Chapter 31

Wish Un-Granted

The rain intensifies as I push through the curtain into the rose garden. Everyone is gone, either back home or chased inside the winery by the storm. Everything is so warm—that special summer lake weather that feels like they put the rain in the microwave for thirty seconds. Seven years ago, during a perfect Vero Roseto summer, this same rain caught me and Ben on Lake Valle in Grandpa Angelo’s pontoon. A gleeful rain.

This kind of rain has never surrounded an unhappy memory in my life.

That’s how I knew Ben would be here before I even saw him.

At the end of a corridor of luscious green walls we grew ourselves, Ben McKittrick stands beside the Wishing Rose bush, his back to me. The massive shrubbery shrinks him as he stands aside the flowing artificial rivers of tears we built. The storm has flooded our rivers, so now everything is tears, illuminated by the sapphire-colored footlights glowing in the dusk. However, the sky hasn’t left us yet—I’m still able to recognize that Ben ditched Grandpa’s frilly tuxedo, a memento too precious to ruin, for his gardener’s tee and khaki slacks.

The rain plasters everything to Ben, leaving nothing about his body to the imagination. My own body, too. Every muscle I struggled to keep, every new curve I learned to love because of Ben, it’s all on display as my shirt and dress pants stick to me like paste.

I am not the Grant Rossi I used to be. I’m somewhere between him and the new one.

And I’m ready to let go of this goddamn curse.

Ben doesn’t hear me coming. His head is bowed to the bush, like a man praying. I approach him, one boot-step after another sloshing through inch-high puddles, gathering strength by the second. When I get close enough, his freckled bicep tenses, grasping one of the few remaining blooms not bought during the festival.

His eyes are shut. He’s making a wish.

A low rumble of thunder cuts the sky. The powerful noise vibrates through my chest and pushes me toward courage. “Is that wish for me?” I ask.

Ben doesn’t startle, or even move. “Haven’t got round to making it yet. Been wondering how to say it.”

My chest rises and falls on a painful throb. “Start with what you want.”

“I want…” His jaw tenses. “A lot of things. Things that contradict each other.”

I laugh heartily. I’ve been there. Asking an anxious homosexual what they want is like asking a child what their favorite dinosaur is: you’re going to get thirty answers. We want so much. There’s so much we can’t have. And our tastes can be astronomically indulgent, not to mention fickle. The answers are many and constantly changing. So how could we be expected to make a single wish about something as thorny as who our hearts belong to?

The good news is, Ben doesn’t have to make this wish alone.

Stepping behind him, wrapping my arms around his, I grasp the same crimson bloom. Our fingers interlock amid the petals.

“Open your eyes,” I whisper.

Ben’s muscular back expands and then deflates with a heavy sigh. “I want to go back in time, find you in the garden when you made your wish, and tell you…tell you nothing. I just would’ve kissed you. We deserved that. That’s how our story deserved to end, not with all this shit. I want to go back and tell you ‘Fuck you for leaving.’ ‘Fuck you for chucking me so easily.’ I needed you. I know you haven’t been happy either, but I needed you, and I’m sorry to tell you I’ve gotten real good at living without you.”

Lexi be damned, my head is making the loudest noises it’s ever made.

Through this chaos, my terrified lips somehow open. “Do you want me to go?”

Ben releases the rose and turns in my arms to face me. We’re nose-to-nose, and his tight jaw has gone slack. Whatever hardness he’s been carrying these last few years has finally been dropped. The boy reappears in his softened, rain-soaked features.

The silly boy, the boy I trusted, the boy I lost.

“I want you to take me,” he whispers, almost begging. “Trust me. Don’t second-guess me. Look at me and be sure, not be filled with…questions. I want you to see me like I see you.”

This sweet guy. He doesn’t get it.

“I trust you,” I say, shrugging. “I don’t trust me. I ruin things. I’m broken.”

Ben’s expression collapses. This isn’t what he wanted to hear—and this isn’t going well.

“Of course you’re broken, you’re gay,” he says.

“Ummmmm…” Briefly, terror soars through my mind at the possibility that Ben has been a secretly self-hating homophobe this whole time.

Luckily, he takes my hand and, chuckling, explains himself. “Everybody queer I’ve ever met, just, we had to grow up too fast. We had to get harder and believe less, and it just made us…”

“Beasts.”

“We deserve a second chance.” He shrugs helplessly. “I love you, Grant. And I hate that. Because I don’t know what to do with that information. I really don’t.”

