Dear Aaron

by Mariana Zapata

  Unless he wasn’t outside waiting for me… If that was the case, I wasn’t sure I’d ever recover.

  A few minutes later, in baggage claim, my suitcase finally came around the conveyer and I picked it up, straining under the weight of 48.8 pounds of bathing suits and more clothes than I’d realistically need. Wheeling my bag behind me in one hand and clutching my weekend bag over my opposite shoulder, my heart rate started going crazy, so much I let out a deep exhale to try and calm it, but failed. Like usual. A knot formed in my throat anyway.

  It wasn’t until that exact moment that I remembered Aaron had never sent me a picture of himself even though he had mentioned it.

  It was fine. Totally fine. I knew he was six foot two and that he’d have a hint of a Louisiana accent in his voice. I would figure it out. Two automatic glass doors went wide as I approached them, dumping me directly outside the building and at a curb.

  And… there was no one waiting.

  At least there as no one waiting there that looked like a twenty-something man who had just spent the last year in Iraq. The only people hanging around were other passengers on my flight and two men dressed in black suits holding signs with names that weren’t Santos on them.

  I looked right, I looked left, then I took a deep breath. There was no need to panic.

  Maybe he was running late.

  Maybe he was at the departure entrance by accident and making his way over right that second.

  Maybe…

  I looked around again and tried swallowing around the lump in my throat.

  Maybe, I could grab one of the taxis parked along the curb. This wasn’t a foreign country with a language I didn’t understand. I had an app on my phone for booking hotel rooms. This wasn’t 1940.

  My hand shook as I reached into my purse and pulled out my cell, taking it off airplane mode for the first time. That was how pathetic and nervous I was. I hadn’t even bothered taking it off because I’d been dreading getting a message that said plans had changed and I was on my own. It didn’t even take a minute before the icon that showed I had seventeen unread messages flashed on the display, only slightly making my stomach churn.

  But none of them were from the newest number on my phone. Eight were from my mom and the other nine were from Jasmine according to my notifications.

  At the sound of the doors behind me opening, I dragged my bag to the side and took another look around, hoping to see a man standing by himself in a corner I hadn’t seen, looking expectant, or maybe holding up a sign with SANTOS or RUBY on it. Or something. Something.

  I could wait a little while. He said he’d gotten a crappy phone. Maybe he didn’t have service, or he was still driving and couldn’t reach his phone to let me know he was running behind.

  I took a sniff. And I blinked. And then I did both all over again, glancing from side to side, standing on one foot and then the other.

  One minute turned to five.

  Five minutes turned to ten.

  And ten minutes became fifteen.

  My eyes started to sting because I hadn’t slept, I assured myself as I checked the time on my phone one more time. They weren’t itchy all of a sudden because I was feeling abandoned and sick to my stomach at the thought Aaron was going to leave me here.

  Once, before Jasmine had started kindergarten, when I’d been the only Santos left at that elementary school, my mom had forgotten to pick me up. Four o’clock had come and gone, and she still hadn’t shown up. It wasn’t until closer to five, after I’d been sitting on the front steps for close to two hours that the vice principal had come out and spotted me. She’d known my mom for years thanks to my older brothers and sister basically being demons that didn’t shut up, and after asking me why I hadn’t been picked up yet, she’d tried calling my house and there hadn’t been an answer. So she’d offered to drive me home.

  I’d cried on the way, feeling so betrayed that my own mom had forgotten about me. My dad had moved out by that point, and looking back on it now, I understood that that’s why I’d freaked out so hard. Of course my mom had a million other things on her mind and wouldn’t willingly forget to pick me up from school, but it had happened.

  She never forgot about it and neither had I from the looks of it.

  Now, standing there outside the Panama City Beach airport without a single familiar face to reassure me, that forgotten but familiar feeling settled on my lungs and my heart.

  I’d been left behind.

  I sniffed. I blinked. I swallowed.

