He goes rigid at my words.
“Get out,” I say again.
“I’m –”
“No, you don’t get to talk. You don’t get to say anything. Just leave. I want you to leave.”
He grits his jaw before shaking his head once. “Salem.”
And God.
God.
I’m so fucking mad at him for saying my name like this, for turning it into a rough, sand-coated plea.
Like I’m putting him through such an ordeal by sending him away.
“Get out,” I scream and before I can think it through, I throw a pillow at him. Hard.
Nothing happens though.
It simply hits his strong, massive chest and ruffles his hair a little bit before sliding down to the floor like a loser.
It doesn’t even make him blink.
“I don’t want you here, got it? I don’t want your pity and your fucking, ‘oh my God, it’s my fault’ routine. I don’t want that from you. I don’t want you to stand there like your world has ended because you think you made a mistake. You didn’t. All right, Arrow? You did not make a mistake. It was my fault. I snuck out. I wasn’t eating. It has nothing to do with you. So leave. You’re off the hook. You don’t have to look so lost and tortured. You can go be the superstar of soccer like you always wanted.”
I’m breathing hard and vibrating now.
And he’s not breathing at all.
In fact, there’s not a single movement in his body.
It’s like I absorbed all his heat and all his air, and now he’s left with nothing. Now he’s devastated and he’s grown holes under his eyes, dark holes, and his lips are pinched and his skin is all pale and leached of color.
It’s like I’ve drained my sun.
It’s evident in his hollow voice. “Salem, it’s not… what you think. I’ve got so much to say and –”
“I don’t wanna hear it,” I snap out.
Because I have no other option but to scream at him and kick him out of the room.
Because the alternative is that I run to him.
I climb off this bed and run to him and cling to his shoulders because he looks so grief-stricken.
He looks as if he’s mourning the loss of my letters as much as I am and that can’t be true.
That can’t be true at all.
“Salem –”
“God, stop saying my name. Stop saying my fucking name, all right?”
I throw another pillow at him, my second one, and another.
But apparently they only have three pillows and I’ve run out of them and he’s still here so I just scream again.
I scream louder as tears fill my eyes and he gets blurry and everything that has happened since he came back from LA crushes me and suffocates me and almost kills me.
“Get out of my room. Just leave me alone. I don’t want you here. Just go, please. Okay? Just go. I can’t take it. I can’t. They took my letters. Do you understand that? They were my letters, my love story and they took them and you look like you care. You look like you even know what that means. You don’t know. You don’t care. You have no idea what it means to care about anything other than soccer, isn’t that what you told me? You told me that you have no use for love or emotions. You told me that you want nothing to do with it. So please just leave. You were leaving anyway, right? So for the love of God, leave now. I can’t deal with this. I can’t deal with you. Just get out of my face.”
Apparently, I’ve run out of words too and I can’t talk anymore.
I can’t.
I’m crying and sobbing into my hands and I don’t even know when I put them on my face. But they’re there now, my hands, and I bring my knees up too so I grieve the death of my love.
So I can…
“You’re wrong.”
I whip my face up at his quiet words.
Quiet but determined, and a repetition of what I said to him on the night it snowed and I told him my secret.
I try to wipe my tears from my eyes so I can see him clearly. But I only get to glance at him for a second or two and notice that his face has whittled down to razor-like sharpness and his body is arranged in a battle stance, feet wide, chest broad, before my tears take over.
And I hear his voice again.
“Because I want.”
What?
I don’t know what that means and I don’t get to ask him because as soon as he’s said those three words, announced them almost, he turns around and leaves.
After that, all bets are off.
I can’t stop crying as I hear his last words over and over.
Because I want…
***
Hours later, I wake up in partial darkness.
My eyes are gritty and heavy and this time I know why. It’s because I couldn’t stop crying after he left. I cried the entire day until they gave me a mild sedative and put me to sleep.
But I’m awake now.
When my eyes fall on the rows and rows of shoeboxes, I even scramble up in my bed. I don’t feel dizzy or foggy at my sudden movements as I reach out and grab a box. I open the lid and there they are.
My little orange, sun-like envelopes.
My letters.
They’re here.
I’m holding them in my hands and I don’t understand…
Then my eyes fall on something else.
A lone envelope, sitting on top of one of the boxes.
It’s gray.
And it has a letter inside it.
A reply to the very first letter I wrote for him, eight years ago.
Darling Arrow,
It’s weird writing you a letter because we sort of live in the same house.
But I guess this is the safer option. I don’t get why but it is.
Anyway, I wanted to answer your question from this morning. You know, when you asked me if I was cold?
I’m not.
I mean, I am right now because your house is really cold, dude. But I wasn’t, back in the kitchen. Because as soon as you came in, you took the cold away, which again I don’t get.
