by Lillie Vale
I jolted. I’d always assumed he was as lonely as I was, wanting to look busy on his phone so no else knew just how much.
“Eventually you made new friends, though,” says Milan, “and . . . it sucked when you told me stories or talked about people I didn’t know. I didn’t want to get recaps for every story; I wanted to just know it, because I’d lived it with you.
“I could never bring myself to say goodbye in order to hit the books or go to class. I told myself I’d work into the night to get back on track, but with the time difference . . . you were three hours behind, and I hated not falling asleep together. So all those times we video chatted or watched movies together, you assumed I was done with my assignments, but the truth was I usually hadn’t even started. And eventually I couldn’t catch up anymore.”
I’ve never felt smaller. Milan thought I’d see him in a different light when I knew the truth, but no, this speaks volumes about me.
In the beginning, aware of the time difference between California and North Carolina, I’d jokingly told him to go to bed, and he’d always waved me off by saying he didn’t have an early morning class the next day. I’d just assumed it was fine, that he was managing his time well.
“So . . . um . . . now you know.” He rubs at his nose, giving me a weak smile.
I can’t return it. “I’m so sorry,” I say.
His forehead scrunches into lines. “For what?”
I swallow. “I had no idea.”
He shakes his head swiftly. “There’s no reason you should have. Like you said, I had good study habits in high school. You couldn’t have known.”
“But I took it for granted that you had a handle on everything. I feel so selfish now.”
“You were eighteen,” he corrects. “In a new, exciting place doing exactly what you wanted to be doing. It wasn’t your job to look out for—”
“Of course it was, Milan! We were in a relationship.” I shake my head.
“Rita, no. I was wrong to unload that voicemail when you had zero clue about what was going on. I could have told you at any time, but I didn’t. The last six years are not on you.”
But of course they are. How can they not be?
Maybe he sees some of the despair on my face, because he leans in, eyes softening. “I’m so sorry for that voicemail. And for not coming to see you when you came back home. And for freaking out on you yesterday. I was one hundred percent trying to pick a fight because it hurt too much to be that close to you and not tell you how I felt.”
I understand. “But the longer we were here, the more you wanted to stay,” I whisper.
His throat bobs as he jerks his head Yes.
“I want to show you something,” I say, holding out my hand. “Come with me.”
We go to the dining room so I can show him the trestle table. The wide legs are the perfect canvas for the beach panorama. Wild ponies trekking between sand dunes and tall, wispy beach grass painted in soft shades of brown. Bluebill Cottage overlooking the faded footprints that go from one side of the table to the other.
I hang back, let Milan follow the tracks around the corner. His eyes widen when he sees the side view of the couple. They could be anybody; small and featureless, except for one thing.
The parakeet-green scrunchie worn in the girl’s dark hair.
He crouches down, hands gripping the table edge.
“This is the scrunchie I returned to you at your house,” he states.
“Yes.”
He rises, meeting my eyes. “Is this what you’ve been working on?”
I nod. “There had to be some way to mark our time here. Leave a little piece of ourselves behind.”
His lips crook into a crooked grin. “Like the forget-me-nots.”
* * *
—
Back on the porch, Milan opens a second bottle of prosecco halfway through catching me up on everything else I’ve missed in his life. “I was irresponsible with my partial scholarship and their money, but I don’t think I’ll ever forgive my parents for stopping me going to the airport.”
I sputter midway through sucking garlic out of the olive. “What?”
“It’s why I left you that bizarro voicemail,” he explains. “I procrastinated on signing up to retake some of my failed classes in summer because I didn’t want to have to ask Dad for the money. So, some alarm bells went off when I asked them for a check to drop at the bursar’s office the morning of the flight.”
“Oh, Milan,” I say with an exhale.
Desi parents do not react well to eleventh-hour surprises.
He gives me a rueful look as he taps his fingers silently against his glass, then refills it, as if he’s building up to the rest of the story. “My dad asked what courses, and I told him, not thinking for a minute that he’d remember I’d already taken them.”
I can see where this is going.
“But, of course, he recognized all the courses right away, and from there it all unraveled pretty quick.” His breath comes out staggered, unsteady. “It was the worst fight we’ve ever had. I’m sure the neighbors thought someone was being murdered. Dad was shouting. Mom was screaming. I don’t blame them. I deserved the fallout.”
“Your voicemail was a mess,” I murmur. “Stricken and panicked and so, so lost.”
His lips part, incredulous. “You remember that?”
I remember every word, but maybe it’s better to leave it in the past.
“Anyway,” he says, rushed, like he’s embarrassed, “I had to ask them for my passport a couple of hours later, and Mom hit the roof. She couldn’t believe that I was still actually leaving, but I knew you were already in the air. I promised I’d buckle down after we got back home, but . . .”
“They weren’t having it,” I say.
Milan’s forehead creases into a frown. “Mom flung the passport at my feet. Said if I walked out that door, I could forget about them paying for those summer classes, let alone any other semester.”
