Just Let Go

by Alessandra Thomas

  It was amazing how everything you’d ever used the time and energy to care about your entire life could be negated by just one broken heart.

  I hauled myself off my couch and yanked the door open, hating myself for not having given Mark a key. I hadn’t given anyone a key, I realized. If I died alone in this house, something that was looking more and more likely by the day, nobody would find me until my body started to smell. There was no one close enough to me to notice or care. Not even a cat.

  God, even when he was a pathetic single guy, Mark had a cat.

  “How is Hawthorne, anyway?” I asked him, and he looked at me quizzically as he crossed to my kitchen island and set down two six packs of beer and a bottle of vodka. I chuckled to myself at my joke.

  “I think you had most of that conversation in your head without me, buddy,” Mark said, looking at me with concern etched across his brow.

  Dammit, he was right.

  “She dumped you, huh?” Mark asked, clapping me on the shoulder with one hand and tugging my drawer open for a bottle opener with the other.

  “No. I dumped her.” It sounded so dumb, so unreal to me, that I groaned and covered my eyes with my hand.

  “No. I don’t believe that.”

  I nodded, taking a long pull off the beer he’d brought me. I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out – it was warm, cheap, and tasted like piss.

  He still noticed that I thought it was gross. “It was all I had. Maybe that means you won’t drink the whole pack and you’ll be able to tell me what the actual hell happened to make you break up with the only girl I’ve ever see you truly crazy for.”

  “That can’t be true,” I scoffed, drinking again. Might as well drink fast so I didn’t have to taste as much of the shit. “You knew me when I dated…” but I couldn’t think of a single woman I’d dated that I’d even felt close to the same way about as I had Natalia. Every time I got close to an “I love you” or a “come meet my parents” with someone I was seeing, things cooled off and then, within a few weeks or even a couple months, died.

  As badly as I wanted someone to love forever, a family to surround myself with, none had ever seemed right. Until her.

  “Fuck me, Mahler,” I cursed while staring down into my lap. “Fuck.”

  “No thanks, bro. That’s Natalia’s job.”

  I shot him a poisonous glare, and only felt a little guilty about it.

  “You fucked up, huh?” he asked, nodding like he knew anything about it.

  “No, she –”

  “You’re saying she made you break up with her? What, she held a gun to your head?”

  * * *

  “No, she held a gun to hers.”

  His brows pulled together, and a truly lost expression took over his face. “You lost me.”

  I sighed and took another pull from the beer bottle, trying to gather my thoughts in that one long swig. “Remember the last time she left the city? What she was going to do?”

  “Oh…” Mark said with a slow nod. “That’s right. She was doing that bull-running thing. Obviously, she survived.” He watched me with an eyebrow raised, waiting for me to connect the dots.

  “Came home with a six-inch scar next to her navel. She liked it. Loved, it actually. Wanted to do more… I don’t know. Adrenaline-inducing shit.”

  “So?”

  “So she did. Base jumping, sky diving, gun slinging. The whole nine yards. And then she went the extra mile. She started doing this stunt actress thing.” I closed my eyes tight and covered them with a closed palm, leaning forward to set my beer on the coffee table. It was suddenly too heavy for me to hold. “Jumping off buildings, stunt driving. Stuff like that. Dangerous shit, man. And I thought I convinced her she didn’t need to do it anymore, but today, she accepted another job. A really scary one.”

  “Oh. Man. She was a stunt driver, wasn’t she? That’s what she left town to do this time, isn’t it?”

  Suddenly, I couldn’t get any words out. It took everything in me to swallow the lump in my throat back down so it didn’t turn into tears. Every time – every damn time I imagined her driving that motorcycle too fast, cutting the wheel too severely to the side, putting herself at the mercy of a two thousand pound cage of steel, plastic and rubber, my brain shorted out. So I just nodded.

  “Ethan, I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks,” I half-choked.

