If the Shoe Fits (Meant To Be #1) by Julie Murphy

After Stacy has a few more drinks and accidentally tries to go into Addison’s villa instead of her own, I decide to walk her to her door and say good night.

As I’m walking back, I see the camera crew clustering around two silhouettes on the beach in the distance.

Deep down, I know what Stacy said about Sara Claire having a type isn’t completely true. She could have said all that just to make me feel better. Still, I feel more confident, like maybe this attraction is shared and not just one-sided. Even now, seeing Henry and Sara Claire on their romantic date from afar doesn’t give me the gut-churning feeling I expect it to.

Back at my villa, I find my duvet turned down with a piece of dark chocolate waiting for me on my bed. Definitely beats the barely two-bedroom apartment Sierra and I shared for two years.

I try getting ready for bed, but I’m too restless to sleep, so I start the water in my outdoor tub and order a drink from room service.

I find a lavender bath bomb and throw a T-shirt on to answer the door. I sit perched on the edge of my bed, waiting for my room service to arrive, but a few minutes turns into fifteen and then twenty. The bath is full, and since I’d hate for it to get cold, I leave a note wedged into the door that reads In the tub, please leave drink here. This moonlight bath is more luxury than I’ve experienced in a very long time, so I think I can handle skipping the fruity drink.

Outside, even though the outdoor shower and tub have a large vine-covered partition protecting me from unwanted onlookers, it’s still a shock to my senses when I strip out of my underwear and T-shirt. I know that no one can see me, but that doesn’t stop me from undressing and hopping into the tub and under the milky bath-bomb-infused water as quickly as I can.

I scoop my hair into a loose ponytail and lean back to take in the starry view. The quiet is so deeply comforting. I let the heaviness of it sink into my bones as I try to find some kind of peace in all this uncertainty.

My thoughts circle back over and over again to my conversation with Stacy. If Henry asked, would I say yes? I don’t know. I don’t know for lots of reasons, but maybe one of them is Dad. After he died, I kept brushing aside the future, only preparing for as far as my headlights out in front of me could see. The thought of meeting someone—someone who I could imagine myself being with for a long time—felt so distant and impossible. I couldn’t see that happening without my parents, but especially Dad, there to witness it all.

But that’s not reality. The realization snuck up on me at high school graduation and then again last summer when Erica asked me to sort through his belongings and then last month when I graduated from Parsons. Mom and Dad are gone. It makes me feel awful to even think it, but they are. And I wonder if all the language around grief and your loved one being there with you always makes it that much harder to deal with their deaths.

Sometimes I can’t fall asleep at night, because I’m scared that when I wake up some detail or memory will be fuzzier than it was the day before and eventually I’ll forget them. But it can’t all be woo-woo feelings or morbid reality. When I was in elementary school and Mom died, and then again in high school when Dad died, my everyday life was almost the same. I still went to school and took the bus home. But this adult version of my life? It’s my second act—my sophomore collection—and neither of my parents will ever be in the audience. I have to find a way to move through all these new experiences without forgetting them. And I have to find a way to create again. All the pieces are there inside me. They’ve just been lying dormant for the last year.

“Hello?” a voice calls, interrupting my thoughts.

“Yes!” I say. “You can leave it on the doorstep. Thank you!”

“You don’t want it to melt, do you?” There’s no mistaking that voice.

My heart skips and my limbs splash as I frantically sink down lower into the bath. “Henry? Don’t come in here! I’m naked!”

He chuckles. “Was that supposed to be a deterrent?”

“Yes,” I say with uncertainty. “Did it work?”

“Sadly, yes. Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m staying right where I am…. I just…I guess I just wanted to see you.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to settle for talking.” It’s been less than twenty-four hours since our steamy make-out session in the early hours of the morning, and somehow it feels like years ago.

“You mind if I eat the cherry out of your drink?” he asks.

I pretend to gag. “Please. I hate those things.”

“Excuse me?” he says, his voice steeped in shock. “You hate cherries? How does anyone hate cherries?”

“In fact,” I tell him from the other side of the partition, “just take the whole drink. It’s been cherry tainted.”

“Wow. Okay, well, now that I know where you stand on cherries, I might as well take myself and my cherry-infested drink back to my room for a quiet night in.”

“Noooo.” I laugh softly. “Don’t go.”

Silence hangs in the air for a moment as I hold my breath.

“Okay,” he finally says.

I can hear the sound of his back sliding down the wall as he sits down in the grass. “Making yourself comfortable?” I ask.

“Well, I’m not open-air-tub-in-a-Mexican-villa comfortable, but this isn’t so bad either.”