by Eden Butler
“Stay the night,” he whispered, eyes still closed. “They won’t wake up until the morning. We can sleep in my old room.”
“No,” I said, smiling when he sighed. “Let’s stay here.” My alternative had Ransom smiling, scooting close to me with his legs straightened on the pool house bed and his arm reaching out to pull me against his chest. “What are you doing?”
“Keeping you warm.”
Yes. That too. The warmth of his skin. I’d missed that. Ransom’s heavy body curled against mine, those strong, long arms curved around me.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, not sure why I needed to know his plans right then. He’d made passing mentions about working with Keira and I know he’d be good at it, but Ransom hadn’t given the Dolphins an answer on when he’d return or if he wanted to renew his contract at the end of the season. I felt uncommonly curious about what he planned.
He opened his eyes, brows lifted as though my question surprised him. “I go where you are.”
“I don’t live in Miami anymore.”
The right side of Ransom’s mouth twitched before he brushed away the hair from my forehead. “Then neither do I.”
“But what about your…”
“Nani,” he said, slipping his thumb over my mouth. “It’ll work itself out. I told you. I go where you are. That’s all that matters.”
The confidence, that assured knowledge he always had, more so than me, God how I’d missed it. Ransom just seemed to always know what he wanted from me. And he knew he’d always have it. That was why my leaving had not really undone him. Not at first. He always believed we were end game. And that's why he simply couldn’t accept my engagement to Ethan, no matter how hard he tried. It simply didn’t fit in with his world.
Ransom kept his thumb on my mouth, resting his fingers on the back of my neck and closed his eyes, that threatening smirk a relaxed grin now.
Ethan’s face slipped into my mind and I frowned, moving the ring around so that the diamond rested against my palm. I had not given it back, but then I’d thought very little about the ring or the proposal with all that had gone on in the last few days. Shouldn’t guilt come with that thought, that Ethan hadn’t even crossed my mind? Shouldn’t shame?
Behind me, Mack snored and Koa grumbled under his breath, their bed squeaking when he rolled over. The quiet in the pool house was only broken by the soft trickle of the lake outside and the bug zapper hanging from one of the columns near the patio. It was a sweet night, wrapped up in Ransom, in his siblings who were mine too, always had been. I hoped they always would be.
“Stay with me.” Ransom kept his eyes closed but had moved his thumb from my lips. I couldn’t tell if he was talking in his sleep or asking me to stick around. Then he opened his eyes. “I’ll beg…”
And just then, my heart broke a little bit more, but the sting of it didn’t burn. I couldn’t help myself, rolling toward him to press my lips against his, never wanting to leave his mouth.
“Don’t go.”
“Shoushou, I’m never gone from you.”
And I wasn’t. He was never gone from me either, even when I wished fervently that he was. Silly me. Day in. Day out, Ransom had remained like most things we love and lost do. Never gone. Not really.
We walk away,
Damaged.
After the memories fall
With potential
Of what I could not give.
It’s not you.
It’s me.
It’s not you.
It’s me.
You’re not.
Him.
Twenty-One
My city. New Orleans. That’s what I told myself it was, what it would always be. Even at fifteen, coming here, staying then because it was finally safe to stop hiding in Metairie with our cousin Leann because Mom didn't want to run the risk of bumping into anyone who knew her from before. That had been the way of things my whole life. Until I was fifteen. Until Cora Michaels, Keira’s mother and the grandmother I never met, died and my mother was forced back to New Orleans to settle the estate. Then, finally, we could walk around the city, absorbing the bright culture, the laughter and music that seemed to pulse though the air right alongside the sound of horses pulling carriages and the smooth mix of voices and music. There was always a band playing somewhere in the city. There was always someone performing for a crowd.
Today was no exception. Koa and Mack were halfway down the street as I followed behind them, walking toward Canal. We’d passed two tap dancers both with upturned ball caps at their feet, dancing on sneakers with bent spoons tied to the soles and a small Jazz trio of horns blasting “When the Saints Go Marching In” for the curious tourists.
