Mixed Emotions

by MIA HEINTZELMAN

  This was his opportunity to finally tell his truth.

  Before he could move to say another word, Zora threw her arms around his waist and he was lost in a storm of warmth and her sweet coconut perfume. He let his chin rest in her hair as he drew her in tighter.

  When she looked up at him, it took everything inside him not to kiss her.

  Not yet.

  “Can we talk? There’s something I need to know,” he said.

  Her eyes filled with questions and worry.

  Mike met her gaze. “I just don’t want to ruin this again.”

  Reluctantly, he let go of her and took her hands, guiding her toward the twin guest bed. They sat facing the bookshelf with their fingers still intertwined and their backs against the wall and feet hanging off the side. It was quiet and warm like someone set the scene for them to cross this last bridge before they could move closer to the sunset.

  “What is it?” Zora asked once they were settled.

  Mike swallowed and lifted his chin. “Every time I’ve tried to talk about this with you, you’ve either changed the subject or walked away, but we need to clear the air. I’ve been lying to myself all this time about you and I can’t deny it anymore. I want you. Only you, Zo.”

  She squeezed his hand, and a soft smile spread from her lips to her sparkling eyes, sending warmth coursing through him. She had to know what he was asking.

  “I won’t even talk. I’ll just listen,” he said.

  With a little shrug, she seemed to resolve herself to get it over with and began. “Four years old is really too young to understand what it means to lose your mother, you know? I mean, I vaguely remember some of the changes in her, like when she stopped reading bedtime stories to me and began sleeping a lot.” Zora pressed her fingertip to her lip and shook her head. “I’d beg her to play and make cookies like we used to, but it was like one day she just stopped caring. And then, she was gone.”

  Emotion clogged in her throat and Mike nodded for her to continue.

  “Then Joseph was gone, too. So, all I really knew after she died was Ev and Grandma Babs, which was fine for a while. But as I got older, I saw other girls with their mothers laughing and doing stupid things together,” she laughed. “Like bra shopping and eating at ridiculous mall restaurants, and I was jealous.”

  Zora’s eyes were red-rimmed and glossy, but she kept going. “I know this is not what you wanted to know, but it’s all part of it.” She shrugged and shifted on the bed to cross her legs and face him. “It’s all related because by the time I was eighteen, I was too good at wearing the mask. I knew how to joke my way around the hurt, and distance myself from anything or anyone who could jeopardize the person I was becoming. I was so afraid of letting anyone in and standing there while they slowly chipped away at the good parts of me like Joseph did to Mom.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What I remember of her had nothing to do with empty pill bottles or seeing her laid out on the bathroom floor through the crack of the door. To me, she was this vibrant, red-lipstick-wearing goddess who was strong, wore bright colors, and spent her quiet moments with her nose stuck in a book. From the stories Babs and Ev told, she was super funny and wild, ran around the house, jumped out from dark corners to scare us, sewed, and she loved so hard it hurt. More and more, I hated the idea someone could strip all of it away because she’d given him access to her heart.” Zora finally peeked up at Mike. “So, I built a wall around mine.”

  He registered the mix of, joy, and anger in her tone. “I know all about them. The problem with walls is they keep everything out, including love trying to get in.”

  Zora swiped a tear from her cheek.

  “She would have turned fifty the day you found me in the cellar. I’d been thinking about all the moments she and I missed. It broke my heart to know she wouldn’t see me find love, make a million mistakes, or get married and have children of my own, and I was falling apart. I wanted to drink away the memories and the emptiness inside of me.”

  She smiled at Mike as she bit back tears. It was a pleading smile, begging him to understand her on her deepest level.

  Mike did. More than she knew.

  “You have to understand, I’d wanted you forever, and you were the only one, but I was so scared because I knew what caring too much about another person could do. To me, Mom was proof of it. When you made love to me in the cellar…” Her smile was bright and whimsical and unseeing like she was back there. “I knew you were the only person with the power to strip me down. So, I pushed you away after, and prayed I wouldn’t regret it for the rest of my life.”

