The Ever After of Ella and Micha

by Sorensen, Jessica

  Her shoulders start to heave and she gives in to my hold, allowing me to pull her over the console and onto my lap. Then I wrap my arm around her and cradle her head against my chest as she sobs into my wet shirt. I smoothe my hand down her head, each sob tearing at my heart. I stare out into the rain, watching it splash against the lake, feeling so helpless. I wish I could take all of her pain and guilt away. She doesn’t deserve this—she doesn’t deserve anything. What she does deserve is someone to love her unconditionally, which I’ve been trying to do for a while, if she’d just let me. I need to find a way.

  “Micha.” The sound of her strained voice jerks me back to reality.

  When I glance down at her, she’s looking up like she’s lost and has no idea where she is as she clutches onto my shirt. I know she’s probably going to fall asleep soon and when morning rolls around there’s a good chance she won’t remember any of this.

  I trace a finger underneath her eyes, wiping the tears away. “Yeah, baby?”

  She takes a deep breath and then she’s pulling on my shirt, forcing me to get close to her. “I love you, too,” she whispers and then she presses her lips against mine. She kisses me briefly, but it’s enough that I feel it all the way through me. I clutch on to her as I kiss her back with every ounce of emotion I have in me, wishing it could be just like this all the time. But just as quickly as it all began, it stops as she leans away and settles back in my arms. Moments later, she’s asleep.

  I listen to the rhythm of her breathing and the longer I sit there holding her, the fiercer my heart beats, and no matter how hard I try to keep them back, eventually tears escape my eyes. My head falls forward against the steering wheel and I cry quietly through the sounds of the rain. Crying for her. For the life she was handed. Because I’m so in love with her it hurts me to see her like this. Because I know when morning comes, there’s a good chance she won’t remember this.

  Because I’m afraid I’m going to lose her forever.

  Chapter 11

  Ella

  When Micha finishes telling me what happened, I lay quietly on the bed with him, my head right over his heart. It’s beating faster than it normally does and I wonder if he’s feeling what he felt that night. The fear I put in him and whatever else was going through his head at the moment.

  “I can’t remember any of that,” I say, looking up at him. “I think it was the combination of the pills and my… my anxiety. Things sometimes get blurry when I go to that place.”

  “I know,” he says, staring down at me. “Like I said, I knew that night there would be a good chance you wouldn’t remember any of it. I just thought that I’d never see you again after it happened.”

  Silence stretches between us as I struggle to remember and he struggles to forget.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him because it’s the only thing I can think of to say. There are no words that could possibly even begin to explain to him how bad I feel for putting him through that and for me doing it to begin with. It still hurts to even think about it, how I was about to throw everything away—everything I have with Micha now. “I really am.”

  He moves me with him as he sits up. “You don’t have to be sorry for something that happened a few years ago—something that wasn’t even in your control.”

  “Running away was.”

  “You know, I thought so at first, but now I don’t think that’s entirely true. I think sometimes in life shit happens and people have to do what they can to move past it.” The corners of his mouth tug upward into a sad smile. “For you, that was running away and for me… with my father, it was deciding it was better to let him go.”

  “But I came back.” I tuck my legs under me and kneel up between his legs. “Well, I came back for summer break because I had to, but now I’m back, for the most part.”

  “I know.” His fingers spread across my cheek. “It’s called healing, Ella May.”

  “I guess it is,” I agree. “But you wouldn’t let your father back into your life, even if he tried.”

  His thumb grazes my bottom lip. “I’ve got everyone I need in my life. My mom. You. Even Ethan and Lila. That’s more than a lot of people have.” His hand leaves my lips and he threads his fingers through mine so the O-ring on his finger is pressed against my engagement ring. “Besides, I have you forever. And one day we’ll have our own family and that’s what will matter in the end.”

  I’m not sure what kind of face I make, but he definitely notes a shift as I move to the edge of the bed.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, sitting up straight and sliding his long legs over the edge of the bed and his feet onto the floor.

  I wanted to prepare myself for this talk, about our future, where we’re going, but now it’s kind of unavoidable because he said our own family… Shit. Does he mean kids and everything? “I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about that.”

  “About what? Having you forever, or having a family of our own?”

  “Um…” I swallow hard. “The last part.”

  “About having a family.” He speaks slowly and cautiously like he’s afraid he’s going to scare me.

  “Yeah, sort of…” I struggle to talk about a subject that makes me feel so uneasy. “I mean, where are we even going?”

  He looks puzzled. “I’m not sure I’m following you, pretty girl.”

  “Are we…” God, this is so difficult. “When you say family, are you… are you talking about having kids?”

  He considers his next words wisely. “Not having kids right at this moment, but having them in the future, yeah.”

  “And what if… what if I said I didn’t want to have kids?” I bring my feet back onto the bed and sit cross-legged.

  He scratches his scruffy jawline as he brings his feet up on the bed and faces me, crisscrossing his legs. “It all depends on why you don’t want to have them, I guess.”

  “So you do want to have them?” I’m a little surprised that he doesn’t even have to think about it.

  His eyes search mine and then he definitively nods. “Not right now, but eventually way down the road.”

