But I know in the end, my presence won’t help Layla. And I need to do this not just for myself, but for her too. I have to believe that a few more months might spell the difference between a life together that will last forever and a life bandaged together that could fall apart. We both deserve to be the best people we can for each other. I want to be worthy of this woman, inside and out.
Layla sniffs every now and then as she cries silently toward the river. I don’t say anything. Sometimes you just have to let it out. I’ll be her shelter while she does.
Layla
We walk around the East Village for a little while longer, but soon my ankle can’t really take much more, and Nico tells me gently that we need to go back to the apartment. It’s already almost two, and there’s a lot to do if I’m going to be on a six-thirty flight to Los Angeles.
Shama and Jamie have been hard at work while we were gone. My things are already in boxes, and they’re just about finished packing my clothes too.
“Hey,” I say. “I can take over from here.”
We spend a few more hours packing and cleaning my side of the bedroom. Nico and my roommates have already done so much. I don’t want them to take on more than they have to. Shama has already said she’s going to keep my stuff with hers in a storage facility, and Jamie is footing the bill to have one of the boxes of things accumulated through the year sent back to my grandparents.
Soon, too soon, it’s time to say goodbye.
“I’ll pay you back,” I say as I hug each of them. “I’ll send a check as soon as I’m home.”
“Shut up,” Jamie says. “My parents send me too much money anyway. I’m a spoiled brat, if you hadn’t noticed.”
Behind me, Nico snorts as he lugs the two suitcases I’m checking on the plane out of my room. I have to laugh. I’m pretty sure we all qualify as spoiled brats to a lot of people.
“Thank you,” I say as I give my roommates both another round of hugs. “You guys saved my life. Really.”
We hold tight, the three of us, before Shama and Jamie finally let go.
“Get out of here,” Shama says. “We’ll take care of putting the rest of your stuff in storage, okay? Just come back better.”
“Okay,” I say. “I promise.”
Nico lugs one of my bags over his shoulder and picks up the other while I grab my messenger bag and my coat. We turn toward the front door, which opens on its own. Quinn steps into the room, and stills when she’s confronted by the four of us.
“Oh,” she says surprised. “You’re leaving?”
I nod. Beside me, Nico tenses visibly.
“I’m going home,” I tell her. “I’ll, um, finish my work there.”
Quinn looks over the bags and glances toward the stack of boxes in our bedroom. She nods. “That...makes sense.” She looks up. “Will you be back in the fall?”
At that, I look to Nico. Uncertainty flashes over his features, but I can tell he’s trying to put on a strong face for me.
“You bet,” I say.
And for the first time since he showed up yesterday, a smile appears. A real smile, the kind that lights up the entire room. The kind that grabbed me from the start.
I turn back to Quinn. “I have to catch my flight. Um...have a good summer.”
Quinn looks at me uneasily. “You too.” She sniffs, but all of the vitriol from yesterday is gone. “Take care of yourself.”
There are no hugs between us. I’m pretty sure that when I get back, Quinn will not be one of the people waiting for me. But when I close the door behind me, I do feel a peace between us at last. An acceptance that maybe wasn’t even there in the first place.
Nico rides with me to the airport, doing his best to make small talk the entire way there. He gives me a laundry list of places to visit while I’m in LA—restaurants to try, which beaches I’ll like best. I don’t really hear most of what he says. I’m too busy taking all of him in: the way he talks with his hands, the way a dimple shows up on one side of his face when he laughs, the way his dark eyes flicker expressively, fringed with those lashes that frame such brightness. No matter what he’s feeling—happy, sad, angry, confused—those eyes always sparkle, like two black diamonds.
Finally we arrive at the airport, and he accompanies me while I check my bags and find my way toward the security line for the gates.
“Fuckin’ 9/11,” he swears, glaring at the security that prohibits him from going any farther. “I miss the days when I could come with you. Watch your plane take off, like in the movies.”
I lean my head on his shoulder. “I wish you could fly there with me.”
