If You Hear Me

by Jenn LeBlanc

  I nod, and as our tears mix so too do our bodies as though we’d never been apart, as though all we learned so long ago on so many nights together prepared us for this most perfect moment. He knows exactly where to touch me, exactly how to touch me. But he’s bigger, grander, and harder by measure.

  “Slow,” I whisper. “I haven’t…” and our shared breath becomes yet another kiss.

  We manage to move and shift and strip until we’re at the pillows and he’s on top of me again, shifting my hips against him. I point at my bedside table, and he reaches into the drawer then he’s tearing open a condom packet, slipping it on, and slipping into me, and I’ve never felt this fullness before. It’s as though every bit of me grew except for this one part and I’m wet, but I’m sore from the stretch…then…my mind spins on the reality, the truth of it all, and I push against his chest. “Please,” I say, and he slides free, his eyebrows drawn together. “I’m sorry,” I say and I’m perfectly horrified.

  He shakes his head, then puts his hand against my mons as his gaze stays on mine and he goes slow, asking permission for every move, every touch in the way his hands gentle, in the way his breath stills, in the way his eyes find mine.

  Then he’s moving down my body, his mouth on my breasts, his hands pushing them together, his face buried between their fullness. “These are new, and I’m so thankful,” he says and laughs before he licks my chest then blows a soft breath across me, sending shivers down my spine.

  I nod. “Mon Dieu oui, comme ça.”

  He slides farther down, his fingers tracing the strength evident in my abdomen, and I watch as his head twitches when he sees the stretch marks at the edges, just little feathers that signal old changes. They’re small and so faded he probably doesn’t even know what they are, but his fingers trace them nonetheless.

  He pushes my legs wide and in one perfect glide his tongue finds my clitoris as his finger comes inside me to that perfect spot, the perfect softness behind my pelvic bone that makes me scream and undulate against his mouth with such abandon I’m trying to remember my own name, but his…his I know as I’ve always known, as though it was born with me and was part of me even before I had one for myself.

  “Daniel,” I say and tangle my hands in his blond hair and I pull him tight as I come against his tongue, and it’s one of the best moments of my life. “Daniel. Mon Dieu.”

  He crawls back over me, his thumb smoothing across the faded stretch marks, a dent between his eyebrows as he considers them before kissing his way up my abdomen. But it’s too late to ignore them, and I panic at the thought of having to tell him everything so soon.

  Six

  Daniel

  She’s everything I remember and more. I’m a little surprised by the fact that she was so tight as to be uncomfortable, but I’m sure we’ll get past that. I’m sure we’ll get there. I slide the condom off and drop it off the side of the bed as I kiss my way back up her body, enjoying the shivers she gives me with each touch, each kiss, each lick. “Camellia, I love you.”

  She sits up suddenly, her eyes wide. “I think you should go.”

  “I—” Wait. “I…Camellia, I…”

  “No, listen, we just needed to get this out of our systems, right? This was just a quick fling and we can both move on now…right? We’re fine now. If I get the position with the symphony, we’ll be fine, because we worked this out.”

  Because I can’t help myself, I look down at my still-hard dick and wonder what it is she thinks I got out of my system. “Wait…no. I haven’t worked anything out of my system. That’s not— That isn’t— We haven’t— No, Camellia, that’s not what just happened. If anything, I know for a fact we should be together. We should be… Wait.” She stands from the bed and pulls a T-shirt from a drawer and puts it on, and I want to scream at the loss of her skin. “Cam, what just happened?”

  She shakes her head, and I can see panic in her eyes. “No, no, I think you should go and we can talk later.”

  “Camellia,” I say, but she’s picking up my clothes and pushing them at me and I can’t figure out what just happened. I tuck my dick in my pants as best I can, but I can’t just leave. “Please,” I say, and she stops and looks at me. “Can we start over?”

  “From what point?” she says, and I don’t know what to say. “Did you want to start from the DJ booth, or did you want to go back and start over from the very beginning? Did you want to go all the way back to when we first met and rewrite that history?”

  “No, well—some of it maybe, if it would change the fact that you left—”

  “I didn’t leave. I was taken. Let’s get that straight right now before we take one more step. A fifteen-year-old girl cannot leave the country under her own power.”

  “No, of course not. I didn’t mean that, and no, I don’t want to go back and change everything we were to each other. I meant…yesterday, I guess.”

  “So, you’d rather walk away from me when we danced, or before that?”

  “No.”

  “Then when? What do you want to change about that?”

  “Why are you trying to set traps for me? I don’t want to walk away from you at all.”

  “You don’t even know me. You just stuck your face in the pussy of a woman you didn’t give your name to first.”

