by L. J. Evans
“Maybe I’ll be able to take a trip home,” I told her as a way of apologizing for causing her distress.
Instead of jumping all over it, she hesitated, which didn’t wound me but made me wonder what the heck was going on with her. “If you don’t, it’s okay. Make sure you get the physical therapy you need. Don’t skimp. I don’t want my son limping along beside me when I’m eighty.”
I chuckled because she wanted me to. “You’re a long way from eighty, Mom.”
She sighed. “Some days I feel a hundred.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, remorse hitting me again.
“It’s not you, Doodles.”
She’d whipped out the Doodles, which she hardly ever called me anymore unless she was feeling sentimental, and that had me feeling guilty all over again.
We hung up with I love yous in the air. I did love my mom. My dad may have been a hero to me, but she wasn’t any less of one. She’d raised me on her own from the time I was ten. She’d never given in to the loss and shut down. She’d supported me even when I’d gone down the same path as my dad, and she’d hated it. She was a quiet super hero, working behind the scenes to make sure everyone’s lives ran smoothly.
By the time Truck got back with my phone, I’d had plenty of time to beat myself up over being a bad son, a bad officer, and a bad date. Thus, I wasn’t in a great mood when he rushed in.
“Thank God they hadn’t put out to sea yet,” he said, phone in hand.
“Took you fucking long enough; you probably could have rowed out to meet them,” I groused.
He lifted the phone, keeping it just out of my grasp, and I hissed my frustration, trying to reach for it.
“Thank you, Truck, for hurrying to get my phone for me when I’ve been an asshole all morning,” he said in a patronizing tone that told me he was just going to continue to give me shit if I didn’t get my act together—and fast.
“Thank you. I’m sorry I’m being an asswipe. Now hand me my fucking phone.”
“Do you really want to call her when you’re being a royal dickwad?”
“Yes, goddamn it,” I said, leaning toward him and groaning as the movement caused pain to radiate down my leg once more.
“Maybe I should call her instead.” He smirked, phone still out of reach.
“I may be stuck in this bed right now, but I can guarantee you, I’ll be out of it soon, and I’ll still kick your ass, cast and all.” I was losing my patience, but Truck just laughed. That had me stalling in my anger. Until we’d seen Ava the other night, I don’t think I’d seen Truck laugh so easily in four years.
Ava was a miracle worker. I wanted her to be my miracle worker. It felt like I was in sudden need of miracles.
When he noticed that I’d calmed down, he handed me the phone, and I grunted a thanks. Once I had it, I was suddenly at a loss. Did I text her or call her?
“Wussing out? Are you sure you don’t want me to call her for you?” Truck offered again with a smile.
“No, I want you to go get me a burger and fries while I take this call in private.”
“Will they let you have all that?”
“I don’t really care what they say,” I told him. He nodded and took off.
My hand shook when I hit the call button. It rang and rang. I was worrying that it was going to go to voicemail because she never wanted to talk to me again when she finally picked up.
“Eli?” Her voice was breathless, concern floating through the phone.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. It was the first thing that came to mind. It felt so insufficient.
Silence.
“Ava?”
“Are you sorry you didn’t make it to our date, or sorry like you never want to see me again?” I could tell from her tone that she had shut down. Her face would be that silent, emotionless one that I’d seen so often since finding her in New York.
“I want to see you again.” It was a growl. “I’m sorry that I stood you up. It wasn’t my intention.”
More silence. “I’ve been worried about you. I had no one to call…”
“I’m an ass. I’m sorry you didn’t have a number. I’ll give you those. As many as you want. I just woke up this afternoon, and you were the first thing on my mind.”
“Are…are you okay?” Hesitation in her voice again.
I looked down at the cast and was surprised that I didn’t feel anything but relief at hearing her voice, at knowing that she’d picked up and that she wasn’t hanging up on me.
“Now that I’ve heard your voice, I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“A harbor seal happened.”
She chuckled, like I’d meant her to. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I made a rookie mistake. Got in between a seal trapped in a net and the boat. It panicked. Smashed me into the stern.”
“Oh my God. How…how bad did you get hurt?”
“Broken patella. Some bruises. Nothing life threatening. It happened yesterday at the end of our shift, and I’ve been out of it pretty much since the surgery. Then, my stupid-ass-so-called friend didn’t have my phone with him.”
Her breath caught on the other end. “Where are you?”
“Staten Island Hospital,” I said.
“Can I come see you?”
Did I want her to see me in a hospital gown? With bruises covering my face and my body that I hadn’t seen yet but could feel? With a cast on my left leg that would make me immobile for weeks?
All I could think was yes. I wanted to see her. I didn’t care how fucked up I was. I just needed to see her. To know that I hadn’t screwed things up beyond repair with at least this one thing in my life.
“I’d like to see you, but if you can’t make it out here, I’ll come to you as soon as I get released.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Now?”
She laughed. “Yes, now.”
My heart leaped. My chest pounded. For good reasons. Ava was coming to me.
“Ava,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Hurry.”
She laughed and hung up on me. I was still smiling by the time Truck got back with a bag of fast food. I forgave him for all his failings, devoured the food, and waited for “The One That Got Away” to show up and make my world right again.
