Letting Go (Changing Hearts Series Book 3)

by Yesenia Vargas

  So I stay away from her. It works for a couple of days. I don’t leave my apartment except to go to work. I keep my lights off, and I don’t reply to her texts and calls.

  But she finds me when I’m heading downstairs to do my laundry. My front door slams shut behind me before I can grab it. It’s about midnight, and I’m sure she’s gotta be in bed by now, but her door opens right as I pass it.

  “You make a lot of noise for someone who’s trying to avoid me” she says behind me.

  I put the basket down and turn around.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?” she asks. She walks closer. She’s barefoot and in a t-shirt and shorts.

  Her legs are long and tan and toned. I look at her hair. It’s dark and wavy, and messy, and she looks tired as hell.

  She’s in front of me, and my dirty clothes lay forgotten behind me. Her hand is on my cheek.

  “What are you afraid of, Carlos? Why can’t you just tell me?” she says barely loud enough for me to hear her.

  My eyes close by themselves as I breathe her in. I don’t deserve to have someone like Naomi.

  “You know what?” she says. I open my eyes and stare into hers. “I don’t want to know what it is. Because I don’t care. I just want to be with you. I don’t care how long we’ve known each other or what’s in your past. I need you.”

  Before I can even think about what she just said to me, she’s pulling me to her and kissing me. And I have no choice. I kiss her back. No matter what she says, no matter how many times I try to tell myself otherwise, I need her more.

  She pulls back only long enough to say, “Come inside.”

  We almost trip on ourselves trying to go into her apartment while not wanting to let go of each other. She gives a small scream as I pick her up and carry her inside. I kick the door closed behind me and lay her down on the couch.

  She’s pulling me down by my shirt, and I’m moving down to her neck. God, I need her. I’m like an addict that just had a drink for the first time in years. Now I need more.

  Naomi lets out a deep breath, and I go back to her mouth. Her hands travel down my arms until she’s clasping my hands in hers. But she can’t seem to hold still because then she’s holding onto the waist of my jeans right where my belly button is. Then her hand is inside my shirt, and my heart is pounding. We’re both breathing loudly when I pull back, above her.

  “Wait,” I say. My body doesn’t want me to stop, and neither does hers, but I know where this is going to lead. “This is too fast.”

  Only her kitchen light is on, but I can see her face. She looks disappointed at first, but then she seems to regain her senses, just like I did. She nods.

  I don’t want our first time to be like this. Rushed and then full of regret later. Regret for me and confusion and then the same for her.

  It would only tear us apart.

  And I’ve decided I don’t want that anymore.

  “Naomi,” I say, still out breath. “I’m not going to stay away from you anymore. I’m done fighting it. I wanna be with you.”

  She smiles and kisses me. Her tongue brushes mine, and I almost lose myself again.

  We stop and look at each other again. “That doesn’t mean this is going to be easy for me,” I say.

  “But we have to give this a chance,” she says.

  I let myself forget about everything then. I lock it all away because I don’t want it to exist anymore. I want to be happy with Naomi. I want to make her happy, just like she’s made me feel like the luckiest man alive.

  So I lock away Valerie and prison and my dad and everything. And I keep kissing her. Slowly this time, memorizing the taste of her mouth and the feel of her skin as she pulls my hand onto her waist, and I realize her shirt has ridden up.

  “I should probably get my laundry at some point,” I say later. We’re both about to fall asleep on her couch. Again. I’m wondering what would be wrong with that.

  “Leave it,” she says. “Who’s about to steal your dirty clothes?” I fall asleep with a smile on my face.

  My alarm goes off, and I rub my eyes and look around. I wonder if my laundry is still in the hall. Just as I realize that Naomi isn’t on the couch with me anymore, I see her come out of her bedroom.

  “Good morning,” she says with a huge smile on her face. I can tell she just woke up herself. Her eyes are kind of swollen, and she doesn’t have make up on. I’m still laying on my stomach, trying to gather the strength to get up when she sits next to me and kisses me.

  I taste her toothpaste, and I realize I should probably brush my teeth. But I wait for her to go into the kitchen before I get up. I do not need her to see my morning wood.

  I put on my flip flips, almost tripping over them, and am at the front door. I open it and peek out. My laundry is there.

  “Where are you going?” Naomi calls out. I can hear her banging around in the kitchen.

  “Don’t you have class?” I say, already halfway out.

  “My finals were last week,” she says from the fridge. “I’m not taking any summer classes. Just working. But today I’m free. What about you? Do you have work?”

  “Uh, no, actually. But I have to go shower. And do my laundry, I guess.”

  She turns to me and smiles. “Okay. Come back as soon as you shower and get your clothes in the wash. I’m making us breakfast.”

  Now it’s my turn to smile. “You cook?”

  She laughs a little. “I guess you could call it that. I manage to keep myself alive without going out all the time, you know.”

  “Wow,” I say, still peeking at her from the door.

  Naomi playfully throws a plastic cup at me, and I finally leave and head to my apartment, taking my dirty laundry with me.

  Nineteen

  I stop asking for overtime at work and instead start taking an extra day off to spend with Naomi.

