SECRET

It's this moment you’ll remember.

This moment you'll always cherish, you'll keep in your hands for as long as you can.

The rush, the exhilaration, something that transforms a day into one that matters.

The first time you see Anna Tanaka's face.

It was—it was really nothing.

A daily ritual—what was once something you hardly ever did, you now found yourself not able to live without.

Reading, taking in each word like oxygen, glued to your phone, engrossed in words you could never quite grasp yourself.

And then, she was just there.

A glitch, an impossibility, an interruption into an otherwise unremarkable evening.

Like something your unconscious conjured, unlocked from somewhere you kept all your desires, the things you wanted but had long ago put away as never being a reality for someone like you.

But she was there.

Arriving in the way beautiful things in life usually do: without warning, without apology.

You stare. You can't help it. Who could?

Anna, straight away, as if you'd always known.

Oh.

This.

What all the stories were about, what every author meant when they introduced a character and simply called her pretty, and immediately gave up extrapolating.

Because how could they?

Anna, a girl that you only witness if you're lucky—and you've never, ever been lucky, not really, not in any way that has ever mattered.

Tall and luminous and symmetrical in that rare, otherworldly way of someone who has never been anything less than perfect. Looks that just stop you. Mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-breath.

She should be on the cover of something, or on a billboard somewhere, everywhere, and nowhere someone like you could ever reach.

You feel it deep in your chest.

It's embarrassing, and seismic, and genuinely sincere.

Everything about her. That's all you see, and that's all there is.

Serendipity, you think.

That's the only word there is for it.

And yet.

It makes you feel sick.

The thing is, you always knew.

Not right away.

At first you only knew Anna, knew she was beautiful, but you also knew that beauty is always its own particular kind of problem.

She stayed with you, through it all, through others that would pass, catch your eye, linger along the periphery whenever you were too engrossed in your fiction, your escapes.

And you could feel it. This nagging thing.

The longer you knew her, the more you understood.

There's a ceiling somewhere above you.

Something inevitable, present in the math, the calculations of every moment.

She was everything you should be content with.

That's exactly what was wrong.

It's your nature.

The part of you, the restless, ungovernable part of you that's always chasing something in the next story, a scroll away, the part that had done the arithmetic long before you were ready to admit.

Maybe you'd been doing it all along.

You know that now. You have known, probably, for a while.

The numbers don't lie.

They never do.

"The other girls told me," Anna says to you, and you can see it in slow-motion, something in her slowly breaking. Something in her eyes, fragile and complicated underneath that steadiness. "About your reputation. Your bad luck. The things you've done."

You say nothing. What is there to say to that?

"They told me that you're addicted to it. The chase. Fame. Fortune." She pauses. You think you can see it. Her jaw tightening, if just barely. "Something more beautiful."

She lets that sit between you.

"They said I'd be wasted on you."

"Anna—"