  That stops me cold. I take her arms and hold her still so she’ll look at me. “Oh, no I didn’t. You know my name and I know yours like I know your body and that wicked scent that seems to have only bloomed. You’re the same Camellia I knew ten years ago even if you’re a completely different person now. You’re my Camellia,” I say. I run my hand down her arms to her hands. “You’re the same person I fell in love with, the same person I promised my world to. I know you, Camellia. I know we can’t pick up right where we were. I understand that on some level and I was…I was overwhelmed. I’m sorry, it was too soon for this, and I want to start over from today. I don’t regret kissing you on the dance floor, I don’t regret anything that’s happened today, but can we just…can we slow down for a moment and talk? Let’s start there. Let’s go on some dates. Let’s go for a walk right now. Let’s get some dinner. Let’s do something, but let’s not walk away from each other like this is nothing. Let’s not do that. Let’s do anything but that. I want to relearn everything about you. Please, let me,” I say, then I look into her eyes. “Please.”

  Her hands tighten on mine and I’m so hopeful in this moment that it feels like my heart is going to beat right out of my chest. It’s difficult to keep quiet but I said everything I needed to say and I can’t think of anything more I should say right now. So I wait for her. Patience may be a virtue but it’s also incredibly painful.

  She shakes her head and looks away, the waning light through the windows catching her eyes as her gaze becomes unfocused. She thinks, and I wait. “Let’s—” she says, but she stops, then blinks, and I wait some more.

  Meli

  I’m not sure what I should do. I feel…adrift. Wanting. But I can’t figure out if this wanting is because he’s here or because I want him to leave or…because it’s over and I think I need to get used to this feeling. I’m trying to lie to myself, and it’s not working. I want him. Still. Always, but there are questions I simply can’t answer right now and there are things I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to tell him.

  It’s not that I don’t know how he will react. It’s that I don’t know what my reaction will be. What happened changed my life in ways I still can’t quantify. And adding the death of my parents on top of everything else that happened…

  I close my eyes. “Dinner. Let’s start with dinner.”

  He squeezes my hands and turns to the pile of clothes I threw at him and starts to dress. “You name the time and place, and I’ll be there. Wherever, whenever.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I…don’t want to but I will if you’re promising me dinner. If you’re telling me this isn’t the end, I trust you and I’ll be here when you tell me t
o be here.”

  I watch him for a moment then I decide. “Now,” I say. “My kitchen.”

  “Okay,” he says as he fastens his jeans and looks at me, and I get my first real glimpse of how much of a man he’s actually become. When I knew him before he was a rail, skinny and gangly and just…boy. But now his chest is defined and cut, his muscles separated by ligaments, shifting with every move he makes. He raises his arms and lets them fall against his sides and those fucking sexy muscles over his ribs that lead down to the most defined— I turn and walk out. That he’s beautiful is neither here nor there. I hear a soft laugh as I walk away from him, down the hall to the kitchen. He knows, of course he does. No man with a body like that doesn’t know how a body that looks like that affects someone else.

  As I pull the dishes out—the pots and the strainer, the vegetables to chop—I think about the man he was with while I was gone. That’s how I found him the first time. He was dating a model who was so beautiful it made my eyes hurt to look at him and…I need to know what that was. Not because it was a man, but because they still end up in the news together occasionally and— Okay. I found Daniel. I need to stop stalking him. There will be time for questions. Lots of questions and lots of answers.

  But not from me—I’m not ready yet for answers. I need to be the questions for now. For a while. For as long as I can distract him from what happened to me. Because the last thing he needs to learn right now is that he was a father. For one brief, shining moment, he was the father of the most beautiful girl in the world and…I can’t look him in the eye and tell him that I’ve kept that from him all these years.

  “So what’s for dinner?” he asks as he takes a seat at the kitchen bar.

  “Food,” I say with a smile. I stab a knife into my cutting board. “I’m not your cook. Get over here and cut these vegetables.”

  He smiles and comes around the bar and wiggles the knife out of the wood before reaching for the tomatoes. “How do you want these?”

  “Small cubes but not destroyed. Have a care,” I reply and set water to boil on the stove as I pull the pasta from the cabinet.

  “Is this your first trip to the U.S.?”

  “No,” I say, and he looks over his shoulder at me.

  “You’ve been back before?”

  “No,” I repeat. “What I meant was, no…you’re not asking the questions.”

  “Oh, okay, well then…ask away.”

  “I’m trying to think,” I reply, but the questions in my head are coming so fast and muddled that I can’t figure out where to start.

  “I graduated from the conservatory,” he says quietly. “I came home after that. I didn’t go on to understudy with Leonine.”

  “But that was your position to give away. You had that locked down, I know you did. You know you did.”

  “I did, and I gave it away. My heart wasn’t there, I…”

  “You’re going to blame me for—”

  “No, no.” He turns me to him and takes my elbows in his hands. “No, absolutely not. It wasn’t you. It was my choice. I could have worked through it. I could have gone on. It was still mine to give away, and I did. I gave it away. It was my choice. I came back to L.A. and did some soundtrack work with the studios. I kept up with my independent work and eventually I took an understudy position when I felt strong enough to be truly competitive. I needed to rebuild that fire. I’d lost it. But it was me who walked away from that. It was all me.”