  Wow. Did I really read the situation that wrong?

  “Zo?”

  “So much for that right? I’ve been reduced to dick pics and drought. Such great choices.” She laughed despite her tears.

  Mike lifted his hand and caressed the soft curve of her cheek before drawing her into to him, dismissing the war going on in his head. The raw emotion in her voice hit him right in the heart. Gently, he brushed his lips over hers before kissing away her tears. So long ago, he’d done the same.

  He only hoped history wouldn’t repeat itself.

  “Don’t cry,” he whispered, holding her firmly in his arms. “I’m not going anywhere, Zo. I’ve always been right here waiting for you.”

  The hum of the heater whirred to life.

  Her head rested on his chest for what seemed like forever until her sobs subsided. They lay in each other’s arms—him flat on his back, her nestled between the wall and the crook of his arm. Mike felt no need to fill the silence. There was nothing more to say, nor anywhere else he wanted to be. For once, he wasn’t in limbo between the past and the future.

  As much as it scared him, he was loving living in the moment with Zora.

  When his eyelids were too heavy to keep open, Mike glided his fingers down the delicate nape of her neck and back up into her short hair.

  She moaned her satisfaction.

  “You want me to leave so you can get some rest? I know you said you needed to work on your book stuff tomorrow.” Mike peeked at his watch. It was past two in the morning. “Or rather in a few hours. It’s close to three.”

  Zora shimmied her body closer to his. She was staring off to the side of the bed. “What’s the deal with the Disney snow globe? How come it’s not on the shelf with the others?”

  Mike groaned. “Haven’t we gone far enough down memory lane for one day?”

  “You started it. I was ready to go straight to sleep.” Her chin popped up off of his chest and she looked at him with her determined whiskey-colored eyes and a shaky smile. “It’s fine for me to pour my heart out and you get to take yours to the grave? Nope. Not happening. Out with it.”

  Mike sighed.

  He shook his head and rolled his eyes then picked up the snow globe. The smooth glass was cold and soothing in his hands. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for Zora to know exactly what he was made of.

  With another sigh, he closed his eyes and got lost in the watery storm. “I went there once, by myself.”

  Zora rested her chin on both of her hands on his chest and listened intently.

  “My little brother Lucas always wanted to go to Disneyland,” Mike said. “He begged to go all the time. He wanted to meet Mickey Mouse, but we didn’t have a lot of money, so my parents just kept telling him ‘when you’re older, when you’re older.’ Before he ever got to go, he took a fall.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zora said. “I knew he passed away, but I never knew the story. What happened?”

  Mike’s shoulders tensed and his grip on the globe tightened.

  You have to be open if you want to heal.

  Though she never practiced what she preached, Mike’s mom said those words to him almost daily after the accident. She heard it from the family therapist and made it her go-to advice. Mike hadn’t thought about those words in years, and he didn’t know why it came to him now, but lying there under the weight of Zora’s expectant stare, it
seemed the only way to go.

  His eyes were still closed, and the familiar scene reeled across the back of his eyelids. He started to tell Zora one of the two worst moments of his life.

  “We were playing tag upstairs.” He smiled widely before it slowly faded. “Lucas was running from me and I was right on his heels when he tumbled headfirst, down the staircase. We thought he was going to be fine because he jumped back up ready to play, but it turned out he wasn’t fine. There was bleeding on his brain and he died in his sleep the same night.”

  “Mike.”

  “When I was old enough, I went to Disneyland by myself…for him. The snow globe was for him.”

  Mike felt wetness on his shirt. When he opened his eyes, she looked crestfallen and pained, and his own agony reflected back at him. Her bottom lip trembled and her skin was flushed.

  “I’m so sorry, Mike. I knew you lost him when you were young, but you never talked about it,” she sobbed. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  He swallowed over the lump in his throat and shook the snow globe, sending teeny Mickeys swarming in a flurry of iridescent glitter.

