Self-care—according to her, I’d been doing a tacky, knockoff job of it. She hijacked my phone, reminding me that Asher’s wish for me to take some time didn’t include stalking my messages. I needed to unplug from more than technology.
She’d thrown me into the shower with fancy soaps and lotions her aunt had brought from Paris, then tucked me into her bedroom with a satin eye mask. When I woke hours later, my overnight bag was perched at the foot of her bed, along with my toiletry case and a perfectly styled outfit for school.
I did my Monday shift at the Feather and my usual in classes, only briefly popping home. For three days, my mother and I were figures who sometimes met in goat tunnels. She hadn’t tried to store another piece of her hoard inside my room. She didn’t speak of the eBay cosmetics, either. But I still sensed the faint outlines of that box on my carpet. I saw the yellow notepad on the counter, and though my confession was the right choice, the products haunted me. Peaches and pinks, swipes of lipstick and pearly eye shadows, threw their pigments around my house. Too bright. Too new.
My self-care required more space than my apartment could give. I had to think about Asher. I had to think about my father. I had to think about me.
Marisol didn’t prod. She worked, too, drifting over text messages between sketching and creating. I knew who was on the other end of her loopy smile.
Sunday evening, I’d paused over all that thinking and asked something of Marisol I knew she’d waited years to hear. She’d nearly given up, too. We were in her bedroom when I sat up from her gleaming white comforter and said, “Teach me to sew.”
She made me declare it two more times before she dressed herself in a bedazzled grin. Marisol taught me the basics first—hours learning the machine, sewing fabric squares, and hand stitching buttons. We cocooned alone. And while I learned the most basic scraps of my best friend’s passion, her mother filled me from her kitchen.
I almost drowned in bowls of garlicky Cuban black beans and rice. Yesterday, Carlos and Camila stormed in with sticky fingers and freshly baked pan dulce, crowned with cinnamon and butter. And this afternoon, after I was ready to try a simple dress pattern, Eva Robles brought tacos heaped with chorizo con papas. The mix of fried potatoes, onions, and spicy chorizo spilled from corn tortillas. On top, she’d sprinkled queso panela and crema and chopped cilantro.
We halted our sewing to eat on the studio floor until Marisol stopped eating long enough to say, “I haven’t told Mama anything. But now I’m sure she’s figured out why you’ve been hibernating.”
“What?” I set my own plate aside.
“Chorizo con papas is our ultimate comfort food and her heartbreak specialty. Unwritten family rule. Can’t believe I never told you that.”
I stared at the taupe carpet fibers.
“Darcy.”
“You and Jase,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Even Asher knew, but I had no idea.” I lifted my eyes. “I should’ve known.” Of course, I could assemble the clues now. How she was always the first to notice him, the little gibes and sidelong looks. “I’ve been so wrapped up in my problems that I missed your happy. You are happy, right?”
“The happiest. We’re just seeing where it goes. But you and me,” she added, cocking her head, “our friendship’s lucky as hell you didn’t feel any earth movement during that stage kiss.”
We shared a laugh before she grayed it out. “Speaking of happy, or happy places, I haven’t seen you open a novel in days. Not even your Peter Pan. One boy isn’t worth giving up your books. Not like your mom did. You love them so much.”
“I...my...” Yes. Okay. The simple words worked. My mouth was finally ready to try a few more—infinitely more complicated ones. “I’m not giving up books for good, and it’s not because of one boy. Not at all because of Asher, or what I told my mom, either.”
“Then why?”
“I can’t use characters and what they’ve done anymore. The paths they chose, or what they did to survive. I can’t do what Elizabeth Bennet or Jane Eyre did. I have to do what I do.”
My friend nodded. “Why now?”
“Because I saw what years of lying and hiding has done. And I really saw what’s on the other side of all those book covers. I felt it, too. For the first time, I felt what I’ve been reading about for years,” I whispered.
Her big, round eyes on mine.