My attention was divided between my alternatively bickering and laughing siblings and my phone, waiting on Aly’s return text asking if she wanted dinner. She’d told me last night, as I tried convincing her not to go back to her condo, that she’d have to miss my little shopping spree with Koa and Mack so she could work on competition choreography that got delayed with my parents’ drama. I’d hated her leaving. I’d hated her missing the day with us too. With my injury, the rehab that followed and my final decision to change that IR status to retired, I’d forgotten Koa’s birthday. I’d be officially retired at the end of the season and Mom and I had plans to scout new artists. I was looking forward to that. Since I couldn’t indulge my kid brother without also spoiling Mack, she’d come along too. They both deserved it. Our parents had started their anniversary celebration early this year spending the next week holed up in a cabin atop the highest mountains Tennessee offered. They’d left before the sun came up, opting to tackle the ten-hour drive in Dad’s new Hybrid Denali. Better them than me.
As Koa jabbed Mack in the side, and she retaliated with the heel of her tween-appropriate boot heel on top of his foot, I suddenly realized just how long this week would be. Very damn long.
“Makana,” I started, using my “angry brah” voice when she made for another jab against Koa’s foot. She wasn’t threatened, it seemed, hurrying up the sidewalk, stopping only when we’d cleared the main intersection at Canal and were well down Camp. I’d parked hoping to get a yes from Aly on dinner and a hell yes that she’d agree to a sleep over since Mark and Johnny would be in this afternoon to spend a few days with us before they left for Nepal on another Doctors Without Borders mission.
“Look, brah,” Koa said, nodding toward the studio building. “There’s Aly and…oh…”
It was that “oh” and the quick stop my brother made that had my grip loosening so that my phone slipped out of my hand and onto the pavement at my feet.
“I thought you fixed this,” Koa said, grabbing my phone off the ground before he plopped it into my jacket pocket.
The street was crowded with fall shoppers and tourists hurrying around the city grabbing everything pumpkin spiced in the shops and delis around us. Across the street Aly stood leaning against the building, her face down, bag slung over her shoulder with Ethan in front of her, holding her hand, caging her with his arm as he rested a palm against the building's facade.
“Kunāne. It’s Aly,” Mack said, seeming to not notice how close Ethan stood to Aly, how her face was flushed, cheeks pink as though she was winded maybe from the exertion of her dance, maybe from…other things that made me want to gouge my eyes out.
“Makana, you and Koa go grab a hot chocolate.” I nodded toward the coffee shop at my right, pulling out a twenty to hand it over to my little sister. Mack didn’t argue and I felt her staring at me, saw in my peripheral the shift of her head as she watched me, then turned toward Aly.
“Do you want any…” But Mack didn’t need an answer. My head shake was good enough.
“Stay there until I come get you,” I told them, looking away from the cozy scene across the street to see my siblings safely inside the coffee shop.
They hadn’t seen me, Ethan and Aly. They hadn’t seen anything but each other, it seemed, faces close toget
her, expressions unmarked by any emotion I could make out. Ethan stood too close to Aly, and she let him. As I approached, my heart sped up, the awareness of the world moving on around me and that big, big question of "why?" moving over and over in my head, shouting in my ears the closer I came to them, screaming in my head when Ethan took Aly’s face between his hands and kissed her. Passionately. Deeply.
Right in front of me.
She didn’t immediately stop him, only pushing him away after seven of the longest seconds of my life. They broke apart and Ethan, taking her by the hand, escorted Aly into the building. They still hadn’t seen me.
I was a lineman. I could defend myself and anyone else who came along from another burly man hurdling across time and space with the intent of mayhem. But this was not a battle on the gridiron. This was not rush/pass play that kept me on my toes. This was Aly. This was my life and I had the sick, sinking feeling that once again both were slipping away from me. Where had it all gone wrong?