  “Like you, I didn’t want to get close to anyone after Lucas. It hurt too much to even talk about it and relive the pain every time, so I kept it bottled up. I’ve never told anyone, but I always felt like I let him down…let my parents down—“

  “No.”

  “I lost my brother, but they lost their child, and it broke them. His untouched bedroom with the Mickey Mouse sheets and Legos on the floor where he’d left them…the scent of Play-Doh and crayons in the air... It got to be too much. Two years later, they divorced and they’ve been fighting over me ever since. Both of them are determined not lose another son, but all it ever did was drive me away. It’s why I gravitated to your family. I could just be a kid again.”

  Zora kissed Mike’s hands.

  “I’m sure he’s looking down on you, smiling. He was there with you at Disneyland—in your heart—every step of the way. That’s what Babs used to tell me about Mom when I needed her to be there for me.”

  “I should have been there for him.” Mike stressed the word because not being there was what really churned his heart. It was why he often took the designated backseat in life when he should be driving. He needed to be the lookout, always watching for signs of peril ahead. Meanwhile, life was passing him by.

  Zora jolted upright, her legs straddling either side of him. Her body was square to his and her expression was deadpan, dire.

  “Don’t do that. Don’t blame yourself. It’ll only stop you from healing. Remember, He died dreaming about playing with his big brother who loved him with his whole heart.”

  At this Mike sat up, too. Their faces were only inches apart. He could feel Zora’s light breath on his neck. He circled his hands gently around her arms.

  “Zo, I’d been so determined not to lose anyone again, I shut everyone out. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to open up. I had this great, big gaping hole in my heart. Then…you sort of crawled in and never left, so when I saw you hurting, breaking down over you mother—”

  “Don’t.”

  “I panicked because I knew what you were going through and I couldn’t bear to sit by and do nothing while you suffered.”

  She swallowed and ran the back of her hand over his strong jaw.

  Mike’s breaths came in quick succession and his heart raced. He lowered his voice and leaned in. “I never knew I could feel this way again.” He sucked in a stark breath as electricity coursed through his veins at their proximity. He sought out and found the swell of her lips. Lightly, he licked each one before slipping his tongue inside.

  She felt like his long-lost friend and the woman he’d been searching for all wrapped up in one. He was falling in love with her all over again, and this time, he wasn’t going to let her push him away.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Zora

  Most of Sunday was a blur. Zora was working on virtually no sleep at all—not because she and Mike clawed into the mind-blowing sex she’d hoped her braless body in a short black dress would inspire. It was their raw and open talk. They’d had to be vulnerable in a way they’d never allowed themselves to be around each other. With the floodgates finally open, neither of them wanted it to end.

  They literally didn’t sleep.

  After the night rolled into the tiny hours of the morning, the day called. She got up and picked up Blue from the dog hotel. When he saw a familiar face, he was a furry mass of wet kisses and soft nudges. Mike agreed to food shop for the ingredients she needed for her recipes. In between errands, they’d managed to exchange less than a dozen or so sleepy words.

  Then again, there wasn’t much left to say that their longing expressions didn’t already communicate.

  With her skin still oozing coffee fumes, Zora moved about the kitchen to pour food from a gigantic bag into a bowl for Blue.

  “Hey,” she said to Mike who was quietly sitting at his makeshift desk at the dining table. He looked as scrumptious as ever with a pen propped behind his ear. He was absently biting his lip and showing no signs of their sleepless night—no sign of dark circles under his gorgeous, bright-green eyes.

  On the other hand, Zora, who was going for breezy and chipper, only managed to sound like a croaking frog.

  “Oh, hey. I didn’t hear you walk in. I’m just trying to get a handle on this before Monday.”

  You’ve got this. Just be normal.

  Just because the rules were officially out the window and butterflies were apparently permanent residents in her stomach, there was no need to cannonball into this. Maybe, just dip her toes in—baby steps.

  “No worries. I didn’t want to bother you. Have you eaten?” she asked, grabbing a big pot and setting it on the stovetop.