He sighs and kisses the top of my head again. “Me too, baby. Me too.” Then he turns to face me. “So. Here we are again.”
It’s hard to know what he means. At the airport? Saying goodbye? Sometimes it feels like that’s all we ever do. But this time I hope, I pray, will be the last time.
He reaches down to take both of my hands and lays them palms down on his chest. Right over his heart. Right over the compass tattoo that I can see through his t-shirt if I look hard enough. The one missing its north symbol.
“You listen to me,” he tells me. He presses his hands over mine, like he’s trying to stamp my handprints over his heart. “I’m not going anywhere. You got that, baby? I’m going to be right fuckin’ here, right in this spot when you get back. I don’t care how long it takes. Three months. Two years. But in the end you better come back, all right? Because I’ll be waiting.”
Wordlessly, I nod. The tears are coming again—fuck, I am so tired of crying. But I can’t seem to help it. I’m not spiraling like I was before, but I’m definitely shattered. It’s going to take longer than a day or two to put my life—put myself—back together. Nico was right all along.
I tip my head up, waiting for a kiss. And dark eyes, so deep I want to dive into them, take me in for a second. Then his hands weave into my hair, and he sets his lips to mine.
It’s a kiss full of promises.
Saudade. The word echoes through my soul, a legacy of my family, the undying desire for something that hasn’t even happened yet. Nothing captures better what I feel for this man.
“This feels like the end of something,” I whisper against his lips. I feel like a shadow of myself, a whisper of a person. Like the wind might blow me away.
“It is the end,” Nico agrees as he pushes some hair out of my eyes. He presses a kiss to my forehead, and lingers there for a moment. “But when you come back, it’ll also be a beginning.” He takes my hands and lifts them solemnly to his lips, kissing one, then the other. “We aren’t lost anymore, baby, because we found each other.”
I close my eyes taking in his words. And then, because there’s nothing else to do, I turn and start walking toward security.
“Layla!”
I pause. I’m barely keeping it together. But slowly, because I have to, I turn around.
That’s when Nico captures my mouth with one last kiss. But this kiss isn’t full of sadness, full of goodbyes. It’s full-bodied, a kiss that holds desire, hunger, all the promise of love and tomorrow and what the world might hold for us. It’s a kiss that sweeps all the doubts out of my mind, that will emanate through me for days to come.
My bag drops to the floor, and I welcome him as he holds my body to his, hovering my toes off the floor while he tells me again and again, with his lips, his tongue, the rumbling vibrations in the back of his throat, all the things that words can’t ever seem to say. That he loves me. That he’s mine. And that as long as we really know that, we won’t ever be lost again.
“I love you,” he says, with a voice that’s lost its breath. “Now go.”
I nod, not even trying to wipe away my tears. “I love you too. Thank you. For-for everything.”
“Don’t thank me,” he says. When I look up, there’s a tear sliding down his cheek too. He laughs and pushes it away. “Just come back to me, okay?”
“You sure you’ll still want me to?”
I joke, but it’s laced with uncertainty.
But he smiles again, that bright, thousand-watt smile that would light up the black of night.
“Always,” he says.
Hours later, when I’m stepping off a plane on the other side of the country, the word still echoes through my heart.
Always.
Epilogue
August 2004
Nico
I check my watch for what’s probably the fifteenth time in the last hour. But fuckin’ finally it shows me the time I want to see.
I pop up from my fiftieth burpee and jog around the other cadets to where Lieutenant Meyers stands, staring at us with his hands on his hips.
“It’s three, Lieutenant,” I tell him, showing my watch. “I gotta go.”
Meyers, the barrel-shaped man who’s been in charge of my group of cadets for the past three months, pushes his aviators up his nose. He reminds me a lot of Frank, the gruff older guy who trained me when I got out of juvie. He knew how to help me in the right direction, but also never put up with my shit. When he died a few years back, it hit hard.
Meyers frowns at me. “What are you leaving for? You gotta pick someone up at the fuckin’ airport?”