  “So,” he continued gingerly. “Just to get the story straight for myself. You gave her an ultimatum, said you can’t be together if she was going to put herself at risk with the death-trap job. And she chose the crazy car driving over a life with you.”

  “Pretty much,” I said. I cleared my throat, mentally banishing the sobs lying in the wings. “It’s a motorcycle, not a car.” God, I missed her. Soul deep, already. It was like she’d turned her back on me and not only left a hole in my life, but in the entire damn city. She probably hadn’t even gone yet. She was probably still in Philly, close enough for me to get to her, even though I didn’t have the choice to go to her. Not really. Not anymore.

  “So, then, I gather you were dumb enough to stick with your stupid threat?”

  My eyes snapped open. I would have sat up rigidly straight if I wasn’t so bone tired. “What the fuck, dude?”

  “I’m just saying. I know ‘pathetic in love’ when I see it. That’s where I am. I have no clue where things are going between me and Toby, absolutely no idea whether there’s even a way for them to work out. But hell if I don’t love her. She doesn’t want what I want… what I think I want. I’m going to ride it out, though. However long it lasts.”

  “Except for you, there’s not really a high chance in it ending with her traumatic death,” I muttered, half-hating my friend and half appreciating the hell out of him just for being here.

  “If I didn’t understand where your emotions were coming from, I would ask if you were sure you weren’t the one acting on a drama movie set.”

  If looks could kill, the one I shot him would have been instant murder. If it hadn’t been clouded with tears. “Not funny.”

  “Seriously, though. You are so afraid of losing her that you push her out of your life because you anticipate her early traumatic death? How the fuck does that make any sense?”

  “C’mon, man. You know my mom –”

  “– I know she lived an utterly and completely safe life until a freak accident killed her. I know Natalia has been doing things that you seem to think spell instant doom and guess what? She’s not dead yet. The universe doesn’t work on an actuarial table, Ethan.”

  “I know,” I said quietly. “I just… she didn’t care enough about me to keep herself safe.”

  “Nobody’s ever safe,” Mark said. “Horrible accidents happen all the time to people who live perfectly boring lives. There are no guarantees. You can’t try to write a contract with the universe, Ethan.”

  * * *

  That was when it finally happened. Every worry, every guilt, every horrible nightmare I’d had reliving the moment I heard Mom died, purged itself in a deluge of big, fat, silent tears. Mark saw, and let me cry. When I sniffled, then sobbed, he moved next to me on the couch and gripped my shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey. It’s okay. Call her.”

  “I can’t now.” I told him about her dad, about how Natalia was being pulled in so many different directions and had just thrown herself in another. “She probably just wanted to get away from it all. Including me,” I said miserably.

  “Then tomorrow. Let her cool off, then call her. Tell her you want her. Okay? Tell her you’ll make it work. For now… drink it off.”

  I clicked the neck of my bottle against his. My heart ached for Natalia, but it also knew that going after her tonight would only make things worse. Mark was right – I was in love, but I was not an idiot. “To tomorrow,” I slurred, only vaguely registering his answering chuckle.

  “Yeah, man. There’s always tomorrow.”

  Chapter 28

  N
atalia

  If Papá hadn’t been sedated when I left the hospital, I would have never been able to leave Philly. Just the way that he looked into my eyes broke my heart. I couldn’t look back into them and tell him I was about to break his.

  Amalia understood when I told her I needed to go to New York for this job. For all the hard work I’d done re-establishing the gym, she had worked just as hard keeping herself apprised of all the ins and outs of operations. I promised her I’d check in remotely every morning and every evening. I wouldn’t even be gone that long, I’d told her, parroting Carol’s promise. It was just two scenes, and I’d be on my way back to Philly.

  I should have known it wouldn’t be that simple. Nothing ever was.

  I checked into my hotel room, just a few blocks from the set where we’d be filming. Carol had told me I’d be riding a motorcycle – something I’d done once or twice on my travels, once down a dirt road in the countryside, and another across cobblestones, which rattled my jaw so severely I could still feel it vibrating hours later. I’d tried out a stunt cycle once, on the relative safety of a movie set, though I’d never ended up filming for that scene. I’d loved every second of every ride.

