I hated this day even more this year than I had the last.

November 15^th: the anniversary of Olivia’s death.

Every year Aria and I would head out to the private lot by the lake Olivia loved, and we’d spend the day telling her all that had happened to us.

We usually visited every month with flowers, though this year had been more like every other month. When she’d first died, I’d come here every day. This year, it wasn’t that either of us had forgotten her; for me it was just more about the moving on.

That was the thing I always struggled with because I couldn’t do it, and no one had ever made me want to—until now.

The day had the misfortune of being a Friday, the day I hated the most, and when I checked, I saw Brooke would be leaving on a Friday too, in two weeks.

I’d thought summer had gone by in a blink, but that was nothing.

The time for the end of Brooke’s stay had come even quicker. She’d come bumbling down that hill on that horrid Friday, and she’d be leaving on a Friday too.

It wasn’t what I wanted to be thinking about right now as Aria and I sat on the little bench in front of Olivia’s grave. The roses I’d planted looked amazing. She would have loved them. When we’d first moved into the house, she’d wanted roses. It was a must, so I’d covered her grave in mini pink roses.

“It’s always hard to come here on this day.” Aria broke the silence that filled the space between us. “Why is that? How come we can come here almost every month but today is always worst?” She looked to me, and I saw her as the eleven-year-old who’d just lost her mother.

The sadness was still there. It never left, not even with time.

“It’s a reminder that she’s not with us anymore. The other visits feel like a build-up to this.”

She nodded, agreeing. “You haven’t said anything to her yet.”

I hadn’t spoken, but neither had she. We’d been here for over an hour, just sitting here, looking.

I shook my head.

She took my hand and laced her fingers with mine. “I have something to tell you both.”

I tilted my head to the side as she smiled. “What is it?”

“I’m going to college next year, and I’m going to be a teacher. I want to teach classical literature at university. I whipped myself into shape so I may have a shot at Yale, but Brown seems to have a better program for me. I reached out to the admissions director and asked what sort of grades they look for, and when I told her all I’d done this summer, she said they’d be happy to have me if I can get the SAT scores I need, which I know I can.”

Stunned didn’t begin to describe how I felt. “God, wow. Aria…”

“Yeah, I know—I shocked me too.” She giggled.

“I’m proud of you. Your mom would be so proud of you.”

“Thank you.”

“So Brown’s is kind of far…what about Brad?” I felt I should ask.

“He wants to go to North Carolina. Brooke told me something a few months back that stood out in my mind. She said if he loves me he’ll understand what’s important to me. He seems to now, which is great. If that changes then I guess that’s something we’ll just both have to accept, but I want this.”

I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “My girl, you are the very best.”

“You too, Dad. How about I leave you to talk—you seem to have a lot on your mind. Maybe it will be easier if I’m not here. I’ll go walk by the river.”

She gave me a curt nod and smiled before she left.

I watched my intuitive daughter walk away then I looked back to the grave and focused on the flowers and the large granite headstone with Olivia’s name carved into it. It was the first time I’d come and found it hard to talk. Usually I’d just start with something silly like the weather.

I’d come two months ago to tend to the roses and had wanted to talk about Brooke then, but it was hard. Now it was harder, harder because in two weeks, Brooke would leave and things would go back to how they’d been before she came.

“I met someone,” I began, and the words felt like a release on my soul. “She kind of reminds me of you, the girl-next-door type, and she actually happens to live next door.” I chuckled at that and paused for a moment. “I think you would approve, but…like you, she’ll only be in my life for a short time, shorter—months. It’s only been months, but she seriously packed a punch. It’s fine. Sometimes these things happen, right? You had to go, and so does she. Different reasons, different women, but somehow you both have to leave me.”

I hadn’t meant to say that, but it was what I felt.

This thing with Brooke was all my fault. I’d known all along we would end.

So…I shouldn’t have fallen for her.

The tension between us was tight.

It was there all night. It started days ago when Ryan came back from the cemetery. I tried to ask him if he was okay, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

It was weird: the tension was there, but then when we had sex it was like he just wanted to devour me.

I knew it was because of me leaving next week. And… because of this thing between us that grew more and more each day.

God, how can it be next week?

I couldn’t believe the time had come so quickly, so damn quickly.

My story on Sally was prepped and ready to be released in the January issue of People. Everything I’d set out to do when I’d come to Wilmington was done.

The job was done.

It was done, but I wasn’t finished yet—how could I be when there was this black hole between Ryan and I? A hole that maybe only I could close.

Okay, it wasn’t a maybe…

I knew it was more of a reality. I could close that hole if I wanted to.

That day when I decided to push my feelings to the back of my mind, I kind of left them there.

I left them there because I didn’t want to freak out and do the wrong thing. I didn’t want to freak out and spoil this amazing relationship we had which I knew, day by damn day was turning into something more.

I felt it grow, and I tried to push it away. I pushed it away because I couldn’t get rid of my fears. Fears I’d had for so long.

So I guess that tension wasn’t just coming from him. It was me too.

Tonight we were at the playhouse. He took me to see, Romeo and Juliet. He held my hand the whole time as we watched the play.

The actors did a great job. Such a good job they sucked me in right from the start and held me there through the entire performance.

At the end scene, which for me was the most powerful scenes known to man, they continued to hold me in the moment.

I must have watched this play a hundred times but tonight was different. Tonight was different because it felt personal to me. Like I could have been a part of the story.

My heart ached for Juliet when she saw her beloved Romeo and realized he’d killed himself with the poison. It broke just a little more when she kissed him in an attempt to kill herself and it didn’t work.

She didn’t want to live without him. It was all so clear. I knew that. My English teacher had given a whole lesson on all the emotions that played out in this one scene.