  More people came out of the building and more cars pulled up along the curb, but not a single one of them was there for me. Not one single car. Not a soul.

  I sniffed, blinked, and swallowed some more. My mouth went dry.

  He’d left me here, hadn’t he?

  A family of four walked passed me, smiling, laughing and joking as they crossed the street, so happy, so freaking happy.

  What had I been thinking? Why hadn’t I stayed home? I was an idiot, wasn’t I?

  But why would Aaron buy me a ticket and then not show up to pick me up? Hadn’t I told him I wasn’t sure about coming? It wasn’t like this had been my idea. He’d invited me. I hadn’t invited myself.

  Tears prickled my eyes, and I honestly felt like something sharp jabbed me in the stomach.

  This is what you get for taking a chance, Rube, my brain egged my heart on.

  He wasn’t here. He wasn’t coming. He’d left me.

  He’d left me here. He wasn’t coming to get me.

  I was so, so, so stupid. I knew better. I freaking knew better.

  It wasn’t until something cool slid down my cheek that I realized my eyes hadn’t just started prickling, they’d gone for it all. The breath that came out of me was hiccupped and choked. Strangled.

  It isn’t the end of the world, I tried to tell myself even as two more tears streaked down my cheek. Stop. I needed to stop and get it together. I wasn’t going to waste tears over being left. I wasn’t.

  I had my credit card.

  Plenty of people traveled by themselves.

  I had a cell phone.

  There had to be a hundred hotels I could stay at close by.

  There were worst places to get stranded at. At least there was a beach. It was summer. I had a bathing suit and plenty of sunscreen.

  I could do this.

  I could—

  Two more tears slipped out of my eyeballs, and I heard more than felt myself suck in a choppy breath.

  I had to get it together. I couldn’t cry. It was fine. I was fine. It wasn’t a big deal that Aaron hadn’t shown up. I should have known better than to let myself get disappointed. When had I ever had good luck with guys to begin with?

  Never. That’s when.

  Aaron not showing up… being stranded alone in a city I’d never been with limited money… none of it was the end of the world. I wasn’t going to cry over being ditched. We were friends—had been friends—and he didn’t owe me a thing. It was fine.

  I wasn’t going to dwell.

  Not me.

  I had my credit card, my good health, and plenty of people back home who loved me. This didn’t reflect on me. Aaron letting me down had nothing to do with me. He was the one who had chickened out, not me for once, and that was supposed to be a victory I could celebrate when my organs didn’t feel like they were getting stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick.

  He’d left me, but it was going to be okay. It was.

  This small part of my brain tried to tell me that maybe something had happened to him. That he wouldn’t have left me here at the airport for no reason. Part of me vouched for the man I’d gotten to know over the last few months, telling me he wouldn’t do something like this…

  But the biggest part of me said I was being naive.

  Three more tears came out of my eyes, and I wiped at my cheeks with the back of my fingers, fighting the urge to cry more because my body sure wanted to do that. Get it together, Ruby. Figure it out and stop standing
here crying in public. You’re better than this. It’s fine.

  I was getting a headache.

  I had to wipe at my face twice more, and when I looked at my fingers, I found black marks from my runny mascara smeared on them, and it just made me even more upset. It made my head hurt worse, instantly.

  All right. I could do this. First thing, I needed a taxi, and I could ask him to drop me off somewhere close to everything. I could find a hotel.

  I had just taken a deep breath as a group of six that had been on the same flight as me walked by, when I heard distantly, “Rubes?”

  I stopped breathing.

  I almost didn’t look up, my vision bleary, but I made myself do it.

  Standing not even five feet away, with a torn-out piece of notebook paper in his hands that said RC SANTOS in thick, scribbly red letters, was a man. Not a boy. Not a man-boy. A man I could have looked at all day for the rest of my life. With neat, short, golden blond hair on his head that I noticed first thing, and a deep tan covering every inch of his exposed skin, I stopped breathing. Deep-set eyes, high cheekbones and a mouth that was pretty darn full for any gender, seemed to tie in together to shape a face that was too good-looking.

