© Copyright 2016 Micalea Smeltzer
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design and photography by Regina Wamba at Mae I Design
Edited and Formatted by Wendi Temporado of Ready, Set, Edit
A Love Like Ours
Ollie and Talia have always lived by two rules.
1. Live life to the fullest
2. Love each other with everything they have.
When the unthinkable happens Talia is left heartbroken and Ollie doesn't know how to fix it. Suddenly this fun-loving couple finds themselves struggling to find the good in life that used to come so readily to the both of them.
A gift from a friend presents them with the chance to travel the world. Something they were both once eager to do.
Hopping on a plane.
Unknown destinations.
Anything can happen…but can they find their way back to themselves?
A LOVE LIKE OURS
An original song written by Jordan Janson
All we wanted to do was ride the waves
in our secret hideaway.
Livin’ on the edge,
Open mind ahead.
And everything was going good,
Yeah everything was going right. But we face struggles, too.
Yeah, we face struggles too.
When we lived on the streets, together for years, kept on smiling, kept on pushing.
But this is a love like ours. Ohh, this is a love like ours.
So we keep on fighting.
Hopping on a plane. Smiles on our faces. Pretending the pain isn’t there, when really it won’t go away.
And the future we planned, in our secret hideaway, is no longer there. No, it’s no longer there. He had to tell me, I know it should have been me.
But we face struggles too, yeah we face struggles too.
How are we supposed to forget the pain that night, that’s everywhere I go?
But this is a love like ours.
Ohh, this is a love like ours.
So we keep on fighting.
So we keep on fighting.
Dear Reader,
A Love Like Ours features characters first introduced in The Road That Leads to Us. They made a much bigger impact in The Lies That Define Us. While this story can be read as a standalone, you might understand and appreciate their story better if you’ve read The Lies That Define Us. I’ve done my best to make the story easy to understand if you haven’t read The Lies That Define Us, but some things might not make perfect sense.
Like the Cheetos. ;)
~Micalea
Ollie
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
The sound of Talia’s heart hooked up to a million fucking monitors. The drab gray and white walls of the hospital room seem to grow closer with each beep. I know eventually she’s going to wake up, and I’m going to have to tell her what happened.
Getting that call …
Fuck.
I never expected anything like this when I answered the phone.
Shot.
The love of my life was shot. Not just her, but my best friend Liam, too, all because some psycho dude was after his girl. Somehow my girl got caught in the crossfire.
I hold her chilled hand in mine, willing some of my warmth to seep into her. Tears dampen my cheeks. I don’t think I’ve ever cried, at least, not since I was a kid, but I can’t seem to stop now.
Talia, the love of my life, was nearly taken from this world.
I’ve loved her since I was just a little kid, before I really even knew what love was. She’s been mine forever; we’re inseparable, and to think of living in a world where she doesn’t exist, where I don’t wake up to her smile every day, breaks my fucking heart.
I’d been so excited to embark on the next part of our journey together.
Parenthood.
But the trauma from her gunshot caused her to lose the baby. At least she’s here, but I know when she wakes up she won’t see it that way.
We both had a shitty childhood, raised in foster homes, and we eventually escaped together and started our own life. Things were finally good for us.
But I guess maybe they were too fucking good and now we’re being punished.
A tear escapes my eye, and I reach up to swipe it away.
This girl … this girl. She’s more than the love of my life, she’s the other half of my soul, my entire world. There is no me without her.
I lower my head to the bed and close my eyes. I can’t sleep, but looking at her lying broken and beaten in the hospital bed is too much for me to bear. I’ve always tried to fix everything for her, and this is one thing I can’t fucking fix.
Sometime later, a small voice speaks my name. “Ol … Ollie?”
My head whips up and I find Talia’s blue eyes staring back at me. She knows. She fucking knows.
“Hey, baby.” I lean over and kiss her forehead. “How are you feeling?”
She ignores the question. “T-The baby?” She asks, her voice hoarse and scratchy. “Is it …?” She lets the question hang in the air, but the truth already swims in her eyes.
I shake my head. “It’s gone.”
I watch as her face crumples, and that last shred of hope she’d been clinging to is severed—and I had to be the one to do it. I’m still holding her hand and she tightens her grip around me as she wails like she’s lost a part of her heart and soul. I guess, in a way, she has. We both have.
She leans halfway out of the bed, trying to get to me, and I wrap my body around hers like I can shield her from the whole world and the hurt that lives here.
But I can’t protect her.
I didn’t protect her.
And now our lives are forever altered and it’s no one else’s fault but my own.
Talia
Ten Months Later
Life goes on.
It’s what people tell you when a tragedy happens, as if that simple statement can erase the pain you feel. Life goes on—in other words, deal with it. The problem is, they don’t know how you feel, the pain that continues to live inside you. I may smile, and laugh, and frankly be in a good place now, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have days where it hurts so much I’d rather die.
