by Alexa Land
Maybe in a few weeks or months, I’d be able to confide in him. Hopefully by then, he and I would be on solid ground, so the truth wouldn’t end us. But it was just way too much to spring on someone I’d known such a short time.
Chapter Four
When I pulled up in front of the warehouse, the gate to the courtyard was open, revealing a pile of mismatched bags and miscellaneous items. Ari appeared a moment later with Fig at his side. His face lit up when he saw me, and he added a blanket to the pile as he said, “I wasn’t sure what we’d need or want on our picnic, so I’m probably overdoing it.” He chewed his lower lip as he studied the things he’d assembled, and then he exclaimed, “I think I have a beach umbrella! Hang on a minute.”
He rushed into the warehouse, and I walked up to Fig and said, “I don’t blame you for wanting to spend time with him, instead of coming with me. He’s absolutely amazing, isn’t he?” Ari had traded the dog’s tuxedo for a bright yellow tank top, which was knotted at the waist and had a smiling sun on it. That made me grin.
Ari returned a few moments later with an oversized, rainbow-striped umbrella. “I think we’re set,” he told me. “So, where would you like to go?”
As we began to transfer the pile to my car, I asked, “What do you think about going to Griffith Park?”
“That sounds perfect.”
I’d loved it there when I was little, but after I turned ten and everything changed, we stopped going. There were always too many people around, and Aunt Roz had worried about my secret being discovered. Now I decided it was time to reclaim one of my favorite places, so I drove us right into the heart of the park, and we set up our stuff near the charming, vintage merry-go-round.
Once we settled in on the floral-print quilt, I set up the umbrella at one end to give Fig some shade, and Ari closed his eyes and tilted his face toward the sun. Of course, I took the opportunity to study him while he did that. He’d changed into a red and white striped T-shirt, white shorts, and red sneakers, and I thought it was very cute that he’d color-coordinated.
After a few moments, he turned to me with a hopeful expression and asked, “Can we ride the carousel before lunch?” He was so happy when I agreed.
The merry-go-round was empty, probably because school was back in session. After I bought us tickets, he circled among the beautiful, painted horses until he found his favorite and climbed aboard. I swung my leg over the wooden horse beside his and made a point of keeping my hands off anything metal, so I didn’t accidentally short it out. He told me, “I’ve never done this before.”
When the ride started up and the music began to play, he laughed delightedly. His enthusiasm was so pure and genuine that I was enchanted by it, and I decided to follow his lead. As our horses rose and fell, one surging ahead before the other took its place, I called, “I’ll race you!” We both leaned forward and cheered our steeds on. People near the merry-go-round were staring. It felt incredibly liberating when I realized I didn’t care at all.
As the ride slowly wound down a few minutes later, I did my best impersonation of an announcer at a race track. Ari’s horse, which had daisies woven into its mane, made one final, slow-motion rotation as I shouted, “It’s Dapper Daisy pulling out in front, Dapper Daisy heading for the finish line, and it’s Dapper Daisy by a nose!” His horse stopped a few inches in front of mine, and he whooped and threw his hands in the air.
Ari jumped into my arms, and I swung him around before putting him down. As we stepped off the carousel, he said, “Thank you. That was so much fun!”
He held my hand as we returned to the blanket. It was such a simple gesture, but it meant everything to me. As he started unpacking the lunch he’d brought us, he said, “I hope you like peanut butter and jelly. I should have asked.”
I assured him I loved it, and we got comfortable and enjoyed our meal. The stuff he’d packed for us to eat was super random, from four types of crackers and seven different drinks to what looked like a trick-or-treater’s haul of assorted candy. I actually loved how quirky that was.
He topped off the meal with the oatmeal raisin cookies he’d baked, and when I tried to bite into one, it turned out to be rock hard. He exclaimed, “Oh no! Told you I wasn’t much of a cook.”
“They’re good,” I said. “Just a little crunchy.” They were hockey pucks, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Fig held one between his front paws and gnawed on it, and I tried to break off a piece with my molars.
Ari wasn’t buying it, and after he swapped out the homemade cookies for store-bought ones, he said, “I brought us some entertainment. Want to see?”
“Definitely.”
He lined up a Frisbee, a container of bubbles, a stack of board games, and two identical books. “These are arranged on the introvert scale from ‘it’s early and I’m not done peopling yet’ to ‘let’s be quiet and read for a while’. I brought us both the same book, because I happened to have two copies of it. I figure it’s still kind of social if we’re reading the same thing.”
“It’s nice to be with someone who totally gets it,” I said, as I reached for the bottle of bubble solution. “I’m starting one step down on the scale, because I’m a klutz and playing Frisbee will illustrate that way too vividly.”
I unscrewed the lid and held the bottle out for him. Ari fished out the plastic wand, then blew a stream of bubbles into the air. As we both watched them float away, iridescent in the sunlight, he murmured, “I know it’s childish and I shouldn’t like this so much, but I just do.”
“The world can be a pretty harsh place. I’m all for finding joy where you can.” He seemed to like that. After a moment, I said, “Tell me something about you, Ari.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s start with your last name. I don’t actually know what it is.”