It was all I could do to keep upright, to turn away from that building, trying my hardest to keep last night from my mind, and the countless nights before then. She’d been mine, like a second skin. Aly had always been the scar I’d gotten at eighteen, something I earned, something I fought like hell to keep marked on my skin. I’d wanted her and always would. Was that the ache my parents had endured for sixteen long years? That feeling that you’d lost something vital—not a finger that you could manage to be without over time and with patience; not like a limb that you could replace with something else to keep you steady. Worse than that: like walking around without your heart. Had my parents really done that for so long? As I stepped away from the building I realized that’s what this was to me—losing Aly was like losing myself completely. I knew that I simply couldn't survive without her. It went beyond wanting her. I needed her. Needed her like I needed life itself.
Two steps, three more and I’d already gained new insight to what all those long, lonely years had been for my mother. How many times had I heard that prayer she made? How often had I wondered when the day would come that those prayers stopped? They never had and now, with the sting of that so very public kiss like a splinter under my nails, I realized I needed to learn a few prayers of my own.
But it was no use. They’d all be the same: Please bring Aly back to me.
I had no shame. Right there, with the bustle of New Orleans life all around me, I stopped in the middle of the street, lowered my head until all I could see was my feet, and I prayed. To be honest, it felt funny mumbling to myself, like a wish I wasn’t sure would come true, but I was desperate to try anything, anything, that would bring Aly back to me. To let me have one more chance for me to show her just how important she was to me, and how much I needed her by my side.
Maybe I stood there seconds. Maybe it was minutes or hours and the sting of her leaving had created some crazy rift in my mind, some weird lapse that kept me from understanding that I hadn’t moved, that I was standing there repeating the same prayer over and over, a dozen, a hundred times, a thousand times. Please bring Aly back to me.
I’d never had much faith. I knew God watched over me, or I supposed He did. Sometimes I thought He liked to fiddle with my life just for shits and giggles. But right then, in the middle of that street in the heart of the bustling city, with all the noise around me, I believed in Him. I believed like a child. I believed in miracles.
And right then, He answered my prayer.
The voice came to me like a whisper at first, and then it got louder, took shape. It sounded sweet and comforting and just like what I imagined salvation must sound like, and when I looked up, that sweet, sultry voice spoke my name.
“Ransom?” Aly said, smiling up at me. How could she smile at me like that? “Where are Mack and Koa?” She looked across me, slightly confused, as though she expected them to be trailing behind me on the sidewalk. Aly came closer, adjusting the buttons on her jacket and the thin dance skirt that fit loosely over her tights. “I’m starving. Where do you…” She stopped speaking suddenly when she spotted the moisture collected in my lashes. “Shoushou…" she said, with concern and love in her voice, as she reached up to brush the tears away, "What is it?”
“You…” The words stopped at the back of my throat, as though speaking them would confirm something I was too terrified to voice. I tried again. “You came back?” I moved my chin, nodding toward the building’s front entrance and the lobby that led straight to Ethan’s office.
Aly looked over her shoulder and comprehension dawned on her lovely, her beautiful face. “Well, yeah. Of course,” she said, looking back at me. “I had to give Ethan his ring back.” She held up her left hand, wiggling her fingers, and my breath caught when I saw it was unadorned, minus that glittering diamond that had torn my dreams apart.
My mind felt muddled, as though I’d tried to drown myself in a fizzy bath of Coke and Pop Rocks. “You, you told him? Aly, you left him? For real?”
“Yes, I did. Of course I did. He wasn’t happy about it," she paused, and her voice caught for just a moment, “but didn’t fight me. He always told me that he wanted me to follow my heart, even if that meant leaving.” A few tears formed at the corners of her eyes then, but she smiled before they could fall. I loved her for that. My Aly wasn’t cruel and even I had to admit Ethan was a good guy. He might have even really loved her. Hell, he must have, he had asked her to spend the rest of her life with him, and God help me, she almost did. Hurting him couldn’t have been easy to do. I mustered what I hoped was an appropriate reply. “How’d he take it?”
