Kaleidoscope Hearts

by Claire Contreras

  “All right, guys, we need to get going. I just wanted to bring this by before I get busy,” Oliver says, kissing Sander on the forehead and helping him hop off the counter. He rounds the counter and gives his sister a hug, laughing at whatever she whispers in his ear.

  I say goodbye to Sander and Sophie. “Do you know what you’re having?” I ask after I give her a quick hug.

  “We want it to be a surprise. At this point, it doesn’t matter, it’s coming anyway,” she says with a laugh that makes me smile.

  “That’s kind of cool.”

  “It’s completely nuts is what it is,” Oliver says, shaking his head.

  “Don’t start, Oliver.”

  “I’m just saying.” He shrugs.

  Sophie rolls her eyes and looks at me, pointing at him. “That is why it’s taken him so long to get you, you know that, right?”

  “Sophie,” Oliver groans.

  “I’m just saying,” she responds, mimicking him.

  He wraps his arms around my shoulders from behind as we walk to the car, tucking his face into my neck. “You think that’s funny?”

  “The fact that everybody says you have the ultimate anal retentive personality? Yes.”

  He nips my earlobe and opens the door for me. “Speaking of anal . . .”

  “Ohmygod,” I say, groaning and laughing as I sink into the seat.

  “I’m just saying,” he says, grinning as he starts the car.

  After a couple of minutes of arguing about whose music we’re going to play—his hip hop or my folk—we end up playing none, because his phone rings and my brother’s voice seeps through the speakers of the car.

  “You’re with my sister?” he asks from the get-go.

  “Yeah, and you’re on Bluetooth,” Oliver responds.

  “Hey, Elle,” Victor says.

  “Hey, Vic,” I respond.

  “What are you guys up to? Jenson’s in town again and wants to meet up for drinks at the usual bar, want to come?” he asks.

  Oliver glances at me from the corner of his eye.

  “Is this code for ‘bring her to the bar for a group date so she’ll know you’re not serious about her?’” I ask, raising an eyebrow at Oliver. His mouth drops, a surprised laugh leaving his lips. Victor stays silent for a beat before he joins in on Oliver’s laughter.

  “Hell no,” Victor says.

  Oliver finds my hand and squeezes it. “Just so we’re clear, this is going to be the complete opposite of that. This will be me saying, ‘I am so serious about this girl. I want to take her everywhere with me, any chance I get,’” he says, looking at me when we reach a red light.

  “This is going to be interesting,” Victor mutters. “I’ll save you two seats.”

  We laugh once the line is disconnected.

  “I want it to be like this, Elle. Always,” he says as he parks in front of the bar. When we get out, he wraps his arm around me and pulls me into his side. “I want to bring you here, and if you decide you don’t want to come, I want to get texts from you that say you miss me.”

  I turn to face him when we reach the door. “I want that too,” I respond with a smile.

  We walk in with our fingers intertwined, and are greeted with a catcall from Jenson and claps from Victor. We sit down beside each other, talking and laughing the way we always have, but this time freely, and everything feels like it’s finally falling into place.

  “YOU’RE SO GOOD with kids. Do you want any?” I ask, as Oliver winds down the road after we leave a charity event at the hospital.

  His hand finds mine on my lap, and I sneak a look at his serious face. “Are we starting twenty questions?”

  “Maybe,” I say, a smile tugging my lips.

  “Can we start in about . . . three minutes?” he says. “How many dates do you think we’ve been on now?”

  I frown, trying to figure it out in my head. “I don’t know . . . wow, I really don’t know,” I say quietly. “Definitely more than I bargained for.”

  Oliver chuckles. “Nice, Elle. Real nice,” he says, as he turns onto my parents’ street.

  “What in the world?” I say in a breath, more to myself than to him. He squeezes my hand and doesn’t respond, only winks as he parks the car in my parents’ driveway. “You know they’re out of town this weekend, right?”

  Oliver doesn’t say anything, just gets out of the car and rounds it quickly to open my door. He grabs my hand and looks at me before sighing and placing a kiss on the top of my head. I follow him as he opens the side gate and walks to the back of the house, passing the bathroom where we were last together. He stops when he reaches the back door.

  “Go to the kitchen. I left something there,” he says.

  I stare at him. “Are you going to climb the tree?”

  He chuckles. “Would you stop asking questions until it’s time?”

  “Okay,” I say, sounding unconvinced. I unlock the door and open it, heading to the kitchen. I pick up a note card that reads:

  I frown at it until I notice a piece of broken, black glass under it. I fight the overwhelming emotions that start building in my chest as I pick it up. I leave the kitchen, and make for the stairs. I lift my foot to take a step, but stop with a gasp when I notice there’s a note card on every step, all beside a piece of broken, black glass.

  By the time I reach my room, I’m holding eleven broken pieces of black glass with as many note cards, and the tears are falling freely down my face. I push the door open with my foot and find Oliver sitting on the roof outside my window, holding a little white box in his hands. I walk over, placing the glass pieces on my desk and duck my head as I make my way to him. He frames my face with his hands and wipes my tears with his thumbs, but the motion makes me cry harder, until I’m laughing and crying at the same time.

