashed him a carnivorous grin and said:

“When I have nothing better to do.”

“Hm.”

“Is that a yes?”

The teacher glared at her for chatting and they both looked down at their notebooks, his page rapidly filling up with his faint graphite script, hers still blinding white. Pretending to take notes but only doodling senseless words as she watched him from the corner of her eye, she waited for his answer for so long she reached the conclusion he was too polite to say no directly, and would instead just never say yes, until his eyes caught hers in the silence and he whispered:

“Let’s do it.”

She signals right, to the usual place between the Methodist church and the school that used to be theirs. Her skin radiates clammy heat in the oversize sweatshirt. What is she doing here? She should be at home revising her lines, recording herself over and over, laser-focused on the role she’s supposed to want more than anything else in the world.

But she can’t stop her stomach from twisting at the idea of getting it, dread rising from it like a ghost-cold hand to grab her throat. Tally has heard the stories. Girls strangled to death by the crowd’s insatiable love. They are part of the mystique. The drugs so the night won’t end, the applause to numb the pain. Pictures of their carcass in the press, eyes glazed in the satin sheets, finally serene.

Fame is a roaring beast; it eats its prey alive.

But while she waits, the church, backlit by street lamps, casts a pointed shadow over her and the old feeling comes back. It warns her of the alternative. A suffocating boredom, the fear of a slow death. What would her life be like had she stayed? Her brief stardom after the school’s plays, the great sense of purpose it had given her. The feeling that the world was only an apple in the palm of her young hand for her teeth to crunch. All these promising sparks: snuffed out by the town’s damp.

She turns the engine off and her breath resounds with exaggerated sharpness in the car. He won’t show. He wants to waste her time. He wants his revenge. She will let him have it.

But a pair of bright headlights floods her car as a truck comes to park in the spot next to hers. She tells herself she will not give in to the memory it stirs – she will not. But she does.

She remembers it all.

What had they been looking for in the forest? Something to do with mosses. Something to do with the fine calligraphy of their lives underfoot, the dense protective webs they formed over the creatures in the ground.

They each carried a backpack and separate pop-up tents. It was almost midday, and the sun filtered through the canopy in wide maximalist beams that warmed the top of their heads as they walked. So close to Nil, Tally had difficulties keeping her heart rate under control, and had the frazzled sensation of being over-caffeinated, though, forbidden from drinking it at home, she hadn’t had any since the beginning of the weekend.

After walking for an hour to a place Tally had never been to, Nil put his backpack down.

“Let’s look here,” he said.

Tally nodded as he pulled a small magnifying glass from the inner pocket of his raincoat. She watched. She had been begged by several people from unrelated social groups to attend a party that night, which she would have done in other circumstances. Since the roaring success of last year’s school play and the growing rumors she had been noticed by someone in the business, she was more often than not the party’s centre. The fizzy delight of people coalescing around her throughout the night, trying to make her laugh, trying to be her friend; the ecstasies of popularity pumping through her system: these were hard things to give up. But Nil observed the moss on the bark with eyes so deep and calm she could not bring herself to care.

“Do you want to try?” He asked, handing her the magnifying glass. “Look here.” He pointed at a spot on the bark. “It’s the protonema.”

Behind the glass the moss looked slick and bright green, algal. He breathed slowly and evenly next to her as she kept her eyes on the bark. There was something between them. She felt it in her bones. Nil had other friends in that class, but he called her if he lost a worksheet, turned to her if the teacher said something stupid or outrageous, brought her the forbidden cup of coffee every morning in the parking lot before class after she complained about her parents’ restriction.

And yet his eyes never lingered on her mouth the way the other boys’ did when she spoke. He never came to the parties she invited him to. Never let his fingers graze hers in the brisk morning when he gave her the cup.

She wanted to confront him. She wanted to grab his face and make him tell her exactly what happened in his mind when he laid eyes on her. And why shouldn’t she? She pulled back from the tree and turned, tilting her chin up to stare him defiantly in the eye.

“What do you think about girls, Nil?”

He looked at her down the length of his nose. “Excuse me?”

“Do you like them?”

He folded the lens and put it back in his raincoat. “Hm,” he said. She saw it on his face the moment it hit. “Wait,” he cocked his head. “Are you asking if I’m gay?”

She didn’t answer and he started laughing.

“Why are you laughing?” She said, almost angry. Wanting him was maddening, but she could handle not having him if she knew he could not be had. Not knowing how he felt about her – or worse, being beaten at her own game – was unbearable. “Why are you laughing?”

“Because you’re outrageous,” he chuckled, his amber gaze playful.

“So you are?”

He shook his head. “I like girls very much.”

She scoffed. “Then what is it?” She said, incredulous. “Do you have a long line of them to get through before it’s my turn? Am I not pretty enough for you?”

“Oh my God,” he said. “Tally.”

Sensing a breach in his composure, she softened her voice, took a step closer. “I’m just trying to understand.” He did not pull back. “I’m trying to understand because I like you, and I think you like me, but I’m starting to get worried you’ll never do anything about it ever.” Beneath the open raincoat, mere centimetres from her face, his charcoal hoodie smelled of pine trees and sun-kissed stones, of him. “If I’m wrong and this is just friendship to you, that’s alright. I just want to know.”

