by McLean, Jay
My knees bounce, anxious, and heat burns behind my eyes. “Of course I am,” I say, barely a whisper.
“Why?”
“Every decision I’ve ever made since I found out I was pregnant with him has been for him, for his best interest, but I’ve never had to justify those choices. It was always just Benny and me, and now there’s you. And it’s important you trust me with him if we… do this.”
“Mia…” My name is a sigh… and a curse. He stands, taking my hand. “I want to show you something.” I think he’s leading me to the bedroom, which is wrong on so many levels, but he doesn’t. He takes me to the bathroom and has me facing the mirror. It takes a moment for me to realize what he’s showing me. Above my eye level, stuck on the mirror with tape, is the back of a familiar picture that was once on my wall.
I read the words I’d written so many years ago:
Leo,
God gave you a voice for a reason.
Use it.
Because if you don’t stand for something, then you’ll fall for everything.
I love you,
Mia.
“It’s because of you, Mia,” Leo says, his voice gruff as he stands behind me, his touch gentle on my shoulders. “That’s why I wanted to get into law enforcement… so I could use my voice to stand for something right.” His eyes meet mine in the mirror. “You changed my life. Before everything else happened, you changed me. You saw something in me no one else did.” His throat moves with his swallow as his hands move from my shoulders down to my arms, and he turns me to him, linking our fingers together. Bending slightly so he can look in my eyes, he says, “I trusted you then, and I trust you now.”
It’s hard to see the emotion in his stare with the tears glazing mine. I ask, because I might be a little insane, “Are you seeing someone?”
Leo blinks, wiping all previous warmth from his eyes. He stands to full height, right before he gives me that cocky smirk I hate to love. “Why? You want to make another Benny?”
I choke on a scoff and roll my eyes, pushing him away from me. “I swear, the things that come out of your mouth.”
Chuckling, he pulls me into him. Not all the way, just enough so I can feel the heat radiating off him. Eyes narrowed slightly, he says, his voice a tremor that makes its way up my spine, “If I recall correctly, you like the things that come out of my mouth.” He lowers his lips to my ear, his hands going to my waist, squeezing gently. “And you really, really like the things I do with my mouth.”
Oxygen. I need it. Stat. And he has some. So I kiss him. It’s a soft, quick, chaste kiss that has my heart hammering against my chest. It doesn’t alleviate even when I pull away. I’m well aware of how dangerous it is to be kissing a boy—no, a man—when we have so much history, and so much of that history determines our future. I panic. Because of course I do. “I should go.”
He doesn’t skip a beat. “No.”
I almost laugh. “Excuse me?”
He smirks. “You can’t just keep kissing me and walking away, Mia. Three strikes and you’re out.”
Fair. He has a point. But also: I’m stubborn, and still panicking. My eyes narrow, playfully. “Oh yeah? What are you going to do? Punish me?” I regret my response the second I see his eyes flash with heat. Oh, no.
“I would love to punish the fuck out of you.” His smirk gets smirkier. “But you like that, don’t you?”
“Shut up!” I shove his shoulder and turn away, trying to hide the crimson I’m positive is staining my cheeks.
“Stay,” he says. “I’ll even let you keep kissing me, since it’s so obvious you can’t control yourself around me.”
“Oh my god,” I murmur.
“Just stay,” he repeats, turning me to him. The smirk is gone. The heat in his eyes, too. “I promise I won’t touch you.”
I chew my lip, hesitant. There’s no possible way this will end well.
“Stay,” he says again, his eyes pleading.
And so I do.
When I get out of the shower, dressed in the most unflattering pajamas in the history of the world, Leo is sitting up in bed with the bedside light on.
Shirtless.
Reading.
Glasses.
That’s the order I notice things.
His eyes flick to mine quickly when I scoot toward the bed, and then he goes back to his book, not looking twice. Which is fine, because it gives me the opportunity to stare at him. The frames of his glasses are thick and black and holy hell… “When did you get glasses?”
He chuckles, closing his book and setting it on the nightstand. “Senior year,” he says. “Which, by the way, is an awesome time for people to start calling you four-eyes.” He snorts. “I don’t need them. They just help with reading.”
He watches me pull out lotion from my overnight bag and start smearing it all over my arms and legs, one eyebrow cocked the entire time. When I’m done, I crawl into bed, as far away from him as possible. He switches off the light, and it doesn’t take long for fatigue to set in. Just as I’m about to fall asleep, I hear him whisper, unsure if he realizes I’m still awake, “You’ve always been mine, Mia Kovács. In my head and in my heart.”
A moment later, he’s snoring, and I’m wide awake, my eyes on the ceiling, letting tear after tear soak into my skin.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Mia
The cold air hits my back when Leo’s alarm goes off the next morning. It takes me a second to comprehend that it’s because his chest had been pressed against me, and now he’s rolling over, turning the alarm off on his phone. He gets up a moment later, pulling his arm from under my pillow, mumbling something about stupid training and stupid laws and stupid criminals. I barely open my eyes just in time for him to close the bathroom door. The shower turns on, and I fall back asleep.
