All I Stole From You by Ava Bellows

Author:Ava Bellows
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

13

I slept for six and a half hours that night, which, for me, is unprecedented. I didn’t even remember trying to sleep, just the moments before unconsciousness that were spent with my fingers tracing the path his lips had made from my mouth to my jaw, down my neck and up again. When I woke up, I turned towards my bedside table, picked up my phone, and saw a new text from Rob, sent at 1:42 a.m.

If I keep smiling this much tonight, people are

going to start asking questions.

I giggled, thrashing my body around in my bed like a madwoman. Maybe I was. Love is a kind of socially accepted insanity, after all.

I wrote back, too excited to draft anything cool and aloof.

you sound very eager for someone who was rushing

to get your ass out the door last night . . .

I put my phone away and walked to the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror. I wanted to see if my appearance had changed somehow.

It hadn’t, but I sported two seminoticeable hickeys on my neck. Once I saw them, they got warm. It was like my pulse lived in them, those two faint juvenile marks. Proof of my time with Rob. Proof of his mouth. Proof of my body, my desirability.

I didn’t bother covering them up as I went on my hike. If anything, I craned my neck out, daring all I encountered to notice them.

As I wrapped my hike up, my phone rang. It was Pearl. I picked up after the second ring.

“Hi!”

“You sound happy,” Pearl said over the sounds of Harper singing in the background.

“You’re supposed to start phone calls by saying hi back, Pearl.”

“Hi back. You sound happy.” The way she said it sounded both like an accusation and a sigh of relief.

“That’s because I am happy. Is that so hard to imagine?”

“Yes. No. A little bit.”

“Jesus.” I groaned.

“No, not hard, just . . . it’s good! It’s great!”

“Yeah. It is. What’s up?”

“Harper’s forgetting what her favorite aunt looks like and I’m forgetting what my little sister looks like, so we’re inviting you over for a tea party.”

“A tea party?”

“Yes. Jonah bought her a tea set the other day, so now she’s in a phase,” she explained.

“So she’s out of the fairy phase, then?”

“Nope, they’re coming to the tea party too.”

I tried to imagine Harper drawing pictures for her fairy friends, leaving snacks and notes for them, not knowing that it was Pearl and Jonah who’d leave her things in return. She’d spend hours once she’d gone to bed drawing elaborate pictures of their invented fairy world. Our mom had done the same for me and Pearl when we were kids, until my dad left. My fairy notes stopped coming for a while after that, until Pearl took up the mantle. When I was eleven, she told me it had been her who wrote the notes. I didn’t speak to her for a week. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized how kind

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