Letting You Burn

I landed at JFK after the most uncomfortable flight of my life to find a single voicemail. It was from ten hours earlier, and it told me nothing at all. 

Hope’s voice, not sounding steady. “Hemi. It’s me. But you’re not there. Call me when you can. If you want to.” 

I didn’t call, because it was almost two in the morning in New York. I went to the hotel instead. And heard at the front desk that Hope and Karen had checked out at noon the day before. 

They were gone.

I almost told Charles to drive to Brooklyn, but I didn’t. If Hope thought I was too much for her, too demanding, how would she feel if I turned up at three o’clock in the morning and told her she was coming back to me? I couldn’t possibly be reasonable, not now, and I needed to be reasonable. 

I was always in control. Always. Except now. Now, I was nowhere close, and I was going to have to do better. Starting by turning up at a reasonable hour and talking to her like a reasonable man. 

In the end, it took me nearly twenty-four hours from the time I’d left Milan before I was standing on a snowy sidewalk and pressing the buzzer for their apartment. When a fella came up behind me and opened the door with his key, though, I didn’t hesitate. I followed him inside. If Hope didn’t want to see me? That was too bloody bad. She was going to see me anyway. I didn’t understand any of this, but I was going to.

So much for reasonable.

I took the four flights of stairs two at a time, then stood outside their door and knocked. When I didn’t get an answer straight away, I may have lost my equilibrium entirely and pounded on the door.

They had to be here. Where else would they have gone? 

“Hope!” It was a bellow. I knew it, and I couldn’t help it. “HOPE!”

The door opened just as my fist was coming down on it again, and I spun with the effort to pull the punch, not to hit Karen in her poor abused head. 

Because it was Karen, not Hope. Karen, looking…looking well, even though a bandage still covered the crown of her head. And somehow, despite the adrenaline, the fury, the grinding frustration, I softened.

“Hi, sweetheart.” I ran my hand gently over the fuzz that had begun to grow back to cover her naked scalp. She still looked vulnerable and plucked as a baby robin, and I kissed her cheek and asked, “How you goin’?”

“I’m good. I mean, I’m good. I hardly hurt, and it’s…” She laughed. “It’s amazing, you know?”

“Yeh,” I said. “I know. How about letting me in?”

She stepped back. “Oh! Sorry. What’s going on, though? I don’t get it. Did you break up with Hope? Is that why we had to leave the hotel?”

“No.” I could hear the grimness in my voice and couldn’t help it, because it had all come straight back again. “It wasn’t me. I’m here to find out what it was. Where is she?”

“In the bedroom.”

I was across to it in three strides, because that was how tiny this grotty apartment was. I knocked on this door, too, but I didn’t pound this time, because I’d reminded myself of that “reasonable” thing again.

She was hiding from me. Why? That wasn’t like Hope. She’d always faced me, no matter how forbidding I may have seemed, no matter how much a lesser woman would have quailed.

“Hope,” I called out. “Open up. Talk to me.”

The door opened, and she was on the other side, her mouth opening in shock. With headphones in her ears, and her laptop and files sitting on the bed. 

Oh. She hadn’t heard me.

She yanked the headphones out, seeming to be struggling herself for something to say. “Hemi. You’re...you’re here.”

“Yeh.” I put my hands on my hips to keep from grabbing her. “Tell me what’s happened to make you leave me, and I’ll make it right. Whatever I have to do, I’ll do it. Just tell me.”

“Leave you? I...I didn’t.”

“What?” Now I was the one staring. “What do you mean, you didn’t? You moved out. You gave back the bracelet. Why?”

“Oh, boy.” She ran a hand through her hair, took in a deep breath, and blew it out. “I can’t...I can’t process. I think we’d better sit down. And I—did you mean it? The bracelet?”

“Did I mean what?” 

She was sitting, collapsing onto the bed as if she couldn’t stand up anymore, and I sat beside her and took her hand, because I needed to touch her. My heart was galloping, and her pulse, I realized, was racing just as fast. Something had gone very wrong, but it wasn’t going to stay wrong. We were going to fix it. I knew it. I could feel it, and just like that, the emotions had shifted directions yet again, leaving me gasping in their wake.

“Give me a...a second to explain,” she said, not sounding any steadier than I felt. “It’s sort of a...it’s a long story. It was Martine. Well, at first it was.”

“Martine?” Of all the things I’d expected to hear, that was the last.

