Isaiah

“What’s in there?” A wide-eyed, blonde-haired, lanky-armed spawn of Rachael peers into the small cardboard box I brought over.

“Stuff,” I say.

“What are you going to do with that stuff?” she asks.

“Things.”

“What kind of things?” she asks.

“Caitlyn,” Rachael says, striding into the room in a sweatshirt and leggings and guiding her daughter away. “I’m sorry. She asks a million questions and she doesn’t know when to stop.”

“It’s fine.” I’m seated on a worn-down sofa covered in flowers in the cozy living room of Maritza’s co-worker’s bungalow.

It’s surreal being here and I have no idea if I’m going to make the world’s biggest fool of myself or walk away with the ultimate victory, but I have to try.

I owe it to myself. And to her. To Us.

“Thanks again for doing this for me,” I tell her, slicking my hands together.

“Of course.” She waves her hand. “She’s going to kill me for lying to her, but I think—I hope—everything’s going to work out for you guys.”

Earlier this morning, I stopped into the restaurant hoping to catch Rachael. All I wanted to know was if she gave Maritza the letter because I couldn’t comprehend why she’d still be so distant and upset with me if she knew the truth.

But when Rachael told me Maritza refused to read it, she unexpectedly softened the blow by offering to help in any way she could.

“She’s a stubborn old mule sometimes,” Rachael says. “Usually she’s this happy-go-lucky girl flitting around with a smile on her face but once she digs her heels into the ground, there’s rarely any moving them.”

“You think she’s going to be pissed when she shows up?” I ask with a slight chuckle, imagining how fucking cute she looks when she’s angry, her pretty face all pinched and her delicate hands resting on her hips.

“I mean, I don’t think she’s going to be running into your arms in slow motion, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Rachael rolls her eyes. “But all we need is for her to come on and hear you out. Cooper’s prepared to lock the door if I say the magic word and Calla’s going to hide her car keys if it comes to that.”

Shaking my head, I smirk. I know she’s just trying to lighten the mood and take the edge off a bit, but all I keep thinking about is the way she looked at me the other morning at the restaurant and the way that everything I said at the hospital seemed to go in one ear and out the other, like she wasn’t even listening.

If she doesn’t want to hear me out, if she’s so convinced I quit talking to her on purpose, then I can’t change that.

But it won’t stop me from trying.

“Mom, she’s here!” Rachael’s son shouts from the front window.

“Okay, okay. I heard you. Now take your sisters and go back to your room for a bit,” she says, brushing her fingers through his wavy blond hair. “And only come out if you hear me shout the magic word.”

Cooper nods and takes his sisters by their little hands, leading them down a hallway. It’s only now, in the stifling quiet, that I realize my heart’s beating like a kick drum in my chest and my palms are sweating up a storm.

I’ve never been so fucking nervous in my life, but I swallow it down. I stuff it down where I can’t see it or feel it or hear it anymore, because I have to get her back. I have to prove to her that I care about her more than I’ve ever cared about anyone in my life, and I can’t do that if I’m a bumbling mess bracing myself for the worst.

The doorbell chimes and Rachael strides across the room. Maritza’s shadow moves on the other side of the opaque glass door.

“Don’t hate me,” Rachael says when she answers.

“Where’s Coop?” Maritza asks, stepping in. “And why would I hate you? You had an emergency.”

Her eyes scan the empty house until they land on me and her smile fades like it was never there at all.

“What is this …?” she asks, pointing to me. “Why is he here?”

“You two need to talk,” Rachael says, placing her hand on the small of Maritza’s back and all but shoving her toward me. “I think you should hear him out, Ritz.”

She stands before me, eyes searching mine and feet frozen. Her lips part, as if she’s about to say something, but then she stops.

Rachael glances at the two of us before drawing in a deep breath. “All right. I’ll be out back with the kids if you need me for any reason, babe.”

As soon as we’re alone, Maritza folds her arms across her chest, eyes narrowing, and I pat the seat beside me on the sofa.

“I’m fine standing, but thank you,” she says.

I roll my eyes, patting the seat a little harder. She still won’t budge.

“Fine,” I say. “Suit yourself.”

“So?” she asks, eyes traveling to the cardboard box beside me. “What did you need to say so badly that you had to involve my best friend and force her to lie to me?”

I lift a palm. “Nobody forced anybody to do anything. This was all her idea, actually. Having you come here.”

She lifts her brows, fighting a smirk. “Fair enough. I can believe that.”

Placing the box in my lap, I reach in and retrieve the first item: a photo from earlier this year from Madame Tussaud’s, where she’s standing next to Miley Cyrus’ wax likeness, her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth.

“Why did you print this?” she asks, examining the singed edges.

“I took it with me over there.”

“You had this printed before you left?” she asks.

“CVS one-hour photo.”

“Why’s it burnt?”

“It was on my right side, resting in an interior pocket, when the first explosion happened,” I say. “Fire and shrapnel mostly hit my left side. I’m convinced you were my lucky charm that day.”

Her mouth turns up at one side, though every other part of her is still trying to pretend she’s still angry with me; her intense stare, her rigid posture and crossed arms.