  It was the promise of zooming somewhere on a roaring bike, my hair whipping through the air, that kept me distracted enough from the memory of Ethan’s face, etched with pain, as I walked away from him. I’d known that I was breaking every bit of trust we’d built between us to smithereens. I knew that he would see my actions as proof that I hadn’t meant what I’d said when I’d told him I loved him.

  What I hadn’t told him, what I couldn’t tell him as I walked away from him, was that I was doing this precisely because I loved him. Loved him so much that I wanted a life with him, and that I wanted to see if I could keep my need for heart-pumping thrills and a devotion to him balanced. He’d answered that question for me even before I left the Philadelphia City limits. He’d broken my heart doing it.

  I knew now that I’d be lucky to ever see Ethan again. It hurt like hell, but I deserved it.

  My dreams of flying down the streets of Manhattan with an engine rumbling between my thighs were squashed when an exhausted-looking production assistant pointed me to a dingy-windowed warehouse, saying we’d be filming inside. Well, I reasoned as I tried to cheer myself up, I’d still be riding a motorcycle. And I was getting paid. And I was going to be on television, for crying out loud. Maybe this was where the rest of my life really would begin. Maybe the gaping hole that had been torn in my heart by leaving Ethan alone and broken-looking in the hospital corridor would start to be filled in by a stunt work career that would begin today.

  Carol called me after I’d already made it to hair and makeup. I was familiar with this part of the process – my makeup had to be caked on so heavily that, in the rare instance any part of my face couldn’t be spliced out of a shot, I looked enough like the actress to allow the shot to be included. The makeup artist was in the process of gluing false eyelashes on as my phone chirped to life on my lap.

  “So, darling, I have some news,” Carol squawked into the phone before I even had a chance to greet her. “Good news and bad news. Bad news, they won’t be able to do the helmet like we discussed.”

  “But, Carol, I –” As excited as I’d been about this job, at least some of Ethan’s protests had sunk in to my sensibilities. I’d told Carol I wanted to wear safety gear.

  “Good news, honey, you’re not even outside. No other cars. So, much less danger, yeah?”

  “But if –” I swallowed my jumbled arguments. There was no point. Carol didn’t know, and didn’t care, about all the dangers Ethan had worried to me about in those quiet moments we’d spent together over the last several weeks.

  “You’re going to be great. They told me there’s a strong harness net, cushions galore, probably only need to do a couple takes. You couldn’t hit your head if you tried. Okay?”

  I blew out a long breath, probably filling Carol’s ear with static. She wouldn’t hear my answer anyway. Besides, even though I’d made promises to Ethan, he probably hated my guts now. What was the point in protesting the inevitable. This was what I wanted to be doing. I had chosen to be here, riding a motorcycle – indoors, somehow – without a helmet. “Net. And cushions,” I reiterated into the phone, showing Carol I’d heard her.

  “Call me when you’re done, okay, doll face?”

  “Sure thing,” I said, willing as much confidence as I could into my voice before clicking off. The stunt coordinator stuck his head into the makeup room seconds later, getting the hair stylist’s approval before whisking me off to meet my ride.

  “Now, it’s all pretty standard,” the stunt coordinator, a muscled bald man named Gary, told me. “We’re just going to do the one today.” I felt thankful for all my gym training as we practically jogged up three flights of concrete stairs inside the vast abandoned warehouse where we’d apparently be doing today’s filming. We arrived at a concrete platform at the top of the last set of stairs we climbed, where a gorgeous gleaming Harley waited for me.

  She was poised pointing down the stairs, and suddenly it hit me – I’d be riding the motorcycle down the stairs.

  “The front wheel goes in this track here, honey.” A steel track ran down the middle of the stairs, and was painted a solid matte green so it could be erased with CGI in post production. “We literally just need you to hold on to the handlebars. You’ll go down the stairs, back up the track and over the ledge.”

