Dear Aaron

by Mariana Zapata

  “You just broke up with one?”

  “No,” I repeated myself. “I just haven’t had one… in a while. Aaron is just my,” I almost choked on the word but managed to get it out with a little bit of fake nonchalance behind it, “friend. One of my favorite friends.”

  And there were my two lies before I even knew I was going there.

  I was not going to look at Aaron. Nope. Not then.

  I forced a smile on my face and asked the girl another question before she could throw a new one out that I didn’t know what to do with, “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  The way she shook her head quickly, like she was disgusted. “Oh no. I don’t have time for dumbasses.”

  I couldn’t help but grin even as I faced forward again.

  And it was Brittany beside me who chimed in with, “It takes a while to find one that isn’t a dumbass, but there’re a few out there.”

  I’m not sure why I glanced up at the rearview mirror again but I couldn’t help but smile, especially not when Aaron’s gaze flicked to mine. The way his eyebrows moved said he was probably smiling.

  “How long did it take you, Brit?” the younger girl asked.

  The woman beside me made a thoughtful noise as Des turned in his seat to shoot her a look that wasn’t meant for me to see. I wondered how long they’d been together. “Twenty-eight years.”

  From up front, I heard Des, the man with the green eyes, mutter, “Damn right” under his breath.

  “Don’t rush it, Mindy. He—whoever—you want is out there somewhere. You’re still a baby, have fun and don’t worry about relationships. I wish I could go back and skip some of the guys I dated when I was your age, believe me,” was Brittany’s advice.

  If her words reassured Mindy too, I had no idea, but they did me. Wasn’t that what I’d told Aaron before? How I hadn’t missed out on anything? Not really.

  Okay, maybe in a way I had.

  The sigh that came out of Mindy had me glancing at her, but her attention was focused through the window. “One day. Who knows how long that’ll be?”

  Maybe it was because I saw so much of myself in her while she had a face like my little sister’s, but maybe it was because I didn’t want her to feel like she was alone, but I told her a tiny part of something I hadn’t really ever admitted out loud to anyone. “I’m twenty-four and I still haven’t found anyone who likes me enough as more than a friend. It’s okay.”

  I didn’t acknowledge until after the words were out of my mouth how sad and woe-is-me they sounded, but… they were the truth. I’d been my brothers’ little sister, and now Aaron only held platonic feelings for me. It was one strike after another that I couldn’t let myself forget no matter how badly I wanted to.

  And it must have been a good thing to admit because I could see the seventeen-year-old smile a little at the window in her reflection.

  But when I glanced forward again and just happened to look at the rearview mirror, I could see Aaron’s eyes on me.

  And I just smiled at him, hoping I wasn’t coming off as pathetic as I thought I would after that comment.

  Chances were, I did.

  “You okay?” I asked Aaron the second we finished carrying all the groceries up the two flights of stairs, with everyone except him cursing over them.

  With the upper half of his body mostly in the fridge as he put up four cartons of eggs and three gallons of milk, I could tell something was bothering him even though he lifted his shoulders almost casually. But it was too casual. He’d been quiet on the remainder of the trip home, letting Brittany and Des argue about who was the better cook between them. I’d let it go, but now everyone had disappeared when Aaron had offered to put up the groceries, I wanted to take the opportunity we had to be alone together again and ask.

  “Are you sure?” I asked him as he took a step back and shut the white door.

  Those dark brown eyes landed on mine and he nodded, his face too serious, too... distracted? I didn’t know his body language well enough to be sure yet. When he changed the subject, it pretty much confirmed that he had something else going on in his head he didn’t want to talk about. Just like when we messaged online. “Want to go to the beach?”

  What I wanted was to know what he was thinking. What I could realistically get was a trip to the beach. “Yeah, sure,” I agreed, watching his face closely. He’d looked tired that morning, but now that six hours had passed, there was something in his eyes that made him seem even more exhausted. Was he not sleeping well?

  “I just have a few more groceries to put up and I’ll meet you outside your room to go,” he offered with a funky smile that seemed like a poor imitation of the ones he’d given me before.

  What was going on with him?

  I nodded, keeping the question buried deep in the back of my throat, and headed down the stairs toward the room I was staying in. It didn’t take me too long to find my bathing suits, but what took the longest was deciding which one to wear. I put all three of them on before picking the most modest, this red one-piece with thin straps and a back that tapered into a V-shape halfway down my spine. There weren’t a lot of benefits of having small boobs, but a non-supportive bathing suit was one of the pluses. Throwing a cover-up over it and shoving my towel, sunblock, sunglasses and the bottle of water I hadn’t drank the night before into a canvas bag I’d brought with me, I put on my shoes and left my room, expecting Aaron to be changing or still be upstairs.

  He wasn’t.

  He was already waiting in the hallway, leaning against his door like a model in a denim commercial, with a towel under one arm, a gallon of water that we’d bought at the store in hand, and that faint, unreadable smile on his mouth. “Ready?” he asked, straightening off the door.

  “Yes.”