“I kept it with me from hospital to hospital while I recovered.” I drink her in, studying the way her features soften, like she doesn’t want to hate me anymore. “Made all the nurses hang it up in my room each time they moved me.”

Maritza steps closer, finally taking a seat next to me. Drawing in a long breath, she rests her eyes in mine.

“I had no idea you were hurt.” Her voice is softer now.

Lips pressed flat, I reach for the top button of my shirt and begin to unfasten it, then the next and the next. When I’m finished, I pull the left side down my arm and show her the burned, scarred mess of skin that trails all along my left side and stops at the base of my shoulder.

“Does it hurt?” she asks.

I nod. “It hurt like hell at first. They had me in a coma for a couple of weeks after it first happened. When I woke up, I was in so much pain I’d pray every night for God to just let me die, but I think it was the drugs talking. Doctors said had the burns traveled to the other half of my torso, I wouldn’t be here today.”

I don’t even touch on the fact that I almost lost a leg from the hip down. That’ll be a story for another day.

Her chest rises and falls slowly and she studies the marks that cover my flesh.

“I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to write you letters,” I say. “I lost your address. I didn’t have your number memorized. There was no way for me to reach you, Maritza, and the idea of you thinking I’d written you off fucking killed me.”

Maritza’s eyes flick to the floor, focusing on the hardwood beneath our feet. “There were so many times I had this feeling … this gut feeling that something happened to you and that that was why I hadn’t heard from you. I believed that for so long. And then when I met your brother, he said you weren’t hurt and that you’d been home for a while.”

“Of course he did. That’s what he does—he lies.”

She shakes her head. “I’m so sorry. If you had any idea what a rollercoaster these last six months have been for me … all the nights I stayed up worrying about you, wondering where you went and what happened …”

I slip my shirt back over my arm before taking her hands between mine. “I can only imagine. And I hate that I put you through that.”

“When I got back, Ma had left the guest room exactly the way it was when I’d left,” I tell her, “and I found these sitting on the nightstand.”

Reaching into the box, I retrieve a couple of small items.

“The receipt from our sushi lunch where I accidentally Back-to-the-Future’d your future children,” I say. She chuckles, taking the thin slip of paper from my hands. “And the ticket stub from the tar pits, where I kissed you in front of a woolly mammoth.”

“Why’d you hold on to these?” she asks.

Shrugging, I say, “I don’t know. Believe me, I’m not a sentimental guy. I don’t hold onto anything. But I guess I wasn’t quite ready to throw them away.”

“That’s kind of … romantic,” she says, head tilted as her lips lift in one corner.

“I don’t know about romantic,” I say, reaching for the bouquet of blue hydrangeas I’d picked up on the way here.

“Blue hydrangeas?” she asks, bringing the flowers under her nose. “I can’t believe you remembered.”

I smirk. “There’s this little flower shop over by Ma’s place. And every time I passed it these last few weeks, I saw hydrangeas in the window. They were usually white or pink or purple, but today they were blue. And this girl I know once told me to always stop for blue hydrangeas.”

Maritza’s perfect teeth drag along her lower lip and her eyes are lit, glassy almost, but the smile forming on her face tells me this is a good thing.

“I never stopped thinking about you, Maritza,” I say. “Not once. And I didn’t realize what that meant until it was too late to tell you.”

“I’m sorry I wouldn’t listen to you,” she says, exhaling. “Your brother was just so convincing … and I’d been trying for months to make sense of everything and then he came along and filled in the missing blanks and I was so sure I had it all figured out, I was so sure you were this horrible person who went around hurting people and not thinking twice.”

Skimming my palm along my jaw, I blow a hard breath between my lips. “Yeah, well. I’m not perfect, Maritza. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of. I’ve taken the low road way more than I probably should have, but there’s something about finding the girl of your dreams and then watching your life flash before your eyes that does something to a man.”

“The girl of your dreams?” She laughs.

“It’s cliché, I know.” And it’s not really a phrase that’s ever been in my vocabulary until I met her. “I don’t know how else to describe you other than you’re everything I never knew I wanted, everything I never knew was possible to have.”

Reaching into the box, I retrieve the burnt letter Rachael had given back to me after Maritza refused to read it.

“Here,” I say.

Our eyes catch and she hesitates before taking the folded paper from my hands and gazing over the faded, smudged ink.

Dear Maritza,

I almost died today.

And I don’t say that because I want your sympathy or I want you to worry about me. I say it because in those deafening seconds when I thought it was the end for me, I found myself thinking about one person and one person only.

You.

Something happens to a man when he’s on the brink of death, and truth be told, it’s as cliché as it is profound. You look back on your life, namely your regrets, and you realize you only had one shot—and either you made the most of it or you didn’t.

It’s that simple.

I haven’t even touched thirty and sure I’ve served my country, but what else have I done? Pissed away the best years of my life on women and beer? Walking around with a chip on my shoulder because my life didn’t go the way I thought it would?

Like I said, I almost died today. And in a way, I did die because I’m not the man I once was.