“I’m tired of pretending.” My chin quivered. “Tired of hiding and keeping secrets. Tired of chasing perfect stories and using them.”
She scooted forward, rested her hand on my knee.
I dug my nails into the carpet. Quivers turned into sobs. I’d teared and sniffled before, but the paper forest in me sagged under the sudden downpour, raindrops streaming over leaves. “I hate that I have to tiptoe around my own mother. We both walk on eggshells in our own home.”
Black streaks marred Marisol’s perfect makeup job. She trembled and grabbed my hand. “I know.”
“The hoarding and how we deal is just another fairy tale. A dark one. And I’m done. That’s one thing I can do. I can be done.” My body worked itself loose, bones igniting like matchsticks. The blood in my veins roared in wild, tumbling rapids. “I thought giving up was the answer, but it’s not. It’s being honest about what and who we are.”
Marisol caged her hands around her face, tears streaming through.
I stilled, quieting. And right then, I faced the last piece of my invisibility. The one that hid my heart from myself and everyone else. The one that kept Asher on the curb and half-truths on my tongue. “I’m a hoarder, Marisol. Like her.”
“God, Darcy.”
I declared my truth again. “I’m Darcy, and I’m a hoarder of words. Words in dictionaries and in stories and books. I’m going to read them—forever—but I’m not going to hoard them anymore. I’m not going to hide in them anymore, either.” I looked at my precious friend. “I want to live out my own story. The autobiography of Darcy Jane Wells. A real story.”
Marisol nodded, again and again. “Start right now. With Asher.”
The flood again, leaking from cracks and crevices. “Before, I pretended Asher didn’t matter, but that was a lie. And when I found out I mattered to him, I forgot to stop pretending.”
“So get real now,” she said. “You did your thinking. What did it tell you?”
Saying it makes it real. “That... I love him.”
“Oh,” Marisol said through a sob.
“But these last few days...it hurts.” I pressed shaking hands over my chest. “When I think of him buying this acorn, it’s so sweet I want to explode. But London was right there. Her words hit too close, and she wasn’t wrong. Then Asher’s face Saturday night—I’ll never forget it. I hurt him for real, too. And I got a glimpse of what it would be like if I pushed him away for good. I know he hasn’t texted to give me time, but I miss that, and everything. I miss him. So all these feelings keep fighting each other, and I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
Marisol did the last thing I expected. There, on her studio floor, next to half-eaten plates of comfort tacos, she giggled and grinned. Hands outstretched, she reached out and placed them over mine. “Darcy, welcome to your heart. You can put your feet up and make yourself at home.”
“What?”
“Don’t you see? This, what you’re feeling—all the wild-ride emotion—it’s not your book-shaped heart.” The smile turned soft. “It’s your heart-shaped heart.”
“Oh,” I squeaked. “This is what love really feels like?”
“This is what love really feels like,” she said.
“It’s awful.”
She cackled again. “So awful. But it’s also not awful, in the most not awful of ways.”
For the first time in days, I truly laughed. Wet, teary waves of laughter.
I slowed, then stilled when Marisol unhooked my mother’s necklace and dropped the acorn into my palm. “Asher drives a black truck, not a white horse. Even the best guy
s aren’t storybook princes. They’re messed up and flawed. I mean, he did rush from London to you, and that made you doubt yourself. And you hurt him, Darcy. You didn’t trust him and lied around it. You both kinda fumbled. But that’s how real love stories go.”
“No knights storming castles, no damsels in distress.”
“Right, and that’s super boring anyway,” she said. “Real hearts love for real. But they also hurt each other for real, sometimes. It’s what’s inside that tells you whether to work it out or run. So, after all the time you’ve spent with Asher, who does your heart—your heart-shaped heart—tell you he is?”
I thought of the boy who drank tea in my bookstore. The intelligent and brave soul who could build and fly, who was thoughtful enough to help a little girl and her mother. He thought my nerdy book brain was cool—extraordinary, even—and not boring and lame. He’d listened and listened and... “He’s the kind of guy I don’t have to pretend around.”