He paused before replying: “Why?”

She took a long breath in.

His proximity, his smell: she was going to die.

“Because I’m obsessed,” she exhaled. She raised her fingers, almost touched his chest. “I need to move on with my life.”

She could not bear to look at his face to guess what his silence meant so she stared at his sweater, so close it was blurry. He said nothing. Her heart began to fall, and fall. She pulled back.

He caught her wrist.

“Please,” he murmured under his breath. “Don’t move on.”

Now he lowers his window, protects himself from her with the distance between their cars.

“You washed your hair,” he says.

“I did,” she says, before adding. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

He turns his engine off. “Me neither.” He looks out of his windshield at the shrouded classrooms ahead, scratches his stubbled chin.

Enunciating each syllable with great care, he says: “I have a girlfriend.”

A senseless flicker of irritation flares in the back of her mouth. If I wanted to know who you were hanging with while I was gone I would have asked you, she wants to say, though a twisted part of her pulses with morbid curiosity.

“I know.” She didn’t. “We could just drive around.”

He regards her for a second then smiles to himself, like there’s a joke she’s not getting.

“What?” She asks.

“Nothing. Driving around sounds good.”

“Your car or mine?”

“Did you bring the peach?”

She takes the bottle from the passenger seat and shows it to him.

“Then mine, so we’re even.”

She ponders the word: even. Tally can’t begin to think of what she’d have to do in order to achieve that as she gets out of her car and a rush of sharp, chlorinated blue, like vertigo, momentarily clouds her mind’s eye. The bodies, the beat, the bar.

The memory festers behind her eyes as she sits next to him, sticks the peach between her thighs, buckles her seatbelt. The bottle is chilly and the condensation coating the glass soaks through her pants. Guilt and excitement at being near him again mix in her stomach in a disorienting cocktail.

Nil does not look at her. He’s all business backing out, staring above his shoulder through the rear window. She had not laid eyes on him since that night. Now, his jaw is right there. She sees its outline from the corner of her eye. In fact, he’s so close she can smell his shower gel, something fresh and blue. But she keeps her gaze steady on the retreating school until they’re on the road, then she reclines against the seat, focusing on each vertebrae as they lengthen against it. Her boots crunch on old, dried mud caked on the floor of his car.

“Why is your truck so dirty?”

“Because I work in the forest.” Again, the careful enunciation, like he’s speaking to someone stupid or particularly volatile – she might be both, considering what she’s doing right now.

Silence falls over them and he doesn’t turn on the radio or make conversation to stop it. It puts Tally on edge, all this quiet next to him, the possibility of hearing his heartbeat. He drives in a straight line west until they are almost out of town, then turns around and follows Main Street from the opposite side, going slowly in case a deer shoots out from the surrounding darkness, as they are prone to do at this time of year.

“Turn here,” she says at the next junction.

He signals left. “Why?”

“Why not?”

Nil taps the soft leather of his steering wheel with his fingertips as he leads them down the more residential streets where big houses are complicated by ropes of fairy lights.

“Do you want some peach?” She says, opening the screw top.

“You go first.”

She takes a swig as he asks, “How is California?”

Please, she wants to say. Just this evening let me forget.

“Sunny. Hungry. Botoxed,” she answers anyway.

“Kind of the opposite of here then.”

She chuckles cynically. “Exactly.”

“And your acting career? I don’t really watch TV or go to the movies, so…”

Nil’s tone is so polite, so even, Tally has a hard time guessing whether he actually cares about anything she says at all, or if he just took pity on her outside the store.

“I’ve been in a few plays in LA, episodes here and there in some shows, an ad or two. I haven’t had my big break yet,” she says, almost apologetic.

“What series?”

“Law & Order?”

A whistle escapes his front teeth. “I know that one. Impressive.”

“Everyone and their cousin has been on that, but thanks.”

Checking his rearview mirrors, he says, softly: “Well I always thought you would make it big if you tried.”

“Actually, I’m auditioning for something kind of big,” she whispers.

“Oh yeah?”

“A new Marvel movie.”

“Really?” He sounds surprised.

“What?”

“No, nothing. I just wouldn’t have guessed.”

“I don’t really like the role to be honest.”

“Then why are you auditioning?”

She shrugs. Repeats the well-rehearsed line: “To put myself on the map.”

“I suspect it will do more than that.”

Indeed.

Her throat tightens so she doesn’t answer. Nil glances at her, sees the frozen expression on her face and nods. He does not press her and the feeling of being once more held by his wordless understanding tames her anxiety. Everyone close to her had had something to say the summer before she left for college, when she’d briefly hesitated between entering the prestigious drama program she’d be accepting to at UCLA, and pursuing independent filmmaking in an obscure production company in Seattle. But not Nil. He was the only who understood her hesitation and at the same time refused to influence her either way.

A car with full headlights approaches from the other lane and lights up the inside of the truck, so that for an instant she sees every minute dust particle as it falls over his face. The sight lingers long after they are in the dark again, so heightened her senses have become: the whole of her attention a beam, his body trapped under its point and lit up, in high definition like the hyperreal colors of an IMAX movie screen. It might be weird this intensity – she senses she has crossed a line, staring at him so unabashedly like that – but she can’t help herself.

