“Can you see this view, babe?”
“I can. It’s amazing,” I tell Micah as he stands out on the balcony of the property he’s at.
He walks back inside and shows me the kitchen as we continue to video chat.
This is the second day he’s been looking at places for us to live. I spent all day yesterday here at home as he showed me property after property, all the while having a sinking feeling in my stomach. The same feeling that’s with me now. It never leaves me and only grows stronger when Micah and I talk—when he shows me these amazing homes where we can start our life together while Kason skates around in the back of my head.
He flips the camera around so that I can see him. “So, what do you think of this one?”
“It’s great.”
He smiles. “You say that about all of them.”
“That’s because they all seem perfect. Seriously, I don’t know how I’m supposed to choose.” In reality, I’ve been having a hard time focusing on these places when it’s all I can do to act normal—to act like my heart isn’t treading in dangerous waters. It was only a week ago that I was so certain with the direction my life is heading. Now everything is getting mixed up.
When I’m with Kason, he’s all I can think about. I go back and forth with the constant what-ifs, but it’s more than just that. It’s the feeling that erupts inside me when he smiles, when I hear his voice, when I feel his touch. I know it’s wrong, but I don’t know how to stop myself from reacting to him. It’s beyond my control, and knowing that terrifies me because I can’t shut it off. And then I ask myself: if I could shut it off, would I?
“Well, this is the last place we’re looking at today. I have to meet with Zach later, and then I’ll be tied up with work stuff for the next few days.”
“How many more places do you have left to see?”
He looks away from the camera before Jeff, the realtor, leans in and says, “A lot. There’s so much available right now. We will be checking out more next week if you decide you don’t want to make an offer on any that you’ve seen already.”
Micah comes back to the screen. “So, what do you think? Should we keep searching?”
I hesitate. How can I make a huge decision like this when I feel the way I do? “Yeah, I think we should look at a few more.”
“Is that Micah?” my mom asks when she comes into the living room.
“Hold on,” I tell him. “Mom wants to say hi.”
She takes the phone from my hand and taps my legs for me to sit up so she can take a seat next to me. I listen to them as she asks questions about all the places the realtor has shown him and he fills her in on all the details. When Micah has to go, she says goodbye before handing the phone back to me.
“I have to run, but I’m going to have Jeff email you the MLS listings for everything he’s shown us so that you can go over them.”
“Sounds good.”
“I’ll talk to you later,” he says. “I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
I disconnect the call and look to my mom, asking, “You ready to go?”
“We’re going to have to push it to tomorrow.” We are supposed to be heading over to Sharon’s apartment and have already picked up a bunch of boxes. “While you were talking to Micah, the office called, and I have to go in.”
“You’re kidding,” I sulk.
“I’m sorry, dear. But with Kason taking time off from work, things are starting to fall behind.”
“No, I understand. I’m just going a little stir crazy without a car.”
“Then take mine. You can drop me off, and when I’m ready to leave, I’ll call you.”
“No thanks. You didn’t even get home last night until after I was already asleep,” I tell her. “It’s fine. I think I might spend the day lying out by the pool.”
“It’s a rough life you live,” she teases as she stands. “And on that note, I’m going to work.”
“Bye, Mom.”
“If you need anything, call me.”
After she leaves, I make myself a sandwich for lunch and eat before turning on the television. Flipping through the channels to find something worthwhile to watch, I give up when my phone chimes with a text from Kason. I haven’t talked to him since he was over here a couple of nights ago. The night he made it clear that he wasn’t ready for us to be over. I had already been battling myself with questions, and that night made everything even more chaotic.
My tummy is already frazzled before I even open the text to read it.
Kason: Your mom just called to check in. That woman refuses to let me come into work, and with school being out, I’m going crazy with boredom.
It’s clear he’s trying to break the tension, so I don’t hesitate to respond.
Me: Tell me about it. She left me here to go to the office when we had plans for the day.
Kason: What were you guys going to do?
I debate lying to avoid possibly upsetting him, but it doesn’t feel right, so I go ahead
with the truth.
Me: I was going to help her pack up your mom’s apartment.
I hit send and wait nervously, hoping I didn’t just make a mistake by telling him.
Kason: You two don’t have to do that. I can take care of it.
Me: She just wants to make it easier on you.
Kason: Maybe that’s what I’ll do today.
When I think about him alone in that apartment, packing his mother’s belongings, and how awful that’s going to be on him, I offer,
Me: I can go with you.
Kason: You don’t have to. I’ll be fine.
I know that’s a lie. How can he even expect me to believe that?
Me: I know I don’t have to, but I want to. You shouldn’t have to do this alone. Plus, my mom and I already have all the boxes in our garage.
Kason: Are you sure?
Me: I’m sure.
Kason: You want to meet me over there?
Me: I don’t have a car. Micah took it when he went back to Miami.
Kason: I’ll be there in ten minutes.