“He said he felt like he’d been knocked out and didn’t get to throw the first punch,” she said and I watched her move as though my mind, my spirit floated above me, observing how smoothly Aly came to me, messing with my collar, distracting herself from my silence by straightening the lapel on my jacket. She smelled like lavender today, a mix of flowers and the sweet scent of her skin. But when she reached for my face, Aly’s gaze jumped to my fingers, holding her hand still, because I needed to feel the pulse under her fingers just to know if she were real. To confirm for myself that it all wasn't just some twisted dream.
“Ransom. What’s wrong?”
“You really did give him the ring back.” She nodded, but didn’t smile, slipping a little closer to me as though she worried I’d knocked myself in the head. “But…you kissed him.”
She looked at me for a moment, puzzled, then let out the most beautiful, most wonderful, most happy laugh I'd ever heard—or maybe it was just my mind that heard it that way. “That was a goodbye kiss, shoushou. He deserved at least that. Ethan’s a good man, a wonderful man. Just not the one for me.”
My rational mind realized she had a point, but my heart didn’t care why she let him kiss her. Goodbye. That was all I needed to hear. I cast about for something to say, and all I could come up with sounded idiotic even to me. “Suppose he hates me.”
“Definitely, but he still has a man crush on Kona.” She smiled, and I couldn't help but smile with her.
“And,” I said, tugging her closer so she had to rest her hands against my chest. “You aren’t going to change your mind later? You aren’t going to do something stupid like convince yourself I only want you for what you can give me? You aren’t going to make me chase after you because you think I’d somehow be better off with someone else?”
“I can pretty much guarantee that you’re not gonna get rid of me again.”
“Nani…” The word came out in a whisper and I didn’t care if it made me sound stupid. She was to me, always. Beautiful right then on the side of the road. Beautiful always, then, as when I first loved her with a desperation that scared and thrilled me, and now, loving her without limits, and even sometime in the future when we’re fifty and eighty and broken shells of who we were, even then she would be beautiful.
Still rocked from the realization that Aly had chosen me, I pulled away from her, unaccountably happy and laughing. “I…I thought.” I
shook my head, exhaling for the first time, it seemed, in months. “I thought you chose him, when you walked away…went inside that building, I thought…”
“Ransom…oh my cheri. How could I?” Aly pulled me close, working her lips in a brief, teasing brush against mine, that soft, perfect tongue sliding softly against my bottom lip. “You’re all I ever wanted.”
You fit everywhere
Inside my body.
The cells that become platelets
The platelets that congeal.
Harsher than poison,
You crawl inside me, thick pumps draining me, filling me
Making me whole.
And when I feel you
When my bones crumble under the strength of your hands,
The weight of your body,
There is breath enough for only two words.
Spoken true,
Real,
Raw,
Glorious.
Glorious.
Twenty-Two
It was there, right with us, all night. Through dinner, with Mack and Koa laughing, forgetting their earlier irritation with each other, their bickering, to keep the smile on Aly’s face. They, like me, were happy for her choice. But even as we told jokes that were a little rude, even as we ate too much, were too indulgent with our desserts, that hum of suggestion remained. I caught it as Aly listened to Mack explaining her ideas for a new competition number. She gave my sister her full attention, never losing focus, except when Aly’s darkening irises swiveled with a hunger that Po-boys and chocolate sundaes could not quench.
It was there between us as we drove Koa and Mack to the Omni Royal Orleans where Mark and Johnny waited for us. They’d take the kids to Mandeville and I would follow, though Mark suggested I didn’t, after dropping Aly off at her condo. Even as my godfather listened to Koa’s animated story about the homeless girl who followed us through the Quarter, Aly laughed in the right spots, humoring my kid brother, even then, it was there too: the hunger. The desire. The lingering connection that we had not been able to quell.