She brings the bottle to her lips and the alcohol convinces her that asking about the girl is actually a good idea.

“So you have a girlfriend,” she says.

His fingers miss a beat on the steering wheel. “Yes.”

“Who is it?”

“I thought you knew already.”

“I just heard you met someone,” she shrugs. “Nothing specific.”

He smiles to himself like she just told him a joke.

“You don’t have to lie, Tally. You haven’t spoken to anyone here in ages.”

“My mom told me.”

“No she didn’t,” he says, then gently. “It’s okay though. To be curious. I get it.”

Nil, the goddamn lie detector. Is that how he knew to find her in the aquamarine glow of that pool? In her ears, the echo of the song that started playing the exact moment she spotted him in the crowd. Last Christmas, Wham! Someone else’s hand on her lower back.

“So who is it?”

He sighs, “Piper Scott.”

Each syllable a bullet in Tally’s chest: Pi-per-Scott. Bam bam bam.

“The blond one?”

“The blond one.”

“Just your type, then.”

He laughs, taken aback. “I guess so.”

He takes a different turn, down a street Tally doesn’t recognise.

“You’re with someone too,” he says. It’s not a question.

“I am.”

She thinks the blow will finally come, but he turns his head to look her in the eye and, seemingly meaning it, says, “Nice.”

It’s all so civilized.

Suddenly, her presence in his truck makes sense: he must be testing himself. Does he still feel the magnetic pull of their connection, or is he finally free? His acknowledgment of Benjamin’s existence makes her want to cry. He is probably listening to a podcast on ketogenic peptide supplements as they speak. She takes another long gulp of wine, to swallow down the cold lump of sadness in the hollow of her throat, while Nil takes another turn. She doesn’t know where they are anymore. At the end of the street, tall, pointed shadows rush to the night sky: the forest edge.

She deserves to be punished. In fact, she will feel better if she is. If he wants to invite her here so he can see just how little he cares about her now and rub it in her face she will let him. She forces herself to smile:

“Sure you don’t want any?”

He glances at the half-empty bottle in her hand, which, now that the alcohol is coursing through her veins, feels heavier than it did when it was full. She sees the temptation in the way his eyes linger. The ultimate test of his disinterest, she thinks: can he drink peach wine by her side, feel her gaze on him as his mouth closes around its rim, and still feel nothing?

It’s beginning to slide in her palm when he says:

“Sure, okay.”

She moves to hand him the bottle but it escapes her fingers and falls behind his seat.

“Oh no,” she says, undoing her seatbelt and getting on her knees to reach for it.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Her fingertips touch the glass. I got it, she almost says, when out of the corner of her eye something jumps into the middle of the road and Nil hits the brakes hard.

“Fuck,” he hisses through gritted teeth, as Tally, gasping, is propelled to the front of the truck. Her shoulder bounces off the steering wheel and she throws her arms ahead to catch herself. She catches Nil instead.

One hand gripping his bicep. The other on his chest.

Out of instinct, he let go of the wheel to catch her too, and the fingers of his left hand cover her hipbone. On her knees above him, her hair tickles his cheek and he looks up at her with his mouth parted, eyes wide.

“Deer,” he whispers.

She can only nod. Under her fingers, his chest shakes with the loud beat of his heart, which does not slow down when the deer is gone.

“I…” she starts, meaning to apologize. “I think…”

His gaze falls to her lips. She thinks what? She thinks nothing. Her mind is blank. No: her mind is the salted memory of Nil’s tongue in her mouth.

He swallows and his Adam’s apple bobs inside his exposed throat. The fine hair on her arms bristles. She inches forward.

In the nearest house, a porchlight flicks on and a man comes out to check on the truck idling outside his property in the middle of the night. Nil clears his throat.

“We should go.”

She peels herself from his chest.

“Yes,” she says, retreating to her seat, blood thumping loudly in her ears. “Yes, you’re right.”

She would stay longer. She would stay all night. Dye her hair in his bathroom the way they used to, conquer the misted woods with their phones’ flashlights, his chest with her lips. She would stay forever, maybe.

Maybe.

It’s too late now.

“Yeah, my parents will worry,” she continues, though the house will only be cold and silent when she comes back, but it doesn’t matter now because Tally has already rolled her dice, years ago in fact, yes, with her own damn hand, so when he drives off and turns and turns once more and the school is right there, bursting out of nowhere like a blade in the night, like a Jack-in-the-box, like a mean and hungry ghost, when he drives into the spot by her car and switches off the engine and says nothing, she gets out.

She unlocks her car, the surrounding silence a block of ice pressing against her back, which his voice unexpectedly splinters:

“Tally?”

She turns. “Nil?”

Something knowing and heedless in his eyes.

“Do you want to go to the forest?”

Thank you for reading. Did you enjoy finding out more about Tally and Nil’s past? Let me know in the comments!

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next chapter

Previously: Tally and Nil have a frosty conversation in the supermarket’s parking lot, but Tally realizes Nil bought a bottle of the wine they used to drink together.

Back at home, she stays a moment longer in her car to steady her breath.

Nil still lives here.

More interesting: Nil still buys peach wine.