With the way we left everything the other night, I’m anxious to see him again. It’s a sensation that swirls in my stomach as I wait for him to show up, and when he does, those swirls break away into nervous flutters. If he’s nervous, too, he doesn’t show it at all when he strides into the foyer in a slightly fitted T-shirt, shorts, and a pair of flip-flops.
“When did you stop knocking?” I quip when I get off the couch.
“When your mom gave me this,” he says with a cocky smile, holding up a key to the house that’s on the same ring as his others.
“Come on. The boxes are out in the garage.”
He follows me out, and when I open the garage door to start loading them into his car, I foolishly expect to see his old Camaro. Instead, there’s a white SUV sitting in the driveway.
“What happened to the Camaro?”
“It died a tragic death on the Howard Franklin Bridge,” he tells me when he clicks his key fob to open the back hatch. “Your mom helped me with the down payment on this.”
I grab a few boxes and slide them into the back of the SUV. “Is there anything my mom won’t do for you?”
“I sense a little jealousy.”
“Jealous?” I question as I raise my brows and perch my hands on my hips. “Of what?”
He shoves an armful of boxes in and chuckles at my phony annoyance. “Her apparent fondness of me. That perhaps I’m her favorite now.”
My jaw drops. “That’s insane. I’ve always been her favorite and everyone knows that.”
“If you say so.” He reaches up and closes the hatch. “Swallow that envy and hop in.”
I drop my hands from my hips and he further teases me with a wink when he opens the passenger door for me.
“You’re not funny,” I sneer.
“Then why can’t you stop smiling at me?”
He shuts the door before I can respond, and when he hops in behind the wheel, the anticipation I felt while I waited for him to get here settles into familiar ease. I’m at ease as he pulls away from the house and begins driving north. I can still remember how nervous he was the first time he brought me to his apartment. He was so scared I was going to judge him when I finally saw how he lived, knowing it was the polar opposite of my lifestyle. But it only made me love him more—the fact that he was opening up and trusting me with something he kept hidden from everyone else.
I never told him exactly how that day made me feel, so when he pulls off the interstate and we draw closer to the apartment, I decide to tell him what I didn’t that day.
“Do you remember the first time you brought me here?” I start, and when he pulls up to a red light, he looks at me. “I didn’t tell you then, but . . . it made me feel extremely special.”
“I thought you’d take one look and be done with me,” he says, and I’ll never forget all the insecurities he used to battle with back then.
The light turns green, and he continues to drive until he’s turning into the complex and right back into his old parking spot.
It’s surreal to be back here—back in the center of my past. The two of us unload the boxes and head up the stairs. When he unlocks the door and I step in, I take a look around to find that nothing has changed since I was last here. Everything is exactly how I remember it. It’s chilling to see that with so much change, this still remains.
Kason pulls the boxes from under my arm, distracting me from my daze. He takes them over to the couch and starts taping a few up so we can start packing. I go to help him and notice he’s gone quiet, which doesn’t surprise me.
“Have you been here since she . . .”
He shakes his head as he continues to assemble the boxes, keeping his eyes on the task at hand. This has to be excruciating for him, and I’m regretting even telling him about coming here.
“We don’t have to do this.”
He grabs a box, tosses it to me, and avoids my words when he says, “Where should we start?”
I look into his eyes and his expression tenses.
“Don’t do that,” he tells me. “Let’s just get this done.” He grabs a couple of boxes, walks over to the small kitchen area, and sets them on the counter. “You want to start in here, and I’ll work on her room?”
“Okay,” I murmur weakly, my chest tighter than it was before I saw his mood completely change as soon as we got here.
I open a cabinet, and when I reach for a stack of plates, I peek over my shoulder to see him walking into his mother’s bedroom. I take a sheet of packing paper and begin wrapping the old dishes and filling the boxes. Each second passes in dreadful silence. When I tell myself to stop worrying so much about Kason, the only other place my mind can go to is all the memories we’ve shared in this small apartment.
I used to love spending time together here instead of at my house. It felt as if we were in our own little private world, far from where anyone could find us. Our secret place where all that mattered was the two of us and no one else.
When all my boxes are filled, I walk over to the couch to put a few more together when I look up at the door to Kason’s old room. I walk over and glance over my shoulder into Sharon’s room. I don’t see Kason, and assume he must be in her closet when I twist the knob and step in. His room is empty. The mattress where Kason first touched me in the most loving way a person could be touched is gone. I opened myself up to him in this very room, exploring each other in the most intimate ways.
Endless amounts of love and laughter were shared within these four walls, and to see it so empty makes me feel empty, too.
I go back to the kitchen with a paperweight inside my chest and continue to pack. I busy myself as I reminisce on some of the happiest moments of my life. They fade in and out, leaving their marks like tattoos on my soul, forever branding me with the reminder that this happened. That these memories are real, and they have life to them. A life I thought would last forever, but it severed all too soon. We were robbed of our time, and before I knew it, we were finished.
“We’re unfinished.”