But anyway.
Maybe you have the sun in your pockets.
Do you?
Oh and I won’t tell. About your juice drinking. I’m not a rat. Your secret is safe with me.
All right, then.
That’s all I had to say.
Salem
PS: Oh! I have a question. Where’d you get that silver chain? It’s so shiny and pretty. I’m not into jewelry at all. I’m more into riding my bicycle and maybe even a little bit of soccer (by the way, I know you’re a huge soccer player. Like, super huge. I’d absolutely die if you ever taught me. Maybe one day you can? I’m not the best player but I can learn!)
Okay, sorry. I totally went off track. What I wanted to say was that I absolutely love it! Your chain.
PPS: I don’t know why I started with ‘darling’ but it felt right. It felt like ‘dear’ is too ordinary for you and I don’t think you’re ordinary at all.
***
Salem,
I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you.
Eight years.
That’s quite a long time, isn’t it?
But anyway, to answer your question: I don’t know if I carry the sun in my pockets. But if I do, then I’m really fucking glad.
Really fucking glad.
And I don’t think I ever thanked you for keeping my secret. The one with the juice and all the other secrets over the years.
So thank you.
For being my secret keeper.
To answer your other question: my dad gave me that chain. But I think you already know that.
He gave it to me because I scored the most goals in a game that believe it or not, I don’t even remember.
I’m actually sitting here, trying to think about it. Think about what game it was but for the life of me, I don’t remember. All I remember
is that it was raining that day and I got to stay up late an extra hour that night because we’d won.
Find it inside the envelope. It’s yours now.
Yours,
Arrow
PS: I found these boxes in Miller’s office. I’m not sure if you’ll like the fact that I had a hand in her being fired. But you’ll just have to make your peace with it.
PPS: If you need anything, anything at all, I want you to tell my mom. I mean it, Salem. I want you to tell her and I’ll take care of it.
PPPS: By now I hope you know that you are the best soccer player I’ve ever seen.
There’s a mailbox outside of Leah’s house.
That’s where he leaves a letter for me.
Every morning.
And he’s been doing it for the past two weeks, ever since I got discharged from the hospital.
Every morning I wake up and rush down the stairs to the front door. I run down the driveway in my pajamas to get to the mailbox and rip it open, and every day I find a gray envelope with my name on it.
Inside that gray envelope, there’s always a white, crisp paper, folded once. On that paper, he writes me a reply.
To one of the letters that I wrote to him over the years.
Which makes me think that before returning those shoeboxes to me, he took the time to read my letters.
But more than that, I think he kept them.
He kept some of my letters so he could reply to them one by one.
Is that stealing, I wonder?
I mean, they were meant for him. They’ve always been meant for him.
So I don’t know.
Neither do I know what his plan is.
Like, is he going to keep writing to me like this? Send a letter every day? Also, why hasn’t he gone back yet?
Because he hasn’t.
Two weeks ago when I sent him away after a dramatic display of rage, I thought he’d leave. He’d go back to California, the place where he belongs. The place he wanted to return to, earlier than planned.
But then he brought back my letters and gave me his pretty chain.
I didn’t want to put it on, you know.
I didn’t want anything to do with it; I was so mad at him. For beating himself up as always, for treating me as a mistake, as an obligation.
I was so, so mad.
But I guess I’m weak. I’m a sucker when it comes to him because I did put it on.
I did.
I have it around my neck right now. It sits on my chest – under all my layers of clothing – between the valley of my breasts, stuck to my skin.
Every time I touch it, I feel him.
I hear him too.
I hear his last words before he left.
You’re wrong. Because I want…
Now, what does that mean? What does he want?
And then there’s Leah.
She cut short her meeting in New York when she heard about what happened with me at St. Mary’s. I was expecting her to lecture me, berate me about my sneaking out and, of course, the letters. Maybe even punish me but she didn’t say anything.
Actually, she was… caring toward me.
Leah and I, we’ve always had a complicated relationship. She’s always been a strict maternal figure who has tried her best to make me toe the line. Though she’s never made me feel like I’m a burden to her, she’s never made me feel particularly warm and fuzzy either.
So her sudden change was kind of surprising.
What was even more surprising was the fact that after I was discharged, she gave me two weeks off from St. Mary’s. I would’ve understood her giving me a couple of days off, especially since the doctor said that I needed my rest, but two weeks was a lot. Even though that period included Thanksgiving break.
But that’s not the most surprising thing.
The most epic surprise was when she came into my room one night and told me that if I didn’t want to return to St. Mary’s at all, she was okay with it. She even apologized about Miller and how it was her fault that she gave Miller free rein because she’d always been so busy with out-of-town meetings and conferences.