She opens her own cheap screw-top rosé and brings its neck to her lips for a sip. It’s lukewarm, overly sweet and just as she remembers it. The taste makes her feel both young and really really old.

Her parents are at the long mahogany table in the dining room, discussing who should sit next to whom at the family gathering they are hosting this Christmas. Both sides of the family come to Tally’s parents’ house because it’s near her grandparent’s care home, is the biggest, and the forest of pine trees that borders the town is a better mood enhancer than the miles of highway that her twin aunts live next to – especially when it snows, which it hasn’t yet. Her cousins call everyday for a weather update.

She lays the wine in a freezer drawer for a quick chill and checks her phone, aware of her irrational hope Nil will message again. He has not. She has Instagram notifications, several texts from Ben, and a wave of little green WhatsApp icons from her acting class group chat filled with videos and pictures of Samantha’s post-play drinks and after-party at the beach. Tally scans the pictures quickly. Most are blurry in a glamorous way, the moon a celestial smear over the midnight ocean. Samantha, Eve, and Tally have their arms interlocked and left legs in the air. Sand falling from their feet, purple dust shining in their light hair.

She closes the app to read Ben’s messages.

B: I miss you already

She smiles to herself.

T: Stop it.

He replies instantly – Ben spends more time than he cares to admit on his phone, tracking his steady rise in followers on Instagram. Tally doesn’t blame him: his face is an actual money maker. When she met him – tall surfer type, ocean eyes, new-money charm – the transparent layer settled over her eyes: Ben will make it big.

B: What did you think of Sam’s part? We didn’t get a chance to talk about it

Tally types, “Meh”, and he replies with a laughing emoji:

B: Some people just want to watch the world burn

She sends back a kiss emoji and closes the app.

Her dad’s voice rises in the next room: he’s moving to the kitchen. Tally fumbles to close the fridge and takes the shampoo bottle and nail brush from the bag before escaping to her bedroom upstairs. She doesn’t want to talk about acting, her career, how much money she’d be making right now if she’d done engineering like her sister. His booming voice echoes in the stairwell as he starts a new conversation with Tally’s mother from the kitchen, where he’s no doubt refilling his bourbon. Whether she is answering him softly or is just not talking at all, Tally isn’t sure. The lack of pause in his speech has never been an indication of the latter, though eventually, whoever he speaks to usually does shut up. It’s tiring speaking into a void. In this he has primed her for the disappointments of her acting career. She might feel more dejected by the dozens of audition tapes she sends and receives no acknowledgement for otherwise.

Tally goes into her ensuite bathroom. The house feels bigger than usual right now, with her sister away. She spends every other holiday with her husband’s family in Pennsylvania, who own an actual Christmas tree farm – talk about festive.

In the shower, exhaustion hits her as she rubs her skull. Her fingers shake slightly from it, and from something else. She presses her forehead to the cool white tiles on the wall facing her, trying to stay focused on the task ahead – live through the short, depressing holiday then fly back to LA to get that goddamn job, that goddamn dream life – but she cannot stop her mind from playing the movie of that year, cannot stop the old feeling from creeping back and expanding in her chest. An unbidden thrill when she remembers how much she chased him after that first day.

How he let himself get caught.

She offers her face to the shower. His lips, his hands, his–

Stop, she tells herself. Big blobs of raspberry-scented foam splash down her lower back into the tub.

Stop.

It takes a long time for the hot water to wash away the glitter. The stream flowing along the porcelain holds a faded blue, almost grey, tint and sparkles dimly for at least ten minutes. When it’s gone she gets out, and, wrapped in a towel, sinks into her bed and checks her phone again. Two missed calls from Ben, whose last questions she ignored for too long, one from her agent Naomi and texts from Eve.

Nothing from Nil.

She considers not calling Ben back – her agent can wait – but her phone vibrates in her hand again with a call from him and she picks up:

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey. How are you? You sound tired.”

Ben does not believe in tiredness. He is one to set his alarm early on the weekend for no reason, or to complete a 30-day yoga challenge, or to read inspirational quotes from the Bible he would later read out to her, ignoring her repeated feedback – that she doesn’t believe in God and just wants some coffee. But his favourite motto is also “fake it til you make it,” so Tally doesn’t know whether he truly feels this pumped all the time. That’s another thing about Ben: he is a good actor.

“Did you have a chance to read the lines on the plane? Did you know Sam is auditioning too? ” He asks, repeating the questions in his last unopened message.

“No,” she yawns loudly, tired though a flush of anxiety blooms inside her ribcage at the thought of the script she hasn’t yet read. “And no. But it’s not a surprise.” Tally and Sam are similarly good looking and similarly competent in skills peripheral to acting, like dancing and singing, so they tend to go for the same parts. And although Tally is the better actor, Sam is even hungrier for it, which evens out their chance of success.

“Miss Tally…” Ben says with gentle disapproval. “It’s your big chance. Marvel doesn’t make movies every two minutes.”

“Well…”

“You know what I mean.”

“I just don’t know how many more girlfriend parts I can play before it actually rots my brain.”

Ben exhales sharply, as if readying himself to trod the well-worn path of this frequent argument.

“It’s just to show your face. Put you on the map.”

“If I get the part, it’ll be a lot more than just showing my face.”