I exhale through my nose. We’ve been through this about five times, twice today. I should have known he was going to give me shit in front of the other cadets.
“Not someone, Lieutenant,” I tell him. “My girl.”
Immediately, a chorus of “ooohs” and whistles and catcalls rises from the ground, where all the cadets are finishing their pushups.
“Fuckin’ girl,” Meyers mutters to himself, but it’s all for show. I cleared this with him on day one. Every day, I show up usually a solid thirty minutes before our training begins, and I usually stay late too. I’m the best cadet in the class, and he knows it. But I was always leaving early today, even if it meant getting tossed out of the entire program.
“Hey, Lieutenant, I’m feelin’ pretty hard up too!” Reilly, one of the guys I get along with pretty well, shouts out. “Can I go see my girl too? She’s waiting for me at a bar in Long Island City.”
“Mine too!” shouts Carson, one of the younger guys who looks like he could still be in high school.
“Mine too!” Shouts echo through the group until suddenly there are forty-five guys shouting about the different bars in the city where their nonexistent girlfriends are waiting for them.
“Twenty more!” shouts Meyers, and with a hush, everyone quiets down and starts grunting with their efforts. “An hour early tomorrow, Soltero,” he says to me, nodding his consent. “Now get the fuck outta here.”
I mill around the baggage claim, shuffling awkwardly with my hands shoved into my pockets while I scan the crowds for Layla. Occasionally a few people glance at me curiously. It’s something I’m going to have to get used to: being looked at with admiration instead of suspicion. People see this uniform—the blue cargo pants and blue shirt with FDNY printed on the front—and they start asking questions. They like firefighters, especially in New York. Little kids look at me, want to be just like me. Their mothers encourage them to talk to me instead of guiding them away. It’s a good feeling. For the first time in my life, I feel accepted in the city of my birth. Like I’m wanted. Like I really belong.
I check my watch again. I know she’s here. I got a text from her about fifteen minutes ago saying her plane had landed. I’d already been pacing around JFK for about an hour at that point, but she doesn’t need to know that. She doesn’t need to know that I’m basically a puppy jumping in its cage, I’m so excited to see my girl.
We talked every day this summer, usually multiple times. It was hard sometimes to connect. Five days a week, I’m at Randall’s Island from morning to night, getting back to the apartment in time to collapse on the pull-out until the next morning. On the weekends, I spend most of my time studying for the tests the next week and working the door at AJ’s and the Roxy. One day, I won’t have to check IDs anymore for extra cash. But cadets and rookies make shit money, and I still have bills to pay.
Layla’s been busy too. In between seeing a therapist and trying to reconnect with her mom, she’s also taken a couple more language classes at the local community college and worked a summer job at the YWCA. She watches the kids while their moms, women who are coming out of worse relationships than hers, talk to the lawyers and social workers to help them get out of their situations. I thought at first that it would be too hard for her to be around that kind of environment, that it might trigger some of her own traumas. But I think it’s actually been cathartic. Helping others in similar situations seems to be its own kind of therapy.
But still, no matter what, we’ve always made time to talk. Sometimes it’s early in the morning, 2:00 a.m. her time when I call her as the sun rises here. Or maybe it’s close to midnight in New York, when she gets home from her classes. On the weekends, we talk for hours, eager to get lost in each other’s voices. And if we’re lucky enough to catch each other when we’re both alone, things get a little dirty. I never thought I’d be good at phone sex, but apparently I have a knack for it. Layla’s always saying how much she likes my voice, and if I toss in a little Spanish here and there, my girl pretty much goes nuts.
Every conversation ends the same. “I love you,” I tell her. “Always.” “Always,” she repeats. “I love you back.”
But I’m tired of “I love you back.” I’m tired of jerking off with a phone pressed to my ear, of wishing I could jump through the receiver and show her all those things I’ve been growling into her ear.
It’s been more than three months since she got on that plane. And I’m here, standing in the same place, just like I promised, ready as fuck to say all those things, dirty and sweet, to her face.
