What if second chances come a second time?
Long ago, Hannah and Jonah called it quits. Long ago, Hannah stopped trying to make things work, and Jonah let her go. Long ago, Jonah mailed back all of Hannah's stuff from his apartment, and Hannah blocke...
At prom, our first proper dance felt like the last. I hated how my hands shook when the song went, I don't want to miss one smile / I don't want to miss one kiss / I just want to be with you / Right here, with you, just like this. It all suddenly felt so real—how high school was ending.
We would be living so far away from each other, all the way across the country. I'd only had him for those few short months and I'd already decided that I should try living without him. I wondered if I'd regret it. I wondered if he'd regret me.
One of my hands slid down to rest atop his chest. I just want to hold you close / Feel your heart so close to mine / And just stay here in this moment / For all the rest of time. He pulled me in so he could leave a kiss on my hair, and my fingers curled on his white dress shirt.
I thought to myself, that night, "Am I making a mistake?" But Leann had said, the best way to put relationships to the test is by drawing the distance and seeing if it will survive. She'd trialed and errored it, she swore to me. You don't know love until you learn how to love apart.
I knew that the distance scared him, too, but I also knew that I needed to do this for myself. I'd spent so much time living my life without direction, never truly knowing what I wished for myself. I needed to find myself—to learn who I am and what I wanted in my life.
It didn't mean that I didn't love him, or that I didn't want it to work between us.
I was really hoping that it would still work between us. But, it turned out that fate had other plans.
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Jonah stole me away before they even announced prom king and queens. He took me to a fancy restaurant, and we had a fancy candle-lit dinner with fancy full-course dinner. We didn't make through dessert, though—I dragged him to our hideaway place, the place he'd often ran to when he needed to think, the open space by the river.
I took off my heels in his car before jumping out and screaming, "Race you to the treehouse!" We'd built the treehouse with the help of our siblings, when the weather had started to warm up enough to melt the snow. Before I even made it to the tree, Jonah caught me from behind, and I laughed as I tried to pry myself away from his bear hug. He flipped my body around so that we faced each other, and we waltzed to his low hums of "You and Me" by Lifehouse, the song he'd played on our first real date way back when.
There's no doubt that I loved Jonah, that I would follow him anywhere in the world if he asked me to. But then Mom told me, "You're young, and you're in love, and it could be overwhelming. Don't be rash in your decisions." And then Dad asked me what I really wanted to do with my life—was it to go to the same college Jonah was planning to go? And I'd said, "No, I wanted to take a break from studying and see what I could do, see if I haven't lived to the fullest yet." Did that mean I didn't love Jonah enough, that I didn't choose to be physically closer to him? Tony answered, "No, that means you love him enough to be confident that you can be about 2,000 miles away and still love each other."
We climbed up to the treehouse, him in his rented tuxedo and me in my chiffon dress, laughing all the way up. He tackled me to the floor, trapping me between his arms and that large grin on his face, and I giggled as I shook my updo off, letting my hair fall free. He kissed me then, slow and sweet the way he always did, like we were a delicate piece of art that he was crafting by hand.
"I love you. I'll love you a long time," I told him. I never quite said forever, since it would mean promises and I knew I couldn't promise forever, and that's an F-word that truly scared the shit out of me—but I could promise a long time.
"Love you more," he replied, now lying next to me as we both stared up at the Christmas lights we'd put on the ceilings of the treehouse. "Always, always more."
"Pfft," I waved him off, "never more than I do."
He hummed. "Is that a challenge, Miss Taylors?"
I sat up and grinned. "It's a competition," I told him then, my face above his, just close enough for my lips to meet the curve of his smile, "that I'll always win."
Now I'm sitting here, on the same wooden floor of our treehouse, looking down at the river from the small open window. And I whisper to the empty wind, "I guess I won, huh?"
Author's note: Here to remind you that you can find the old version of Purposefully Accidental on my Ko-fi page! The book is, of course, unfinished, but if you're curious about the 13 chapters of the old draft from 2018, you can go ahead and read it there!
On another note... I'm so excited for Speak Now (Taylor's Version) to come out this Friday (!!!). I just realized it's gonna be Chapter 13 this Friday. That's insane! I wrote AOP during the release of 1989, and here we are now. Isn't it crazy?