“Exactly!” He exclaims, as if she finally got the point he’d been trying to make this whole time. “You’ll be a star. You can do whatever you want after that.”

She isn’t sure it’s true but she doesn’t say that. She doesn’t say that success in this industry is looking more and more like a cage. She doesn’t say it because Benjamin, like the rest of the friends she has made over there, does not understand. What’s not to like about a fabulously gilded cage? Above all, she doesn’t say it because she’s afraid being denied entry is a fate worse than looking at the world through its golden bars.

She rubs her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired right now.”

He pauses, feeling guilty, no doubt – Ben is actually genuinely nice – and his voice brightens again. “You can just start again tomorrow.”

She plays with the purple tassel sewn in the corner of her duvet cover, feeling the fresh sheets slowly absorb the rapidly cooling remains of her shower. Through the window opposite her bed she can see the green and red fairy lights decorating the neighbour’s roof, and, between the foliage of a row of short cypress trees, the bright red hat of a lit-up Santa.

“Yes,” she answers, trying to ignore her unease, trying to convince herself not only that Benjamin is right but also that she wants him to be.

Soon they will call. Soon they all will.

                                                                   *

After dinner she tries to sleep, but wakes up a couple of hours later, at almost 11pm. Her bedroom is dark apart from the thin haze of Christmas lights and the curved blade of a moon crescent high in the sky. The room is pristine. Her computer, unused for months, shows its blank face on top of her desk. No clothes forgotten on the chair or hooked over the closet door, no mug on the bedside table, not even the burst of the suitcase she hasn’t opened yet. The night stares at her with a mute, lonely face.

She lays on her back and tries to breathe like they do in the yoga classes Ben drags her to sometimes, and in the quiet Nil’s face resurfaces from the back of her mind as if out of a deep black pond, at the same time as the tactile memory of a hand on the small of her back, of an icy winter breeze blowing through her perfumed hair, of the eerie shine of a pool in the horizon stinging her eyes.

Three more deep breaths and she picks up her phone.

She has to scroll quite a long way down until she can find his nickname: Peach.

I’m sorry, she wants to say. I’m so sorry. But she does not. The words too heavy and full of all the things she is sorry for if she lets herself think about it, which she cannot do, for the sake of the LA life she’s been trying so hard to build.

A different scenario unfolds behind her mind’s eye instead. She should not ask. She should not. But so what? He doesn’t have to say yes.

Her fingers are anxious and clumsy and she has to type her message several times.

T: Would you like some peach?

She sends it then slams her phone screen down on the bed and balls her hands into fists. Waits for it to buzz. Prays it will, prays it won’t. If he says no, or doesn’t answer, that will be it, she tells herself. She will not message again: closure.

When it vibrates her fist shoots out. It’s only Eve, asking her what she thought of the latest draft of her short story, whose main character everyone agrees is heavily inspired by Tally, if Tally were the ghost of a dry cleaner in Brooklyn.

She ignores it and checks her conversation with Nil. The ‘seen’ tick has appeared but he has not answered. In an attempt to pretend her heart is not banging against the edges of her skull, Tally drops her phone and rolls over in bed as far away from the offending object as possible.

It’s for the best. No threads left to get caught in, like a cardigan on a rough door. She will tape her lines and go back to LA and quash every murmur of doubt within her telling her to get out of there before its lights char her soul.

It’s for the best.

But she takes her phone and stares at the screen anyway, its brightness painful, her bedroom roaring with the beat of her strangled heart when the three dots appear at the bottom of the conversation. Disappear again.

Five minutes pass.

Prepared not to sleep for the rest of the night, or perhaps ever, she puts the phone back down on her chest with a cold calm, when it vibrates again, once.

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chapter one: the road not taken

chapter two: the kind of cold

chapter three: write this down

chapter four: call it even

chapter five: babe

chapter six: old times’ sake

chapter seven: the ache

chapter eight : the holidays

chapter nine: time flies

chapter ten: messy as the mud

chapter eleven: the warmest bed

Previously: For the first time since she left, Tally is home for Christmas. At the grocery store, she sees the ex she never got over and whose heart she broke in order to pursue her dreams of acting fame in LA.

He explicitly told her not to contact him again in his last message. A message, like the ones before it, she never responded to.

In the velvet quiet of her car, she can almost hear it again, the garish music that was playing that night. Tally pushes the memory out of her mind to watch him slip through the opening doors. His shoulders: broader than she remembered. He isn’t a boy anymore, the one whose lingering presence here has kept her from coming back all these years.

She thought she could bear it now, seeing him again.

She was wrong.

In high school, people liked her because she was pretty, but she liked him because he was kind. In the town surrounded on all sides by a deep, damp forest – so deep in fact, so damp, it felt less like a place in a country and more like an island drifted out of clouds, a shred torn from some ancient and forgotten world – girls dreamed of cutting their teeth on a vampire’s diamond skin and that’s how she knew he was not like the rest of the boys: Nil did not snicker at girly things. In biology class where they met he made the first Twilight joke over the microscope (“Prophase” he’d said darkly, though they were studying bacteria, not cell division) and pretended to be the Edward to her Bella as they passed it back and forth.