  “And what if I said that way down the road I couldn’t see myself as a mother.” I chew on my lip nervously. “Then what?”

  He slips his fingers through mine and holds both of my hands. “Why can’t you see yourself as a mother?”

  I roll my eyes and pull one of my hands away to gesture at myself. “I think it’s sort of obvious.”

  He looks genuinely perplexed. “No, not really.”

  “Because of who I am.” I struggle for words. “Because of my problems. Because I don’t even know what being a mother entails. I mean, I had a few good moments growing up, but other than that I pretty much took care of my mother instead of the other way around.”

  He wiggles his fingers from my hand, grabs my knees, and drags me closer to him. “Exactly, which is why I think you’ll make a great mom.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” I disagree. “If anything, it’ll make me a very confused mom.”

  His hands glide from my knees to my thighs and his fingers jab into my skin like he’s afraid to let me go. “No way. As much as I hate it, you took care of everyone in that household. You cooked. Cleaned. Paid the bills. Helped your mom take her medication. Stayed home and took care of her while your father went out to the bar every night acting like a teenager. At sixteen, Ella May, you were more responsible than a lot of thirty-year-olds.”

  “I did stupid stuff, too,” I remind him. “I think you’re forgetting all the fights I got into, all the roofs I jumped off of, the many times I made you drive reckless and tested the boundaries of life.”

  “You had to breathe somehow.”

  I think about what he said, squirming because all this positive talk about me is making me uneasy. “You’re seriously freaking me out right now.”

  “I know,” he says. “But it’s the truth. You’ll make an awesome mom if and when that time comes around.”

  I eye
him over with skepticism. “And what if it doesn’t? What if I say there’s just no way I can do it? What if I say that I just want to spend the rest of my life drawing and listening to you sing? Just you and I?”

  “Then I guess it’ll be just you and I growing old together,” he says with a trace of a smile on his lips. “And I can live with that, too. I can live with anything just as long as you fucking marry me.” And with that, he gets to his feet. “This weekend. No more messing around.” He sticks out his hand and I take it, nodding.

  He pulls me to my feet and we walk toward the door. “Although, I must say that we would make beautiful babies together.” He flashes me a cocky grin and I roll my eyes. “Imagine one with your hair and my amazing eyes.”

  “You’re too cocky for your own good. Besides, I’d rather they had your hair and my eyes. I’ve never been a fan of the color.” My face twists in disgust I grab a few strands. “Although I love your eyes, too. Maybe she could just have your hair and eyes.”

  His brow crooks up as he starts to pull the door open “She?”

  I bite down on my tongue, realizing my slipup. “Did I say ‘she’?” I feign dumb.

  He nods and there’s a sparkle in his aqua eyes as we step out into the hallway. “So you’d want a girl?”

  I fight for oxygen and then seal my lips. If I could picture myself with a kid, I picture it as a little girl, all punked out with blond hair and blue eyes. I’m not ready to admit that aloud yet, though. “Can we just go tell your mom about the wedding?” I ask, trying to sound neutral, but my voice comes out more off pitch than I intended. “Before Lila and Ethan let it slip out.”

  He looks at me for about five seconds longer and I wonder whom he sees. The girl he met when he was four? Or the one who ran away when she was eighteen? Or this new one who thinks about weddings and babies? “Whatever you want,” he finally says and starts down the hall.

  He’s always saying that and I tug on his arm, stopping him. “What about what you want for once?”

  He pauses, searching my eyes for God knows what. “I have everything I want right here,” he says simply, and I can tell he means it.

  Chapter 12

  Micha

  The whole baby talk with Ella was a little weird, but it needed to be talked about, I guess. I’d never thought that much about it, but having kids wouldn’t be so bad, down the road of course. It’s not like I worry I’d turn into a shitty father like mine. I think I was always a bit more like my mom than him and I’m glad. But I want to make sure that Ella and I are both in the right place if we decide to have them.

  I meant everything I said. Either way, kids or not, I’ll be happy as long as I’m with her. But I think now I really need to talk to her about my future in music and the tour coming up. I should have probably told her right after the baby talk since we were talking about our future. It would have been a good time, but I was scared and nervous of what she would say—or what she wouldn’t say. Music is my passion, my emotional outlet in really hard times, and Ella knows this and I know she’ll be supportive, but what I don’t know is if she’ll come with, and if she does, will she be doing it because she wants to or because she thinks it’s what I want? And if she doesn’t, then that means I have to give it up—give up my dream. And knowing that makes me want to avoid it as long as possible.

  With the tour and our future still lingering in my mind, we enter the kitchen with our fingers linked, the fresh aroma of coffee in the air. I feel like I’m seven years old again and Ella and I are telling my mom how we broke our next-door neighbor Mrs. Millerson’s garden gnome because we wanted to see if it was a real gnome. Mrs. Millerson had caught us and told us we had to get her a new one. We thought we were going to get yelled at but thankfully my mom always went a little easy on me due to the fact that my dad bailed out and she’s always had a soft spot for Ella.

  But now instead of telling my mom about the broken gnome we’re telling her that we want to have a wedding in five days and how we almost got married without her. My mom flips out at first, more than I thought she would, but her anger turns to excitement when I remind her that yeah, we were going to get married without her but we decided not to.