The next time I wake, it’s to Leo’s wet, warm mouth pressing against my forehead. “What time’s your flight?” he asks, his voice low.
I pull the covers up to my mouth to hide my morning breath and keep my eyes closed as I murmur, “Midday.”
“Do you have an alarm set?”
“Uh-huh.” I peel my eyes open and am rewarded with the blue-blue of his irises right on mine.
He’s squatting down by the side of the bed, and he smiles, gently shifting my hair away from my eyes. “So you’ll stay here until it’s time to go?”
“Is that okay?”
He nods. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.” My eyelids are too heavy, and his bed is so warm.
“Can you send me another picture?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe one of the both of you?”
I smile against the pillow and force my eyes open again. “I can do that.”
Another alarm goes off on his phone. “Shit,” he says. “I have to go.” But he doesn’t make a move to stand up.
After a few seconds of him studying me, and me doing the same, I say, only slightly embarrassed by his penetrating stare, “You’re going to be late.”
He sighs, dropping his head between his shoulders. When he looks up, there’s a reverence in the way he says, “I was never ready to walk away from you, Mia Kovács.” He stands and walks to the door, and I watch, my heart in my throat. It’s not until I hear the front door open that I sit up, my pulse pounding in my eardrums, and call out his name.
A second later, he’s standing in the doorway of the bedroom. “What’s up?”
My shoulders drop as I try to settle my breathing. And for no other reason than because I want him to know, I tell him one last secret I’ve held on to: “You’ve always been the main character in my story, Leo Preston.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
Leo
Every time Mia sends a picture, I ask for another one.
The camera roll in my phone is filled with nothing but pictures of Benny and Mia.
“Who’s the girl?” Logan asks, and I shove my phone so deep in my front pocket, I whack my nuts. Behind the wheel o
f his truck, my brother laughs.
“No girl,” I say, after wincing in pain.
“Or guy,” he says. “No judgment.” He glances at me quickly before focusing on the road again. “Every time your phone goes off, you’re so quick to check it, and you’ve been on that thing since you got home, which is weird. For you.”
It’s true, it is weird. And he’s right; I have been on it a lot. But this time, I wasn’t on my phone because Mia had sent a picture. I needed a distraction. Brain bleach, really. I must have misheard Logan when he initially asked me to go to this meeting with him. I thought he told me it was one of his “sobriety” meetings. It wasn’t. It was just him and his therapist, Amanda. The thing is, and this is going to sound so horribly selfish, but there are certain things about Logan’s past that I’d rather not know the details. What they discussed today was one of many. Now his secrets are mine, and I don’t know what to do with them. I wish I could give them back, so I never have to know them because I hate them. I hate the visions they bring up, and I hate the bile in my throat and the hate in my heart—hate that’s so rooted in my veins and my chest and my mind, and I don’t know how to deal with it. So, as soon as we got in the car and on the road, I looked at the pictures Mia had been sending over the past few days, and slowly, the hatred ebbed. And then flowed. It flowed so quickly and so dense that it became too much. All I can think about is Benny and the fact that I’m not there to protect him from the things that cause Logan’s torment.
As I sat in on his session, all three of us in that small room, Logan’s knees bounced, his jaw tensed, and he tapped, tapped, tapped at his pockets. Every time he did it, Amanda would motion with her head to the action, and he’d force himself to stop. “You don’t need it,” she said, and I knew she was talking about drugs.
Logan got like that a lot—the shaking and the craving for a way out of his head, his memories. Every time he got triggered, I’d watch him go through the motions until he worked through it in his mind, and then he’d stop, act as if nothing happened. I wondered if the process was healthy—if it was part of his healing. I should’ve asked Amanda, but I didn’t.
“Earth to Leo?” Logan says, snapping his fingers in front of my face.
“I’m here,” I tell him, but I’m not.
Not really.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Probably another picture. And I’m gone again, my mind consumed with thoughts of my son.
My son.
I look over at Logan and wonder what it would be like if I shared my secrets with him—if he’d want to give them back like I do his.
He wouldn’t.
Because our secrets are nothing alike.
* * *
I spend the rest of the day floating around town. I visit my godson, Preston, who I realize is only a few months older than Benny. Then I head over to Lucy’s bookstore, where she’s working alone. With her voice low, she asks about Benny, but I don’t have a lot to say. I tell her that I’m meeting him properly next weekend, and she asks if I have any more pictures to share. She gives me those eyes—not the accusatory ones—the romance-loving ones, and I wish I’d paid more attention to the books she forces me to read because maybe then I’d know how the hero is supposed to act or feel. I show her the pictures, and she beams, her smile wide. But then her eyes get watery, and I know she wants to say all the things, but she doesn’t. I’m grateful for that.
When I get home, I sit with Dad on the porch. I read, and he works while sipping his coffee, and it reminds me of the farm. “We should get you a rocking chair,” I say mindlessly, and he eyes me with a look that screams what the fuck, kid?
When night falls and the house is quiet, I sit in my room and look out the window just like I did for most of my childhood. It’s weird. I’m home, surrounded by friends and family... only I’m not.
