CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Layla
My face hurts. My ankle hurts. Everything hurts. But even with that and the fact that I have an avalanche of stuff to deal with today, the world still feels a little lighter.
And a little colder too. It takes me a second to realize that the arms that were wrapped around me all night are gone, and that I’m alone in my bed, covers draped over my bare shoulder.
Quinn’s not in the room––in the wake of our fight, she really did take the couch. I feel bad. We may not be friends anymore, but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be able to sleep in her bed.
Nico walks in, fully dressed in his t-shirt and jeans, his hat on backwards, cell phone to his ear. My cell phone, I quickly realize.
“Sure,” he says. “Thanks, Cheryl. Yeah, I’ll make sure she prints out the ticket.” He catches me looking and winks. “Okay, you too. Take care.” He sets my phone on the desk before pulling up a chair in front of me so he can take my hand. “Morning, beautiful,” he says softly as his thumb plays over my knuckles. “You slept like the dead, you know that?”
I blanch. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
Nico shrugs and gives me a sly half-smile. “You snore too. It’s okay. I’ll make sure to bring earplugs next time I see you.”
“I do not snore!” I search for a pillow to whack him, but by the time I swing it around, he dodges it easily, chuckling.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s just a little snore. A baby snore, like a kitten.”
I tug my sheet over my head. “Kill me.”
Nico just chuckles and waits patiently until I pull the sheet back down. He lounges back in the chair, content, it seems, to just sit with me.
“Was that...was that my mom?” I ask a few moments later.
His gaze flickers around the room uneasily. “Um, yeah.”
Without explaining anything else, he stands up. I hold the sheet awkwardly to my chest and watch as he walks to the dresser by the closet. One of my suitcases is on the floor, open and half packed with clothes, I realize. Nico opens one of my drawers and starts transferring stuff into it.
“What-what are you doing?” I ask, completely confused.
“I talked to Shama,” he says as he folds a t-shirt. He’s clearly not used to folding small pieces of fabric. He has to try three times before he can get it into a square, which he puts on top of the others he’s already done.
“You talked to Shama...” I repeat.
Nico looks up from dubiously examining a tank top. “Yeah. She emailed your professors and got extensions on your final papers through the summer. You already finished your language finals, so the rest are just essays. You just have to email them to confirm.”
He folds the tank top in half, but it keeps falling apart every time he tries. Snorting with disgust, he balls it up and shoves it into the bag with a lot more force than a piece of cotton deserves.
I sit up and push my hair out of my face. “I don’t understand. Why are you packing my stuff up?”
Nico stops. He takes off his hat and passes it in between his hands a few times. The sounds of my roommates making breakfast filter under the door. He looks around the room guiltily, shifting on the balls of his feet like a caged animal.
“You, um, you wanna go for a walk or something?” he asks abruptly. “How’s your ankle?”
I swallow. This is out of nowhere, and I probably look even more like a punching bag than yesterday. If he wants me out of the apartment to talk, this can’t be good. But already the place feels suffocating. I need to get outside.
“Um, it’s all right,” I say. “I can probably just take some ibuprofen, I guess.”
I swing my legs out of the bed, and Nico’s eyes follow them down to the floor. His eyes dilate slightly before he blinks and looks away.
“I need to stop at Duane Reade for some of that makeup your sister showed me anyway,” I tell him.
And just like that, the look is gone. Nico blinks, and his gaze hardens as he looks back at my neck and face, takes in the real extent of my bruises. I hate that look. It makes me want to throw a paper bag over my head and be done with it.
“Just, um, give me a second to get dressed,” I say, looking pointedly at the door. “I need to take a shower, okay?”
He pauses, clearly unwilling to leave me alone, even for a second. But I sit there, waiting, until finally he nods.
“Okay,” he says as he moves toward the door. “Take your time.”
~
Nico
For the next thirty minutes, I wait on the couch, chatting with Shama and Jamie while they eat their breakfasts. I stare moodily out of the windows that look out toward Union Square. Quinn is nowhere to be seen, although according to Shama, she slept on the couch before leaving early to keep studying for her finals at the library for the rest of the day. Good. Layla doesn’t need any more stress today, especially since I’m pretty sure she’s not going to want to hear what I have to say.