  Thomas, my mom’s boyfriend who’s a little younger than her, is in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal at the table while all this goes on. He looks a little more cleaned up than when we last saw him, at least he’s wearing a clean T-shirt and jeans without holes in them. My mom is still dressing like she’s younger—her shirt has all this flashy diamond shit on it and there’s some on the trim of her pants. But I don’t say anything about it. I get that she’s happy and even though I still think Thomas is an idiot, especially when he drips milk on the front of his shirt, he seems to make her happy.

  “So we’re really going to do this?” my mom asks with a grin on her face as she pours a cup of coffee.

  “Do what?” I ask, exchanging a confused glance with Ella, who shrugs, as confused as I am.

  My mom shakes her head at me as she sets the coffeepot down on the counter near the sink. “Get married.”

  I press back a smirk. “I didn’t realize it was a we thing.”

  She sighs, like I’m a silly little child, and walks past us, making her way across the kitchen to the fridge. “I didn’t mean we as in all of us.” She opens the fridge door and takes out a gallon of milk. “I meant we as in you and Ella.” She beams at Ella as she pours milk into her coffee. “The daughter I never had. God, this is going to be so much fun.”

  Ella steps back, tensing, shying away because my mom’s enthusiasm is scaring the shit out of her. “What’s going to be so much fun?” she asks.

  “Planning your wedding.” My mom glances at Ella and me as she puts the milk back into the fridge. “You two are going to have the best wedding. I’m going to make sure of that.”

  I pull Ella toward me and circle my arms around her waist, trying to ease her panic. “You know you have only five days to plan it and then we have to return home, right?” I tell my mom.

  My mom clasps her hands together and glances over her shoulder at the snowflakes drifting down from the cloudy sky. It’s early afternoon but with the lack of sunlight it looks like it’s late in the day. “Five days is perfect.” She returns her attention to us. “I can do a lot in five days.”

  “And we’re all broke,” I remind her, pressing Ella’s back against my chest. She’s being really quiet and it’s making me nervous. I’m not sure if it’s all the wedding talk that’s freaking her out or the fact that we just had a baby talk.

  “I have some money saved up.” My mom collects her cup of coffee from off the counter. “And besides, you can have a nice wedding without spending a whole lot of money.” Her eyes land on Ella. “Do you have a dress already?”

  Ella shakes her head and then blinks at my mom distractedly. “What?”

  “A dress, sweetie.” My mom looks at me questioningly from over the top of her cup as she takes a swallow. “Does she have one yet?”

  I lean over Ella’s shoulder to catch her eye and I’m startled by the layer of water in her eyes. There’s something wrong and I need to find out what. “Yeah, she has one,” I say to my mom and then grab Ella’s hand and lead her toward the hallway, calling over my shoulder. “Mom, we’ll be right back.”

  Ella absentmindedly follows me. Once I get her into the hallway and out of my mother’s gaze, I stop us and whirl her around to face me.

  “Okay, what’s wrong?” I ask, examining her watery eyes.

  She stares over my shoulder at a few framed pictures of my mom and me hanging on the wall. “It’s nothing.”

  I place my hand on her cheek and force her to look at me. “It is something; otherwise you wouldn’t be about ready to cry.”

  “I don’t…” Tears bubble in the corner of her eyes and her voice cracks. “It’s just that… God, this is so stupid.” She rubs the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “Nothing you say is stupid,” I assure
her, wiping a stray tear away with my thumb.

  She frowns doubtfully at me. “Even when I told you that I was pretty sure we could push to one hundred miles per hour when there was a foot of snow on the road?”

  “Yeah, well, we all have our drunk moments,” I say, recollecting the night she’s talking about. How she was a little drunk and a little excited over the fact that some dude told her she had a nice ass. She would never admit that was what was making her all cheery, but I could tell it was and it was fucking annoying.

  “Go faster,” she’d begged from the passenger seat with her head against the dashboard as she watched the night sky through the window. “Go, like, a hundred.”

  “No way,” I’d replied, shifting into a lower gear as the engine grumbled. The road was dangerous going twenty-five, the car barely able to keep any sort of traction as we slid up the vacant street, heading home.

  “Oh come on, Micha Scott.” She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. She had on a leather jacket and a black shirt underneath it that had a low collar and I could see the curves of her breasts. The sight made me hard, which pissed me off because another guy had put a smile on her face. “Just try it. If things get too crazy, you can stop.”

  I shook my head, ripping my gaze from her cleavage. “You’re drunk and thinking stupid.”

  “Hey, that’s not very nice.” She’d pouted. I hated when she pouted because she looked ridiculously sexy and it made it difficult to deny her anything she was asking for, even if it meant us getting killed. She propped her elbows onto the console and leaned over, putting her face only inches away from my cheek. “Come on, just do it. For me.” She had this amused, drunk look on her face. She was too gorgeous, perfect, beautiful for her own good. If I could, I would have told her that. Told her how amazingly perfect she was and how I could spend thousands of hours writing lyrics about how beautiful she was and it wouldn’t even begin to describe it.