  The manager just chuckles to himself and walks away when he asks me why I can’t put in as many hours anymore.

  “I needed to start cutting your hours, anyway,” he says. “I’m glad you’ll be fine either way.”

  Now I’m on Naomi’s couch again.

  “So are you going anywhere this summer?” I ask.

  “Nope,” she says without any hesitation. We’re watching a movie on TV. Her sofa is small, but it’s a sectional so I lay back on the corner of it. She’s sitting in front of me, my legs wrapped around her.

  It’s crazy how comfortable we’ve gotten around each other in such a short amount of time.

  Less than a month since I actually met her on the roof of this building, thinking I was done with all of this.

  Now she’s my girlfriend. I kiss her forehead. I’m so glad she found me that night.

  “I’ll just be heading to my parents’ house a lot, helping my mom take care of my siblings. They have camps and stuff that they go to, and she needs help picking them up sometimes. I usually watch them until she gets home from work on those days.”

  “I thought you said she’s a cafeteria lady, though. Isn’t she off summers?” I ask.

  “Yeah, but she cleans houses and stuff during the summer.”

  I nod. We go back to watching the movie. It’s almost over. I run my hands down her arms then I wrap them around her ribcage. She turns around and kisses me, and I give her a squeeze.

  “You hungry yet?” I ask when the movie is over.

  “Yeah. You?” she asks.

  I nod, and we stand up. “Should we go pick something up?”

  She makes a face. “I’m getting tired of fast food. Let’s make something.”

  She goes to the kitchen and starts opening cabinets. She turns back to me. “Do you like pasta?”

  I shrug. “Sure.”

  “Pasta it is.” She pulls down a box and sets it on the counter. Then she turns a dial on the stove and pulls a pot from another cabinet and fills it up with water.

  In the next few minutes, she also defrosts some chicken and cuts it up. She quickly seasons it and pours
it into another pan on the stove.

  “So do you like to cook?” I ask.

  “Kinda. I know the basics. But I’m not in love with cooking, I guess. I do it because I don’t want to eat out every night and suddenly weigh like three hundred pounds one day.”

  I smile.

  “What about you?” she asks. “Do you cook?”

  I sigh. “Not really.” I tell her about the times I had tried to cook at my apartment my first few weeks living here.

  “Oh my gosh. Are you serious? Get over here so I can teach you to make this, then.”

  “Am I gonna regret this?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, walking over and pulling me into the kitchen.

  I love the feel of her hands around mine. “Pasta is easy, even for people like us, who only cook to survive.”

  I look at the water boiling in front of us.

  “See, it’s boiling. Now we add the pasta.” She pours in a bunch of colored noodles. “You just have to stir it every minute or so because it’ll stick. Plus I have my chicken over here.” We take a step over to the chicken in the pan. She picks up a metal spoon and mixes it up.

  “You can pull the package of chicken out of the freezer in the morning so it’ll be ready to cook by the afternoon or just stick it in the microwave for a few minutes.”

  I’m not paying attention to her cooking lesson so much as her. The sound of her voice, how close she is to me. Her smell.

  “Then you just add some garlic salt and put it in the pan,” she says, but I’m not really listening. Just watching her.

  “Here,” she says, giving me the metal spoon. The chicken is sizzling in front of us. I take the metal spoon, but I didn’t hear what I was supposed to do with it.

  She reaches into another cabinet and pulls out some white pasta sauce in a jar. She takes out another small pot and sets it on the stove. She wipes off the counter. She’s about to tell me something else, but I don’t let her.

  Her back is to the counter, and I’m against her, kissing her. Her arms reach around my neck, and we stop hearing the sound of pasta boiling and chicken being cooked on the stove next to us.

  I hoist her up onto the counter, and she wraps her legs around me. Now she bends down to kiss me, and my hands are under her shirt and around her waist.

  She finally pulls away several minutes later. “If we keep going, we’re gonna have burnt dinner to eat,” she whispers. I help her down, and she gives the chicken another stir. Then she quickly takes the pasta off the stove and goes to the sink. I get out of her way. She drains it. She turns back to me and stares a second before saying, “Pour that jar of sauce for me into that small pot.”

  I finally turn around and do that.

  A few minutes later, we’re eating pasta and a simple salad she made.

  “What do you think?” she asks.

  I finish taking a sip of my water. “Well, the chicken’s a little burnt, and the pasta’s a little overdone, but the salad is good.”

  She laughs really hard. “Well, it’s your fault my chicken Alfredo didn’t come out to perfection this time.” I see her starting to blush but she doesn’t tear her eyes off of me.

  “I’m just messing with you,” I say. “Anyway, it was worth it.”

  She finally looks back down at her food, and I smile at the fact that I just made her blush harder.

  My fingers weave into Naomi’s. We’re on her bed. We just got home from the carnival that came into town a few days ago.

  It’s almost one in the morning, and I have work tomorrow, but I don’t care. I just want to be here with her.

  Her bedroom lamp is on, and I can tell she’s about to fall asleep. Her eyes are closed, and her breathing is getting deeper.

  “I should get going,” I say quietly, about to get up.

