by Fiona Starr
After Ash stood me up, I wallowed in umbrella drinks and hung out with the girls instead of working. That means I have only this coming week to really bear down. I can’t believe I let a guy wreck my plans.
I roll my suitcase to the living room and Susannah’s waiting for me.
“I think you need to go see him. Tell him goodbye, if nothing else. You won’t be able to let this go if you leave with everything up in the air like this. Besides, he doesn’t get to just ghost you like that. Who does he think he is?”
I take a deep breath. “You’re right. I need to know what happened.”
“Come on, I’ll walk with you.”
The beach cove is busy with television crews setting up for some event. Ash mentioned how the reality shows put on games here over Spring Break, but I’ve never seen one in person. It looks like fun.
I step up to the bar and look around, but nobody’s here. I knock on the door to the office and wait, but there’s no answer
I shrug at Susannah. She’s standing in the sand, waiting for me.
Damn him. It isn’t fair that I don’t get to have a say in how this goes down. “I’m going to leave a note,” I call to Susannah.
I fish around the bar and find a pad and pen. I think about what to say and it all falls flat. I don’t want to yell at him.
I missed you the past few days.
Ghosting doesn’t suit you.
- Bridget
I add my phone number and tear the page from the pad. Then I grab a glass from the bar and use it as a paperweight, leaving my note next to the register.
Well, that’s all I can do, I guess.
I head back to Susannah and she puts her arm around me.
“Feel better?” she asks.
“Not really.” I lean my head on her shoulder and we walk away.
“Well, at least you tried. You’ll be glad you did.”
“Yeah. I don’t know. I just want to go home.”
Chapter Nine
BRIDGET
ONE WEEK LATER
I’m leaving my adviser’s office after our final meeting before I defend my thesis in front of the committee. I’m pretty sure I have the content down cold, but I want to review the last few changes with her and make sure my paper meets all the technical requirements before I turn it in. I’ve been holed up in my apartment for days, forcing myself to give my paper one hundred and ten percent—the time I missed on vacation caught up with me. It’s hard to believe I’m almost finished.
I close the office door and head back to my apartment. When I get to my building, I stop short and gasp.
Ash is standing on the sidewalk outside my building. He’s got two black eyes, a bandage over his right eyebrow, and his soft wrist cast has been replaced with a hard one that goes all the way up past his elbow.
“Ash? What are you doing here?”
He smiles and his mouth quirks up on the one side. “I’m sorry. I’m late for our date. You won’t believe what happened.”
All the comebacks I have rehearsed in the shower all week fall away. He looks pitiful. He also looks really happy to see me.
“You came all this way just to take me to breakfast?”
He nods and gives me that smile again. “Yeah. I would have come yesterday, but it took forever to figure out your address. I had to lie to the registrar and tell her that I was your brother and I was in an accident and lost your address when I lost my phone.”
“Really? I am a little alarmed that it was so easy.”
“Don’t be. I was very convincing.” He pulls me to him, his fingers on my hips. “I was desperate to see you.”
I look up at him. “When you didn’t show up I convinced myself that you weren’t interested. That I misread everything.”
“Are you kidding me? I haven’t stopped thinking about you since that first day.”
“Me too.”
“Thank god you left that note. When Luis saw it he started looking for me. He had no idea anything was wrong.”
“What happened?”
“You saved my life.”
ASH
When Bridget appears outside of her apartment, I feel like I might pass out. Between pain meds and travel and how the sight of her sends my heart racing, I have to fight to stay on my feet.
The guys who took me were thugs working for the police. Apparently, when I took the bank deposit with me the day I went to the hospital, I messed up the routine. Luis usually handles the bank stuff, and by doing him a favor and running that errand, I inadvertently took all the cash away a day too soon. When the chief’s guy showed up to collect, the money was gone.
They assumed I was trying to hold out. Since my sister was away, they figured I wasn’t going to play ball.
They beat the shit out of me and broke my arm. I’m pretty sure they were going to kill me. That is until my sister showed up with a bag of cash and a promise to keep making payments if they let me go. She had to convince them I wasn’t working against them.