But, knowing still made my heart break for her loss and I understood how she felt when she grabbed Romeo’s dagger and said, “O happy dagger! This is thy sheath,” and buried it in her chest.

“There rest, and let me die,” Juliet continued.

I watched her body fall on top of Romeo’s, tears streaming down my cheeks.

Warm hands covered mine bringing me back to reality. I looked down to where Ryan held my hand and saw how tight I was holding on to him. So tight my knucles turned white. It was quite dark in here, but I could still see them.

He lifted my hand up to his lips and kissed it.

“You okay?” he whispered.

“Yeah, it’s the scene. I always get like this.”

He looked me over. I knew he knew that was a lie, but he didn’t call me out on it.

On the drive back, I caught him looking at me several times.

I was going to be staying at his place tonight because Aria was sleeping over at a friend’s house.

When we got inside, he went straight into the sitting room. Instead of turning on the main light, he switched on the lamp and moved over to the fireplace to get a fire going. I joined him, sitting next to him and resting my head on his shoulder.

“Ryan 101: Ryan shuts down completely when he’s worried about something.” I slid my hand over the thick mass of muscle on his forearms.

“Brooke 101: Brooke leaves in ten days and she’ll go back to her life in LA.”

I lifted my head. “That’s not me. That’s something that’s scheduled to happen.”

He looked away from me and back to the fire as it started to get going. The solemn look on his face pulled at my heart, at my soul.

“It came too quickly.”

He didn’t want me to go. I could tell from just looking at him, but he would never ask me to stay because he knew everything I’d planned for my life in LA and my career.

My heart squeezed and that black hole felt so much bigger when I thought of the coming week, of leaving.

Ryan looked back to me and our gazes locked. There were a million things to say, but I didn’t want to say them.

I couldn’t tell him that I was scared to love him.

I moved toward him at the same time he reached for me. Falling into the hungry kiss he fed me. Right there by the fire, we kissed the clothes off each other, and I could feel him everywhere, all over me and inside me in a haze of…love.

It was different; his touch was different, and we were different. The passion that normally gripped us was so unreal it left me weak. This was more. It was beyond lust-filled desire to consume each other.

It was something that couldn’t be described with words. You had to feel it to understand the energy of the force that surrounded us and rippled from me to him, from him to me. It heightened when he slid into me, and then I swore time stood still. Everything in that moment stood still, and all I could see was him.

Ryan, making love to me.

Making love.

It was like that all night. We were like that all night.

We made love until we passed out from exhaustion. Ryan fell asleep from it.

But I couldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t sleep because I’d never made love to anyone before.

I’d never made love before because I’d never been in love before. Not before now.

The joke was on me and I was the fool.

What I had with Craig was nothing. It was just an occurrence that happened.

But it wasn’t the real thing.

I never knew until tonight that it was never the real thing. The thing I thought I was trying to have even though it didn’t work out for my parents.

This was it. What I had with Ryan was love.

It was love and I was the fool because I was the instigator of it. I created the path for him to know me. The real me.

It wasn’t Craig I’d given my heart and soul to it was Ryan.

It all dawned on me as I watched him drift off to sleep. Then panic welled in my throat.

Within the stillness of the black silence that surrounded us the icy tendrils of fear twisted around my heart.

It started there and worked it’s way throughout my body knotting up my insides.

When I agreed to this no strings attached relationship I really did believe it would work. But tonight showed me I believed what I wanted to at the time.

I belived whatever my mind told me because I wanted so badly to be with him.

And now this had to happen…

My heart was full of him.

I’d experienced a lot of firsts with Ryan, and I realized it was because I’d allowed him to reach my heart. Somehow, he’d gotten past my defenses and reached me.

I didn’t even notice when it started happening but it was my fault. My games. I was the one who started the whole Brooke 101 game with him.

It was just a manner of speaking. Me being sarcastic at the time when I ran into him at the store.

I didn’t know it would blossom into something else. Something I feared so much.

Love.

I’d liked Ryan from the get-go. That spark and the chemistry was there. It was all there, and I fed off it with sass, teasing him and allowing myself to think it was just fun. When we’d first started seeing each other, that whole way of thinking we were just fooling around was shit, and me agreeing to no-strings-attached fun was shit too.

It was all bullshit.

This feeling in my heart told me that. It also told me I hadn’t gotten into this relationship to sabotage it. What kind of woman got involved with a man who had a sixteen-year-old daughter and loved them both if she was going to leave?

The feeling in my heart, the swirl of emotion that gripped me when I looked at him told me I was completely in love with Ryan. He was it for me—

It was so easy to love him. I did it effortlessly.

But, this wasn’t supposed to happen and I wasn’t supposed to feel this way.

I wished like hell I could have entertained the possibility of me trying this and seeing where it would lead. A normal person would just do that. It made sense to do that.

Except I freaked out.

It freaked me out.

Love freaked me out because I didn’t want to love and lose.

That was it. that was the reasoning behind my fears.

Sally said it was better to have loved and lost than to not love at all. I’d head that so many times, read it so many times. But I didn’t agree. Not for me.

The truth was I had a deep fear of loss, of giving my already fragile heart to that one special person and losing them in whatever way life chose to take them from me.

It frightened me.

The flames of panic and fear licked violently at my insides and scorched me clean.

This was supposed to be no strings attached, then things changed and we became something else.

Something else I couldn’t handle.

Ryan was the exception.

I allowed myself to fall for him and that by itself made me vulnerable to all the uncontrollable things that came with it. Things might be good now but what would I do when it changed?

What would I do if it all blew up in my face?

That thought, that horrible thought made me slide off the bed, out of my man’s arms and away from his heart.

Then it made me leave.

I worked so hard for everything I’d ever accomplished. This was the first time I’d ever felt like a failure.