But while she slept through most of the morning––seriously, if I hadn’t known before how hurt she really was, inside and out, the fourteen hours of sleep my girl just took would have told me––her friends and I were busy. Now that they’ve really clued in to just how messed up Layla really is right now, they jumped right in, helping me get things squared away.
Because there are only two things on my mind at the moment.
One: I love her. I love her more than anything. More than myself. More than my job. More than the need I have on a fuckin’ cellular level to touch her, smell her, taste her. Those are things that suit me, but this love goes beyond that––it’s not about me, it’s about her.
And so the second realization beats loud and clearly, painfully through my skull: She needs to go home.
I barely slept last night, staring at the ceiling, looking around the posters on her walls while I recounted the past two days. The terrified phone call from the street. The plane ride where I thought I was going to chew my own arm off with anxiety. Arriving at her dorm to find her missing. Busting into that apartment to find her being attacked.
His blood. My fists. Her bruises.
But it would always come back to her, lying there in my arms, snoring peacefully. Occasionally she would cry out a little, or murmur something unintelligible under her breath. My baby is fuckin’ adorable when she sleeps. I never knew. I hate that I never knew. That I let a whole year pass between us without knowing all these small things about her. That I’ll have to put at least another three months more between us before I can start learning about them again.
Because my baby is broken. I was happy to give her a little pleasure last night––let her know that someone could touch her again without cruelty. I would worship her body all day every day if she’d let me, especially if it would convince her of that. But the look in her eyes that flashed every so often––pure, unadulterated fear––felt like a lightning bolt through my chest. It’s the last thing I ever want her to feel around me. Her wounds go so much deeper than a few bruises on her face. My baby needs time, real time to heal.
And she can’t do that here.
I went over it, over and over again in my mind, trying to figure out a way we could make it work. But I can’t for the life of me figure out how I’ll be able to pay for an apartment for the two of us and give her the attention she needs while I’m at the academy for the next four months. Me, I can deal with living in whatever shithole place I can afford on a cadet’s salary, but Layla deserves better than some basement room in Queens or my brother’s couch. She needs a place where she doesn’t have to worry about things like paying the electricity bills or dealing with seedy landlords, where she’s not going to be left for eighteen hours a day while I’m learning how to become one of New York’s Bravest. She needs a place where people can take care of that shit for her. Where she won’t be alone.
Still, it wasn’t until I called her mom that I was absolutely sure that sending her to California was the right thing to do. Cheryl has been hurting too this last year––I don’t even have to know her to hear that in her voice when I told her what had happened to her daughter. To hear the guilt that echoed there as she realized that her own negligence was a primary cause of all this chaos. If Layla is really going to heal from all of this stuff, she needs to make peace with her family and the changes they’ve gone through.
So yeah. She can’t do that here.
Layla emerges from the bathroom, dressed and looking much more alert, even though the hot water gave her a rosy complexion that darkens the purple and yellow colors around her neck and face. She’s more bundled up in jeans and a sweatshirt than a sunny spring day in May really needs.
I stand up and go to her. We really are like magnets, and it’s more intense now than it ever was. Which is why today is going to be that much harder.
“You ready?” I ask as I kiss her forehead.
She nods, then waves at her roommates. “Let’s go.”
~
I escort her to the drugstore on the corner, walking slightly ahead of her with her hand clenched in mine, like I’m her bodyguard. This city has a tendency to chew people up and spit them out––I’ve seen it again and again. I never wanted that for her. She came to New York to follow her dreams, even if she’s still figuring them out. But in the end, it still got the best of her.
“Hey,” she asks as I tug her around a subway grate. “What happened with your mom? What’s going on with that?”
I pull her close and kiss the side of her head. This is my girl––even when she’s down, she’s still thinking of others.
“Gabe is helping her move to Alba’s guest room for a while,” I say. “That’s K.C’s mom.”
Layla nods. “I remember. The one who threw the party, right?”