“She came to see me yesterday. Well, you know that. And she said…she said that you gave her that necklace she wears all the time, and that when that extravagant present came for a...a woman, it was the…” Her voice wobbled on the words. “The end. That that was goodbye. And I thought that you’d had me working for your old mistress. I couldn’t believe you’d do that, though. I couldn’t. I told myself I was going to wait to talk to you. But when the bracelet came after all…” Another breath. “I just...I snapped. I’d been up and down so much, and I know that’s an excuse. I know I should have waited for you to explain. I knew it a couple hours later. I had the most horrible feeling that I’d gotten it all wrong. And then I couldn’t reach you, and you didn’t answer, and I thought again...I thought I must have been right. And the longer it went on, that I didn’t hear anything, that you didn’t call...”

“Because I was on my way back to you.” She’d been up and down? That made two of us. “I was on the plane. Thinking the same thing. Thinking I’d stuffed up somehow, not knowing how to make it right. But Martine? No.” There was rage there now, but not at Hope. At Martine, and at myself. I should’ve seen this. I should’ve known it. “I gave her that necklace to say ‘thank you’ after our very first Milan show. She worked bloody hard, and she did well, and that’s why she’s where she is, but after today, she won’t be. She’s going to be gone. Because I never slept with her. Never. And I guess she was bitter about that. And hard work or no, she’s gone. Today.”

“No.” Hope was looking up at me, the urgency clear to see, and something else, too. Distress? Why? “No, don’t. Please. I don’t want to work for her anymore, but I don’t think you should fire her. I think it just burned her too much, having me foisted on you. I think, on some level, she might even have been trying to...trying to help. She was jealous, but I don’t think that was all. I think she thought she was telling the truth. Not the truth about that, but the truth about you. Except it’s not the truth. You know what I realized? Last night, when I was thinking? When I was so sure of how I’d screwed up, and so worried that you’d never forgive me?”

She’d left me behind again, but that was nothing new. “What?”

She passed that by. “I realized I was the one being the king. I was the one letting you burn, the one without any loyalty, without any faith. I’ve always read that swan story and thought, how could he do that? And then I did it. Me. I heard something from somebody else, somebody who was jealous, and I believed it. I believed in that person instead of believing in the person who’s proven to me, again and again, that he’s real, and he’s trustworthy, and he’s honest, and he’s good. I didn’t believe in you, and I was wrong. And I thought, No. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to let that fire get lit. I’m not going to let you burn. I’m going to wait and ask you. But I didn’t want to be in the hotel to do it. I wanted to be here, at home, where I was...where I could be strong.”

“Sweetheart.” My arm had gone around her, because I could no more keep from holding her than I could have let her burn. “You’ll never be the person without faith. Never. And you can be strong anywhere. And much as I’d like to say that I can’t believe you didn’t trust me, I know exactly why you didn’t. I haven’t been a man a woman could count on, and I may have given some women jewelry, too. Martine was right about that. But with you, it was different. This wasn’t goodbye. This was…this was ‘I love you.’”

I’d never said the words before, and now, I couldn’t believe it. They didn’t feel scary. They felt right. They felt necessary.

“Oh.” She was trembling again, but maybe for a different reason this time. “Oh. I’m so…Oh, Hemi. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I doubted you. I kept telling myself that I knew you, that this wasn’t you, but I let the past take hold of me all the same, and I’m so sorry. But there was no note, and...”

The tears were pooling in her eyes, running down her cheeks. And she didn’t even try to hide it. The second time she’d let me see her like that, that she’d let me know her, and I was never going to let myself forget what a gift that was. 

“No, sweetheart,” I managed to say. The tenderness was doing its best to overpower me, my chest swelling with it as if my heart had grown. Because it had. Because she’d made it happen. “I’m the one who’s sorry. There wasn’t a note because I wasn’t man enough to say the words, even to somebody else, so they could write it down for you to read. I’m sorry that it’s taken me all this time to say it, and to let you know it, and to be the man you need. But I’m going to do my best to be that man now.”

“You’ve always been the man I need.” She wasn’t trembling anymore. She’d pulled herself together, because that was Hope. So strong and fierce in her love, so gentle in her touch. The tears were still there, but she was smiling through them. Her eyes were steady, her hand was on my face, and everything I needed was in that hand, in those eyes. “And I love you, too. Of course I do. I love you so much.”

“Then…” I pulled the velvet case out of my pocket, the one I’d stopped to collect on the way here, because I’d been determined that I was going to put it around her wrist, even if it was the last thing I did before she said goodbye to me forever. 

I opened the box and pulled out the circlet of sapphires and diamonds, the dingy surroundings and dim winter light of Hope’s bedroom unable to diminish their flash. “Then, please. My Hope. Please let me put this on you. Please tell me that I get to keep you. Please let me love you.”