She continued, “I’ve always been hard on him, on Arrow. Extremely hard. Harder than necessary. Harder than… what’s humane even. I told myself that I was trying to mold him into someone Atticus would be proud of. But now I think maybe I was doing it because I missed my husband. I missed him so much that I wanted to keep him alive. Through my son.”
Before I could even attempt to respond to that, respond to her frank words about how she’s treated Arrow, she ducked her head and cleared her throat.
“This came for you.” She had a gray envelope in her hand that I’d somehow missed, and she put it on my dresser. “I’m glad he has you.”
She left then, leaving me stunned.
That was the first letter from him, two weeks ago.
In which he told me that he’d leave a letter just like the one I was holding in the mailbox every day.
That’s why I’m here tonight, in front of his motel door.
Because I want to know what it all means.
I want to know why he’s doing these things. Why isn’t he leaving? Why does Leah think he has me when he doesn’t even want me?
If this is some crazy attempt to pay for what he thinks is his mistake, then I want him to stop.
I want him to stop torturing me, making me fall in love with him even more.
Before I can talk myself out of it because holy fuck I’m terrified and this feels exactly like the night I came over to stop him from leaving, I knock at his door.
Two loud sharp knocks that make my knuckles throb.
I rub them to chase the sting away and the door whips open before I’ve even finished the task.
And he’s there.
Right in front of me. Only a few feet away.
The love of my life.
This is the first time I’m seeing him after that day at the hospital, and he looks… exactly the same.
Standing at the threshold, wearing a pair of washed out jeans and his gray V-neck t-shirt, he looks burned out, my sun.
He still has darkness under his brilliant blue eyes and his features are still all razor sharp and severe.
“Salem,” he says in a rough voice.
In a voice that sounds unused.
My lips part. “Hey.”
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he snaps, his brows pulled together in a frown.
It’s the same question he asked me the other night too, and like that night, my nerves mount but I try to calm myself.
I try to seem unruffled.
“I came to see you,” I say.
“How did you get here?” he asks – again the same question from the other night, which is not helping me stay calm but again, I try.
“I took a cab.”
Something about that makes him clamp his jaw and stare at me severely. “What the fuck are you thinking? You just got out of the hospital. You’re supposed to be resting. You’re supposed to be getting better.”
Despite all my attempts to stay unaffected, I fist my hands at my sides. “I got out of the hospital two weeks ago. It was a minor blood sugar thing. I am better.”
“If you keep running around town like this, you won’t be. You’re not supposed to stress yourself out. That’s what the doctor said, didn’t he?”
“How do you know what the doctor said? You were never there.”
At this, a resigned look comes over his face. “That’s not the point.”
“Did Leah tell you?”
He remains silent but I get my answer and then fuck being calm.
Fuck being collected.
“So you’ve been talking about me to Leah. But you haven’t come to see me.”
Because I’m mad about it.
I’m mad, okay?
Like, he’ll leave me letters every day. He’ll talk to me throu
gh them but he won’t come to see me.
And I have waited.
Every. Day.
Every single day that he left me a letter in the mailbox, I actually waited for him to knock at the door. I waited for him to come see me, talk to me, tell me why.
So many times I wanted to catch him in the act myself. I wanted to set up camp at my window and intercept him when he came to deliver the letters.
But I stopped myself.
Because I’ve begged enough and I was giving him a chance to come clean.
To tell me.
Now I find out that he’s talking about me to Leah.
How cruel of him to do that.
How unkind of him that he’d rather drive me crazy with all these emotions and questions than come talk to me himself.
He sighs then, plowing his fingers through his hair. “Come inside.”
I glare at him for a few seconds and he returns it with a calm but somewhat heavy look. Then, I do go inside.
Because I need answers.
But unlike last time when I was careful to keep my distance from him while entering, I touch him.
Well actually, I bump his chest with my shoulder as I pass him by.
Because I’m angry and I want him to feel it.
His only reaction though is a soft inhale, like he’s smelling me or something.
But I refuse to think about it.
I refuse to think about him taking a whiff of me or how heated his body felt or how long it’s been since I touched him.
I absolutely refuse to wonder about anything related to him anymore.
But I break that promise a second later when I get my first look at his room.
I halt in my tracks and run my eyes across the space that I’ve been in so many times. The space that I remember every inch of.
It has always been so clean and organized and neat.
Right now though, it’s the opposite of that.
Sheets are crumpled; pillows are strewn about. His gray blanket lies on the floor as if he’s had a fight with it and threw it away in disgust. Discarded clothes make a tiny hill by the bathroom door.
And there are books. Everywhere.
On the bed; on the floor.
Some are wide open; some are closed. Some are stacked together in a large pile on the desk and in his slim-backed chair.
My Darling Arrow Page 34