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you’re in a car with a beautiful girl who loves you, and it will never be enough.
we’re more than best friends, she flings her arms around yours, shoulders knocking like knobby knees and french perfume teasing your nose, we’re like sisters. and you don’t say anything to that, you can’t say anything to that, but you squeeze her tighter, and when she laughs, you do too. because the armrest digs into your stomach and your elbow’s smashed into the gearshift but none of it matters, none of it, because her skin is warm and her shirt is thin enough to feel her shoulder blades moving like tectonic plates. you think that this is how the gods must feel, the world soft and lovely and encompassed entirely within your palms.
then she’s letting you go and her eyes are bright like the moon, and yours like the stars, because maybe she doesn’t love you like you love her, but at least she loves you at all. and her bubble-gum lips enrapture as they chatter about every little nothing, every song on the radio and every movie at the mall and every boy she’s kissed out back of the diner. that’s where she likes them: half-shadowed, half-glowing, like something hewn from a dream. isn’t it romantic, she sighs, and her eyes get far away, orbiting a light source galaxies apart from yours.
i wouldn’t know, you confess, and her mouth forms a perfect ‘o’. you’ve never been kissed? oh, betty, she says, oh, betty. you nod mutely, even though it’s not true. in junior high colton ridgeway cornered you in the parking lot after the football game. sweet little thing, he’d said, you look just like your sister. his broad-shouldered smirk, the rabbit pace of your heart. wonder if you taste like her, too. polly had arrived just before his tongue made it down your throat, wrenching her baby sister away and jamming the keys into the car. the whole ride home you kept waiting for her to say something, to ask what happened, if you were okay. colton was polly’s boyfriend. she never asked you a thing.
isn’t it romantic, veronica had said, and you don’t know. you don’t know what it feels like. you don’t know how it’s supposed to feel, but her midnight hair brushes her cheek and her skin glows under the streetlamp and she is celestial, she is a heavenly body, she is a constellation unto herself. you think this is how comets must feel, the solid ice of your chest locked on this orbit until your body burns up or crashes into another or your sun implodes and carries you with it.
well, her eyes twinkle, we can fix that, can’t we? you blink, check the empty seats behind you, blush when she smacks your arm and laughs. me, silly. heat pools in your gut, your neck, escapes in your nervous giggle. don’t worry, she says, it’s just practice, so when it’s real, you’ll know what to do.
you give the tiniest of nods. she shifts forward, and her midnight hair brushes your cheek, and you can’t move. there’s a song playing on the radio, something smokey and gray, something about floods and falling in love. you think distantly that it might be raining, but maybe it’s not. her lips press to yours and she’s kissing you. she’s kissing you, and it means nothing. you’re in the car with a beautiful girl who’s kissing you, her hand splayed on your thigh, the other cupping your neck, and it will never be enough.
the radio croons, heaven help a fool who falls in love. but heaven has never cared much for your kind, has it.
so? veronica asks, and she’s back on her side, and you’re back on your side, and the cup holders and consoles and armrests between you span an impossible distance. you nod and smile, and she nods and smiles, the tiny bit of tension vaporizing from her shoulders. i’m so excited for you, she touches your arm, archie’s gonna be one lucky boy.
it’s not raining outside, but it should be.
the diner parking lot is nearly empty. you pull up right in front of the windows, close enough to glimpse jughead and archie sitting together in a booth. perfect timing, she says, and together you make your entrance. the boys grin and scoot over and you slide in across from archie and veronica. jughead’s hands move animatedly as he tells a story, veronica’s wide laugh sparkles like chrome, and archie’s lips curve mechanically, his milkshake untouched. his eyes track jughead’s movements, a quiet sort of yearning in his gaze that you can only recognize from your own mirror.
he meets your eyes and you both know. his mouth twinges and his smile is sad, the pair of you just ships flashing in the night, two stray satellites passing on parallel orbits. the girl and the boy next-door in a booth with a beautiful girl and a beautiful boy who love them, who will never love them enough, and you think: this is how it feels.