She nodded. “And he must know what’s really inside you, too. He’s still got you on his radar, waiting for you to figure it out. So figure it out. You don’t need another book character.”
“No, I don’t. And this time I’m going to do what Darcy from The True Story of Darcy Jane Wells would do.”
“What’s that?”
I breathed truth into the real me, not the invisible me. “Ransack your sewing room for a thimble.”
Twenty-Nine
Thimble
“‘Surely you know what a kiss is?’ she asked, aghast.
‘I shall know when you give it to me,’ he replied stiffly, and not to hurt his feeling she gave him a thimble.”
—J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Even without Marisol’s cellular wizardry and powers of information, I could’ve guessed where to find Asher. Dusk touched down onto Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport as I eased into the lot and spotted his truck. I parked next to it, under a sky tinted purple-gray and bloated with steel wool clouds. An orange wind sock followed my motion. Today it pointed toward the rows of tethered airplanes, the breeze heralding my arrival like breathy trumpets.
Nothing royal about me, though. I came in black jeans and a floaty white top with eyelet panels. Marisol had insisted on five minutes with me and a brush, face wash, and a dab of soft blush and rose-pink gloss. Then she sent me out with two silver baubles in my palm.
I approached the hangar bay where the Fleets kept their Piper. The entrance was open, and the cabin lights glowed in the distance. The riser was lowered. My palms glazed with damp and my belly rolled with marbles.
I approached the plane from the front, straight toward the nose. Asher would see me from the captain’s chair. And when I finally spotted him, one paralyzing thought came: maybe I was too late.
Asher pressed his face toward the large cockpit window. His expression was muddied behind the glass, but he stood quickly and appeared on the riser seconds later.
I tried to hold my head high, waiting.
Asher exited the hangar and stopped a few feet away from me, worrying the cuffs of his gray pullover the way people do when they don’t know where to put their hands. “Lesson learned. Never tell Jase your hiding spot.”
Enough play rang in his tone to keep me from spinning on the ball of my foot. Still, I spoke from the middle of a wire stretched across canyons. “You didn’t want to be found?”
“Only by some people. I think you’ll find the list surprisingly short.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t come?”
He lowered his head briefly. “There was this one moment at coffee last week. You looked up at me from your latte, and I thought you were gonna reach across the table and just kiss me right there. So, no. I hoped whatever was behind that look hadn’t changed, and you’d find me. Somewhere.”
I stepped forward, already feeling my own atmosphere change—calmer, the edges brushed soft with want. “I never lost you. But I had to take my time. I had to find me first.”
“Did you?” His eyes honed to steel, like they’d robbed a bit of sky.
“You were right, on the curb,” I said gently. “I was pretending, and you deserved better. I’m sorry. And, yeah—it’s all me, here. And these.” My left hand uncurled, revealing his little acorn charm. Then I flattened my right hand, the worn thimble dotting my palm. I placed it into his waiting hands.
“What does this mean?” he asked, his smile widening around the same words I’d said days ago in the alley.
“It means I want you to know I’m here for more than making good on your promise. I want to give you one of my own. And I’m glad J. M. Barrie was clever enough to plot the thimble, so I’d have something to come here with. But I still don’t have a clue how to do the part that’s supposed to happen next,” I said.
“How would you write it if you could?”
My face crinkled, and I wondered if I’d heard him correctly. “Write it?”
“You’ve read thousands of stories. How do you want the rest of yours to go?”
“I—”
Asher took my free hand, the one not holding the silver charm, and squeezed our laced fingers. “You didn’t choose a mother who forgets birthdays and shops so much you can barely walk through your own house. You didn’t choose a father whose first contact with you came eighteen years too late. And you didn’t choose me dulling the shine on your acorn moment by making you feel, even for a second, that you were some rebound move.”
“None of that.”