  I nod, but I don’t believe him. He was set to go on to the internship before I left and he was so excited about it. I know he didn’t do it because of me, and he can’t con me into thinking otherwise. This is the missing piece—I hadn’t found out what happened once he left. There’s a hole in his bio that nobody seemed to be able to fill for me, and there it was. He gave it all up because of me. I feel sick at the thought because my hope at the time was that his life wouldn’t be ruined by what happened. There was no hope for me, but if it had to be that way, I was hopeful that he’d be saved. I turn back to the stove to stir the pasta, and he runs his hands up and down my arms for a moment before he releases me and goes back to chopping.

  We’re silent for a while. The sound of the boiling water and the knife on the block are oddly comforting and peaceful, and my racing heart calms enough that I begin to think about the past and actually smile.

  I loved him. I loved him so strong and so much that it filled me, and when I was taken back to France, I never thought I’d recover, except that I had his baby inside me, Isabeau, growing strong and sure. The first time she kicked I knew we’d find him someday and we’d be a family, I just knew it to my bones that we’d all be together again…someday. The dreams of a child.

  That won’t ever happen now, but the two of us are here, and if I can calm down enough to talk to him and to get through the missing pieces, maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to have the forever I dreamed of with just the two of us.

  I close my eyes and run my hand down my abdomen, remembering the feel of her growing, then realize I’ve started crying and try to stop myself—wiping the tears away quickly—but not quick enough.

  Seven

  Daniel

  The stifled sound of her tears rips my chest open and I turn to her, leaning my hips against the counter behind me. I cross my arms against my chest to prevent myself from touching her, since she keeps shrugging me off. “This is what I know, Cam. We were once something so strong that we believed nobody could touch us. We believed we were invincible.”

  “We were children,” she says, but I hold my hand up, asking for patience.

  “I imagine that’s just a product of being fifteen, but the fact is I can still feel whatever that was here between us now. I believe if we walk away, again, from something so strong that we’ve managed to come back together ten years later, and we’re both still wrecked from the loss of each other, that we need to do something about it. We need to try to figure this out, get through the past and see if we can fix whatever was so broken between us that we didn’t reach out to each other for so long.”

  “You didn’t know where I was,” she said quietly.

  “I did. I mean…” I take a deep breath because I want to be truthful in everything I say to her, but what comes next hurts. It’s not easy to remember these things, mostly because from the perspective of adulthood I feel like I gave up too easily. “Your parents turned me away several times and I stopped trying for a while, after Paris. Because it hurt so much, every single time I failed. My parents begged me to stop tracking you down and trying to contact you. I think…at the time I thought maybe your parents had threatened my family somehow, but I don’t know what they could have said that would scare my parents so badly, so I just kinda figured it was because they were afraid of what might happen if I decided to take off for France. Because I talked about it. I was willing to go. Your father…”

  “He wasn’t a friendly man,” she says, and I look up. She looks so sad, so devastated. She turns and leans against the counter next to me, playing with her lower lip as she looks away.

  “No. It wasn’t until later that I learned they’d died since I was actively trying to avoid you, but if I’d known when it happened, I’d have come to you.”

  She nods and crosses her arms over her chest then swings one foot out and kicks my toe. “Hey. I know how my parents can be—could be. I mean, they took me away from you.”

  “Was that it? Did they find out about us? Is that what happened?”

  “Sort of. Yes. Basically. There’s more but I—”

  I can feel her tense and cut her off. “It’s okay, we have time. You aren’t going anywhere for at least three months if you get through the tryouts and possibly for a much longer time. We have time, if you’ll give us time.”

  “Don’t put this all on me.”

  “I’m not…trying to. I won’t. I’m not entirely sure how to… I mean, if it were up to me we’d have all the time in the world. I just—” I feel like I’m walking on the
most pothole-ridden street in the world and I’m not doing a good job of navigating it.

  “I only mean that you need to be able to walk away if something goes wrong. You don’t know…you just don’t know, ten years is a lot of time and space. A lot can happen in ten years,” she says then turns back to the stove and pulls a noodle from the pot and flings it at the wall. It sticks, so she pulls the pot from the stove and strains the pasta in the sink, tossing it with olive oil. “Grate this cheese and let’s eat,” she says, and I smile and grate cheese faster than I’ve ever grated cheese in my life and I manage to keep all my digits. Miracle of miracles. She takes the tomatoes and cheese, adds fresh basil she chopped to smithereens and a few other spices and tosses it all in one bowl, covering it with another before shaking it up and flipping it over. “Dinner,” she says, and I smile and follow her to the small table by the balcony with a couple of glasses of water.

  “So…”

  “Eat,” she says, pointing at me with a fork full of pasta. “Just for a few minutes, shove some food in that grin and put that mouth to good use.”

  I smile. “That I can do.”

  After quietly doing dishes side by side, she pulls me to the sofa. She pulls up Netflix, where she queues up something called Crazy Head. It ends up being pretty hilarious, and we make it through two episodes before she’s yawning against my shoulder.

  “You should get some rest,” I say, and she nods. “I should…” I don’t finish the thought, hoping she tells me what I should do, and that what I should do includes staying here with her.

  She sits up and smiles at me because she’s too smart to be played. “You can stay,” she says. “But you’re sleeping with your clothes on like this is primary school and my bedroom door is open.”