And it’s true he was handsome, but not in the way of the other boys known for their handsomeness, with their harsh masculine brows, their floppy hair, their bleeding gums on the football field, no: Nil was handsome in the way of something precious and radiant and easily crushed, like an untouched snowfield, and although in that first hour she did not immediately recognize it, the lethal spark that would melt them both, it did not take long until looking into his eyes she could freely, rapturously admit it to herself: he would be her ruin.

It was the first day of their final year and he sat very upright in his chair as she marched late into class. There were several seats for her to pick from, but he was so focused staring ahead at the whiteboard, his spine was so erect, his notebook so perfectly parallel to the edges of the desk.

Tally could not resist messing with his straight lines.

“Hey,” she said, lowering herself into her chair, ignoring the teacher’s glower at her tardiness.

He did not look away from the board until the teacher turned her back to them to pick up her pen. He glanced at Tally then, and she noticed his eyes were an orange, almost golden brown. “Hi.”

“My name is Tally.”

“I know,” he said, which was not a surprise. By the beginning of their senior year, everyone knew who Tally was. “You were in the play.”

She smiled, the pleasant heat of her small fame rising slowly along the nape of her neck. She had just that morning overtaken the captain of the school’s football team unassailable lead in Instagram followers. “And you are?”

She had noticed the pretty boy sitting next to her before – in the cafeteria, in the narrow corridors that stitched their school together – and knew his name but pretended not to. He was even more handsome up close. Discreetly, she dipped her chin to direct a beam of sunlight from the nearby window into her blue eyes and make them burn brighter, and he paused before giving his answer, as if aware something was being done to him – as if he could notice Tally silently, expertly casting her spells.

“Nil,” he said.

The teacher walked across the middle aisle to distribute printed copies of the year’s curriculum, and Nil scanned the sheet handed to him with his catlike eyes.

The game was more fun when it was challenging, and Nil would be a challenge, she could tell. All these straight lines. All this focused, polite energy. And he was so handsome, actually. Annoyingly so. It made her want to taunt him more.

“Unusual name,” Tally said, slowly bringing two fingers over their shared desk to tap his wrist once. “Nice to meet you, Nil.”

He looked away from the page, his gaze sweeping down her face to land on the spot of skin she’d just touched.

“Nice to meet you, Tally,” he whispered back, and even stranger than his composure was the small shiver she felt ripple down her spine when he said her name.

Now she watches him put his empty bag in a basket before his silhouette, sharp in the outdoors sleeveless jacket, disappears behind the discount aisle. Once he is out of her field of vision, she wonders whether she has in fact dreamed him up.

Regardless, she stays in her car and turns the heater on. Quickly, her breath and the artificial warmth fog up the windshield glass. She draws a sleeve over her fist to clear an uneven circle in the windshield. Would it feel like it had then, the hit of his gaze on her face?

He does not want to see you, Tally reminds herself.

But what if she just checked in, as a friend? A friendly check-in would surely be okay. Time has passed and they were friends once after all. Before. The forest, the first kiss. She, so certain of her own desirability as she stole his lips; he, indeed so willing, but oh so overwhelmed.

Both of them so achingly young.

Yes, they were friends before then.

The gap in the condensation fills up again; she is wiping it when the automatic doors open, and his reappearance snuffs out her resolve.

The pool, too bright beneath the stars. The drunken bodies dancing in the candlelight. That horrible music.

Her fingers touch the ignition. She will let him go. This one thing he deserves. He checks left and right before crossing the road, overlooking Tally’s car though it is straight in front of him, blissfully unaware of her presence inside it. She feels small and highly breakable. One gaze: that’s all it would take. To make her crumble, soundlessly, like an ancient ruin.

The glistening drops abandoned on the hoods watch, and wait and wait and wait.

Nil looks up.

In his shoulders, a pause. The car. He can’t see her there, shrouded in darkness, but through the opacifying glass she sees his eyes flit downward to the number plate and he stops in the middle of the road. Lets his arms dangle there as he searches the windshield. She can almost hear the thoughts in his mind: Has the car been here all along? Has he crossed her path inadvertently in the aisles? Missed her shadow in the grocery line?

His attention intensifies. Soon her shape will emerge from the surrounding darkness. It’s too late to hide. Her fingers pull the interior door handle, its click completely inaudible beneath the pounding of her heart.

Just friends, she tells herself as she gets out and the air bites her face.

Just friends.

“Hey,” she says.

He doesn’t speak, doesn’t move. Instead he puts down his full grocery bag and obstructs it slightly from her view with one of his legs, as if hiding something shameful: a gun, ammo – or worse: condoms. Yes, a bag chock full of those, for all the other girls he’s loved since her.

His car keys hang limply now from his free hand as he assesses her. His silhouette backlit by the store, she can’t make out the expression on his face, though maybe that’s for the best. At least he hasn’t run away.

“How are you?” She catches herself at the last second before adding something polite and horrible, like “It’s been a while.”

“What happened to your hair?” He replies, ignoring her question, and the tone and texture of his voice – a voice that has never quite stopped haunting her dreams – makes her heart throb with a guilt so acute she could cry.

But she touches the top of her head, gives nothing away. “A dumb party. The glitter was actually my idea.”

He does not reply.

“How are you?” She repeats, uncertain.

