by Leanne Davis
“You seemed a bit more desperate than just selfish yesterday. Probably shouldn’t ignore that internal message.”
Our sandwiches arrive and we both lean back in the booth to let the server set our plates down. The salty scent of fries wafts up to my nose and my stomach twists in eagerness. I might be nervous and worried but I’m also starving. I dig into the food with such gusto, it doesn’t reflect a broken heart. I glance up after quickly chewing on a large bite and find Ramiro watching me. “What? Never seen a hungry girl eat before?”
“Not one in the kind of shape you’re in. I think you could bench press me.” He grins. I give him the finger. I am in good shape and run daily. I keep myself toned and fit with only the slightest definition of muscles. I have more of a runner’s figure than that of a bodybuilder. I focus on yoga and long-distance running rather than weightlifting. Plus, I get lots of cardio in my competitive sports.
“I’m athletic, mostly because of my running. But my diet doesn’t always reflect my other healthy habits.”
“Seriously? Impressive. What now though? What do you want to do?”
“Travel. Write. Leave here. I don’t know. Something not found in Ellensburg.” I blush again, realizing the irony. We’re the same age and Ramiro has no concern over what he wants to do or why or how he’s going to do it.
“Travel and write what?”
I shift around. “I don’t know exactly. It’s all a foggy mirage in my head. I picture myself at airports, with one of those perfectly packed carry-ons and a business suit. Going somewhere. Where? I don’t know. Doing what? I don’t know. I love to write. I studied journalism. But what to do with that? I don’t know.”
“And getting married to your high school sweetheart and hometown boyfriend was how you thought this grayish daydream would come true?”
“Um.” Stumped, I set the sandwich down and drink the water. “I told you, not too well thought out.”
“No, I kind of know what you mean. Doing something. Some never-before-thought-of kind of job that you can’t study for or learn about. You don’t grow up knowing about it because it’s not as common as being a doctor or a dentist or an advertising executive.”
“Exactly. That’s it. I don’t know what. I just have ideas. I didn’t give it much of a chance, did I? What about you?” His expression jerks and his eyebrows rise. “What? Don’t you dream? Or have aspirations?”
His smile is small. “I’ve always thought I’d like to be a contractor. Build things.”
I tilt my head. “Like houses?”
“Anything. And I don’t mean being the one lifting the wood and nailing the nails, I mean the one designing it or putting all the pieces together.” He shrugs, sipping his soda. “You asked me about my dream. That’s all it is.”
“Does it have to remain only a dream? I mean, aren’t there ways…?”
He shakes his head. “For some perhaps. Hey, I have a decent job, and I’m eating lunch with a pretty girl today. I’m doing just fine. Today. Right now.”
His smile is quick, big and distracting. He winks at me. But a second before that, I glimpse something more. Something hungry inside him. Ambition. Desire. Longing.
Things that I embrace too. I jilted my fiancé to go after them and now I know deep down that the only thing stopping me is my own fear. I always dread going against the norm, doing the unexpected.
I set my water glass down. “Mostly? I’d like to go to the place where my mother was raped and see it. I’d like to write about her journey. Just to see it. Feel it. You know? Maybe get in her head space and then…”
“Write her story,” he finishes and his gaze remains on me. I’m surprised at the level of interest, not to mention the intensity in his brown eyes.
“Yes.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Everything. My mom, most of all.”
“You’re young. You’re free. You’re capable. You can go anywhere.”
“Need money.”
“Get a job. Save up for it.”
I hesitate. “I don’t have my mom’s permission to do that.”
“Most journalists don’t require their subject’s permission.”
“She’s my mother,” I whisper and shudder, imagining my mom as a neutral subject.
“Just saying. You’d have to toughen up for anything like that.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. If it’s that important to you and the rest of the world.”
“It is an important story. About women and our vulnerability. It can happen to anyone at any time.”
“Then if you decide to tell it honestly, you can’t write about it like your mom says. It would have to be done with a degree of neutrality. She would be the subject of your disclosure. Not your mother, in that instance. Maybe you don’t really want to do that kind of a project.”
“No. I do. I always have. I just haven’t been able to work up the courage to tell… well, anyone else. No one knows but you. I never even told my sisters… or Harrison.” I frown, shaking my head, confused. “Not sure why I blurted it out to you.”
“Innocuous stranger.”
“Okay, innocuous stranger.” But that doesn’t ring true. I need a better reason for why I told him.
“You wouldn’t believe the shit people tell me while I’m working on their yards. It’s like we’re trees, standing deaf and dumb, in their gardens. Not living, breathing or fully able to repeat whatever they say.”
“Are you serious?”
“Well… I might pretend not to speak English very well sometimes. Makes a lot of them think I can’t comprehend their directions. I’ve heard about illicit affairs, drug addictions, shopping addictions, odd sexual behaviors and just… weird shit. One lady believed her dog was her husband, only reincarnated, and wow, you wouldn’t believe some of the shit they did.”
“Does that really work? You might speak English better than I do.”
“It works all the time. If I don’t want to deal with someone, or talk to them, or if someone just seems like an asshole, which they often are to me because they think I don’t understand, I don’t reply or react.”