  Not sure how to act or what I should say, if there even was anything to begin with, we walked side by side in silence, down and out. The sky was bright and blue, and the wind was strong as we made our way toward the beach, weaving between the houses and onto the boardwalk leading to it. I spotted Brittany and Des to the right, Des under an orange umbrella with Brittany laid out on towel, face down sunbathing.

  “Is Max still not awake?” I asked him in a whisper. Aaron had already explained to me that Mindy had mainly just tagged along to San Blas to get out of the house; it wasn’t like she could swim with her cast on.

  Aaron made a snickering noise in his throat. “No. He works a graveyard shift. It’ll probably be closer to the end of the week before he’s waking up before two.”

  “He’s the one who works at the refinery?”

  “Yeah.”

  I nodded as we headed closer to his friends, and took a deep breath at what I’d have to do next. I’d never really been too self-conscious about being in a bathing suit before, but that was mostly because I’d given up comparing myself to others. When you have one sister who works out all day and you have another sister and mom who are both slim and perfectly proportioned no matter how much they ate, you kind of had to. I was pretty small all around, except for my thighs and butt, but it was nothing to note when I’d seen Jasmine’s buns of steel every day for years. There was nothing worse than comparing yourself to another woman because there was always going to be something that they had that you didn’t. Always. It helped that my mom had always told me I was pretty just the way I was, even if I didn’t always completely believe her. That’s the kind of thing moms said. She’d even told my brothers they were handsome and those two looked like gremlins.

  What might have also helped, as Aaron and I dropped our towels close to where Des was stationed on a lounger, with two arms crossed behind his head and sunglasses over his face, was that Aaron didn’t see me as… more than a friend. I didn’t have anything to prove to him… even if I would have wanted to. With my towel extended long-wise, I dropped the rest of my things on top of it and faced the direction of the water as I pulled my cover-up over my head and let it fall too.

  I didn’t bother looking behi
nd me as I lowered myself onto my towel and settled on my butt, snatching the bottle of sunblock I’d brought and pouring a handful into my palm so I could start applying it to my legs. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Des sitting up and going to pick on a sleeping Brittany before they both stumbled toward the water. I managed to get both my legs saturated before I glanced to the side to find Aaron sitting there with his own towel maybe three inches away from mine. His gaze was so focused on the beach break, I frowned. I hadn’t thought too much of how quiet he’d been, but… What was going through his head? Something bad? I could remember how quiet my brother had been for a while after he’d gotten back from his tour following his injury, and I didn’t like Aaron doing the same thing, especially when I didn’t know him well enough to have a solution… if there even was one.

  Feeling something pretty close to panic, or maybe it was desperation, filling my belly, I reached over to poke him, not knowing what else to say or do to get him to stop making that distant face.

  Luckily that was enough to get him out of his trance because he blinked once and turned to face me, an easygoing expression on his face finally, not the strange one that had been on there right before. “You okay?” he asked, looking at me like it was the first time he’d seen me in a long time, his gaze going from my face down, being totally obvious about checking out my bathing suit.

  I wasn’t going to think about it.

  “Yes,” I said to him, noticing he still hadn’t taken his shirt off. “Are you?”

  He did that quick nod again that made my stomach clench. What was going on with him?

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his gaze finally swinging slightly lower, a dimple prickling at his cheek. “That’s cute.”

  My face turned as red as my bathing suit. At the rate I was going, I needed to get a sunburn all over so it wouldn’t be so obvious every day.

  His index finger touched my right strap so lightly, I almost didn’t feel it. “Did you make it?”

  I fought the urge to squirm. “My bathing suit?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, now checking out the little gold clasp right between where my barely B-cup boobs were.

  No one had ever looked anywhere below my neck before. “No. It was Jasmine’s, but she gave it to me.” I picked at the strap he’d just finished touching, giving it a pop. “It looks better on her, but I like it.”

  The smile that came over Aaron’s mouth was the most gradual, slowest thing I’d ever seen. It was almost pitying, but something about it cut that corner and made it so sweet, it confused me even more. And of all the words he could’ve said to me, he went with, “I doubt it, RC.” And with that expression still on his face, he lifted his chin and frowned down at my skin. “You don’t have a scar.”

  I made a noise in my throat loud enough for him to glance up at. “From my surgery?” I basically croaked, even though I knew that had to be what he was talking about.

  Aaron nodded, his gaze flicking back down at the triangle of exposed skin on my chest.

  “They didn’t… the catheters were by my…” I waved my hand around my groin. “Hips.”

  That had him glancing back at me, one eyebrow up. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I smiled.

  Another slow smile crawled across that mouth I’d probably be daydreaming over for the rest of my life. “All right. Hurry up and finish putting sunblock on then, would you?”

  I wrinkled my nose but reached for the tube, part of me glad he was letting the surgery talk go. I put more sunblock on my palm as I bounced my gaze from my palm to Aaron and back again, attempting to move the conversation along before he changed his mind. “Did you not bring any?”

  Like every other man I’d ever known, he didn’t “need” any.

  I tipped my head to the side and gave him a flat look that had him cracking into a grin like he hadn’t just been staring off into space minutes ago and then staring at my bathing suit and chest. “Fine,” he finally groaned, taking the sunblock from where I’d left it balanced on my thigh.