I smile at the memory. Up until the end, that party, dancing with my girl, was one of the best nights of my life. “Yeah. She’s going to stay there until one of us can go to Havana and track down her birth certificate.”
I sigh. I’m starting the academy next week and going to be living on a cadet’s salary for the next four months. I don’t know when I’m going to have time or the money to go to Cuba, but I need to figure it out. See exactly what I need to do to get permission. I honestly don’t trust any of my siblings to take care of it the right way, but one of us needs to go. Soon.
Still, we wouldn’t even know about it if it hadn’t been for Layla. I squeeze her hand and kiss her cheek again. She smiles.
We’re quiet as we walk through the drugstore. I watch solemnly as she uses a sample of that cakey shit my sister gave her to cover up the marks on her skin. It still looks like she’s wearing pancake batter, but at least this time the color is close to her actual skin tone. About halfway through, she catches my gaze in the tiny mirror attached to the wall and smiles again, but neither of us says anything while she finishes and buys a jar of the stuff at the counter.
We’re quiet as we walk around the craft market set up in the middle of the square, meandering around the stalls, my arms sometimes around her waist, sometimes slung around her shoulders, sometimes just holding her hand. But always touching. Never apart. I haven’t told her the plans yet, but I think maybe she knows.
In spite of her limp, which is already getting better, we make our way across town, all the way through the East Village and Alphabet City, and eventually I steer her south toward East River Park, where we walk on the wide concrete path that winds around the river’s edge.
“It looks nice over there,” Layla says, pointing to some of the brownstone buildings you can just make out across the river in Brooklyn.
I nod. “That’s Williamsburg. It is a nice area. Getting expensive, though.”
Layla chuckles. “Everywhere here is expensive.”
I shrug. She has a point.
“Sometimes I think it would be nice not to live in Manhattan,” she says, still looking across the water. “This island is so crowded. I don’t know...I haven’t really been to other parts of the city...but it seems like maybe getting away from all these tall buildings, all these people shoved together might be...peaceful.”
Her words only make my resolve that much firmer. And that much more painful.
“Your flight’s at six thirty,” I say abruptly. I might as well get it out there.
Layla turns. “What flight?”
I chew on my lip. “The one I asked your mom to book for you this morning.” I take her other hand so she can’t turn away. “You need...fuck, Layla. You need to go home for a while, sweetie.”
Her gaze flickers around the park for a moment. It might just be the wind blowing off the river, but she looks like she’s about to cry.
“What home?” she asks finally. “My parents are split, Nico. My ‘home’ is an empty house in Pasadena where I’ve spent maybe five nights my entire life.” A tear tracks down her cheek, and she swipes it away angrily, smudging some of the makeup onto her hand. “No, that’s wrong. My home is with you. It’s always been with you. That’s why this whole year I’ve been so––”
Her voice cracks, and she looks out to the river while another few tears fall. I’m not going to lie––I’m struggling to keep it together too. The last thing I want to do is say goodbye to her again. But she needs this. She knows she needs this.
But she also needs to know that we’re for real. That no matter how far away she goes, for how long, I’ll be waiting for her when she gets back. Or maybe it’s me that needs to say it. To hear us both acknowledge that fact.
“Hey.”
I let go of one of her hands and tip her face to look at me. Her eyes are bluer than the water, bluer than the sky above us. They shine, glossy with tears, but she looks at me straight. Already she has more strength than she did yesterday. The thought spurs me on.
“You’ve been so what?” I ask as I stroke her cheek.
She takes a deep breath and leans into my hand for a moment before answering.
“Lost.”
It’s a whisper, so low the word almost flies away on the wind. But it still rocks my soul to its core.
“Ah, baby.” I cup her other cheek and press my forehead to hers. My heart is shaking. This is harder than I ever thought it would be. “I’ve been lost without you too.”
“I feel like I’m being punished,” she says, her voice choking a little. “Like I’m such a mess, I have to be banished. Is this about last night, that I couldn’t...? I’m sorry––so sorry. I’ll be better. I’ll do whatever you need, I swear, I––”
“Shhhhh.” I cut her off gently, kiss the tears off her cheeks. “It’s not about that. Last night was perfect.”
