“Does it hurt?” she asks.
I nod. “It hurt like hell at first. They had me in a coma for a couple of weeks after it first happened. When I woke up, I was in so much pain I’d pray every night for God to just let me die, but I think it was the drugs talking. Doctors said had the burns traveled to the other half of my torso, I wouldn’t be here today.”
I don’t even touch on the fact that I almost lost a leg from the hip down. That’ll be a story for another day.
Her chest rises and falls slowly and she studies the marks that cover my flesh.
“I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to write you letters,” I say. “I lost your address. I didn’t have your number memorized. There was no way for me to reach you, Maritza, and the idea of you thinking I’d written you off fucking killed me.”
Maritza’s eyes flick to the floor, focusing on the hardwood beneath our feet. “There were so many times I had this feeling … this gut feeling that something happened to you and that that was why I hadn’t heard from you. I believed that for so long. And then when I met your brother, he said you weren’t hurt and that you’d been home for a while.”
“Of course he did. That’s what he does—he lies.”
She shakes her head. “I’m so sorry. If you had any idea what a rollercoaster these last six months have been for me … all the nights I stayed up worrying about you, wondering where you went and what happened …”
I slip my shirt back over my arm before taking her hands between mine. “I can only imagine. And I hate that I put you through that.”
“When I got back, Ma had left the guest room exactly the way it was when I’d left,” I tell her, “and I found these sitting on the nightstand.”
Reaching into the box, I retrieve a couple of small items.
“The receipt from our sushi lunch where I accidentally Back-to-the-Future’d your future children,” I say. She chuckles, taking the thin slip of paper from my hands. “And the ticket stub from the tar pits, where I kissed you in front of a woolly mammoth.”
“Why’d you hold on to these?” she asks.
Shrugging, I say, “I don’t know. Believe me, I’m not a sentimental guy. I don’t hold onto anything. But I guess I wasn’t quite ready to throw them away.”
“That’s kind of … romantic,” she says, head tilted as her lips lift in one corner.
“I don’t know about romantic,” I say, reaching for the bouquet of blue hydrangeas I’d picked up on the way here.
“Blue hydrangeas?” she asks, bringing the flowers under her nose. “I can’t believe you remembered.”
I smirk. “There’s this little flower shop over by Ma’s place. And every time I passed it these last few weeks, I saw hydrangeas in the window. They were usually white or pink or purple, but today they were blue. And this girl I know once told me to always stop for blue hydrangeas.”
Maritza’s perfect teeth drag along her lower lip and her eyes are lit, glassy almost, but the smile forming on her face tells me this is a good thing.
“I never stopped thinking about you, Maritza,” I say. “Not once. And I didn’t realize what that meant until it was too late to tell you.”
“I’m sorry I wouldn’t listen to you,” she says, exhaling. “Your brother was just so convincing … and I’d been trying for months to make sense of everything and then he came along and filled in the missing blanks and I was so sure I had it all figured out, I was so sure you were this horrible person who went around hurting people and not thinking twice.”
Skimming my palm along my jaw, I blow a hard breath between my lips. “Yeah, well. I’m not perfect, Maritza. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of. I’ve taken the low road way more than I probably should have, but there’s something about finding the girl of your dreams and then watching your life flash before your eyes that does something to a man.”
“The girl of your dreams?” She laughs.
“It’s cliché, I know.” And it’s not really a phrase that’s ever been in my vocabulary until I met her. “I don’t know how else to describe you other than you’re everything I never knew I wanted, everything I never knew was possible to have.”
Reaching into the box, I retrieve the burnt letter Rachael had given back to me after Maritza refused to read it.
“Here,” I say.
Our eyes catch and she hesitates before taking the folded paper from my hands and gazing over the faded, smudged ink.
Dear Maritza,
I almost died today.
And I don’t say that because I want your sympathy or I want you to worry about me. I say it because in those deafening seconds when I thought it was the end for me, I found myself thinking about one person and one person only.
You.
Something happens to a man when he’s on the brink of death, and truth be told, it’s as cliché as it is profound. You look back on your life, namely your regrets, and you realize you only had one shot—and either you made the most of it or you didn’t.
It’s that simple.
I haven’t even touched thirty and sure I’ve served my country, but what else have I done? Pissed away the best years of my life on women and beer? Walking around with a chip on my shoulder because my life didn’t go the way I thought it would?
Like I said, I almost died today. And in a way, I did die because I’m not the man I once was.
For the first time in my life, I’ve realized what I truly want and that’s meaning. I want a girl to miss and a girl that misses me. I want the corny letters and care packages. I want to come home and wrap my arms around you, swinging you around in a gymnasium around all the other guys reuniting with their family. I want to get to know you. I want to make you smile and do ridiculous things together. I want to push your limits and I want you to push mine. I want to get in fights with you and I want to have crazy makeup sex when they’re over.
There are so many more constellations I want to show you, Maritza.
Just months ago, I lost myself in your smile and I found myself in your kiss. You were the one. I was just too afraid to say it. If only I’d told you sooner, maybe you’d be mine right now.