  Trying my best not to be obvious as I spread the cream over my forearms before moving up to my biceps and shoulders, I watched as he rubbed the barest amount into his legs, the white getting stuck in the light brown hairs and over the tops of his big, almost pale feet. There was a line somewhere a few inches above his ankle bone where the color of his legs changed almost dramatically to the shade of light tan his feet were. From his boots, I figured.

  “Hey, don’t be stingy. Get some more sunblock if you need it,” I told him.

  He let out this little snicker in his nose. But that was all. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me, before he dropped his hand and went back to applying sunscreen, his hands dipping beneath the hem of his shirt to rub at his chest without exposing more than a sliver of a lean hip and an inch of skin above his swim trunks.

  I finished putting sunscreen on my face when Aaron rolled up to his knees on his own towel, his body facing mine. He didn’t move for a second, and I didn’t want to look at his face to see what he was focused on, until finally he said, “You missed a spot.”

  When his thumb went to the shell of my ear, smoothing sunblock on it before swiping down to rub at my earlobe, moving the small star-shaped studs there, I let him. I shouldn’t have, but I did. Keeping my gaze on the center of my chest so he couldn’t see the struggle going on inside of me was harder than I’d ever imagined, especially when he did the same thing to my other ear, and I had to hold in my breath to keep from panting.

  He was touching my ears for freaking sakes. If I didn’t know how sad my experiences with men were, I would have been more surprised at how pathetic I felt getting excited at him touching my earlobes of all things. Lame.

  I swallowed and waited until Aaron moved his hand to the center of my face, his thumb swiping across my chin slowly before pulling back and saying, “There.”

  All I could do was manage to grind out a “thank you” that sounded like I was out of breath.

  Aaron got to his feet and I did the same, rubbing some more cream under the seam of the bathing suit on my bottom. I was doing that when Aaron’s shirt fluttered to the sand. He was shirtless. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, because how many times had I seen a shirtless guy? A thousand? Thank you, Internet. I could be calm. Be cool.

  I made sure not to suddenly look up and ogle him or make him self-conscious as I kept rubbing sunblock into my skin. When it had been long enough, and I couldn’t think of anything else to stall with, I let out a breath and had a smile already on my face when I raised my eyes all casual and friendly. Standing under the sun, the difference between the almost bronze color on his face, neck, and arms, and the lighter, slightly tan shade on his chest, legs, and feet, was pretty apparent. I would never call it a farmer’s tan though. There was no hint of red or pink on his skin, like my mom or Tali would get if they were under the sun for too long. No matter how much those two tried, they never got tan. They were either white or red, there was no in-between.

  Aaron was not one of those people. He was light gold and he was gold, there was no hiding it. But the main thing that there was no hiding from was that body under the three different shades of his skin tone.

  Stick a needle in me, I was done.

  I saw the rest of my life in that split second.

  There was never going to be getting over Aaron. Ever. I was going to die alone. I accepted that as I gave up trying to be sneaky, taking in the way he was built. He wasn’t big and bulky, or barrel-chested in any way. Aaron was slightly thicker than a swimmer but had their physique, all abs and shoulders and long biceps. He was perfect. Absolutely perfect. That saying about God breaking the mold when they made someone had been written with Aaron’s birth in mind. Each muscle looked like it had been chiseled, each bone perfectly sculpted. Even his nipples were perfect. How? How?

  How was I supposed to look at this for nearly an entire week and know he was just my freaking friend?

  The answer wa
s: I had no idea how that was supposed to happen. I really didn’t. I’d lied to myself and tried to convince myself it was possible, but it wasn’t, was it?

  I swallowed and looked away, reminding myself not to be that person. I could do this. I could survive this week. I had to.

  “Ready?” he asked, making me glance back at him, but that time, keeping my gaze on his face.

  There was a knot in my throat as I nodded. “Yeah. But if you want to go ahead of me and hang out with your friends, it’s fine. I don’t mean to take up all your time.” His mouth did that turn thing. “I can be alone.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Ru,” he said in that calm way. “I’d rather hang out with you.” And then, as if that body on display hadn’t been enough to remind me of how shitty of an idea coming here had been, he went on to add, “You don’t have to be alone.”

  If my smile was tight and said “you’re killing me,” it didn’t reflect on his face. All I could do was make a sound in my throat that could have meant anything.

  We were wordless as we made our way forward. The stretch of beach to the right and left was packed with people, but not so many that it felt crowded. Mostly, it was family after family in groups of every size, with kids running, sand castles in the process of being built, and cooler after scattered cooler.

  The water was warmer than I expected when I stepped into it. “Drag your feet through the sand, so you don’t accidentally step on a stingray,” Aaron warned over his shoulder.

  A stingray? In the water? That I could step on?

  I’d been too busy trying not to stare at the smooth expanse of Aaron’s back and his small waist with two tiny dimples settled right at the base; I hadn’t really thought about anything swimming around in the water around us. I’d been to the Caribbean three times in the past with my family on vacation, and my mom, who wasn’t a fan of snorkeling, had always booked us at hotels with crystal clear water nowhere close to reefs. I’d never been snorkeling before. The water here was pretty darn clear, but…