  “No,” she says, turning to me and wrapping her arms around my waist.

  I smile and lay back down. We’re both exhausted, just like when I was a kid and my dad would take me to the carnival with my big brother. We’d get on los carritos chocones. We’d each get in one because we didn’t like to share a car, and then we proceeded to crash into each other as much as possible until the ride was over.

  We only did that two or three years, though, before my brother got too big for the little kid rides I still liked and then he was going on his own and with a girl.

  That was me and Naomi tonight, except we got on los carritos chocones. And the ferris wheel. Like three times, just looking out over everything. It kinda reminded me of that night on the roof with her. Part of me was kind of unsettled, remembering what I had been about to do that night, but then another part of me liked it, because Naomi would have never been in my life if it weren’t for me hitting rock bottom and going to the roof that night.

  I think maybe that was supposed to happen. I was supposed to feel helpless and alone. Because Naomi found me.

  I notice Naomi is making herself stay awake. She gives a big yawn and rubs her eyes.

  “Go to sleep, babe,” I say. “I should head home anyway.”

  “No, I don’t want to yet. We’ve had too much fun for it to be over already.” She looks up at me and smiles, and I kiss her on the lips. We had stopped at a Waffle House on the way home for scrambled eggs, bacon, and waffles. “That coffee I had is not working,” she says, her eyes slowly shutting again.

  I’m kinda sleepy but not as much as her.

  “What are your parents like?” she asks with her eyes closed.

  How do I even respond to that question? I’m hoping she fell asleep and I can go home and we’ll forget about this conversation. But she opens her eyes and looks at me again.

  I look away and shrug. “My mom is…I don’t know. She works in an office as a kinda secretary or manager or something. We don’t really talk much.”

  Not in months. And I don’t really feel like getting into explaining why.

  Naomi stares at me, probably figuring that out.

  “And your dad?”

  I swallow and try to look back at her. “He’s…a mechanic. He owns a shop in town. He’s cool.”

  I wonder if she’s gonna keep asking questions like this. Talking about this is hard enough, but I don’t think I can bring myself to tell her everything right now. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I have no idea.

  But she doesn’t. She just asks one more question about my mom.

  “My mom and I have just never been close, I guess. I finally learned that she just really only cares about herself.”

  A few minutes later, I’m still talking, but I notice Naomi’s soft snores. And I smile. I don’t how long I just talked to myself, but even when she’s asleep, Naomi has her way of making me say things out loud.

  I slowly slip out from underneath her, and I pull the sheets over her. I kiss her one last time, and I lock her front door behind me. And I head to my own bed.

  Twenty

  “So when are you going to meet my parents?” Naomi asks.

  If she’s asking that question, it’s because this is starting to get pretty serious. And just when I’m starting to have doubts about us again.

  Naomi isn’t dumb. She notices that I’ve been tense around her, especially when she touches me.

  I shrug. “Are you sure it’s the right time for that?”

  She stares at me. We’re on my couch. I’m flipping through channels, and she’s on her laptop.

  “Carlos, I’m ordering books for classes that start in a couple of weeks. Summer is almost over. Remember we started going out at the end of May? August starts tomorrow.”

  I think about that. “So we’ve been together two months?” Doesn’t feel like it. And I sure didn’t think I’d be meeting her parents already. I’m not sure I can do that.

  “Babe, I’m talking to you here.”

  I glance at her so she knows I’m not ignoring her. “I know. I just—don’t you think we should wait a little longer?” I rub my hands through my hair.

  Part of me is really happy that I’m wit
h Naomi, but I can’t deny the other part of me that’s been nagging at me again, more and more each day.

  You’re not the right guy for Naomi. She’s a good person. You’re not. You can’t escape from your past. It’ll always be part of who you are.

  And this isn’t right. You can’t keep doing this to Valerie.

  But most of all, I can’t even imagine what it would be like for Naomi to find out the truth about me.

  Especially from someone who knows me or who’s heard about me.

  Your boyfriend is Carlos Herrera? You know he went to prison, right? That’s not even the worst part. He got drunk and cheated on his girlfriend in high school. She drove drunk to get away from him and ended up killing herself.

  I get up, trying not to panic, and head to the refrigerator. I glance back and notice she’s back to doing something on her computer. I open the refrigerator doors and look inside, but I’m not hungry. I just don’t want Naomi to see me like this.

  I thought I could get past all of this. That maybe I finally found the right person and maybe deserved some peace. But I can’t.

  Valerie will always haunt me.

  “I should head home,” I tell Naomi a few days later. “I have work tomorrow, and you have school.”

  “Spend the night,” she says, looking at me. We’re on her bed. We’ve been talking, nothing else.

  It’s not that she doesn’t want to because she does. And part of me wants to, craves her actually, but a bigger part of me knows it’s not right.

  Because I’m pretty sure what I have to do.

  I just don’t know how to do it.

  I have to break up with Naomi. It’s what I should have done since the beginning. I knew that, but I convinced myself this was okay.

  I can see Naomi is still studying me. She’s not stupid. She senses something is off about me.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  I get up and sit on the edge of her bed. “Nothing. I’m just tired.”