I guess what I’m trying to say is … wait for me.
Yours,
Isaiah
P.S. I could never hate you.
When she’s finished, she folds the letter and presses it against her chest, staring at me with through glassy, squinted eyes.
“You knew me all of nine days …” her voice is broken, tapering into nothing.
“I spent more time with you in those nine days than I’ve spent with any other woman in my adult life,” I say. “Well, aside from Cassie.”
“Who’s Cassie?”
“We dated all through high school,” I explain, rubbing my hands together. I don’t talk about her and I can’t remember the last time I said her name out loud, but I promised myself that if Maritza gave me another chance, I’d tell her anything she ever wanted to know, bullshit-free. No filter. “Summer after senior year, she showed up with this positive pregnancy stick in her hand. We were both scared shitless. Within a couple of weeks, I’d gone down to the nearest Army recruiter and enlisted myself.”
“Oh my God. That’s a little extreme.”
I shrug. “It was either that or working minimum wage jobs to support us, hoping someday maybe we could go to college if the stars aligned. Plus, I was just a kid. An eighteen-year-old kid who didn’t know anything about anything. I was terrified and I just wanted to do right by her.”
“That’s really sweet.”
“Yeah, well. I came back from basic training, wanting to surprise her. Ending up getting a bit of a surprise myself,” I say, rubbing my lips together as I pause. I can still picture this clear as day. “Walked in on Cassie and Ian in bed together. Damn near murdered him that day and had Cassie not been there, shrieking and pregnant, I just might have. But I let him go. And Cassie confessed that they’d had a thing for quite some time—the better part of our senior year, actu
ally. And not only that, but she said the baby was his and that she’d lied about how far along she was so I wouldn’t know.”
“Jesus.” She cups her hand over her mouth. “So you were betrayed not only by the girl you loved but your twin brother.”
I shrug. “I expected that sort of thing from Ian. He was always chasing after everything I had, wanting everything I wanted. He was so jealous of me it drove him to do stupid shit all the time. It was like his life mission was to see how many times he could get me in trouble with our parents. He once pretended to be me and showed up at my work acting crazy and yelling at customers just to get me fired, and it almost fucking worked.”
“Is he mental? Who does that?”
Rolling my eyes, I continue, “You know, he’d done so much shit to me over the years, and all I wanted to do was get him really good. So when we were seventeen, I stole my dad’s car and parked it in some gas station parking lot a couple of miles from our house. When I got home, I dumped the car keys in Ian’s room and waited for Dad to get up for work. Well, my little plan worked at first. Dad blamed Ian for the missing car and I told Dad I saw a dented-up Buick like his parked at the Conoco down the street. Anyway, long story short, I guess Dad had been late for work a few times when Mom had been sick and he was on his last write-up. His boss said if he was late again, he was fired, no questions asked.”
“My god. What happened?”
I pause. I’ve never told this story, not to anyone, not out loud. Maritza’s hand lifts to my back and she scoots closer.
“I told him the truth,” I said. “And he left. We don’t know if he was walking down to the Conoco to get his car or if he’d just had enough … caring for his sick wife and trying to support his six kids … but he never came home after that. The next day, we got a call. Someone found his body in a ditch off the highway a few miles from our house. He’d been mugged, assaulted, left for dead. He died for a Timex watch and the twenty-dollar bill in his wallet.”
My hands form a bridge over my nose and I take a few moments to compose myself.
“Isaiah …” Maritza nudges her cheek against my shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
“My whole family blamed me for a long time. Now they don’t talk much about it,” I say. “Ma doesn’t know exactly what happened of course—she doesn’t know about the car keys thing and me trying to get back at Ian. But everyone else does. Ian made damn sure they all knew.”
“So when your brother said you had demons and that you ruin lives … is that what he was talking about?”
“I imagine so, yeah.”
Her hand lifts to cup the side of my face and for a moment we just sit and breathe, her warmth mixing with mine.
“I hope someday you’ll be able to let that go,” she says. “I hope you’ll be able to stop blaming yourself.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe someday.”
Sitting up, she rests her palm on my face and her eyes lock on mine. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
A moment later, her pillow soft lips graze mine and she breathes me in, but before we kiss, I have to say one more thing.
“I’m not a perfect man,” I say, my voice low and soft. “And I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. But letting you go? Letting you walk away without a fight? That might be the biggest one of all. And I can’t do that, Maritza. I can’t let you go.”
Pulling her into my lap, I hold her stare and reach for her face, guiding her mouth closer, until I taste her familiar strawberry lips and peppermint tongue.
“Then don’t,” she says a moment later, coming up for air. “Don’t let me go.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Maritza
It’s crazy how much life can change in an instant.
One minute I’m serving pancakes, the next minute I’m spending a week with an Army corporal who makes my stomach somersault every time I look at him.
One minute I’m writing him letters, the next minute I’m writing him off.
But now we’re here—in the present moment.
And all those minutes have added up, turning into days and nights and weeks and months and now that same broody Army corporal is standing in my grandmother’s trophy room listening to her wax poetic about her Hollywood golden years.