My heart squeezes. So he stayed for money.
“No, that’s not why I didn’t meet you,” he says, seeing the look on my face.
Most other Indian kids I know either got a full or partial scholarship, or a free ride on their parents’ dime, with the implicit understanding that they would study what their parents wanted. It was hard to put your foot down when it meant turning your back on financial assistance you didn’t have to pay back—at least not directly.
“I stormed off to my room pissed. At myself. At them. Even a little at you.” He interlocks his fingers, clasps his hands as if in prayer. “The first thing on my mind was talking to you. Only I messed that up, too.”
My heart twists. “I wish I’d known. That was a lot for you to handle on your own.”
“There’s nothing you could have done.”
“Don’t. Don’t do that. I could have been there for you, damn it.”
I don’t want to center myself, but it tears at me that I didn’t even have the chance to help him. In keeping his difficulties to himself, he robbed me—us—of the chance to make it through the dark clouds together. Stronger for it.
His laugh is bitter. “I went and spoke to my advisor right away, and while I didn’t get my original scholarship back, he said a lot of scholarship money winds up just sitting there because people don’t apply for the smaller ones.”
I’ve heard that from Dad, too, ever since he started teaching.
“So that’s what I did. I got a job as a department assistant and in the campus bookstore, working every hour I could get to pay my parents back for summer classes.”
“They forced you to pay them back even after you canceled your trip?”
“Oh no, no,” says Milan. “When I presented them with the check, they were mortified. The idea that I thought I had to pay them back for anything made them feel like bad par
ents. Dad refused to deposit it. But they were right—I wasted their money, and I know how hard they worked to save up for my education.”
There’s a sour film coating my tongue. He had to work so hard to make up for how much I distracted him. I swallow past it. “It’s commendable that you paid them back.”
But his story’s not done yet.
“The next semester,” he says, “a real estate agent from High Castle came to talk in one of my elective classes, and they said their interns got paid twenty hours a week plus academic credit. Figured it didn’t hurt to try?” A rueful smile takes over his face. “Josh Bell took one look at my GPA and almost showed me the door. Somehow I convinced him how badly I wanted it and he gave me a chance. Who would have thought that I’d be that good at it?”
For the first time, there’s a note of pride in his voice. “I didn’t accept another penny of my parents’ money. Then Josh said if I passed the licensing exam, he’d hire me and pay me back the cost of the test. I loved the work, so . . . I had everything to gain.”
Suddenly, his place on the High Castle Royalty wall makes sense.
“Wait, so is that how you got promoted to junior partner so fast?” I gape. “I thought it was weird, but you’ve been working there for years longer than I thought.”
“I switched to the real estate concentration. I worked full time—more than full time, really—to put myself through school part time. I only graduated last year.”
When I’m quiet a few beats too long, Milan gives me puppy-dog say-something-say-anything eyes.
He seems so nervous about what I’m going to make of all this, but how can I be anything other than awed? He’s accomplished so much on his own to prove he wasn’t a fuckup to his parents. He’s done himself proud, and I don’t know how to tell him that I’m proud of him, too.
I reach for his hand, settling my palm over his fingers and slotting my fingers in the valleys between his knuckles. He stills abruptly, breath caught on a gasp. His skin is warmer than mine, and even though there aren’t any static shocks, my entire arm tingles. When I run my thumb over the inside of his wrist, his signature move, his upper body jolts, fingers flexing.
“Milan,” I say, soft as down. “You’re wrong. I want to know every version of you. The one who splurges on food because he knows I’ll love it. The maddening man who will argue for the sake of arguing about two shades of blue tile that’re almost exactly the same. The guy who uses even his failures to learn and succeed. We’re both so much more than the sum of our parts.”
Chapter 23
I think this must be what closure feels like. The feeling follows me throughout the rest of the work week. I haven’t been able to stop wondering what could have happened next if only he hadn’t had to leave for a meeting so soon after our talk.
When I close my eyes and run the lightest of fingertips between my knuckles, my body comes to life the way it hasn’t since—well, since. My cheeks flame. But all the same, it’s no substitute for him.
To keep my hands busy, I get started stacking the shelves in the living room, intermittently texting Raj for details about her first date with Luke last night.
When I went back to the mainland for a tandoori dinner with my family for Aji’s seventy-third birthday, Raj borrowed Harrie and Freddie (“But, Rita, think of the children! They need to socialize with their peers before they forget how!”) to legitimize her presence at the dog park and stage a run-in.
It was utterly transparent, but from the goofy smile Luke wore when he saw her, apparently he was charmed by the subterfuge. Enough so that Raj asked if she could hold on to my doggos for longer (“Rita, you’ll get so much more work done without them underfoot! Pleeeeease?”).
I’m not sure what the past few days makes me and Milan. Friends? Or more than that?
Definitely more than friends. Raj sends. People who used to be as in love as you two were don’t have a middle ground. You’ll never be nothing to each other.