During the car ride home, Annie tried to explain the connections between the tourism trade and the infrastructure that makes the country run. “Sanitation, salvage, recycling, trash—it’s a huge industry all over the world, and Cancún is no exception. It’s just the way it is right now. Before this chief it was one of the federal guys. Before him it was whichever cartel was on top. Organized crime is growing down here, it’s not going anywhere. You can fight, or you can play along. I love it down here, but there’s always someone with their hand out.”
Once the doctors gave me the all-clear, I was on the first plane home.
Standing here looking at Bridget, I realize how lucky I am and how important it was for me to get here to see her. That alone shows me how much has changed for me. “You saved my life.”
She smiles and kisses me slowly. “I am so glad you’re here. How long are you in town?”
I touch my forehead to hers. “Actually, I was hoping to talk to you about that… over breakfast.”
“Oh yeah?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
She pulls me toward her door. “How about you come inside and we see what comes up?” She shoots me an eyebrow.
“You need to be gentle, I’m not at full strength yet.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I know just what you need.”
She leads me inside and as the door closes behind us I feel like the life that came before this moment is done and I’m about to embark on a new path. This new life is one with passion, and purpose, and most importantly, Bridget Blaze.
First Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
ASH
I toss the magazine on Bridget’s desk, and wait for her get off the phone. The headline on the glossy cover features a collage of images of a generic beach hotel, palm trees, and a landfill. The entire thing is covered with dollar signs. Emblazoned over the image is the headline in red letters:
Corruption in Cancún: Dirty Business
The piece is the culmination of my work over the past year. Since my kidnapping. Since meeting Bridget.
I reached out to my old boss at the paper in Miami, and with his help, I pitched it to several media outlets. This magazine and its cable news arm signed on to sponsor my research and gave me the resources to support me while I worked to bring it all together.
Annie said she was behind me one hundred percent, but that she was worried about my safety. That’s laughable considering she’s still living down there where it all went down. But she’s married to a guy who’s pretty connected and she’s got an understanding with the chief.
“You’ve blown the lid off, Ash. This story is now too high profile; they won’t be coming for me. They don’t want revenge; all they want is money.”
Bridget and I moved to Colorado after she graduated. She opened up shop in Blaze Corporation’s main building where she’s consulting with her family’s resorts on implementation of sustainability initiatives. Her programs are starting to get some traction and now she’s reaching out to
other organizations as well. It feels like a movement.
I watch her on the phone. Her passion for her work is clear to anyone she meets. Passion like that was always so foreign to me, so unattainable. But now, everything is changed and I owe it all to her.
She hangs up the phone and picks up the magazine. “Oh, Ash. You did it!” She gets up and comes around her desk to where I am standing. “I am so proud of you.”
“I feel like I owe it all to you,” I say.
She drapes an arm over my shoulder. “No way. This was all you.” She kisses me and smiles, and I want to stand there forever with her in my arms.
“I’m serious.” I lift her arm from my shoulder and hold her hand. “Before I met you, I was up to nothing. I had no plan, no purpose. No fire. But then you came along and you made that seem all right. You didn’t judge me, you didn’t see me as a loser.”
“Ash…”
“No, it’s true. But after the kidnapping and everything, when I thought I wanted to do something about what happened, you didn’t tell me to hide or run away. You saw a fire in me and you encouraged me, even though you knew it was scary.”
I get down on my knee. “Bridget Blaze, you saved my life. Because of you, I am here today. But not just alive… I am living a life of meaning and purpose, and most of all, love.”
She’s got tears in her eyes, and a smile on her face. She wasn’t expecting this, and that makes me even happier.
“I can’t imagine what my life would be like today without you. I don’t want to even think about it.” I pull a tiny velvet box from my pocket and open it for her. “Bridget, will you marry me?”
She looks at the ring and then takes my face in her hands. “Oh my god, Ash! Yes!” She gets down on her knees and kisses me between her words. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
Second Epilogue
ANOTHER YEAR LATER
BRIDGET
After a whirlwind romance, a kidnapping, and an explosive exposé in a national publication, I would have thought that Ash and I would settle into a quiet, unassuming life with lots of low-key everything. But sometimes I wonder if our relationship was born under a restless moon or something, because our lives have been anything but quiet. If fact, it seems everything we do brings with it it’s own special kind of chaos.