Her willingness to compromise herself breaks my heart. She doesn’t understand what she’s offering. I’m humbled by it, honored by her desire to make me happy. But my girl needs to figure out her own worth again without pleasing other people at her own expense. She needs to know that she doesn’t have to sacrifice her comfort, her limits, with someone who really loves her. That I would love her more for being true to herself anyway.
I fold her against my chest, wrapping my arms around her as we turn to look out at the river together. There’s a water taxi carrying a bunch of tourists on a tour of the boroughs, and if I look up the river, buildings in Brooklyn and Queens block the river’s edge on the other side. Even farther up the river is Randall’s Island, where I’ll be spending the majority of my time until October. It’s blocked by Roosevelt Island, but I know it’s there. The Academy, the place I’ve dreamed of since I was a kid.
I just wish it didn’t feel like a choice between my dreams and her. Because it took everything I had not to tell Cheryl to book me a ticket too. Beg her to let me stay in that big house. Let me trim their hedges, clean their gutters, whatever it would take to earn my keep.
But I know in the end, my presence won’t help Layla. And I need to do this not just for myself, but for her too. I have to believe that a few more months might spell the difference between a life together that will last and a life bandaged together that could fall apart. We both deserve to be the best people we can for each other. I want to be worthy of this woman, this incredibly beautiful person, inside and out.
Layla sniffs every now and then as she cries silently toward the river. I don’t say anything. Sometimes you just have to let it out. I’ll be her shelter while she does.
~
Layla
We walk around the East Village for a little while longer, but soon my ankle can’t really take much more, and Nico tells me gently that we need to go back to the apartment. It’s already almost two, and there’s a lot to do if I’m going to be on a six-thirty flight to Los Angeles.
Shama and Jamie have been hard at work while we were gone. My things are already in boxes, and they’re just about finished packing my clothes too.
“Hey,” I say. “I can take over from here.”
We spend a few more hours packing and cleaning my side of the bedroom. Nico and my roommates have already done so much––I don’t want them to take on more than they have to. Shama has already said she’s going to keep my stuff with hers in a storage facility, and Jamie is footing the bill to have one of the boxes of things accumulated through the year sent back to my grandparents.
Soon, too soon, it’s time to say goodbye.
“I’ll pay you back,” I say as I hug each of them. “I’ll send a check as soon as I’m home.”
“Shut up,” Jamie says. “My parents send me too much money anyway. I’m a spoiled brat, if you didn’t notice.”
Behind me, Nico snorts as he lugs the two suitcases I’m checking on the plane out of my room. I have to laugh. I’m pretty sure we all qualify as spoiled brats to a lot of people.
“Thank you,” I say as I give my roommates both another round of hugs. “You guys saved my life. Really.”
We hold tight, the three of us, before Shama and Jamie finally let go.
“Get out of here,” Shama says. “We’ll take care of putting the rest of your stuff in storage, okay? Just come back better.”
“Okay,” I say. “I promise.”
Nico lugs one of my bags over his shoulder and picks up the other while I grab my messenger bag and my coat. We turn toward the front door, which opens on its own. Quinn steps into the room, and stills when she’s confronted by the four of us.
“Oh,” she says surprised. “You’re leaving?”
I nod. Beside me, Nico tenses visibly.
“I’m going home,” I tell her. “I’ll, um, finish my work there.”
Quinn looks over the bags and glances toward the stack of boxes in our bedroom. She nods. “That...makes sense.” She looks up. “Will you be back in the fall?”
At that, I look to Nico. Uncertainty flashes over his features, but I can tell he’s trying to put on a strong face for me.
“You bet,” I say.
And for the first time since he showed up yesterday, a smile appears. A real smile, the kind that lights up the entire room. The kind that grabbed me from the start.
I turn back to Quinn. “I have to catch my flight. Um...have a good summer.”
Quinn looks at me uneasily. “You too.” She sniffs, but all of the vitriol from yesterday is gone. “Take care of yourself.”
There are no hugs between us. I’m pretty sure that when I get back, Quinn will not be one of the people waiting for me. But when I close the door behind me, I do feel a peace between us at last. An acceptance that maybe wasn’t even there in the first place.