I tape another box closed as his words echo in my head. I take the box from the counter and stack it with the others that are on the floor. I look at my progress and worry when I check the time to realize that two hours have passed and I haven’t heard a sound from Kason. He went in with only one box and hasn’t come out once to get more.
I walk into his mother’s room and find him sitting on the floor of her closet with his back facing me. He’s holding a pile of stuff in his hands, and when I cautiously step around him, he looks up at me with red-rimmed eyes.
I kneel in front of him and find he’s holding a bunch of childhood papers.
“She saved these,” he says, his voice strained and hoarse. “There are boxes full.” To his side are opened boxes filled with spelling papers and art projects he must’ve done when he was a little boy. Sitting next to him is a piece of yellow construction paper with dried pieces of pasta glued down to spell his name. “I used to think she didn’t care about me because she was never around,” he tells me. “I was too young to understand why she was always gone, and at the time, I thought she didn’t love me. But she kept everything.”
He holds out the papers for me to take, and when I do, I quietly flip through them—each math worksheet, handwriting page, and art project. I stop when I come across his small painted handprint that he turned into a fish. Running my finger along his tiny ones, my heart breaks for the little kid inside him that’s still hurting.
“It feels as if she’s going to come home from work any minute.”
In my most gentle tone, I offer, “I’m sure it’s going to feel that way for a while.”
“I used to feel the same about you, too. That any minute my phone would ring and you’d be on the other end, and I’d realize that it was all just a bad dream.”
I set the stack of papers aside, and when I take his hand, I reveal, “I also felt it. That one day I would wake up and the nightmare would be over.” I choke up and press my lips together to keep myself from breaking down.
He reaches out his hand and touches the side of my face. “I would’ve done anything to be in that nightmare with you just so you wouldn’t have had to be alone.”
I believe him when he says this, wishing I could’ve been strong enough to tell him back then. If only I would’ve given him a chance . . .
I look into his eyes that bear so much honesty. And like a magnet pulling my soul to its truth, I kiss him.
The moment my lips touch his and he pulls me to him, I lose all my senses and drown in my affinity for this man. An affinity I slammed the door on years ago, only to be reminded that it never left the second I came back and saw him.
Straddling my legs across his lap, I hold his face in my hands as he bands his arms firmly around me. Neither of us hesitate as we push into the kiss, and when he opens my mouth with his, our tongues touch, sending a frisson of neediness up my spine. One drop of him on my taste buds is all it takes for me to melt completely into him. My body slacks in his embrace, which is so strong and so solid around me that I know in my heart he could’ve carried me through my storm if only I had given him the chance.
My hands lose themselves in his hair, and he shifts to his side, laying us on the floor. Our legs tangle, and I’m breathless when his lips leave mine, dragging down my cheek and along my neck. He kisses my veins, and I whisper, “I’m so sorry.”
Kason pulls away and, with eyes so beautiful, stares down at me.
“I’m sorry I hurt you.” I whisper as I run my hand over the stubble on his face. “I was so confused. I was scared . . . and ashamed, and all I wanted to do was run.” Honesty weighs heavily on my bones as I tell him this while he quietly listens to me. “I didn’t want to believe what had happened to me, and I didn’t want you to know. I couldn’t hurt you like that. So, I ran.”
“I would’ve run with you, if only you would have let me.”
“I didn’t feel worthy of you.” His brows cinch together in question when I say this, and I add, “I blamed myself for what happened to me . . . I still do.” I swallow a piece of misery lodged in my throat. “I shouldn’t have been there. I shouldn’t have spoken to that guy or given him my time, but I did.”
He shakes his head. “That’s bullshit.” He runs the backs of his fingers along my cheek. “I don’t know how you’ve built this up in your head that you think you hold any amount of responsibility for what happened, but you don’t,” he insists.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know you. But I get it. I understand the burden of blame, the feeling that you’re the one at fault, that somehow you were the cause.” He takes a slow blink and wavers before saying, “To this day, I still wonder what I did to deserve what happened to me as a kid.”
“You did nothing.” I’m quick to say it, but he’s even quicker to return it, stating, “And neither did you. Yet, we still blame ourselves when we know we shouldn’t. That’s what these people have done to us, and only we can understand it because we’ve been through it.”
His face swims into iridescence as he proves us to be more alike than what I thought. And through this unfathomable pain, I manage to smile because I finally found someone who understands exactly how I feel.
But he was always here.
I ran away from the very person I should’ve been running to.
Nobody could possibly understand me like Kason does because we reflect a shared trauma that we’ll forever be marked by. I was always so worried that, if he knew, he’d look at me as something vile and horrific, but he feels the same way about his own past, and yet, he gave me the truth to his disgust and put all of his trust in me that I would love him regardless.
I should’ve trusted him.
But I couldn’t because I couldn’t get past my own fears that kept me imprisoned for far too long.
“I never wanted to hurt you.”
He leans down, resting his forehead against me, and with lips that brush against mine, he says, “Maybe this is our chance to begin again.”