What I've Done

by Jen Naumann

  “Really?” I ask. “Does that mean you’ve been influencing me all this time?” I laugh playfully but he doesn’t answer my question. Instead he drops his hand from my chin and slowly picks the guitar up, setting it between us.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  He laughs. “It’s a guitar. I figured you at least knew what one looked like.”

  “Obviously,” I say, rolling my eyes and smiling a little. “What I meant is who does it belong to? Is it yours?” I tell myself if he busts it out and plays a song for me I’m pretty sure I will faint. It would be too much to take on top of his amazing good looks and wonderful personality.

  He unzips the case to reveal a handsomely pale, acoustic guitar. It looks just like the one I remember my father having when I was a little girl, but I think my mother sold his years ago to pay some bills. I run my hand along the sleek body of it, marveling in its beauty.

  Eli grins down at me. “It’s yours.”

  I push the guitar gently back at him. “No way! I told you not to buy me anything and I meant it, Eli. I can’t accept something like this. I’m sure it is worth a lot of money.”

  He shrugs and places it in my lap. “I didn’t spend money on it.”

  I raise an eyebrow at him but laugh at the same time. “So you stole it?”

  I pull the elegant instrument up into my arms the way I had seen my father do a hundred times.

  Eli laughs in a soft voice. “You really think I would steal something like this?”

  “Of course not. But where did you get it then?” I run my thumb along a few of the strings, shivering with delight at the lovely, deep sound the instrument makes.

  “It belonged to an old friend. He couldn’t use it any longer, so he asked me to give it to someone that would appreciate it.”

  “Are you serious?” I ask. This friend he speaks of obviously meant a lot to him and I am touched that Eli chose to give it to me.

  He is watching me with a pleased look, but I can tell there is something bothering him; something he has wanted to tell me for days but can’t get himself to say.

  “Lily...” He licks his lips and his expression turns downright apologetic. “You are going to be eighteen in something like an hour from now, right? Do you remember how I promised I would tell you everything on your birthday?”

  I nod with delayed movement of my head, feeling a bit anxious by whatever it is he is about to tell me. There is a faraway look in his eyes that I’m not sure I want to understand.

  His eyes seem to soothe over me as he speaks. “The guitar belonged to your father. Lily, he sent me here.”

  I swear my heart totally stops beating.

  I let my arms fall to my side. Either I didn’t hear him correctly or he has totally lost his marbles. I search his eyes for the right answer but he continues to watch me patiently as I process what he has said.

  “That’s not funny, Eli. My father is dead. You know that.”

  He brings his hands up to my jaw and lets his soft thumbs caress my cheeks. “Lily, this may be a bit hard for you to process, but your father was an angel—your mother’s guardian angel.”

  I am so stunned I don’t know what to say, so he continues with great pause, as if carefully choosing each word before saying it. My vision becomes blurred when tears begin to form.

  “When your father allowed himself to appear to your mother, they fell in love. The connection an angel feels with his human is beyond anything you can imagine and not like just any ordinary love. But if that love turns into the romantic kind, it becomes even deeper. It isn’t unheard of for angels to choose to become mortal to be with a human. Once they die as a mortal, however, they aren’t allowed to return to earth because of the choice they have made.

  When your father died, your mother’s heart broke into a million pieces. She knew you needed her, but when the pain of losing your father became unbearable, she used the alcohol to numb the pain of losing your father. When the alcohol wasn’t enough she turned to drugs.”

  With every word he speaks, I feel as if I am falling deeper and deeper into some kind of tunnel. His voice becomes tinny and sounds further away with each word. The light around me begins to fade, strangely feeling a lot like the night I almost died. But I know deep in my heart Eli isn’t crazy and he isn’t making up some kind of wild story.

  “Your mother brought you out here for a reason, Lily. This is the city where your parents met when she came out to visit a friend. This is also where your father decided to fall for her. She hoped you would find the kind of happiness she once knew when she lived here.”

  My mother had never mentioned that she had met my father in California, but Eli’s story begins to make sense, like puzzle pieces falling into place. She had lived all those years with a severely broken heart and brought us to the place where she had found their love. All the stories about angels and my father that I previously wrote off as drug-induced rants were actually her attempts to reveal their secrets to me.

  Eli wraps his arms around me, pulling me into him for support. The usual warmness radiating from him brings the welcoming calmness with it that I have come to expect when with him. My heart eventually begins to take on a normal pace and I take a deep breath, letting the ocean air fill my lungs.

  All at once, I remember what Eli said to me about being able to do special things.

  He is so incredibly attractive and I always feel safe when he is near.

  I know he has always been watching over me; he had appeared out of nowhere to save me in the alley from Shorty and he was there the two times Johnny had appeared.

  “You,” I whisper, placing my hand against his muscular chest.

  He nods when he sees the understanding cross my face. “I’m your guardian angel.”

  A thousand rapid bursts of electricity pulsate throughout me. You would think all of this would be hard to hear and that I should be freaked out by it, but his words are somehow comforting. This beautiful man was sent to watch over me, just as my father had with my mother. It seems natural that I would fall in love with him.