“Oh, right. I guess we skipped that part. It’s Bloom.”
“That really suits you.”
He grinned and said, “Thanks. I actually chose it for myself when I moved to L.A., a new name for a new chapter in my life.”
“How’d you come up with it?”
“Don’t laugh, but I saw it on a T-shirt. It said ‘bloom where you’re planted’. That quote’s been around for ages, but I happened to see the shirt right when I was trying to come up with a name, and it just clicked. I like the idea behind it, that no matter where we end up, we should always try to make the most of it.”
“I like that, too.” As he dipped the wand back in the soapy liquid, then blew another stream of bubbles skyward, I said, “My last name’s Vale. I can’t recall if I told you that. My aunt gave me her name when she adopted me, but it had been changed, too. She was Rosa Valdez when she first came to Hollywood in the late 1940s, but her agent convinced her to change it to Rosalind Vale. He claimed it was to make her seem more sophisticated. When she got older, she realized he’d probably been trying to whitewash her, because he believed being a Latina in Hollywood was an obstacle to landing leading roles.”
“I’m curious about something,” Ari said. “If she adopted you, why do you call her your aunt and not your mom?”
“She absolutely was my mom in every way that counts, but she didn’t want to take the title away from my biological mother. My parents died when I was a toddler, and it upset Aunt Roz that I had almost no memories of them.” After a pause, I said, “I’m sorry, I know I talk about her a lot. I’ll try to stop doing that.”
Ari slid across the blanket and leaned against me. “I want to hear all about your life, Griffin, and Roz was a big part of it. The way to keep her memory alive is by talking about her, so please never stop doing that.”
The afternoon was perfect. We spent it playing board games, talking, and just enjoying each other’s company while Fig snoozed in the shade of the rainbow-striped umbrella. Around six o’clock, a group began to gather on the far side of the carousel. A DJ booth was set up, and colored lights and whirligigs were positioned around the edge of the lawn.
We deci
ded to check it out and walked over hand-in-hand. About thirty people had started dancing, and they all were wearing headphones. A sign read: Silent Disco. “Oh! I’ve heard of this,” Ari said. “You rent the headphones, the DJ plays different music on two or three channels, and you pick what you like and dance to it. That way, everyone can enjoy their own beat, and there’s no noise to bother anyone. Can we try it?”
The people dancing to music only they could hear looked pretty silly. But Ari seemed excited about the idea, so I found myself saying, “Sure. Why not?”
He bounded over to the table set up near the DJ booth and soon returned with two pairs of headphones. “Let’s sync up, so we can dance to the same thing,” he said. Then he held one of the headphones to his ear as he flipped channels. When he found something he liked, he held it to my ear and asked, “How about this?” It just sounded like every techno song ever. I nodded in agreement, so he tuned both headphones to the same station, and they lit up red. It was a relief when he put mine on for me, since I’d worried about shorting them out when I touched them.
He put his on next, and then surprisingly, he wrapped his arms around me. We both began to sway to the music, even though it was up-tempo, and I grinned and relaxed as I rested my hands on his waist.
And just like that, what could have been painfully awkward became totally magical. I looked around at all the people on the lawn, more closely this time. There were couples, groups of friends, some people on their own, and several little kids, and everyone was having a great time without worrying about how they might look to others. Half the headphones were lit up with a blue light, the other half red like ours, and now that I could hear the music, it all just fell into place.
Best of all, of course, was the gorgeous boy who was holding me tight. When he looked up at me and smiled, my heart skipped a beat. It seemed like he was made of sunshine and sky, with those bright blue eyes and unruly golden waves. I studied him with a sense of wonder as I ran my fingertips along his jaw and my thumb grazed his full lower lip. By some miracle, he was looking at me in just the same way.
Both of us stopped dancing. The anticipation in that moment was exquisite. It felt as though the entire universe paused and held its breath, and I cupped his cheek as my heart raced.
The brush of my lips against his was soft and tentative. His eyes slid shut, and he tilted his face toward mine as his lips parted. I kissed him again, lingering this time.
It was my first kiss, and it was a revelation.
I’d never understood the appeal of kissing. Not really. I’d seen people do it in countless movies, read about it in all sorts of books, and never got why it was such a big deal.
Until that moment.
Wow, I’d been so incredibly clueless.
I pushed the headphones down so they hung around my neck, and he did the same with his. Then I took his face between my hands, and he clung to me as I kissed him again. It was sweet and urgent, tender and demanding, so many contradictory things, all rolled into one simple and profound act.
When we finally parted, Ari looked up at me and touched my cheek. His skin was flushed, and his chest rose and fell as he caught his breath. Then he smiled again, and it was glorious.
Everything had changed in those few seconds, and we both knew it. We were more than we’d been, but not yet all we would become.
I didn’t really know what to do next, but Ari did. He put his arms around me, and we began to slow dance again. We didn’t even bother with the headphones this time.
The sun was setting when we finally left the park. Fig sat on Ari’s lap with his driving goggles on, and all three of us glanced at the silent disco as I pointed the convertible toward the exit. There were probably two hundred people dancing, and the crowd had shifted from families and people of all ages to a twenty-something party crowd. I was glad we’d gotten to experience it when we did.