My family is in New York.
My family.
Holy shit.
I don’t even allow my brain to process the thought before my hands are gripping my phone and I’m dialing Mia’s number. She answers on the first ring and asks, “How are you?”
And the only thought I have is said aloud before I can stop it. “Incomplete.”
I’m met with silence. And that silence stretches for so long that I wonder if she even heard me. But then she says, “I’ve felt the same way for a really long time, Leo.”
A knot forms in my throat, and I picture her standing against a wall, her black hair a contrast to the white backdrop. I can’t see anything besides her, and maybe it’s because I have no idea what her life is like, what her apartment looks like, or if it’s because… because I only ever saw her. Ignoring the ache in my chest, I ask a question I didn’t have the nerve to a few days earlier, “Has Benny ever asked about me?”
“Once,” she says, before sucking in a breath.
“What did you tell him?”
It takes a moment for her to answer. “I told him that his mommy and daddy loved each other very much, but we were young, and we made some bad choices. And I told him that I got sick right before I had him… and I said that you were a wonderful man who loved with his whole heart and that everything good inside him comes from you.” She breaks off on a single sob, and I hate that I’m not there to hold her, to wipe at her tears.
I sniff back my emotions, my breaths ragged as they leave me. “What did he say?”
“He asked what color elephant poop was,” she says through a giggle, and I find myself laughing with her.
We talk for a little while more before she tells me she has to go. “I’ll see you next week?” she says, and I want to tell her that I miss her.
“Yeah, I’ll be there.”
“Okay,” she says, then pauses. “I miss you, Leo.”
My smile is ridiculous. “I miss you, too, Mia.” A relieved sigh falls from my lips. “So much.”
“For so long,” she says, and then she’s gone.
I throw my phone on the bed and go straight to my closet, where I pull out an old backpack. Then I move to one of the three bookshelves in my room. Unlike Lucy, I don’t have an order in which I sort my books, besides fiction, non-fiction, and educational. I go to the educational ones and drop down to my knees to access the books on the bottom shelf. There are seven of them in total, all thick hardbacks with bright-colored covers and large font titles. I wipe the dust off them with the bottom of my shirt, and then open the first one to the title page: My Book of Rocks and Minerals: Things to Find, Collect, and Treasure.
The “My” in the title is crossed out, and written in my seven-year-old scribble is Leo Preston. I grab a pen off my desk and cross out Leo, then write: Benny beside it.
I hesitate when it comes to his last name, and so I leave it as it is.
Benny Leo Preston.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Leo
Just as I pass the Welcome sign, I pull over on the side of the road. It’s the third time I’ve done it on the drive to the farm, so I don’t know why I’m doing it again. Still, I open the backpack filled with books and check over them. All seven are still there, along with the present I’d spent hours wrapping and unwrapping and re-wrapping. I’d bought five different wrapping papers and opted for a blue one with Bs in different fonts stamped all over.
I’m stalling. I know I am. And I’m well aware that most guys in my situation would’ve jumped at the chance to meet their son, but clearly, I’m not most guys. Which sucks. Because right now, all I am is a giant ball of fucking nerves.
I zip up the backpack and grasp at my hair, trying to talk myself up. I roll the tenseness out of my neck, and then attempt to shake out the stiffness in my hands.
In under five minutes, I’ll be face to face with my son.
My son.
Jesus.
Mia had told me that her dad and Tammy would be coming with them, not because they worried I was visiting—because they still didn’t know about me for sure, even though Tammy suspects—but just to give her a break if she wante
d to spend time with me.
She said it apologetically, like I’d somehow feel different if they were there. To be honest, when I think about Benny and hope for a future with him, I don’t just see him and Mia. I see her dad and Tammy and Holden, too.
Like I do whenever I’m too deep in my head, I run through every possible scenario and catastrophize every situation. The worst would be if Benny takes one look at me and hates me off the bat. I think that’s why I bought the present.
I’m bribing him.
I wonder if bribery is in any parenting manuals. Are there parenting manuals? I should probably get some.
I roll my eyes as I pull out on the road again and run through conversation topics in my head. He’s four, the same age as Preston, so I know I can talk to him, and I’m pretty clued in on what four-year-olds like. Preston’s going through a Paw Patrol phase. His favorite characters are Chase, the cop, and Rubble, the construction worker, because of his parents. His favorite food is hot dogs, sliced and eaten with a toothpick, because why not?
I realize that I’m saying all of this, out loud, to myself. And before I know it, I’m pulling into the farm. And before I can second-guess myself, Tammy is walking between the house and the barn, pushing an overflowing wheelbarrow full of dirt. At the sight of it almost tipping over when she loses control, I get out of the truck and jog toward her. “I got it,” I tell her, and she laughs quietly, moving out of the way so I can grasp the handles. “Where do you want it?”
“By the porch would be great,” she says, wiping the sweat off her face with her forearm.
I take the wheelbarrow to where she points and release it slowly before turning to her. “Hi,” I breathe out, and the warmth of her smile challenges the heat of the sun beating down on us.