  “Nah, I haven’t done much besides sit here and wrack my brain over this building nonsense.” Mike sighed at the paper in front of him and lifted his gaze to Zora. “Why? What have you got going on over there?”

  She’d wanted him to look at her, but she couldn’t have prepared herself for the weight of his undivided attention. The way he watched her was all-consuming and heavy. She breathed out slowly, remembering his words from their talk.

  I’m not going anywhere, Zo. I’ve always been right here waiting for you.

  “Uh, just a little something to kick this cold. Soup.” She flashed him a quick smile before averting her gaze. She dug colorful vegetables and herbs out of the refrigerator and loaded them on the counter. “I’ll make you a bowl when it’s done.”

  Zora was still groggy. Her head was stuffy and her body achy and weighed down from the hard mattress of the guest bed. Still, she had yet to come down from the high after everything they’d said to each other the night before…that morning. “Happy” was not a strong enough word to describe her emotions. Floating…no, levitating was more like it.

  Her heart had swelled so full she could hardly keep it in her chest.

  Today, every time they passed each other she was positively giddy. Earlier that morning, when she’d gone to freshen up in his bathroom, since the one for guests was being retiled, she was instantly swept into a haze of Mike’s scent. It had taken her down, literally, to her knees. Actually, she’d been snooping in his medicine cabinet and under his sink to nail down the woodsy, minty fresh aroma. It turned out to be a combination of Old Spice, winter fresh mint mouthwash, and ocean breeze body wash.

  This was what being near him did to her. The man was intoxicating, and Zora was drunk on him.

  No wonder I’m slurring my words.

  A bout of tingles tickled her nose and she held up a finger as she squinted her eyes. Not now. Her nostrils flared and her lips quivered. She just knew she looked somewhere between nauseated and dizzy.

  Then, a spastic sneeze escaped.

  “Whoa! Bless you.”

  “Thanks.” She sniffled. “Shit. I’m going to need something stronger than spicy chicken noodle soup. I need some
feel-good food in a bad way.” She rubbed her throat as she swallowed before turning to pour in the broth. With the fire on high, she just stood there holding onto to the stove.

  “Need any help?”

  “No, I’m just stuffy and sneezing. I feel like shit, and I don’t have a clue how I’m going to make this deadline if I get any worse.”

  “Don’t worry. I, uh, grabbed you some medicine while I was at the store, just in case. It’s in the bathroom on the sink. I kind of heard it in your voice last night.”

  Mike was still engrossed in his pile of papers, but Zora was shell-shocked. Her eyes went wide as she shot him an incredulous look. For a second, she just watched him, wondering how she’d missed this thoughtful, caring person. Somehow, she always thought he was being nice to her because she was Everett’s sister, but this was some heady stuff. She wasn’t sure how to be this way with Mike.

  She whipped her head back to her pot where a few faint bubbles were beginning to rise. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  The room went silent and Zora could feel the awkward tension thickening the air. “It was pretty stupid going out in a tiny dress in the rain, wasn’t it? Probably only made it worse.”

  Wow, I’m really on a roll.

  “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

  Zora placed the chicken breasts in a pan and began cutting the vegetables, but she was still watching Mike from the corner of her eye. His brows were drawn together as he rested his chin on his steepled fingers. He’d gone back to scouring his table full of documents and was brooding, cerebral-looking, and apparently unaware his small gesture was huge for Zora.

  A fresh wave of desire to slammed into her. At that moment, she knew whatever this connection was they shared, she wasn’t willing to let it go.

  “What’s the problem?” Zora asked. She was focused and calm as she measured seasonings, but she was still watching him out of the corner of her eye. “Your silence is so loud.”

  He teetered back onto the hind legs of the chair with his arms propped behind his head and laughed. “That obvious, huh? It’s just, I don’t know if you follow what’s going on with the real estate end of things, but I’m just trying to figure out where your brother’s head was when he decided to do this deal with Arnold.”