For the first time in my life, I’ve realized what I truly want and that’s meaning. I want a girl to miss and a girl that misses me. I want the corny letters and care packages. I want to come home and wrap my arms around you, swinging you around in a gymnasium around all the other guys reuniting with their family. I want to get to know you. I want to make you smile and do ridiculous things together. I want to push your limits and I want you to push mine. I want to get in fights with you and I want to have crazy makeup sex when they’re over.

There are so many more constellations I want to show you, Maritza.

Just months ago, I lost myself in your smile and I found myself in your kiss. You were the one. I was just too afraid to say it. If only I’d told you sooner, maybe you’d be mine right now.

I guess what I’m trying to say is … wait for me.

Yours,

Isaiah

P.S. I could never hate you.

When she’s finished, she folds the letter and presses it against her chest, staring at me with through glassy, squinted eyes.

“You knew me all of nine days …” her voice is broken, tapering into nothing.

“I spent more time with you in those nine days than I’ve spent with any other woman in my adult life,” I say. “Well, aside from Cassie.”

“Who’s Cassie?”

“We dated all through high school,” I explain, rubbing my hands together. I don’t talk about her and I can’t remember the last time I said her name out loud, but I promised myself that if Maritza gave me another chance, I’d tell her anything she ever wanted to know, bullshit-free. No filter. “Summer after senior year, she showed up with this positive pregnancy stick in her hand. We were both scared shitless. Within a couple of weeks, I’d gone down to the nearest Army recruiter and enlisted myself.”

“Oh my God. That’s a little extreme.”

I shrug. “It was either that or working minimum wage jobs to support us, hoping someday maybe we could go to college if the stars aligned. Plus, I was just a kid. An eighteen-year-old kid who didn’t know anything about anything. I was terrified and I just wanted to do right by her.”

“That’s really sweet.”

“Yeah, well. I came back from basic training, wanting to surprise her. Ending up getting a bit of a surprise myself,” I say, rubbing my lips together as I pause. I can still picture this clear as day. “Walked in on Cassie and Ian in bed together. Damn near murdered him that day and had Cassie not been there, shrieking and pregnant, I just might have. But I let him go. And Cassie confessed that they’d had a thing for quite some time—the better part of our senior year, actually. And not only that, but she said the baby was his and that she’d lied about how far along she was so I wouldn’t know.”

“Jesus.” She cups her hand over her mouth. “So you were betrayed not only by the girl you loved but your twin brother.”

I shrug. “I expected that sort of thing from Ian. He was always chasing after everything I had, wanting everything I wanted. He was so jealous of me it drove him to do stupid shit all the time. It was like his life mission was to see how many times he could get me in trouble with our parents. He once pretended to be me and showed up at my work acting crazy and yelling at customers just to get me fired, and it almost fucking worked.”

“Is he mental? Who does that?”

Rolling my eyes, I continue, “You know, he’d done so much shit to me over the years, and all I wanted to do was get him really good. So when we were seventeen, I stole my dad’s car and parked it in some gas station parking lot a couple of miles from our house. When I got home, I dumped the car keys in Ian’s room and waited for Dad to get up for work. Well, my little plan worked at first. Dad blamed Ian for the missing car and I told Dad I saw a dented-up Buick like his parked at the Conoco down the street. Anyway, long story short, I guess Dad had been late for work a few times when Mom had been sick and he was on his last write-up. His boss said if he was late again, he was fired, no questions asked.”

“My god. What happened?”

I pause. I’ve never told this story, not to anyone, not out loud. Maritza’s hand lifts to my back and she scoots closer.

“I told him the truth,” I said. “And he left. We don’t know if he was walking down to the Conoco to get his car or if he’d just had enough … caring for his sick wife and trying to support his six kids … but he never came home after that. The next day, we got a call. Someone found his body in a ditch off the highway a few miles from our house. He’d been mugged, assaulted, left for dead. He died for a Timex watch and the twenty-dollar bill in his wallet.”

My hands form a bridge over my nose and I take a few moments to compose myself.

“Isaiah …” Maritza nudges her cheek against my shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

“My whole family blamed me for a long time. Now they don’t talk much about it,” I say. “Ma doesn’t know exactly what happened of course—she doesn’t know about the car keys thing and me trying to get back at Ian. But everyone else does. Ian made damn sure they all knew.”

“So when your brother said you had demons and that you ruin lives … is that what he was talking about?”

“I imagine so, yeah.”

Her hand lifts to cup the side of my face and for a moment we just sit and breathe, her warmth mixing with mine.

“I hope someday you’ll be able to let that go,” she says. “I hope you’ll be able to stop blaming yourself.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe someday.”

Sitting up, she rests her palm on my face and her eyes lock on mine. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

A moment later, her pillow soft lips graze mine and she breathes me in, but before we kiss, I have to say one more thing.

“I’m not a perfect man,” I say, my voice low and soft. “And I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. But letting you go? Letting you walk away without a fight? That might be the biggest one of all. And I can’t do that, Maritza. I can’t let you go.”

Pulling her into my lap, I hold her stare and reach for her face, guiding her mouth closer, until I taste her familiar strawberry lips and peppermint tongue.

“Then don’t,” she says a moment later, coming up for air. “Don’t let me go.”