Page 7 of Never Forget You
“I don’t know, to be honest.” That answer surprises me. “Something to help people, that much I’m sure of.” Oh, of coursehe wants that. He’s so perfect! “But I don’t think I have the sort of science brain to be a doctor…”
“My science teachers all think that I could do something like that,” I admit. “But I’m not sure either.”
He leans down and kisses me on the head. “Well, we can work that out together, can’t we? We can do something to change the world together. Me and you. Doesn’t that sound great? We don’t need to have everything figured out right now. Just one another. Everything else will be a million times easier.”
He just makes the future sound so appealing, so awesome, not stressful at all. And that’s the life I will be able to live once I manage to get my dad off my back. This might be the first step toward it since he clearly hates me right now. Itcouldcause him to back off and leave me alone once he works out that I’m an adult and my own person… or he might come down on me like a ton of bricks, making everything so much worse.
But I will survive that knowing I can come back to Harry at the end of it. Everything feels easier.
“I really do love you, you know?” I tilt my head up to kiss Harry again. “So much. I didn’t know that love could feel like this. It’s… well, it’s wonderful. I’m so glad that life made our paths cross like this.”
“It’s fate, isn’t it?” He grins. “Destiny bringing us together. It has to be. I guess everyone gets one person in their life, one soulmate, and we’re just lucky to have found one another at such a young age. It means that any struggles we go through, even the ones to be together, will all be worth it. Nothing can bring us down.”
I do feel lucky that in all of this mess, we managed to stumble across one another. I don’t know if I’ve ever believed in fate and soulmates before, but I do now. Meeting Harry is for a reason, I am absolutely certain of it. I squeeze his hand tightly in mine as the emotion gets to me hard. But good emotion this time, the sort that I want to take with me. I hated this vacation at first, but now it’s become the start of the rest of my life. And for the first time in a very long time, the future looks bright. I just don’t know how I’m going to leave this bench and Harry’s arms. This is the best place in the world to be.
6
HARRY
“G–Georgia?” I crick my neck side to side as I wake up, still on the bench outside my house where at some point in the night, I must have drifted off. I really didn’t want to sleep and waste even a second with Georgia, but I guess the exhaustion and the emotion got to me in the end and I crashed to sleep. “Georgia, where are you?”
She’s gone. That strikes me hard. She’s left me while I’m sleeping, which is hard… but I suppose it’s best in a way because I don’t know if either of us could stand a sad goodbye. I don’t think I could let her go. But it’s challenging, it’s killer. I can hardly stand it. Knowing that I don’t know when I will see her again absolutely tears me apart.
“Oh, God.” There’s an actual pain in my chest. It’s like my heart is really exploding. “Oh, God, I miss her.”
I press my hand to the bench beside me to try and keep myself together, which is when I find myself touching a piece of paper. I don’t know whether to completely fall apart or to gasp with relief as I see that it’s a letter from Georgia. Admittedly, I don’tactually know her handwriting, but I know her well enough to know this is her.
“This had better have a phone number on it,” I growl to myself as I realize that I got another chance with Georgia and I still forgot to ask for her contact details. “Or I am going to damn well lose my mind here. Surely, she thought of it…”
I can’t speak as I see her words, her declaration of love for me, and of course, her phone number as well, which is a massive relief to me. It means she was being truly honest with me last night when she insisted that we would make it work. It didn’t seem like empty words, but now I’m sure of it. Now I know that we will be together forever.
“Wow.” I bend double as the pain goes down to my stomach and I struggle to breathe. “This is hard.”
I should have prepared myself for this. I could’ve gotten myself all sorted for it. I knew the day of Georgia’s leaving was coming around soon enough. I just didn’t know that it would be so soon. But that doesn’t make me any less foolish. Although, could I have prepared myself for a feeling I haven’t experienced before?
“At least I have this,” I whisper to myself as I cling tightly to the letter. “At least I have something…”
It takes me a while, but eventually, I head back inside to see my family. My mom immediately sees the look on my face and knows what’s going on. She hugs me, just for a second because she seems to sense that I can’t take it any longer, and she sends me up the stairs with a glass of water and a piece of buttery toast so I can sleep my heartbreak off and maybe do a bit of crying in peace. God, I need that. I don’t know when I will stop crying…
The hours pass. They seem to pass agonizingly slowly, and my text message has gone unanswered. I keep giving myself excuses, such as she might still be flying, because I don’t actually know where she lives, another stupid thing that I definitely should have asked her and never did, but with every passing second, I’m worrying increasingly that it might become hopeless. Dark thoughts start to creep in, such as it might be a fake number, or her father may have her phone because he’s so angry about me. I can’t help but panic that it really might be the end of things, after all.
Love is supposed to overcome everything, but what if it can’t? What if we’re just two stupid teenagers and we can’t plan to spend the rest of our lives together right now? But what if I also never feel that way about anyone ever again? I’m sure that if I told Mom my worries, she would reassure me that with age will come wisdom and that I’ll feel more for someone else, some reassuring bullshit like that, but I just can’t see it. Ever.
“Oh, my God!” My phone beeps with a text message, and my heart soars higher than air. “It’s her, it has to be…”
But it isn’t, and that’s more soul crushing than anything else in the world. It’s a message from Matthew asking me to join him at some party, like he doesn’t know I can’t, like he isn’t aware that the world is folding in around me. I mean, he doesn’t know. I haven’t told him or anything, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
I start to message him back, to tell him why I can’t make it out, but honestly, it’s too much effort. I can’t. Instead, I drop my cell phone on the bed and listen as it slides to the floor besideme with a clunk. I do hope it isn’t broken so I’m prepared the moment Georgia finally does text me back and bring sunshine back into my life again, but I don’t have any energy left to pick it back up again. I don’t know if I’ll ever have energy again. I’m broken.
“Georgia, I love you,” I whisper, hoping that by sending enough love out into the universe, my luck will change. “I love you more than anything else in the world and I just want you to be mine. Please, please be mine.”
Hope. If I keep hope, then anything is possible. Then, we might find a way back to one another and everything will be fine all over again. As soon as she comes back to me, life will return to what it was before. Happy and joyous. Although I don’t know if I will feelthatagain until I have her back in my arms.
“What happened to you, Harry?” Matthew pats me on the back as we walk through the school gates for our final semester before graduation. “You were gone for the rest of the vacation. I missed you but assumed that you and…”
I flinch before he even says her name, which causes him to fall into an uncomfortable silence. It’s been a little while now, and maybe I should have moved on from the fact that I’ve lost Georgia and there’s no way she will message me now after all this time, but I haven’t. It still hurts as much every single day. I can’t get over the pain.
“Oh, well, we’re at school now and it’s nearly time to graduate, which means we’re coming up for the summer of our lives,doesn’t it? We’re going to have the best time then. That’s when all the tourists come…”