“You can do that? I think I’d punch them on impulse. There is something even worse about talking to someone who doesn’t understand the language in ways that aren’t decent.”
“You’d be surprised at how indecent people can be towards me. But you? Nah. You aren’t talking at me. You’re talking to me. We’re talking to each other. And I want to hear what you say.” He smiles and something weird makes my heart swell.
I push my food away. “Thank you, Ramiro Vasquez. Twenty-four hours with you somehow manages to change my whole perspective on life in ways that four years of college couldn’t. Not often do things as momentous as that happen.”
His face tilts, his eyes dim, and his mouth puckers up while his eyebrows wrinkle. “Being a bit dramatic, aren’t you?”
I shake my head, the ends of my hair flipping over my shoulder. “No. Not at all. Thank you. You helped perhaps more than anything else could have.” I shrug my shoulders. “Who knew, huh?”
“Yeah, who knew?” he mutters as his gaze leaves mine. His eyes drift towards the window as if he is lost in a new thought.
The check comes and he pays the bill. I wave towards it. “I promise you, when things settle down, I’m going to take you out to dinner, you know, to repay you.”
He laughs. “I won’t see you again, snowflake. That’s not how this works.”
“You’ll see me again,” I vow. But he shrugs and gives me a curious, distant smile. Straightening my posture, I ask, “Could you take me home now?”
Chapter Five
~Ramiro~
I don’t expect her to be so open. Not only to what I say, but also to what I experience. Yeah, I’m totally laying it on thick, thinking it’ll make her uncomfortable or tick her off. I don’t expect her to thank me for… what exactly? I don’t know. I’ve been glib, pretty heavy on the guilt and she turns aro
und and thanks me for somehow putting her problems into a different perspective. Why? Because my life sucks a little worse than hers? Is that why she’s cheering up? I’m shocked that she even listens to me and with so much care and sympathy. Not often the kind of reaction I get, especially when I’m aiming for the opposite. I shift my truck into gear, sliding my butt around at the sudden internal conflict that bubbles in my chest. I don’t want to freaking bond with the girl.
I have no idea what I’m doing with her. Am I turning her towards me or against me? I don’t know what to do. But now, I’m driving to her house. Will’s house. And isn’t that what I should be doing? Using her to get to her father? It seems like she likes me, so why not exploit it, and gain access to the true target, which drew me to this town in the first place?
She keeps twisting her fingers together as we draw nearer to her family home according to her directions. I pull into a large, covered drive-up next to the home’s double-door entrance. Her face is pale and she looks like she’s about to be sick. She must care what they think.
“You should come in,” she says to me, twisting in her seat suddenly.
I open my mouth at the exact moment to say, “Well, I guess this is it.”
We stare at each other and burst into matching grins. “I don’t think I should come in. This is strictly between you and your family.”
“Yes, but they might yell less in front of a stranger.”
“Don’t let them yell. It’s your life. Your mistake. Your responsibility.”
“I spent their money.”
“Then pay them back. Work it off. Then it can’t be used over you. Don’t owe anybody anything and they can’t lord it over you.”
“I could… I could so totally do that. In fact, I should do that, it’s the right thing to do, and it would be one way of righting this wrong.”
“I doubt your parents really care about you righting this wrong. As long as you learn from it.”
“No, I think they’ll care. And I think that is the perfect start to becoming a new me. A new Emily. A free Emily. An Emily who doesn’t just float by, and allows nothing to happen because of my fear to break out of the mold.”
I smile gently at her. “It was the oddest entire day I’ve ever spent with anyone. And thank you for that, snowflake.” True fact. Weirder still, I mean every word.
Emily is as nice a person as I’ve ever met. Naive and innocent. Clueless. Sheltered. She’s seen nothing. Been nowhere. She’s so untainted.
But what I like most about her? Her desire to not be all those things. She knows she is. She’s open to learning about what people unlike her might experience. She’s open to learning and listening and expanding her own viewpoint. Something I haven’t been very receptive to. I didn’t think I had to be. I felt the world owed me something, and a growing sense of bitterness arose from deep inside me. Yeah, I’ve witnessed and received plenty of bigoted statements. Outright, to my face. Some people are less obvious, using more cultured insults or veiling threats with feigned manners. Either way feels like shit. And most of this happens before anyone knows the first thing about me. Not my past or my present. Not my job. Not my citizenship. They just act on their erroneous assumptions.
I don’t want to like Emily Hendricks but she is a likeable person. I prefer to use my anger towards life in general against her, but for some reason, that doesn’t apply to us. Whatever us is.
I stare forward, gripping the steering wheel, growing annoyed. I am confused by her. That giant, white monstrosity of a dress sits between us on the seat like a barrier separating us. How fitting. She has to lean across the bench seat to start gathering all of it. She pauses. I sense her staring up at me and turn my head to meet her gaze. She smiles softly and shifts closer and I almost jerk back when I feel the soft pressure of her lips on my cheek. It’s totally chaste and sweet. Like a kiss any girl would give her dad or her brother. But it’s startling.