His teeth scraped across his bottom lip. “Before I—just one question, okay?”
I nodded.
“All the times we’ve talked about books, you’ve never said if you read romances. But are you really ready for one? Not a make-believe or pretend one. The real deal.”
“I’m ready.”
A brilliant smile. “Then write it, Darcy. Write it...edit it however you want.”
The notion drugged me, because I knew what he was really doing. What it really meant. Asher was giving me a gift—not a silver bracelet or a ring. Not flowers or a card or even an acorn charm dropped into my penny tray. My first real gift from a boy was a pen to write my own love story, but—
“That’s not fair,” I said. “If everything’s only what I want, the way I want it, I’m just living one more fairy tale.”
“Then write me in, and we’ll decide stuff together.” He moved closer, calloused hands roaming over my bare forearms. His touch, still so impossibly new, but never foreign. The Asher in front of me was as familiar as tea and books and paint-splattered clothes.
“You’re already in. You already were.” I held up my acorn.
His hand rose, uncovering the thimble, one brow arching high.
Asher might like fast things, but I knew my first honest-to-God kiss would not be one of them. His smile stretched, yawning across his face, dimpling flushed cheeks. Amber eyes opened like skies hungry for flying machines. He pulled me close, into ribbed gray cotton. One arm wound around my back, the other tracing my face from brow to chin, chin to brow. A heart-shaped face.
He rested his forehead against mine, and we breathed like that, gaining air and dizzying altitude. A half second, then his mouth. His lips brushed soft kisses over mine, over and over and achingly perfect. I caught myself up, let him show me the way of him until we sank deeper and climbed higher, all at once.
We didn’t, couldn’t stop. Kissing Asher—twirling my fingers into the dusky brown curls at his neck, over the wood-solid plane of his back—was like years’ worth of granted wishes. Stories had only told me half-truths, never fully admitting it could be this good.
I held on, letting him pilot me to a dream-wake place. I glided over the crackling warmth of a stone fireplace, laughter rolling off a creaky porch swing. I saw a plump, golden moon rising behind bedroom window glass. Fuzzy slippers and flannel and running through sprinklers over sun-warmed grass. When the last image flashed, I swore I was there, wiping dusty feet over a woven mat—Welcome—through an open door, into a s
pace clear enough to see the beginnings of forever.
Who does your heart tell you he is?
Emotion scarred the back of my throat as I realized the answer. I’d always had a roof over my head, but Asher Fleet was home.
Thirty
Next
“‘Second to the right, and straight on till morning.’”
—J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Of course, my real home still stood, newly gray on the outside and shockingly cluttered on the inside. The courtyard in front of 316 Hoover Avenue was finally finished. Flagstone trails snaked around bushes and flowery shrubs. New, gleaming mailbox units walled the far side. We had a new table, too. I studied it for a moment. White and modern, paired with gray chairs with stretchy all-weather seats. Not my table, not Marisol’s. But the hearts and stars around our necks and inked over twin souls would always be.
“Are you sure?” Asher asked. We stood at the bottom of the staircase with new railing, leading to old horrors.
“No, but I need to show you anyway. No more hiding.”
He pulled me closer. Soft lips grazed my forehead. I leaned into his solid form, his intoxicating warmth, but I still wasn’t used to any of it. It had only been a day since we kissed, and everything still felt like a first.
“You know it doesn’t matter, right? Whatever’s in there won’t change anything for me.”
Another gift—he was full of them. But I stood as closed as my front door, my shame so tightly shut around me, and his precious gifts only seemed to bounce off my surface. Still, I tipped my head toward my unit, and we climbed up and up. With my key in the lock, I told him, “This is what happens next.”
Dust swarmed over metal, fabric, and plastic. Three steps in, I knew Asher smelled it, too, worked to breathe through clouds of itchy motes. I flicked the light switch and flinched as my real world opened in front of the only boy I had ever loved.
The Library of Lost Things Page 25