Annoyance flickers over his mouth. “I’ve been okay, Tally.” Her name in his mouth, a hot wave in her lower back: not just guilt this time. “Thanks.”

“Cool.”

The moment slips out of reach as raindrops slowly drip from the cars.

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” he says.

“Just for Christmas.”

He nods. He doesn’t need to ask where she’s off to next.

“Well, I’ll let you go.” A fake cheer gives her voice a broken, artificial warmth. “Merry Christmas.”

He doesn’t say anything in return. Only stares at her a moment longer before walking away, taking the long way around to avoid further contact while she climbs back in her car.

His coldness cuts through her like a knife but she has no choice but to drive by his truck to reach the exit.

A whirlwind of memories sweeps through her mind, of how warm his body was when he fell asleep around hers, how only his words could soothe her writhing soul in the dark. Now he is half inside his truck as he removes clutter from the seat, desperate to get away from her. The white grocery bag left on the ground flares in the beam of her headlights. Whether he’s still aware of her presence and is only pretending to be busy with his car interior she can’t tell, but as she drives past her lights fall on the thing jutting out of the bag, the thing he’d tried to hide.

Her heart skips a beat then careens on: the translucent glimmer, the label taped together with the sticker of a ripe pink fruit.

Peach wine.

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Camera.

Bitch, smile.

She didn’t know him but she knew he liked it like that, with the dip of her chin, the sharp glint at the back of her gaze. He nodded as she spoke: entranced. She could always tell.

He raised his hand:

“Thank you Tally.” Smiled over the round rim of his glasses. He looked more like a history teacher than the big-shot director of the latest Marvel sensation. “That was very good. We’ll be in touch.”

Days later, at a traffic light many miles away from that room, she takes her foot off the gas and the red glare blurs the corner of her vision as she stares vacantly ahead, the minute details of her last audition playing on repeat in her mind.

Next to the big man, the casting director’s lips had stretched into an unreadable smile. Tally still can’t tell what the woman thought about her performance, though she must have liked it up until now, seeing how far along she is in the process, which is closer than she’s ever been to her Big Break. That’s how her agent started calling it two weeks ago, when Tally got invited to the penultimate round. She glances at the rear-view mirror, catches the anxious frown creasing her brow.

What if she doesn’t want the part?

Don’t be stupid, she chides herself. Of course you do. What sane actor who has worked their ass off for four years and no money wouldn’t want to be the romantic lead in a mega MCU production?

The answer is in the question. This actor would have to be insane.

She switches radio stations until she finds one not playing Christmas songs, then turns it up to sing along to The Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live For Today,” as practice. She takes singing classes along with everything else people have suggested she do in order to land more jobs, and is neither bad nor memorable: she knows how to sing like she knows how to write a good email.

The car behind her beeps. She hadn’t seen the traffic light turn green. Pressing the accelerator, she mutters under her breath: “What place could you possibly be in a rush to get to?”

For there is nowhere to go in Roses, Washington. You stay because you’re either too lazy or too scared to leave.

She drives on to the supermarket. She needed shampoo and an excuse to get out of her childhood home basically as soon as she got there, so she told her mother she’d take care of the last-minute groceries. She hasn’t been back in four years and she already wants to leave. The smell of cinnamon and good spirit: nauseating. Tally does not like Christmas.

At least, not anymore.

She didn’t even have to come. Her parents have finally come to terms with the fact that if they want to see Tally they will have to make the trip to LA themselves. No, this year, she booked the flight herself, two weeks ago, on a whim, entering her card details with her phone stuck between shoulder and ear as her agent said the words on the other end of the line: “They want to see you again.”

Going home seemed like a good idea, then. Until she got there, where everything reminded her of things she’d rather forget.

A memory like a blow to the gut: the green-blue glow of a pool, bodies in shimmering clothes, a makeshift bar.

She can’t think of this now.

The market is not as busy as she hoped, so she picks each item from the list written in her mother’s large adolescent print with exaggerated caution to waste more time, even though it means enduring all the Christmas tunes the Gods of Pop have ever produced as they blare from the speakers onto her dirty head.

After the audition she’d gone to a beach party, where she and the other girls lathered each other’s hair with a glitter gel Tally had had no time to scrub out before rushing to LAX. But there was no shampoo left in her bathroom, and she didn’t want her hair to smell like her mother’s; Tally grabbed her car keys from the little rose-shaped pot by the door where she had left them years ago, and hit the familiar road to the store.

She lowers a nail brush into her trolley and scans the aisles, passing a teenager with bleached blond hair explaining to her mother the point of purple shampoos and an elderly man with feathery white peaks on either side of his skull. Without stopping, slowing down, or even looking for it on the shelf, his arm shoots out to pluck a plain Head & Shoulders bottle, in a gesture repeated a million times.

Tally scratches the rough matting of glitter covering her scalp as she inspects the bottles facing her. The party had been organized to celebrate the opening of a play Samantha – fellow Class of 2024 graduate – has landed a big part in, and although it had not started at the beach, Tally had brought it there. Sitting on one of the theatre’s dusty, foldable red chairs, she found herself thoroughly bored by the main character – brooding middle-age male with a falsely deep upset at the state of American politics and a penchant for laid-back, creative women – an obvious playwright’s self-insert – and could think of nothing but the salted ocean air while Samantha, full of wit, swanned around the stage in sheer clothing rearranging paint brushes in a perfect embodiment of the type of acting Tally dreads.