  Eli rests his forehead against mine and his expression changes to something deeper, something pained. “Lily, when you took all those pills…”

  The sadness seeping from inside him is so intense that I cry out when I understand.

  Just before I had slipped into what should have been my death, a now familiar warmth had encompassed me when I had suddenly remembered how much my little sister needed me and wanted to live. As Eli holds me in his arms now, I know it had been him who came to me the night I tried to kill myself. He had somehow appeared to save me just before I would have died.

  A stabbing guilt takes hold deep inside of me, making it difficult to breathe.

  Fat tears spring into my eyes and run down my face. “You were there.”

  “You don’t know how badly I wanted to hold you that night,” he whispers, wrapping his soft hands over mine. “Lily, you were supposed to die that night. It broke my heart that you gave up on life so easily like that. Don’t you know what a wonderful person you are? There are people that love you, very much.”

  A sob escapes my lips. “I made a mistake and I wish I never would have taken all those pills. But you saved me. How did you do it?”

  Our eyes search each other’s and I want nothing more than for him to hold me tight and take all the pain away. It seems logical that I had been so intensely drawn to him the very first time we had met. All this time he has been protecting me and he had saved my life once before.

  He looks away when his face falls with an even more intense level of sadness. “I overstepped my boundaries and broke some rules in doing it, but I was selfish and I couldn’t let you go. I just couldn’t stand to see you hurting like that. Not after everything you had been through with your mother. You need to understand, Lily, that when you chose to take your own life you also chose to become something else—something…dark.”

  The tightness in my chest all at once becomes a stabbing
pain. I hold my hand to my chest, hoping my heart will hold on and keep beating. “You’re saying I’m dark as in evil-dark?”

  Visions of the devil and grotesque demons fill my head and aren’t easy to push away. Wanting to take my own life is something I have been ashamed of since the day it happened, but now it seems to carry even more consequences that I didn’t think about at the time.

  Eli turns back to face me, his eyes attempting to comfort me but only partially doing their job. “Not yet. Since my influence is what made you choose in those final moments to live, your virtue is still in question, as well as my status as an angel. There is a bit of a debate going on over what will happen to your soul.”

  “What, like you’re on suspension or something?” I let out a short burst of laughter but know it isn’t really anything to be laughing about—not with the way he is looking at me now. My mind can’t even wrap around the part he told me about my soul and I don’t want to know who is involved in this debate.

  “Lily,” he whispers, running his hands over my face.

  My breath is caught in my chest as I watch his lips come in closer to mine. I shut my eyes and flinch slightly when his soft lips finally brush up against mine. When I open my eyes again I find him watching me with a crazy intensity. I set the guitar in my lap and throw my hands into his hair, pulling him back into me. I am pleased to discover his locks are every bit as thick and soft as I have imagined them to be.

  Our lips meet again in a kiss that is also just as warm and excellent as I had hoped it would be. His hands hold my face with loving tenderness as the kiss deepens, a fire burning through me from my mouth all the way down to my toes. My lips feel increasingly alive each time he pushes his up against them. We both seem to stop for air at the same time, resting our foreheads together as we catch our breaths.

  “Wow.” I gasp, waiting for the pounding in my chest to subside.

  I have never experienced anything so profound, whether in a kiss or through any other emotion. It will be impossible to ever look at him again without blushing after such an intimate moment.

  “I have wanted to do that since the first time I met you,” he whispers, running his hands along my jaw line. The sweet taste of his mouth lingers on my lips and I press them together to savor it a bit longer.

  “Wait a minute,” I say with a bit of a nervous chuckle. “Haven’t you known me my whole life? I thought guardian angels were supposed to be a lifelong thing?”

  He actually rolls his eyes at me. He quite obviously did not want to make out with a baby, but I am confused by what he is trying to tell me. “Not always. I wasn’t assigned to you. Your father asked me to protect you since he can’t return to earth on his own. He was so worried about you when your mother’s drug addictions became out of control. I first saw you back in Minneapolis, just weeks before you took those pills. Your father had described you as being someone beautiful and full of life, but when I found you I knew you were close to giving up.”

  I want to ask how long he has felt this way about me. Has it been since he first saw me? If that is true then he had to watch me kissing Tommy at the dance. I wonder just how much pain I have caused Eli in the time he has been watching over me.

  I reach out to take his hand in mine and bring it up to my mouth, lightly pressing my lips up against it. The expression on his face changes from one of utter sadness to total passion and he pulls me closer, letting his lips linger just inches from mine. I throw my arms around his neck and wrap my fingers in his hair once again.

  “I love you,” I say with a trembling breath.

  His warm, soft lips come crushing down onto mine without further delay. My salty tears mix in with the delightful taste of him. My body becomes alive with the desire that has been building up in the past few days as I begin to return his kiss with unabashed fervor. He utters a low groaning noise from deep within his throat and digs his fingers into my hair, pulling me closer to him. I press my body firmly up against his, wishing we could totally meld into one another. My feet are tingling happily as our kiss deepens and he holds on even tighter. Just when it feels as if I could possibly explode from a mixture of excitement and ardor, he pushes me away.