But that’s what I’m afraid of. Now that he’s back in my life, how can I say goodbye to him once this house is done if we’ve become “definitely more than friends” again? Bluebill gave us a shared space to orbit each other. Without it, what if we go back to the status quo?
That’s why, trusting in fate to be on our side one more time, I logged in to MyShaadi last night to reset my old answers with true, honest ones. The kind I would fill out if I was really looking for the One. If Milan and I matched before with my bullshit answers, we have to now, too.
I chomp on my hearts-not-sticks pretzels while hoisting a stack of seven thin art books to a middle shelf of the bookcase. Their black and white spines compliment the monochrome world globe on the opposite end. I arrange more clusters of vertical books and separate them with an artsy bowl of pearlescent sea snail shells, framed around-the-world vintage postcards, and black horse head bookends. A spill of purple spiderwort trails down from the copper planter above.
When I’m done, I check my phone to find that Raj has sent me a picture of herself holding that horrific ceramic rooster to her face and feigning a horror movie scream while Freddie’s buried his head behind the sofa cushions. And another of Raj and Luke out at dinner, sharing an appetizer plate of deep-fried ravioli.
A weird first-date present AND Italian food? I might be in love! reads her message.
Huh. Some guys bring flowers, some bring haunted roosters.
Smiling, I return to my shelves. A large purple geode goes on top of a leather-bound volume of poetry. They nestle between a Grecian bust pot with a thriving silvery green rex begonia and a framed floral needlepoint.
The rest of the books go up on the shelves in alternating horizontal and vertical stacks, leaving plenty of white space. I love to showcase books as art pieces, while using wire baskets to tuck away anything that doesn’t quite fit my aesthetic. In my house in Goldsboro, it’s usually the well-thumbed, dog-eared romance books featuring men with straining, sexy muscles, disheveled cravats, and just-ravished women in rumpled gowns that I don’t want Aji to see. Not because she’s a prude, but because she’ll cheerfully make off with them in her purse.
The air shifts behind me. “These bookshelves are incredible.”
My heart leapfrogs. “Hi, Milan.” I hesitate, then say, “I really hoped you’d come today.”
He’s right about the shelves. Refinished to look brand-new, they seamlessly melt into the wall on either side of the blue-tiled living room fireplace. You can’t even tell that these are the same junk bookcases Dad hauled from the curb.
The warmth of Milan’s breath nips at my ear. “I remember when you painted them. They looked nothing like this before. So many clients, even the ones that don’t even read a single book a year, want built-in bookshelves. It’s a hot-ticket item.”
His hand lands on my shoulder. Squeezes. “You added a lot of value to this house.”
“I hope whoever moves in has the books to fill the space,” I confess, not turning around. “Whenever I make something, I try to imagine the kind of person or family that’s going to buy it. I imagined this shelf filled with yellowed, dog-eared paperbacks from a secondhand bookstore. Hardcovers that lost their dust jackets years ago, their corners worn smooth from rereading. Some picture frames up. Memories you’d want to see every day. Memories that take you back.”
“This looks exactly like what you just described,” says Milan, voice a low rumble. “Down to the well-loved books.” A beat. “It’s everything I’d want in my home.”
He can’t see me, so I don’t need to bite back my smile, but I do it, anyway. “That’s the perfect way to put it. Well loved. There’s something about old things, right? Comforting favorites. A place in time you want to return to, revisit, like an old friend.”
Like talking to him now, better than friends.
He touches my arm, warm fingertips on bare skin. I startle, whirling around.
> He’s standing close. Too close. I almost collide into him.
“Whoa,” he says, hands coming up to steady my shoulders like I’m a spinning top. His warm thumbs slip into the sleeve of my black tee and he doesn’t let me go.
Somehow, he seems more startled than I am.
My breath stalls in my throat when I see the look on his face. All masks dropped. Open, for-all-the-world-to-see yearning on his face. He lets me see it, doesn’t throw the shutters up.
“That shirt’s an old friend,” he says, just the tiniest bit hoarse. He pinches the sleeve of my black tee between his thumb and forefinger. “You wear it a lot.”
“I mean, I have a lot of black tees.”
“Yeah, but you like this one the best,” he states.
What a weird thing to say. I shoot him a confused okaaaay smile.
“You were wearing it the day we reunited, too,” he says, an undefinable quality in his voice unlike anything I’ve heard before. “And about a dozen times since.”
Curiosity leaps into my throat. If I asked, would he remember what I wore the first time he realized he was in love with me? The ditsy floral dress I wore when he gave me those forget-me-nots and teasingly made me promise not to forget him (as if I could even if I tried)?
His hands are still on my shoulders, and now I’m feeling dizzy for altogether another reason. His forehead is scrunched, intense, the way he looked when we were doing our homework together, only this time it’s not a tough math problem he’s trying to figure, it’s me.
The warm pads of his thumbs inch further up my sleeves, gentle but a little rough, too, maybe from working on the house. My nipples stiffen against my bra and I instinctively strain forward, yearning to be crushed against the solid heat of his chest, but I draw back just in time.