  Way too good-looking.

  He looked like a model. If this was him, it was no wonder he’d had so many girlfriends and they’d all been nuts. Nobody gave up this kind of guy without a fight. But it couldn’t be him.

  There was no way….

  No freaking way.

  Was this a joke?

  I turned my head to glance over my shoulder, and then turned to look over my other shoulder like there was some other Ruby or person in the world that could go by RC Santos that this man could be asking for. Because the name was common and all that.

  But when I faced forward again, the tall, very six-foot-two-ish blond man with the paper that said RC SANTOS on it raised his light-colored eyebrows gradually. I saw his Adam’s apple bob. Gulp. And in the slowest motion possible, hesitant, hesitant, hesitant, one of his hands let go of one side of the sign and both his fists dropped, paper and all. The man blinked, and I took in what seemed like dark brown eyes staring at me beneath that heavily constructed bone structure. I took in the way his lips slightly parted, and the way his whole face went slack as he swallowed again.

  Then that mouth, that mouth, seemed to curve up, his smooth shaved cheeks went pink… and I realized he was smiling. At me. Brown eyes lit up as they scanned me from my face down to my gold flats and back up again.

  “Ruby?” the man asked in that voice I fully, totally recognized from the one and only conversation we had on the phone in the months we’d known each other.

  But I still blinked at him.

  This was a joke.

  It had to be.

  This could’ve been straight out of a movie where I got kidnapped and taken, sold into human trafficking and my family would never see me again unless one of my brothers vowed vengeance and went to search for me. Like that would happen.

  But it was the smile on the blond man’s face that seemed to just… click. To say maybe this wasn’t a prank. That I wasn’t imagining this.

  “Aaron?” His name out of my mouth sounded as wary as it seemed in my head.

  “Yeah,” the man my gut was 99 percent sure was the person I’d spent a year e-mailing, said.

  I didn’t miss the way he looked me over one more time, or how his smile wavered. Hesitated. Flickered. Before coming back to life, lips together with only the corners arching upward.

  Maybe it had been a bad idea to not send him a picture of myself after so many months.

  Was he disappointed? If he’d genuinely thought I’d resemble my sister or my mom, it was his own fault for setting up those expectations. I’d told him I looked like a mix of both my parents. I wasn’t the pretty one in the family or the funny one or the talented one or the outgoing one or the smart one…

  I was just Ruby.

  Just Ruby. And that had to be enough. I’d come too far for it not to be.

  I blinked at those brown eyes staring a hole into me. I swallowed just as hard as he’d swallowed a minute ago. Then I told him before even processing the whispered words coming out of my mouth, “Can I see your ID?”

  He blinked, and just as quickly as he blinked, he smiled almost, almost tenderly and nodded. One of his hands went behind his back as his gaze bounced all over me. Something small and brown filled his hand, and he finally moved his gaze to the wallet he held. His hand was steady as he passed me two plastic cards, one was a Kentucky driver’s license and the other was a military ID with the name I knew well: Aaron Tanner Hall.

  It was him. Crap on a stick, it was really him. My hands were shaking just a little as I looked at his driver’s license one more time before handing it over, thisishimthisishimthisishim going around and around my head, stealing the power from my lungs as I told him the one thing I hadn’t exactly been planning on admitting as my voice practically shook, “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  Aaron—not some faker who had hacked into his account and decided to come kidnap me out of all the other people in the world that he could find—shook his blond head, still frozen in place even though his features seemed to be bouncing back and forth between a smile and an expression that might have been a surprised one or a confused one, but I didn’t know him well enough to be sure.

  “I thought—” He cleared his throat, making me drag my eyes toward his bobbing, very tan Adam’s apple. “I was standing over by the lot, waiting. I didn’t know….”

  He was disappointed. He was disappointed, wasn’t he?