~
Nico rides with me to the airport, doing his best to make small talk the entire way there. He gives me a laundry list of places to visit while I’m in LA––restaurants to try, which beaches I’ll like best. I don’t really hear most of what he says. I’m too busy taking all of him in: the way he talks with his hands, the way a dimple shows up on one side of his face when he laughs, the way his dark eyes flicker expressively, fringed with those lashes that frame such brightness. No matter what he’s feeling––happy, sad, angry, confused––those eyes always sparkle, like two black diamonds.
Finally we arrive at the airport, and he accompanies me while I check my bags and find my way toward the security line for the gates.
“Fuckin’ 9/11,” he swears, glaring at the security that prohibit him from going any farther. “I miss the days when I could come with you. Watch your plane take off, like in the movies.”
I lean my head on his shoulder. “I wish you could fly there with me.”
He sighs and kisses the top of my head again. “Me too, baby. Me too.” Then he turns to face me. “So. Here we are again.”
It’s hard to know what he means. At the airport? Saying goodbye? Sometimes it feels like that’s all we ever do. But this time I hope, I pray, will be the last time.
He reaches down to take both of my hands and lays them palms down on his chest. Right over his heart. Right over the compass tattoo that I can see through his t-shirt if I look hard enough. The one missing its north symbol.
“You listen to me,” he tells me. He presses his hands over mine, like he’s trying to stamp my handprints over his heart. “I’m not going anywhere. You got that, baby? I’m going to be right fuckin’ here, right in this spot when you get back. I don’t care how long it takes. Three months. Two years. But in the end you better come back, all right? Because I’ll be waiting.”
Wordlessly, I nod. The tears are coming again––fuck, I am so tired of crying. But I can’t seem to help it. I’m not spiraling like I was before, but I’m definitely shattered. It’s going to take longer than a day or two to put my life––put myself––back together. Nico was right all along.
I tip my head up, waiting for a kiss. And dark eyes, so deep I want to dive into them, take me in for a second. Then his hands weave into my hair, and he sets his lips to mine.
It’s a kiss full of promises.
Saudade. The word echoes through my soul, a legacy of my family, the undying desire for something that hasn’t even happened yet. Nothing captures better what I feel for this man.
“This feels like the end of something,” I whisper against his lips. I feel like a shadow of myself, a whisper of a person. Like the wind might blow me away.
“It is the end,” Nico agrees as he pushes some hair out of my eyes. He presses a kiss to my forehead, and lingers there for a moment. “But when you come back, it’ll also be a beginning.” He takes my hands and lifts them solemnly to his lips, kissing one, then the other. “We aren’t lost anymore, baby, because we found each other again.”
I close my eyes taking in his words. And then, because there’s nothing else to do, I turn and start walking toward security.
“Layla!”
I pause. I’m barely keeping it together. But slowly, because I have to, I turn around.
That’s when Nico captures my mouth with one last kiss. But this kiss isn’t full of sadness, full of goodbyes. It’s full-bodied, a kiss that holds desire, hunger, all the promise of love and tomorrow and what the world might hold for us. It’s a kiss that sweeps all the doubts out of my mind, that will emanate through me for days to come.
My bag drops to the floor, and I welcome him as he holds my body to his, hovering my toes off the floor while he tells me again and again, with his lips, his tongue, the rumbling vibrations in the back of his throat, all the things that words can’t ever seem to say. That he loves me. That he’s mine. And that as long as we really know that, we won’t ever be lost again.
“I love you,” he says, with a voice that’s lost its breath. “Now go.”
I nod, not even trying to wipe away my tears. “I love you too. Thank you. For-for everything.”
“Don’t thank me,” he says. When I look up, there’s a tear sliding down his cheek too. He laughs and pushes it away. “Just come back to me, okay?”
“You sure you’ll still want me to?” I joke, but it’s laced with uncertainty.
But he smiles again, that bright, thousand-watt smile that would light up the black of night.
“Always,” he says.
Hours later, when I’m stepping off a plane on the other side of the country, the word still echoes through my heart.
Always.
~