  “I’m sorry. I think the tears are stopping now,” I say, wiping my nose with my hand as I kneel in front of him the way he’s facing me. He opens the box as he looks in my eyes, and mine leave his only to see what’s in the box. It contains more broken glass pieces, but these are colorful and vibrant.

  “For every smile,” he says, taking out the first piece and putting it beside us.

  “For every happy tear,” he sets down another.

  “For every laugh.”

  “For every time your eyes light up.”

  “For every piece of good news.”

  “For every piece of bad news.”

  “For every fight.”

  “For every kiss.”

  “For every hug.”

  “For every morning.”

  “For every night.”

  “For every wrong I’ll try to make right.”

  When he’s finished setting down every piece, he looks at me. “I want an October 21st,” he says, and continues when I just stare. “I want to travel back in time and go back to the beginning. I want to tell my father he was wrong about life. I want to tell him that it doesn’t wait for anybody, and that you can’t put love on hold for trivial things like money. I want to climb back on this roof and shout on the day I fell in love with you. Because I do love you, Elle. And despite my stupidities and my running away, I never stopped being in love with you. I want to go back to that party and make myself stay in bed with you so I could have dealt with this.” He points at his chin. “And we could have figured out the consequences together. But most of all, I want to go back to all the times I dodged your questions about love and tell you that I did find the one. I found her crying on this roof one night. I found her in a coffee shop when I needed her. I found her dancing with another guy and planting edible trees. I found her caring for strangers and kids who needed someone to listen to them.”

  “And how do you know she’s the one?” I whisper, wiping the tears spilling down my face.

  He brings a hand up to my cheek and caresses over it with his thumb. “I know because, when she’s not with me, I feel like I lack oxygen, and even when I am with her, I feel like I can’t breathe enough. Y
ou asked me if I want kids, and the answer is, that I want anything—everything—you want to give me. I want your mornings and your nights. I want your bickering and your eye rolls. I want your nudges when I’m hugging you too tight at night. I want your groans when I tell you a joke, and your moans when I’m making you feel good.”

  “And what do I get?” I ask, my voice a hoarse whisper.

  “You get everything,” he says, looking at me like I’m insane for even asking. “My career is just starting, and I have a million student loans. I don’t have a million dollars, and I can’t buy you a gallery yet.” He pauses to flash me a smile. “Or take you on a hundred trips. And it might take me some time to find a job here with more stable hours than the hospital has to offer, but if you’re with me, Elle, I don’t care. My body is yours.” He puts my hands on his chest. “My mind is yours. My hands are yours. My heart is yours. Everything I have is yours. Everything I am is yours.”

  I lean up on my knees and take my hands from his, wrapping them around his neck. “For every time you made me feel smart,” I say, dropping a kiss on his temple. “For looking at me like I’m the only girl in the world.” I kiss the edge of his eye.

  “You’re my favorite girl in the world,” he murmurs, closing his eyes and breathing deeply as if he’s claiming my scent as his.

  “For treating me like I’m important.” I kiss his cheek.

  “You’re the most important person in my life,” he says, opening his eyes to meet my gaze.

  “For giving me space so I could grow.” I kiss the side of his mouth. “For loving me.” I kiss his jaw, over his stitches. He watches me in awe when I back away and smile.

  “Marry me,” he says with a determination in his voice that makes my heart shake uncontrollably. “I don’t mean get engaged for a year and just live together. I don’t want to put a ring on your finger to claim you so the world can know you’re mine. I want to know you’re mine. I want you to know I’m yours, and that this isn’t some relationship we can easily get out of. I want your forever, and I want it to start now.” He takes a breath, his eyes flickering between mine to make sure I’m still with him. “Let’s go get married tomorrow. If you want the big wedding, we can do that after.”

  When I pause for too long, because I’m in complete shock, he chuckles. “Or not. If you just want to move in together, let’s do that instead, but I don’t want to do this thing where we go our separate ways after our dates. I don’t want the one drawer in each house. I want the whole closet full of both of our clothes,” he says, grabbing both sides of my face. “I want the bumping into each other when we’re trying to get dressed in the morning. I want it all, Elle. I don’t—”

  I lean in and kiss him, swallowing his pending words and hopefully whatever thoughts are running through his head. The picture he paints is too beautiful for me not to want it. I want all of his mornings and his nights. I feel like I’ve been waiting to hear those words from him for ten years, and even though I had the engagement and the living with somebody else for a while, I never got the what if it had been Oliver out of my head. We kiss for a long moment, our tongues intertwined, my fingers buried into his hair, his hands on my face, and our heart beating against each other. When we break the kiss, I nod furiously, and he sighs the longest, relieved breath, and looks like he just won some kind of silent auction.

  “I want that too. I want everything,” I whisper, earning a huge grin from him. “I can move, you know . . . my lease on the gallery is almost up.” I pause to take a deep breath. “I can move with you, anywhere,” I say, smiling up at him when we climb back into my room.

  “Move? Are you kidding? I’m thinking about putting down whatever I have in my savings account to buy that cottage you’ve been living in.”