In private – to people not like Samantha – she calls it: the Disappearing Act. The kind of acting any pretty girl with a brain large enough to remember two lines can do, making them all endlessly interchangeable and the originality of their individual acting styles therefore irrelevant. Even more dreadful is the fact it’s the main thing Tally’s being casted to do, and maybe her best shot of becoming someone someday, in the gleaming, camera-filled warehouses of the Hollywood hills.

The dozens of fragrance names on the shampoo bottles start to blur into one and Tally senses her eyes glaze over, her hand open and close on a random bright bottle that she tosses over the two cabbage heads in her basket.

It’s full and she only brought one bag; her mother will be pissed off to see her come back with more. They sprout from the corner of the kitchen like an invasive species, she says. A familiar guilt creeps up. For not being more practical, for not wanting to be here. But doesn’t her mother secretly enjoy putting Tally down, pointing out her shortcomings so she can feel better in comparison, as if it could wipe off the boredom she must no doubt feel, having stuck with the few hundred square miles allocated to her at birth, in the kind of life Tally’s grandparents planned for their daughter before she was even born?

Caught between visions of herself at the height of a fame she is no longer sure she wants, and a mundane, aging Tally stuck in the same old town, a craving rises below her sternum that she does not attempt to resist. She marches to the very back end of the store, ignoring the beers and the spirits, and goes straight to the wines. It’s too cold for rosé, really, but she finds herself irresistibly drawn to their attractive curves of translucent pink on the shelves, bright as clear jewels.

Just as helplessly, her gaze slides over the bottles to find the one she has reached for perhaps a million times too, like the old man and his shampoo, and when she sees the adolescent peach-flavored wine still in the exact same spot she last last saw it in, her heart tightens slightly and it does not feel entirely bad.

He is still called Peach on her phone.

Not that they keep in touch.

She reaches for the bottle and at the same time remembers she offered to pay for the groceries despite her tight budget. She pushes thoughts of her credit card away. Suddenly, she would sell a kidney for this bottle, and she grabs it by the neck.

In the parking lot, something in the air makes her pause. A fine, brief rain has given the road a fresh black coat. A car rolls past with its windows down despite the season, playing the same radio hits she heard in the store and which she can still faintly detect when the automatic doors open behind her. For an instant, a familiar, scintillating film settles over her surroundings and a blurry, illegible scene showing her what path the universe might soon take flickers before her eyes. But it’s wrong: nothing happens. Just her heart beating hard, her arms sore from the bags she carries, the air so cold and damp. She gets to her car.

Nothing ever happens in this town.

But as she hoists the bag onto the passenger seat the image suddenly clears and it makes her wild heart beat wilder. In the dark, she stops moving, long tanned fingers hovering over the freezing wheel, like a mouse smelling a cat, though Tally knows all too well if anyone’s a predator it’s her – slit pupils and roiling back muscles in the brush, stalking, playing mercilessly with her prey.

A second later, a muddy pick-up truck exits the main road and enters the parking lot. Craning her neck, she stares as it stops in a free spot far away from the entrance. The truck is new. It is not necessarily his.

But she knows it is.

He gets out of the car and she involuntarily sucks in her breath. His face just as she remembers it: the waving halo of light brown hair framing his forehead, the high cheekbones, the hard jawline – the gentle mouth. He leans inside the truck to retrieve a shopping bag, shuts the door and presses a button on his keys, prompting the headlights to blink once to confirm the lock. Tally tracks his course to the automatic doors while he looks straight in front of him, spinning his keys around his index finger.

The hard outline of his phone in his back pocket – if she called him now he would feel it, and what would he do with her name flashing on the screen, and what would she do if he chose not to pick up as he no doubt should, and if he did would she tell him to turn around or would she get out of her car to shout his name? – he walks certain and serene on his small mission. He does not check the surrounding cars, does not recognize hers.

The mouse does not miss the cat, of course not.

Or does it?

The supermarket neon lights ahead bounce off the cars and shine in the million tiny raindrops covering their hoods, a million alternate universes watching her; some in which she calls out to him, some in which she stays hidden in her car, some in which she presses her forehead to the cold, cold wheel and clasps her hands against her chest to pray he’ll notice her instead; a million bright eyes watching her without blinking, waiting to see which path she’ll choose.

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damn season is a short story inspired by the Taylor Swift song ‘tis the damn season, from the evermore album.

I started writing it as a fun side project to entertain myself in the difficult months of early motherhood, and I quickly realised I wanted to share it with other story-lovers in the fandom and beyond.

📌 Before we continue - If you like the sound of this, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your readers?

This spreads the word and supports me in writing more stories so I can keep contributing to this beautiful community of readers and writers.

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There will be one chapter a week, for 13 weeks.

Chapter 1 comes out on the first Thursday of November.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this playlist I made to accompany it.

Can’t wait to explore the road not taken with you <3

Stéphane

‘tis almost the damn season

here is its soundtrack.

chapter one slipping into your inbox soon xx

With love,

Stéphane

PS: Do you have any addition to make to this playlist? Let me know in the comments!