Lemony Snicket - Am I in Love?
The worst thing about Stain'd-by-the-Sea was that it didn't have Beatrice in it. Perhaps that was a strange thing to complain about, but he had been thinking about it a lot. Thinking about her a lot. Sometimes he even had dreams about her.
He knew that what he felt for Ellington Feint was not love. It had some of the same symptoms but you couldn't fall in love with a person like that when she lied all the time and there was someone at home who made you feel like you were flying and falling at the same time every time she said your name.
Lemony was almost thirteen, which felt very grown-up, but it wasn't, really. He knew that, too, and felt rather proud of being young, because he didn't understand adults. He didn't think they understood each other, for that matter. At his age, feelings were strange, and the attraction toward the girl who lied to him proved that. But the more he thought of Beatrice, the more he was sure that the feelings that he had for her were something much more solid.
He wanted to go and ask her what she thought, how she felt about the things that were stirring in his young heart. At his age, Lemony was just discovering what love meant, and he was becoming more and more certain that it felt like the flutter that went through his heart and settled deep in his stomach when he thought of Beatrice and that beautiful smile of hers. It felt like home.
He was almost desperate to go home, sitting by himself in a place where there used to be lots of people, a place that would stay empty until the end of time. He wanted to go and help Kit out of her predicament. He wanted to play a game with Jacques, like they always used to. He wanted to sit by Beatrice on their favorite bench and talk about how things had changed since he first met her.
He felt he had grown a lot in the past two years. That was how long it had been since he first met her, almost to the day. The day was not long before his birthday. He could still remember the exact day, because his memory was perfect- "photographic", he'd been told, which was very rare and sometimes gave him headaches- and because it was something that meant an awful lot to him. It might be a day that he would look back on in thirty years, a day that he would remind her of. "Remember that day when we first met?"
Lemony's cheeks flushed slightly as he realized how far ahead he was thinking. It was a marriage fantasy, of sorts, himself at forty-two, just shy of his forty-third birthday, smiling at Beatrice, his best friend who had never left his side in all that time, matching rings on their fingers gleaming in the light of a lamp in the home that they shared. He really had to be in love. He had never had that kind of thought about anyone else, not ever, not in all his nearly thirteen years.
He stood up and put his coat back on with a shaky sigh, his eyes fixed on the horizon. He needed to get back to the city, back to Kit and Jacques and back to Beatrice so he could tell her what he'd realized. The sooner he fixed this broken town and solved its riddles, the sooner he would be able to get root beer floats with her, or maybe just one float with two straws, like they did in the movies. He would be able to hold hands with her, and he was sure it would be splendid.
He walked up an empty street to get back to work, and his heart was full.