  My eyes followed where he pointed, taking in the way the green track did indeed end where the ledge did. As promised, twenty feet beyond, a sturdy net waited to stop my path and drop me onto a thick green cushion below.

  “And the bike? How will it …”

  * * *

  “On a tether, honey,” Gary chuckled, clapping my shoulder. “Carol said you were familiar with bike work. This bike won’t even fall.”

  “Bikes, yes. It’s just been awhile since I… you know. Have ridden them off cliffs. Or staircases.” That was a gross exaggeration. I had never ridden a motorcycle off anything. Still, I ignored the dryness that had taken over my mouth and throat like slowly spreading scales. I was filming for a primetime television show with a major network. The budget was through the roof, and everything looked safe. Gary had everything under control.

  I nodded, swallowing the dryness away and approaching the absolute beauty of a bike with authority. “Okay,” I said, straddling her and gripping the handles with my newly manicured hands. Action heroines, after all, had to have flawlessly shiny nails. This was show business.

  I took a deep breath, settling my bottom on the seat. You should have a helmet, at least. The thought rose to the front of my mind, sounding annoyingly like Ethan’s voice. Gary had just explained to me why I didn’t need a helmet, and yet here was Ethan’s stupid paranoia, somehow having hitchhiked with me to New York. Even though I had explicitly not invited him.

  Even though part of me would have given anything to know that I could go back to the hotel and find him waiting for me. A very strong, simple part of my brain wanted him in my life, even though I didn’t want my life to be simple at all.

  I said a little prayer as I revved the motorcycle engine, re-familiarizing myself with the feel of my heel dropping back and the purring engine under my body.

  “When I say action, just tip her forward and brace for the movement, okay honey?” Gary called from his position beside the camera. Unable to get any actual words, I gave a thumbs up, then gripped both handles again, waiting for the call.

  What happened next stretched on for long, torturous minutes, or only a split second. It was impossible for me to tell as I tipped down the stairs, then back up over the railing, hurtling through the air with the bike between my legs for a single, breathless moment before I felt the net brush my face. The bike fell down and must have snapped back on its tether, but my body kept hurtling forward against that rough, blessed net. Instead of catching me and bouncing me on its promi
sed trajectory downward, though, it gave way. It only took me half a breath to realize that I wouldn’t, in fact, be bouncing on the green cushion below. I would continue moving forward – right toward the old, dusty warehouse window.

  The last sound I remembered was a crazy, high-pitched scream filling my ears and drowning out all thoughts. Only later would I learn that the primal, otherworldly sound had torn forth from my own throat, right before my body hurtled through the glass.

  Chapter 29

  Ethan

  I was getting way too old for this.

  Mark had stayed through the two six-packs of beer that he’d brought, then ordered a pizza and two more. We’d blown through those, too, as the sun sunk low behind the Philly skyline and Hawthorne yowled for food. It was then, stumbling through the kitchen cupboards for the bag of his kibble, that Mark had announced that Toby was coming to pick him up and that he would leave me alone in his misery. That was fine with me. For the past several hours, I’d been on the verge of crying. I wasn’t too macho to admit that all I wanted to do was bury my face in the pillows on my bed that still smelled just like her and weep like a baby. That was exactly what I did for the handful of seconds before the alcohol and exhaustion sent me into a deep, fitful sleep.

  I woke up the next morning and checked my phone first thing. Not a single damn call from her. Not even a text. Of course, my first reaction, to chug a gallon of water and punch it out at the gym, depressed me today. Natalia wouldn’t be there, and the whole time I stood at The Knockout I’d be reminded of her. Plus, Amalia might ask questions – ones I didn’t know how to answer. So instead, I jogged around the neighborhood, stopping often to adjust my headphones in case I got a call.

  I knew Natalia was on a job in New York. I knew I could go after her, beg her not to do the stunt, whatever the hell it was. I also knew that would be the one surefire way to drive her even farther away from me.