“And that’s how I knew Richard Burton was going to go back to Elizabeth,” Gram says with a melancholic sigh, twisting her pearls around her fingers. “They were just meant to be. But it’s all right. Everything worked out. Had I not met my husband, I wouldn’t have had my two boys or my two beautiful granddaughters.”
Isaiah turns toward me and I give him a wink.
“Everything always has a way of working out, doesn’t it?” he asks.
“Always.” Gram smiles. So far she seems to be quite taken with him, at least judging by the fact that she’s been leading him from room to room ever since breakfast this morning, showing off her awards and movie props and costumes. Isaiah seemed to take a particular interest in the white bikini from the Davida’s Desire poster, even going so far as to jokingly ask if she ever loaned out any of her costumes.
I smacked his arm when she wasn’t looking.
Sicko.
“We should probably get going, Gram,” I tell her when she attempts to lead us to the room where she keeps her framed posters and the actual baby grand piano she danced on in 1968’s Sunset Sonata.
“So soon, Lovey?” She pouts, turning to face me. “But you two just got here. And I wanted to show him my posters.”
I check the time on my phone. “We’re catching Splendor in the Grass at the Vista. Starts in an hour.”
Gram’s eyes shift between the two of us and she wears a knowing smirk. “Well, all right. Some other time, then, Isaiah?”
“Of course, Mrs. Claiborne,” he says.
She bats her hand. “Please. Gloria’s fine. And I do hope I’ll be seeing more of you around here. It’s good to see the sparkle back in my granddaughter’s eyes. It’d been gone for so long.”
I saunter up to Isaiah, sliding my hand into his and grinning at him the way I haven’t been able to stop doing since yesterday, when we had our heart to heart.
“Pretty sure it’s here to stay this time, Gram,” I say.
She hooks a hand on her narrow hip before pointing at Isaiah. “But if she ever loses it again—”
“She won’t,” he says, giving her his full attention. “I’m not going anywhere. I can promise you that.”
“Have fun at the movies, you two …” Gram sashays down the hall in her fur-lined, white satin robe, disappearing into her master bedroom and closing the door.
“You want to hear something completely insane?” I ask him when she’s gone.
“What? You think you love me?” he asks.
My jaw falls. Of all the things that could come out of that gorgeous mouth of his, I wasn’t expecting that.
“I was going to say that this week is my parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary and that my mom had to choose between my father and my uncle but …” I draw in a deep breath, “yeah, I do think I love you.”
His lips curl into a slow smile, the very same one he wore this morning in my bed as he peeled the sheets from my naked body and climbed over top of me for the third time in under twenty-four hours.
With his hands cupping my waist, he pulls me in and crushes my lips with his. My body surrenders and I’m having second thoughts about going to that movie because suddenly I’m thinking spending the afternoon in bed with this guy sounds like a lot more fun.
“You just going to leave me hanging, Corp?” I ask, my mouth brushing against his as he kisses me again. “I just told you I think I love you.”
“I heard you,” he says, stopping to stare into my eyes. “I just wanted to let it soak in first before I said it back. I want to remember how this feels for the rest of my life.”
Isaiah’s fingers lace up the back of my neck, his palm cupping my jaw, and he brings his mouth onto mine once more.
“I lo
ve you, Maritza,” he whispers. “And I’ve known it was going to come to this since the day I left LA with your picture in my pocket. It just took losing you completely for me to finally accept it that my feelings were real and they weren’t going anywhere.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Isaiah
“So this is her? This is the girl who put the smile back on your face?” Ma rises from her chair as I bring Maritza inside.
The doctor’s switched up her prescriptions a bit since her hospitalization last week and ever since then, she’s become a completely different person, almost a better version of her previous self—the woman she was before she got sick. Granted, she still has a few moments where she’ll be tired or achy, but we’ve improved leaps and bounds from where we were before.
Originally, I didn’t want to bring Maritza around Mom until Mom was feeling up for visitors … just didn’t know it’d be so soon.
“Mom, this is Maritza.” I give my girl’s hand a reassuring squeeze that she probably doesn’t need. She didn’t seem the slightest bit nervous on our drive over here. In fact, she was pretty excited. “Maritza, this is my mother, Alba.”
Maritza releases my hand and meets my mother more than halfway across the small living room. “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”
“Likewise,” Ma says, eyes twinkling as she smiles. “I hear you’ll be joining us at Calista’s barbecue in a couple of weeks?”
Maritza nods. “Can’t wait. Isaiah says it’s your birthday?”
Ma’s brows rise and she swats her hand. “It’s a family barbecue that just so happens to be on my birthday. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you how old I’ll be. I quit counting a long time ago. And Isaiah, can you believe Ian said he can’t make it? Said he’s traveling for work or something.”
“I can believe it. And you’ll be fifty-seven,” I remind her.
“Shhh, shh, sh.” Ma silences me, wagging her finger. “In my mind, I’m still thirty-five. Forever thirty-five.”
“We’re only as old as we feel, right?” Maritza asks.
P.S. I Hate You Page 21