  I laugh. “I’m just saying that—if you want to go—you have my full support.”

  “This is home, Elle. I want to stay.” He stops when he reaches the bottom step and brings his hand to my face, brushing over my lips. “Besides, I’m simple. I just need you.”

  And that’s the promise we made to each other. No matter how crazy life gets, we’ll always stick by the other. We’ll share our dreams, our failures, our smiles and our frowns. Day after day, we’ll drive each other a little crazy and remind the other how head over heels in love we are. Because that’s the kind of love we have—the kind that doesn’t come in a bottle, but can fill thousands of them, because we have that much of it to spare.

  WHEN WE WERE kids, my sister always wished upon stars. She swore that all of her wishes came true because she did that. Being that she was older and wiser, I believed her, and I too started doing the same. When I was five, I wished for toy dinosaurs. When I was seven, I wished my dad would come back home. When I was eight, I wished my mom would work fewer hours. When I was nine, I realized wishing upon stars was a waste of time because none of my wishes came true.

  Still, when I was nineteen, I sat on the roof of a pretty girl’s house and wished for things to be different. When I was twenty-one, I realized that circumstances were everything, and I wished we met under different ones. At twenty-six, I wished things had turned out differently, and that I hadn’t lost her. At twenty-eight, when life brought us together again, I stopped wishing and started doing.

  And here I am, at twenty-nine, watching as she walks over to me in a long white dress, in front of a crowd of our loved ones, wishing I could freeze frame this moment in time. I want to remember the one where her expressive, hazel eyes find mine, and she’s visibly taken aback by the emotion she sees on my face. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I will never tire of watching her walk toward me. I hear the clicking of the camera beside me, and smile as a gust of wind hits us. It awakens the waves behind us, and makes Estelle’s long, dark hair splash across her face. She takes a moment to gather it in one hand and push it aside, as I give her father a huge hug.

  “I don’t need to welcome you to the family that you’ve been a part of all along, but I’m proud to call you my son. Officially. Again,” Thomas says with a hearty chuckle and a squeeze.

  I don’t respond, opting to smile instead. I’m not a crier, but his words make a surge of emotions rise inside of me. I turn to the woman who has been my wife for the past four months and grin, feeling like the luckiest motherfucker in the world, because I am. We married the day after I proposed, just as I told her we would. As soon as her parents’ flight landed, we picked them up from the airport, called Vic and Mia and had them drive to the courthouse. Even Dallas showed up to help us celebrate, which was an added bonus, since I associate him with her Wyatt-era, or used to.

  I moved my stuff into her cottage on the beach and worked in the hospital while I found a permanent job, which took a couple of months, but it happened. The best part about my job, aside from the fact that I work with a great team of doctors in a good environment, is that we stayed in Santa Barbara. When Estelle’s lease was up, we bought a space together, close to our little beach cottage. It’s still a work in progress, and although I help her as much as I can with it, ultimately it’s her space. It’s her dream that she brings to life every time she walks in there. I’m just happy she lets me be a part of it all.

  At the feel of Estelle’s hand sliding into mine, I smile and lead her to the officiate to be married again, in front of all of our friends and family.

  “You’re supposed to look at him,” she whispers.

  “I’m here to marry you, not him.”

  She laughs, her eyes flittering up to mine. “I promise you can stare at me for the rest of your life. But not all the time, because that would be totally creepy.”

  I lean down and kiss the tip of her nose. “Kind of how you were staring—”

  “Okay, you guys need to seriously shut up,” Victor interrupts from beside me with a groan.

  “Yeah, nobody wants to know where that conversation was going,” Mia adds.

  “Keep it PG,” Jenson chimes in.

  “I’m about to kick everybody out
of here,” I say in response to the officiate clearing his throat and raising his eyebrows with impatience.

  The ceremony continues without interruptions. We say our vows, which are short and generic, and we both smile at the memory of our longer vows, the ones we recited to each other in bed the night after we got our marriage license. We slide the rings on each other’s fingers and hold hands again, and, as soon as we’re pronounced Mr. and Mrs. Hart, we turn to one another. It’s as if everybody around us disappears. Our eyes lock, my hands comb into her hair, hers cup my jaw, and we move almost as if in slow motion, our eyes scanning every inch of the other’s face, completely immersed in this moment.

  At the sound of the waves crashing in the distance, Estelle’s eyes start to brim with tears, but she’s smiling, the elation in her eyes matching what I feel inside. Suddenly, the moment right before our lips touch, droplets of rain start to fall over us. We pull back slightly and turn our heads up to the sky. Our guests start chanting for us to kiss. A slew of “Hurry up already! What are you waiting for?” surround us, but Elle and I remain unmoved. We smile, we laugh, and finally I pull her face to mine and my lips close over hers, taking, giving, offering, asking, pleading, promising. I kiss her with all that I am, imperfect but willing, hopeful and full of potential. Take me, I say with my tongue. Let me prove myself to you. I’ll be worthy, I promise. And she kisses me back with the same ardor, sealing our vow.

  Thank you for reading!

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