  He inhales deeply with his eyes still closed. “Lily, this isn’t a good idea.”

  His words come across as rejection. I had assumed all this time his kindness toward me was a sign that he is just as equally in love with me, but maybe I had mistaken the duty he had as something more. Embarrassed by how passionately I had kissed him, I uncurl my fingers from his hair and pull them back to my side. I look away with my face flushed.

  He chuckles in a soft voice and holds my face in his gentle hands. “Lily, I love you too.”

  My eyes dart back to his and I can see he truly means it. “You do?”

  He nods. “More than you could ever imagine. But our being together like this will complicate things. If I were to become mortal, I could die like anybody else, and then I would possibly never see you again—not until the end of your lifetime, anyway. I would not be able to return to earth. After what happened to your mother and all the pain she felt, I can’t stand to see something like that happen to you, too.”

  The panic stirring in my stomach rises to my throat. I pull his hands into mine and hold tight, willing the panic to go away. “But nothing says you would die young like my father did, right? You could live to be a little gray haired old man.”

  He looks down at our intertwined hands. “Most fallen angels don’t live a long life.”

  “Why not?”

  He sighs and looks past me for a moment. “It’s complicated.”

  “So don’t choose to fall. Then you could just go on as an angel and be at my side through everything, right? I guess I could live with that.”

  He stands to face the water. “I can’t stay forever, Lily.” His voice is quiet and his posture is slumped. At the moment I can’t imagine what could be more tragic than seeing a depressed angel.

  I stand as well and spin him around to face me. “Why not?”

  He swallows with slow pause. “I was sent here by your father when you were in need, which means I was chosen to complete a task. I messed up when I saved your life, and now, I don’t know…”

  “Can angels die?” I gasp.

  His eyes search mine, seeming to want some kind of comfort, but then drop to the ground when he finally answers me. “No, but the elders may decide at any moment that I can never return to earth.”

  The ground seems to move underneath me and my head feels weighted down with all of these monumental facts he keeps throwing in my direction. When I begin to appear unsteady on my feet, Eli reaches out to hold me up. My head presses up against his chest and so many emotions begin raging through me.

  With Eli I know I am loved and belong with him. I can feel it in my bones and with every breath I take. When I am with him, I am home. I can’t stand to have that taken away from me. Not after losing both of my parents and everything I have been through.

  “You can’t leave me,” I mutter, barely aware that my lips are moving.

  He squeezes me tightly and rests his head against mine. “I won’t, if I can help it, but I may have no choice. I wish it was up to me, but it isn’t. The elders who control my fate have to answer to the big guy upstairs. Angels are not like humans. We don’t have free will.”

  My chest burns with the anger that is building from the whole situation. I back away from his hold to look up at him. “So tell them you want to be with me. Tell them I have already lost both my parents and it’s not fair if I lose you, too!”

  “It’s not that simple, Lily.” He sighs, rubbing my back with slow movements.

  I am furious and frustrated at being so helpless. It’s not fair that we have just confessed our love for each other only to be told we cannot stay together. “Then let me do it.”

  “You can’t. You have to be a pure angel to enter my world.”

  I am nearing hysterics as the options continue to disappear
before me. “What about my father? Can’t he convince them to give you a second chance? If he was worried about me before, there is no way he would want to see me have to live without you, right?”

  “Lily, listen to me.” He takes my face in his hands again, brushing my cheeks with his gentle thumbs. “Your father wouldn’t want this for you. He knows it destroyed your mother when he died and he would refuse to let the same thing happen to you.”

  I blink back more tears. “So he sent you on some kind of impossible mission? It isn’t up to him to decide who I want to be with. It’s my choice. It’s too late for you to leave me now. I love you, Eli! Whether my father approves or not, I have already chosen to be with you!”

  The corners of his mouth waiver in an attempt to smile, but sadness ultimately wins over his expression. “I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but you will fall in love again with a human that will love you unconditionally and take care of you the way I can’t.”

  My lips quiver. “I don’t want to be with anyone else. I just want to be with you.”

  His persistence breaks when he sees me crying. He inhales deeply and pulls me back to him, holding his lips against my head as I cry. The thought of not being able to spend forever with Eli is too much to take in. There has to be another way we can be together.

  When I can finally pull myself together I lean back and take his beauty in with a whole new level of understanding. As a little girl, my father had told me vague stories of how angels walked the earth to protect us, even though we didn’t know they were there. I had always regarded his stories along the same lines as those of Cinderella and the tooth fairy.

  Maybe that was the reason it had been so easy for me to accept the truth—maybe my father had been preparing me for the day I would learn his secret. He must have known I would one day find out what he had been.

  “So how is it you always know where to find me?” I ask. “Do you just follow me around twenty-four hours a day?”

  He laughs. “Not always. I can see certain things before they happen.”

  A small smirk crosses my face as I envision him looking into a crystal ball. After accepting the truth that he is an angel, it is easier to believe in other outlandish things. “You mean like a psychic?”