Ari said, “You know, we’d originally made plans for a dinner date tonight.” When I glanced at him, he asked, “Would you maybe want to get a pizza and go back to your house?”
Internally, I was screaming, Yes! He doesn’t want the date to end! But I managed to say, “Great idea,” like a normal person.
He called ahead to an Italian restaurant, and we picked up our order a few minutes later. When we pulled up to the gate at the base of my driveway, we had to sit there while it screamed its way open. Ari burst out laughing, and I had to chuckle too, because it was just so ridiculous.
Fig preceded us into the house and sniffed all around, probably detecting the alleged vampire who’d dropped in earlier. I led Ari to the family room and made a space on the coffee table for the pizza box before saying, “I’ll bring us some drinks. Please make yourself comfortable.”
The dog ran upstairs in his search for the intruder as I went into the kitchen. I wasn’t really prepared for a guest and probably would have been desperate enough to bust out Nancy’s box of wine, but I didn’t actually know where that had ended up. Instead, I poured two glasses of iced tea, grabbed some plates and napkins, and joined Ari on the couch.
When Fig finally gave up the hunt, he jumped up beside us on the sofa and scarfed down the slice of pizza I’d set aside to cool for him. Then the dog turned to me with a question in his brown eyes, and I told him, “That was a big piece, and it’s enough for now. I don’t want you to get sick.”
He scowled at me before casting a pointed look at the television. I sighed and poked the remote with the eraser end of a pencil, navigated the DVR’s menu, and pulled up the recordings of Fig’s favorite shows. As a Spanish-language telenovela began to play, I told Ari, “My dog likes to watch television.”
Ari had a remarkable knack for taking everything in stride, even stuff that was batshit crazy. He just said, “I think the way you dote on him is sweet,” and when we finished eating, he asked, “Can I have a tour of your house?”
“Definitely.” He followed me into the kitchen while I put the dishes in the sink, and I explained, “All the purple and lavender is because of my aunt. They were her favorite colors.”
As we walked down the hall toward the front of the house, I gestured at a closed door and said, “This was a guest room, but Roz moved down here when her arthritis made the stairs too difficult.” Then I indicated the formal dining room and said, “We literally never used that. When her friends would come over, we’d all either sit around the kitchen table or on the patio out back. We never used the living room, either. It’s pretty, though.”
I flipped a light switch, so Ari could see the pink, white, and lavender color scheme, floral wallpaper and area rugs, white grand piano, and fussy antique furnishings. When I was about fifteen, I’d glued rubber covers onto each of the switches in the house, which acted as insulation and kept me from shorting them out. I was grateful for that bit of foresight right then, because it meant I didn’t have to do yet another weird thing in front of Ari, like turning on the lights with an oven mitt.
“It is really pretty,” he agreed. “It looks like a parlor from a Jane Austen book.” As we began to climb the stairs, he gestured at the framed movie posters that lined the staircase and asked, “Are these all of your aunt’s movies?”
“They’re just her favorites. She made thirty-two films, but she said some weren’t worth remembering.”
When we reached the second floor, I gestured down the dark, wood-paneled hallway. Most of the doors along it were closed, and I said, “The master bedroom is at the end of the hall, and the room I slept in when I was a kid is right beside it.” Then I stepped through a doorway and flipped another light switch as I said, “This has always been my favorite room in the house, so I decided to move in when I was a teenager.”
Bookcases lined three walls, extending so high up that there was a rolling ladder to access the upper shelves. The room was full of great period details, including a huge, stained glass light fixture suspended from the high ceiling, elaborate cornices and moldings, and an elegant fireplace, which had a comfortable
seating area in front of it. Roz had let me choose the colors for this room, so thick, royal blue drapes framed the many windows and matched the Turkish area rugs. My bedding was all in deep blue as well, and the bed and a nightstand were tucked into a round alcove formed by one of the house’s turrets.
Ari wandered over to the bookshelves and murmured, “If I had a room like this, I’d never leave it.”
“Actually, this is where I spend the majority of my time. There’s a wonderful backyard too, but this has always been the center of my universe.”
Maybe that sounded a bit pathetic, because he turned to me with some sort of strong emotion in his eyes and asked, “Did you have a happy childhood, Griffin?”
The answer seemed very important to him for some reason. “Yeah, I really did. I suppose it helps that I’ve always been a total introvert. I had books, Aunt Roz, and my dog to keep me company, and that was all I needed. Kids my own age just seemed loud and erratic, while my aunts would refer to me as fourteen going on forty. I think the way I was raised suited me perfectly.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” He wandered over to the closest bookshelf and said, “Wow, look at this collection. How many have you read?”
“Just about all of them.”
“Even the ones in Spanish?”
“Yeah. I’m much better at reading the language than speaking it, probably because I never got to practice. Roz wasn’t bilingual, despite the fact that her parents emigrated from Mexico. They thought it was important for their children to speak only English, because they wanted them to blend in.” While I was talking, I looked around the room to make sure nothing embarrassing was laying around, like a pair of ratty underwear or something. When I turned toward the windows that faced the front of the house, my breath caught.