A new group of people spills down the escalators, I search their faces, looking for those blue eyes I still see every time I close mine. Will she look different? The same? She sent me a couple of pictures of her on the beach, but I still see her bruises in the back of my mind.
Then she appears at the top of the escalator. She’s glowing with the effects of a summer spent in the California sun. Her skin is darker than I’ve ever seen, but the top of her normally black hair is bleached a little bit lighter. Her hair is down, waving around her shoulders and face, and the tiny shorts she’s wearing show off long legs. She turns to the side to pull something out of her bag, and I get a peek of her ass in profile.
Shit, her ass. I was a gentleman the last time I saw her, but that body part alone has starred in weekly dreams I have. The really fuckin’ dirty kind. The kind that either make me reach for the phone and pray she’s alone or else force me into an ice-cold shower where I have to imagine K.C.’s abuela to calm myself down. And even then...yeah. Let’s just say another part of me is very ready to get reacquainted with my girl again.
Finally, she catches sight of me, and her face bursts into the biggest, brightest smile I have ever fuckin’ seen.
“Hi!” she shouts over the crowd, causing several people in front of her to turn around with cranky expressions.
Fuckin’ New Yorkers. Sometimes people here forget to smile. Well, fuck ’em. I’ve got a grin on my face a mile wide, and I don’t give a shit.
When she’s finally able to get off the escalator, she starts jogging awkwardly through the crowd, her bag and purse banging on her sides. By this time, I’m hopping like a fuckin’ rabbit on the other side of the barrier, ready to catch her the second she passes security. My girl is practically a linebacker as she elbows through people waiting for their bags. But I can see on her face the same thing that’s probably written all over mine.
But just before she reaches me, doubt shakes through me like a thunderclap. Is she okay? Will she want what I want? Will she be the Layla I used to know? Will I be okay if she’s not? Suddenly the fact that Layla and I have never really had time, plain and simple, to know each other and be sure of one another, looms ahead. My heart is thumping in my chest, and as
the rest of the questions filter away, a final few remain:
Will she still love me for exactly what I am? And will I love her too?
She comes to a stop, and for a second, the entire airport disappears. I guess there’s only one way to find out. I open my mouth.
“Welcome home, baby.”
Thank you for reading Lost Ones!
Layla and Nico’s story finishes in True North. Keep reading for the first two chapters or go here to download the whole book:
http://bit.ly/TrueNorthNovel
A Note from the Author
Thank you for taking the time to read Lost Ones. A great deal of research and work went into this book, but I feel that I should call attention to a few potential inaccuracies. The first, and most glaring, is the expedited order of Nico’s application with the FDNY. The FDNY was actually hiring in 2002 in the wake of the horrific events of 9/11, but I moved that up a year to fit the events of the story. I also expedited and shifted around the order of the application process slightly to fit the characters’ other plot progressions. Similarly, I might also point out that physical conditioning like in the final scene might be more likely for new cadets rather than someone about to graduate. What can I say? I just wanted a hot pushup scene.
On a more serious note, this was easily the hardest thing I have ever written. Harder than my academic writing. Harder than my first, second, third, fourth, or fifth book. It was so difficult because, more than anything I have ever written, Lost Ones was a catharsis of events I’ve kept long buried.
When I was a sophomore in college, I ended up in a physically abusive relationship. It’s funny—I think that’s the first time I’ve ever written that down. It’s strange to see it there, in print form. It’s so permanent. It will never go away.
But such are the lasting effects of abuse, of all types. My story is not unique. We are living in an incredible moment where, for the first time, millions of women are coming out of the shadows to tell their stories of mistreatment. People misunderstand, perhaps seeing many of these stories as a pursuit of vengeance. I think they are about catharsis, the process of purging demons that stay inside you long after your original persecutor may be gone. Of finally having a moment to say your truth out loud and have people listen. Validate. Believe.
Bad Idea- The Complete Collection Page 72