I watch the mother and daughter in front of me as the little girl argues with her over wanting candy from the checkout lane. The poor mother looks frazzled and tired, bouncing a baby on her hip. The baby tugs on her ponytail, and the mother winces.
A familiar pang pierces my chest. If I hadn’t lost the baby in the accident, as I call it, he or she would be a few months old right now. I’d be that poor, frazzled mother with crazy eyes and only a few hours of sleep. It sounds dreadful, but I’d give anything for that to be me.
“Can you believe they only had ten bags of Cheetos? Ten.”
I look over my shoulder to see Ollie heading toward me with his arms full of Cheetos bags. I lean a little farther over, looking behind him, and see a few bags lying on the floor behind him.
“Looks like you lost a few there,” I point out as he dumps what he has in his arms into the cart.
The little girl’s eyes grow round as she stares at the overflowing pile of Cheetos.
“I have to go back and get the stragglers,” he announces, pushing his shaggy blond hair from his eyes.
The woman in front of me smiles for th
e first time, laughing softly as Ollie walks off to collect the rest of his beloved Cheetos.
“Men, they never grow up, do they?” she comments.
I smile back. “No, they don’t. Your kids are adorable.” I wave at the little girl, and she ducks her head shyly.
The woman pushes her cart forward as the checker finally begins scanning her items. “Thanks,” she tells me, bouncing the baby when he grows fussy. He slobbers on her shirt and she sighs. “No one warns you how hard parenthood is,” she remarks. “But even on the bad days, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” She smiles at her daughter and then reaches over for the candy bar they’d been arguing over only moments before and places it on the conveyer belt. The little girl’s eyes light up and she jumps up and down with excitement.
Ollie comes back with three more bags of Cheetos and drops them in the cart.
“I think—Talia?” He stops whatever he was going to say when he sees the look on my face. “Talia,” he says again softly, swallowing thickly.
I close my eyes, breathing out through my mouth. I wait for the pain in my chest to dissipate. I open my eyes slowly and the worry in Ollie’s gaze makes me feel slightly guilty. I don’t like worrying him.
“I’m okay.”
He brushes his fingers over my cheek. “You know, it’s okay to not be okay.”
“I know,” I mumble, looking away as the mother pays for her groceries.
“Talk to me,” he pleads.
I look around, shuffling my feet. “We’re in the store … can we just not? We need to get this stuff to Liam’s and I just … I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
Ollie frowns.
We’ve been together for a long time—so long that I can’t remember what life was really like without him in it—so that means we know each other better than anyone else. We’ve always been good at communicating, talking about the way we feel, we wouldn’t have stayed together this long if we weren’t good at that, but this is one those things that’s just too hard to talk about.
Ollie presses his lips together, and I know there’s more that he wants to say, but he also doesn’t want to upset me—because that’s Ollie, always wanting me to be happy.
Our items are scanned and Ollie pays with the cash Liam gave him.
Liam, our friend, decided it’d be a great idea to have a party to celebrate the beginning of summer. Last summer, I would’ve been ecstatic for that, but now? Not so much. It feels more like an obligation than anything else.
Ollie takes the change and loads the bags into the cart. His eyes keep flicking over to me, and I hate that he’s worrying about me. He’s done enough of that.
When all the bags are loaded into the cart, I push it outside with Ollie walking beside me.
Outside, the sun shines brightly and I squint, reaching for my sunglasses to put them on. I inhale the salty beach air, and like always, it reminds me of one of the many reasons I love Malibu.
Ollie and I grew up in foster care, both of us bouncing from one place to the next, until we finally found each other. We ended up being housed by the same foster family when we were ten. We were sixteen when we learned that he was being transferred to a new home and made the decision together to run away. Smart? Absolutely not. Best decision of my life? Yes. Irrevocably, yes. Living on the streets at that age was hard—understatement of the century—but I wouldn’t take it back for anything.
I stop behind Betty—our old, teal-blue-and-yellow, peeling paint, and rust-covered Volkswagen bus. She’s ancient, practically a relic, but she still runs better than you’d think and she’s never let us down.
Ollie opens the trunk and my bike rattles on the rack. He loads the bags into the back, and when the cart is empty, I return it.
When I get in the car he’s already started it and Spice Girls blasts from the speakers. The van only lets us play cassette tapes and we have quite a collection of “classics” at this point.
He glances at me, stone-faced, then when I least expect it, he starts belting out the song and shaking his shoulders in some sort of weird awkward dance.
Laughter bubbles out of my throat and soon I’m clutching my stomach because I’m laughing so hard.
Ollie being … well, Ollie—he gets really into it, doing some pretty impressive dance movies considering he’s sitting in the driver’s seat. There’s a lot of head banging going on, which totally doesn’t go with the song, so it only makes it funnier.