I am sunk. Utterly sunk by his words. I don’t even try to reach for glibness or cynicism. Instead, I reach for his shoulders. “I love you, too! I always have. I never stopped, even if it seemed like I did when I let you get away all those other times. Guys scare me so much that you’re literally the only boyfriend I’ve ever fought for. Do you know what that means?!”

Ben blinks, a little afraid. “What?”

“It means I wasn’t cursed to lose every boyfriend, and you weren’t cursed to lose yours! Hutch, Brendan, Ruben, Dylan, Jon, Scott, Micah—I lost them because they weren’t you. I was seeing Hutch when I made the wish to reveal who I really loved. And it did! Or at least, it was trying to, but I was being such a stubborn, emotional car crash, dumbass—”

Ben nods. “I agree, keep going.”

I laugh like it’s my first time. I couldn’t drop my smile if I tried. “The rose was saving me until I found you again. It needed us to save this house, and…” I swallow hard. “And if we’re really going separate places after this, then at least the rose made sure I didn’t give up on us without a fight.”

Ben clasps my face in his rough, chapped hands and kisses me. Wet with rain and coarse with his prickly stubble, the kiss—while far from my first with him or any boy—feels like my first adult kiss.

We separate but keep our heads pressed together. We breathe on each other.

Ben smirks. “I hate that goddamn rose, and I hate your GUTS.”

Giggles overtake me. “I know! I made this so much more complicated than it should’ve been!”

“If all this magic hoo-ha talk is what it takes to get you to be my boyfriend already, I salute you and the damn rose.”

My smile falls.

Boyfriend. That is what I want.

But like Ben said, the things I want contradict each other. I want Vero Roseto to thrive. I want to go to school to be the best designer I can be. I want Ben to admit he’s homesick for Scotland. I want us to be together. I want too many things.

We hold each other in silence, my hand cupping the small of his back as the summer rain continues pooling up to our ankles.

“Will you two make your wish before the rose bush is underwater?!” a voice shouts behind us. At the curtained archway, Aunt Ro and Uncle Paul wait under a double-wide umbrella. They’re still in their festival clothes, except both have thrown on knee-high Wellington boots.

Ben and I quickly separate to a close, but less intimate, proximity. Scowling, I say, “Ro, that’s the second time you’ve snooped on my wish!”

She waves me off, her many bracelets jangling. “Grow up, Grant! I snoop on everyone’s wishes—gay, straight, family members, guests. I’m Mama Bianchi, and you’re on my turf, so get used to it!”

Ben and I chuckle, while Uncle Paul raises a testy finger. “There’s been a lot of drama in this house caused by you two boys. At the very least you owe me and Ro a front-row seat to what we hope will be the conclusion of this opera.”

I frown at Ben. “You and me? Without all the roller coaster stuff?”

Grinning slyly, Ben plops his head on my shoulder. “I wouldn’t be interested.”

Oh God, it’s true. We might actually be in love with the fury of it all.

“Let’s make that wish,” I say, shaking a river’s worth of rain from my curls. Ben and I approach the rose bush as the thickening clouds darken the summer evening. The shaft of light surrounding the gargantuan bush is angelic, the rain briefly illuminated in it like tiny scratches. We reach for the same bloom—a brilliant, red creature. An opulent bloom at the end of a path of a thousand thorns.

Just like us.

Gently holding the rose, I look at Ben, and his gold-flecked hazel eyes look back with the same mixture of fear and hope. “What do we wish for?” he asks.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It feels risky to wish to be bonded to Ben forever when we both have so much growing to do. We both know such rigidity is not how you properly tend a garden. It also feels weird to wish for an end to both our curses—him never sticking around, me never keeping anyone—because we now know that’s bullshit.

So, what then?

I just wish I could trust it’ll all work out somehow.

My heart lifts. I glance back at my aunt and uncle, who are smiling expectantly, and then back to Ben, eagerly awaiting my guidance. I am the seasoned veteran of rose wishes, after all.

“I wish,” I say, not looking away from Ben, “to trust that whatever path we take—even if it ends up being away from each other for a time—it always leads back to you.”

Speechless, Ben bites back a little gasp. His eyes are brimming.

He knows our journey still won’t be easy.

He needs the same trust I do.

“I wish for that, too,” he says.

As two curses come to an end, soothing, happy rain crashes down on Vero Roseto, feeding the beautiful grounds after such a horrible rot almost claimed it, almost claimed us all.