And our next adventure is no exception.
I remember the exact moment we learned what was coming.
“Three?” Ash looks pale as he swallows and echoes the doctor’s words during the ultrasound.
“That’s right.” He moves the wand to capture everything on the screen. “Here you can see beating heart number one, and here, number two, and way over here, number three.” He smiles at Ash and then at me. “Congratulations, you two. You’re going to have your hands full.”
“Three,” Ash whispers, his mind probably moving in a million directions at once.
I keep shifting my gaze between the screen and Ash. Triplets. The word ripples through me, raising excitement and dread and fear and worry before rounding back onto excitement once more. Three babies.
Then I just throw my head back and laugh. “We seriously don’t know how to do anything low key.”
Ash grabs my hand and kisses it. “Three!”
Fast forward six and a half months. We’re at the hospital, and they’re rolling me in to the operating room for my scheduled c-section. The babies are all doing great, but I am one tired mama.
We’ve done everything we could possibly do to get the house ready, and aside from three bassinets, and stocking up on triple inventory of everything, it hasn’t been too crazy preparing, to the surprise of both of us.
Once they get me prepped, they bring Ash in and he touches my arm. “This is it. The last moments when it’s just the two of us.” He bends and kisses my forehead. “Are you ready?”
I smile at his excitement. “We’re going to have so much fun.”
“So, what about Matthew, Charlotte, and Axel,” he says, continuing the on-going debate about the names for our two sons and daughter. None of the names either of us has proposed has felt right. We have gone over family names, friends, our own names, the doctor’s names and now we’re going totally random, searching for the ones that feel right.
I shake my head. “Not sure. I think we should wait to meet them.”
He smiles. “Won’t be long now.”
The room is dark and quiet. I open my eyes and look around, expecting to find myself alone. The monitors next to my bed blink and flash, my IV drips fluids, and I feel a contented sleep coming back over me. I am just about to close my eyes when I realize Ash is sitting in the rocking chair with three tiny bundles cradled in his arms.
He is whispering to our babies, talking to them in the softest voice.
“And what about you? Do you think you’ll be a lawyer or a musician, or what about an adventurer? Maybe you’ll climb Everest.” One of the bundles coos and I see a flash of tiny fingers arching upward.
“And what about you, baby girl? You have your mother’s mouth, you know. It curves down right at the bottom there, exactly like that. Do you think you’ll be an astronaut or a painter, or maybe you’ll be the one to climb Everest.”
He bends to kiss each of their heads and then leans back and sighs, a huge smile on his face.
Happiness blooms inside me and spills out of my eyes. I can see it so clearly; he’s going to be an amazing father.
“You talk to them so sweetly,” I whisper.
His eyes meet mine and he grins. “Hey,” he whispers. “How are you feeling? Can I get you anything?” He adjusts the baby bundles and gets up, holding all three of them in his huge arms. He comes over to me and hands one of the boys to me. “I can’t get enough of them. They are so amazing. You’re amazing, Bridge.”
I pull the swaddling down so I can see his tiny face. I can see Ash in the shape of his eyes and the brow line. “Have they told you what they want to be when they grow up?”
He just smiles and shakes his head, handing me our daughter. She has his chin with the tiny cleft in the center.
“They aren’t very talkative right now. I think they’re being shy about it—not ready to discuss anything in detail.”
“Sounds about right.”
He keeps holding our third son and sits on the bed next to me. “Look at them, Bridge. I mean, just look at them.”
We stare at our triplets and then each other, and when he smiles, I see a tear spill over onto his cheek.
He shakes his head. “I had no idea I could ever be this happy. I love you, Bridget. I love you, and our babies, and our big, crazy life.”
“It’s about to get a whole lot crazier,” I say.
He smiles. “It’s going to be so great.”
More Spring Breakers Stories…
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May: His Violet
His Violet: A May Flowers Short Story
Copyright © 2019 by Fiona Starr
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
First Epilogue
Second Epilogue
More May Flowers Short Stories…
Chapter One
CHARLIE
The first time I laid eyes on Violet Duchenne, there was a spark. It was one of those things… it rang through me in that moment when our eyes met. We were in Freshman Orientation—the A-through-E group—and she sat next to me in the university’s lecture hall.