I laugh and laugh until tears stream down my face.
When the song finishes, Ollie collapses against his seat and gasps for air. “I didn’t know lip syncing was so exhausting.”
I wipe my tears away, unable to stop smiling. “I love you,” I tell him. “Thank you for always making me laugh.”
He smiles back and leans over, wrapping his hand around the back of my neck. He pulls me to him and presses his lips to my forehead. My eyes flutter closed at the feather-light touch. When he releases me, he murmurs, “I love you too, Tal.”
“Me and you against the world, right?” I whisper, echoing words we’ve said many times over the years.
He smiles back and his eyes are light and happy, but worry still tinges the edges.
“Me and you against the world,” he echoes.
“You know,” Ollie begins, plopping the groceries he holds down on the kitchen island in Liam’s house, “you normally cater all your fancy pants parties. Why are you not doing that this time?”
Liam puts his phone down on the counter and narrows his eyes on all the bags. “What the fuck? Did you buy every bag of Cheetos they had?”
Ollie grins and nods, his blond curls bouncing slightly when he does. “Hell yeah, you gave me cash and told me to get some party food. Cheetos are party food. There’s also some beer in there somewhere and a pack of hot dogs. You did say to get hot dogs, right?” Ollie glances at me with horror-stricken eyes. “Fuck, I forgot the buns.”
I laugh and shake my head, poking his butt. “Found some.”
Liam shakes his head. “You guys are so weird.”
Ollie wraps his arm around me and grins at Liam. “And you think you’re not? That’s cute.”
Liam shakes his head.
He and his girlfriend, my friend, Ari, were a part of the accident ten months ago, and like me, they’ve had some trouble letting the horrors of that night leave them. Liam now, though, seems to be the happiest I’ve ever known him.
“Where’s Ari?” I ask.
I have to admit my friendship with her has been strained since the accident. I don’t blame her—although she continuously reminds me that I have every right to—but it’s like we don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. I think we’re both tiptoeing around the other, scared of saying the wrong thing, and it sucks.
“She’s outside,” Liam answers, tossing his thumb over his shoulder like I don’t know where the outside is. “We should head out there.”
I watch Liam carefully. He’s up to something. That much is obvious.
I trail behind Ollie and Liam. Outside, it’s empty, which I wasn’t expecting.
This keeps getting weirder and weirder.
There’s a steep set of stairs that lead from the back of Liam’s house down to the beach, and that’s where he’s taking us.
Ollie glances back, giving me a speculative look, and I’m happy to see he’s as confused as I am.
Our feet plunge into the sand—my flip-flops are instantly full of the stuff—and then Liam leads us further down the beach. I can see a gathering of people and I assume this is where he decided to have his party. I’m used to his parties spilling out of his house, into the yard, and beach, so for him to have everyone gathered down here a ways is weird.
We get closer to the group and suddenly they shout, “Surprise! Happy Birthday!”
I collide into Ollie’s back when he stops and he curses, immediately turning around and making sure I’m okay.
I rub my forehead and give him a sheepish smile. “Sorry.�
�
“S’okay.” He grabs my free hand, pulling me beside him. I lean into his side and Liam stands across from us with a big grin.
“Happy Birthday, Ollie.” Liam smiles, spreading his arms wide.
It’s then that a see a bunch of our friends, a DJ, and enough food to feed an army.
“Um … thanks,” Ollie hesitates. “But it’s not my birthday.” To me, he hisses, “Is this like that stunt he pulled with Ari last year? I’m confused.”
Before I can respond, Liam speaks.
“Your birthday is next week but you’re not going to be here next week.”
Ollie and I exchange confused glances.
I’m pretty sure I’ve stepped into the twilight zone.
“Um … yeah I am,” Ollie says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Liam shakes his head. “I’m getting ahead of myself. Come here, both of you.”
He crooks his finger for us to follow him, leading us to a table stacked with gifts. Ari stands there with her therapy dog—a yellow lab named Frieda. She pets the dog’s head and gives me a small smile.
“Hi,” she says before looking away awkwardly.
My stomach clenches. Not because I’m mad at her, but because I don’t know what to say. This awkwardness that has existed between us for almost a year sucks, but neither of us can figure out what to say to the other. We’re stuck in this weird back and forth.
“It might be your birthday, but this is a gift for the both of you, from both of us.” Liam hands Ollie a slim rectangular box like one might put a piece of jewelry in, but jewelry doesn’t make sense in this situation.
Liam throws his arm around Ari’s shoulder and she leans into him, placing one hand on his stomach.
“Go on, open it,” Liam urges.
Everyone gathered watches us, curious about what’s in the mystery box. I spot Jeremiah and Brady, two of our surfing friends, and wave.
Brady cups his hands around his mouth. “Stop fucking waving and open the box!”
I laugh and look up at Ollie. “I think they want us to open the box.”
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