“Thank you, Ramiro. For rescuing me yesterday.”
“Knight in shining armor. Don’t forget it, snowflake.”
She rolls her eyes but this time, it’s good-natured. She moves over to the passenger side of the truck, grabs the door handle and hops out, dragging the mountain of filmy, white dress with her. Arms overflowing, she stands on the pavement.
She steps closer to the door again. “We should hang out sometime, you know? Not because of all this, but because we want to see each other again.”
“As what?” My hesitation is clear.
“What else? As friends. You’ve been a pretty good one, considering you were a complete stranger only yesterday.”
I stare at her in disbelief. She can’t be serious. I admit to the stirring I feel in my body every time I glance at her, or see her lips, her profile, or her body. It isn’t something I’m proud of, and I don’t feel any friendship vibes with this girl. Not at all. But twenty-four hours after escaping her previous engagement, she has no idea what she feels about anything, especially me.
What the hell am I doing? Will Hendricks. I want access to him. She’s initiating contact. So, why not? I nod.
“Yeah. Whatever, snowflake. You know where to find me.”
I pull out, leaving her staring after me, without confirming our plans either way. I suck at many things and acting like a manipulative, con artist is just one of them. I should have pursued her. Or put more pressure on her. Gotten her number or vice versa. Instead, I leave it all up in the air. How can I approach her father without maintaining some kind of contact with her?
But then her gaze lingers on my truck as I pull away. Maybe I’m a subtle mastermind, because I’m convinced at some point she’ll reach out to me and then I’ll have some kind of access to her and her father, and it won’t even be my idea. It’s riskier than me being the aggressor, but it also might be much more effective in the long run.
Except for the stabbing pain in my temple as I drive away, I try to reassure myself this was the right thing to do.
~Emily~
I watch his taillights disappear down the roadway and turn back towards my house. Groping around to find the door handle, I nearly fall through the front entryway.
All heads turn towards me as I burst in. There are my sisters and their significant others, my parents and even my aunt and uncle, all having lunch. Leftovers. My wedding reception food. It’s strewn all over the counter in the caterers’ containers, some open and others with spoons stuck in them.
An awkward silence fills the space, which should have been difficult to accomplish with so many people gathered there. I press my lips together and walk towards the couch. Ever so gently, as if I care deeply about this dress that I trampled on, got dirty and then left all wadded up, I place it on the couch. I take far too long and finally lift up my head and glance around.
I clear my throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know until that very moment I couldn’t go through with it.” I’m not sure what else to start with. Hi. Hey. Hello. All those greetings seem inadequate. Obviously, this is a huge moment so I might as well dive right in and stop pretending it isn’t.
“You couldn’t have figured it out even an hour sooner?” Christina is the first to talk. I glance at her. Her lips turn up, but her eyes are narrowed. I’m not sure if she’s mad, annoyed or supportive.
“I wish I could have,” I shrug slightly and throw my hands up. I meet the eyes of my dad and mom separately.
“Why didn’t you tell us you had doubts?” my dad finally asks softly. I’m surprised he isn’t heated or confrontational.
“Because I didn’t. I didn’t know I did. Not until that moment… and it became so… so… real.” I shake my head.
I have no idea how to explain it. I just went through the motions without feeling any of it. I didn’t pause to consider how the event impacted the rest of my life. I treated the whole thing like a long to-do list. Each time I checked something off the list, I reveled in the accomplishment, as progression towards the end goal, and felt satisfied with myself. I didn’t
let my misgivings enter my mind. I never felt it. Not like I should have. Or contemplated what the event meant to the rest of my natural life.
“I know I should have come to this realization far sooner, but sometimes, I get lost in a routine, or in a plan and that’s all I do. I divorce my feelings from it and just make it happen. I accomplish what I need to in order to make it succeed. I just learned to ignore the long term implications and focused instead on planning a wedding.”
“And not a marriage,” Christina says softly. I nod, giving her a small, tight smile.
“Yes, I kind of ignored that fact. Marriage is supposed to last for the rest of my life. And then I was there, staring at it all in stark reality and I knew I could not do it. You don’t need to lecture me. I know how wrong I was. How stupidly I handled it and how much I hurt Harrison and everyone else. I intend to apologize to him next. After I shower and change my clothes.”
Yeah, not exactly something I’m eager to explain, much less, have the right words for.
Melissa gets up, setting down a plate she has resting on her lap. She comes near me and leans back, her critical gaze scanning me. She is a few inches taller than me, with long dark hair, and is possibly the most beautiful adult woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. People think I’m pretty in a pleasant, “perky” way. Melissa is esthetically perfect, stunning. We bickered all our lives, driving our parents’ nuts at times with our unending sibling rivalry. Only in the last few years have we started to make a mutual effort not to treat each other like that. We were too close in age, with clashing personalities and we didn’t respect each other. Typical sisters. Christina is five years older than us and she acted more like another caregiver. She and Melissa struggled when Melissa was old enough to fight with her. They locked horns stubbornly for quite a few years, while Christina and I shared a smoother, easier relationship. Being her baby sister, she treated me as such, and I kind of liked the role.