  “You don’t look like I thought you would,” were the words he used to break the silence. His pronunciation was slow, calm. He blinked in the middle of his sentence as his chest went wide with an inhale and just as quickly deflated with an exhale. I stopped breathing as those dark brown eyes of his roamed over my face and down my front all over again. His mouth did that wavering thing again, fluctuating, indecisive before settling into a weak smile as his eyes bounced all over me one last time. His voice was as wary as his smile as he said the five words we’d said to each other so many times over the last few months, a reminder of our friendship, a reminder that he’d invited me to come here. “You know what I mean.”

  He was disappointed. That’s what he meant. What was new? I should have known. Should have expected….

  I didn’t fight the urge to blink or suck in a breath through my nose that sounded choppy and broken into syllables that it wasn’t capable of. My heart started beating faster, nervous, more nervous than I thought I’d probably ever been before, and that had been really nervous. Tears prickled in my eyes like they had moments ago, but I didn’t let them fall. I wouldn’t. Somehow, someway I managed to clear my own throat and tell him more softly than I would have liked, “I told you I don’t look like my mom or my sister.”

  The man I was sure was named Aaron made a sound that resembled a huff, almost like a laugh, but the next six words out of his mouth made me flinch. “No. You don’t look like them.” And then, while I was pinching my lips together again at the brutality of his honesty, telling myself not to cry because he’d done this to himself by thinking I was lying, he really did laugh as he took a step forward, his eyes suddenly so bright and focused, that face of his I’d just been shocked with, lit up. “You hungry?”

  He asked it like it was nothing. Like he hadn’t just confirmed something I’d accepted a long time ago but never got that much easier to accept. Like I didn’t have one little tear I desperately wiped at in the corner of my eye.

  “What’s wrong?” Aaron asked immediately as his eyebrows knit together, by some miracle making his gorgeous face look even more handsome, even after he’d basically admitted he’d thought I was something or someone else and was trying to process it.

  I was such an idiot.

  My vision went blurry, and I could sense the anxiety in my sternum and belly. “This feels weird,” I told him honestly, nerv
ous, nervous, nervous. More nervous by the second. By the millisecond. I tried sucking in a breath that wasn’t there.

  “Ruby, what’s wrong?” came his concerned question as I looked down at the ground, fisting my hands at my sides.

  I swallowed. I told myself to keep it together. Reminded myself that I’d known this was going to happen and that I wasn’t going to be disappointed. So I lied as I wiped at my face again, forcing myself to look at him as I spoke. “I thought you changed your mind and I was deciding what to do…”

  Those dark eyes, so at odds with his coloring and hair, widened. There was no hesitation on his face when Aaron took another step forward, a frown growing across his mouth and practically radiating throughout his entire body. “I wasn’t going to change my mind,” he claimed, steadily. His irises bounced back and forth between one of my eyes and the next, the line of his jaw going tight. “Are you all right?”

  I sucked in a breath through my nose, shrugging, and gulped, reaching up to rub my palm over my breastbone. I couldn’t be having a panic attack. I couldn’t. But I tried to take another breath and there was nothing there. There was nothing there and my hands had begun sweating at some point and feeling like they were covered with ants, and my heart was beating like crazy and— “I feel like I can’t catch my breath…”

  Aaron’s head jerked, and I’d swear his face paled. The four steps he took forward were immediate, leading him to stop directly in front of me before I even realized it. Aaron Hall, who was even more gorgeous than I ever could have imagined, was in front of me and I was freaking the hell out.

  I was freaking the hell out.

  Because I was frustrated and let down and trying so hard not to be. I wasn’t good at this crap. I should never have come.

  When his hand reached for my arm, he didn’t hesitate for a second as his fingers wrapped around the delicate skin on the inside of my elbow, and before I knew what was happening, he was steering me toward a bench I hadn’t seen, one arm going over my shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world. And the entire time he did that, he said, “You’re fine, Ruby, you’re fine. Breathe, breathe…” over and over again until my butt hit the bench and he was stooping in front of me.