♫ ♫ ♫
It seemed like “now” was another long forever, but it also gave me time to brush my stinky teeth and make sure that I didn’t smell as bad as the damn harbor seal had smelled before Ava showed up. Truck was unusually cooperative. I had a sinking feeling it was because he thought my career had just washed out to sea with the last cutter.
All thoughts about guilt over my mom, the potential loss of my career, and the pain in my leg drifted away when I saw Ava framed in the doorway of the hospital room. Her short hair swung about her chin as she paused to take me in. She clutched the hem of the brown leather jacket she wore as she moved toward me, squeezing and releasing as if she was nervous, upset, or both.
When she got close enough, she did that half-run thing she’d done with Truck the other night and gave me a loose hug. And it struck me again that it was almost as if she didn’t know how to hug. I wanted to pull her tighter to show her how hugs were supposed to feel, but the bed and the cast got in my way. I still had her in my arms, and she didn’t pull back for quite some time.
When she did remove herself from my arms, there were unshed tears in her eyes, like there had been when she’d hugged Truck and begged for forgiveness. Except now, I could see that there was fear and relief in her eyes as well. I was swamped with my own conflicting emotions—relief, happiness, and anguish. I was pissed that I’d caused her to worry, but I had to admit a certain sense of joy that she cared enough to do just that—worry.
“You look like shit,” she told me with a weak smile, sitting down on the bed with me, the soft, patterned leggings she was wearing rubbing against the
hospital gown and the nothing I had on underneath it—tantalizing me.
“I don’t feel like shit,” I told her with a smile.
“That’s only because you haven’t seen yourself in a mirror,” Truck joshed.
I ignored him and focused on Ava, on the weak smile on her lips. “I’m sorry that I made you worry.”
“Worried-schmurried. I forgot about our date until you called,” she teased.
“Liar.”
We were grinning at each other like people who had lost every shred of sanity. Truck stood at the foot of the bed, and I could feel his eyes on us, but I didn’t bother looking his way.
The long purple shirt that Ava had on hid some of her curves but brought out the color in her eyes. Eyes that were bright and sparkling. It felt almost like the years since I’d seen her had wandered away. She was smiling and shining. It was hard not to be drawn to that. I wanted to see her this way all the time.
“Well, I can see I am no longer needed here,” Truck said. “I’m going to go catch some z’s. I’ll call you later to see if you need anything.”
Then he was gone.
“Where’s your phone?” I demanded.
She pulled it out of the bag that was at my feet. “Why?”
“I’m typing in a few numbers.”
She didn’t object; she just unlocked it and handed it to me. I plugged in the three numbers I did know by heart: my mom’s, Mac’s, and Truck’s. Then, I handed it back to her, along with my own.
“Your turn,” I told her.
“What?”
“Numbers of people I need to hunt down if you disappear on me.”
“I don’t plan on disappearing,” she said, but she took the phone and typed in a number for Jenna and Brady.
“Do you have any family that I should have in here besides the asshole?”
She shook her head. “These are the two people on the planet who would notice if I vanished for more than a day.”
I vaguely remembered Jenna’s name from our time together at the beach house. But it was Brady’s number that caused my smile to wilt a little. She’d said they were just friends, but I could tell they had a bond—a bond that her and I hadn’t developed yet.
She put my phone down next to me, and I put my own hand on top of hers, capturing her thumb with my own. “I’m sorry about our date. I’m sorry about this.”
“Can I just say that it’s kind of sexy that you got hurt saving an animal,” she replied, the huskiness of her voice lowering another notch and making a part of me awaken that had been asleep with the pain coursing through me.
“Idiotic, really. I know better.”
“Were you supposed to just let it die?”
“No, but I know better than to be between it and the boat.”
She didn’t respond for a moment. “I thought…I don’t know what I thought.”
I brought her hand to my lips, placed a kiss on the inside of the palm, and was rewarded with her sighing.
“Our date will still happen.”
She looked down at our hands that were now on my chest where I’d placed them. “Do you think that maybe life is telling us that we shouldn’t?” she asked.
“Shouldn’t what?”
“Date.”
“Because I got smashed by a seal?” I was rewarded with a smirk.
“It just seems…that when we meet, there’s always drama around it.”
“Again, I don’t think the seal had any intention of derailing our date. I’m pretty sure it was just thinking of its own survival,” I replied, because I wasn’t going to go where she was going.
She was silent, thoughtful.
“Ava,” I said her name so that she’d meet my eyes, and she did. “When you see me—when you’re near me—tell me what you feel.”
“I think—”
I cut her off. “Not what you think. What you feel. What does your body tell you without your brain getting in the way?”
She tried to pull away, but I held on to her hand tighter, wrapping mine around her wrist and lifting my other hand to her chin so that I could gently push it up, locking our gazes again.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“That’s lie number two of the day,” I told her. Her eyes drifted sideways and then back to mine. “Do you want me to go first?”
Her head barely inclined, but I took it as a yes.
“When you’re in the same room with me, I feel like my body is being called to yours. Like the waves are called when the moon is drawing the tides. Like the pull you have on me is ancient and old. As if we’ve been doing this dance for longer than man has been on Earth. I feel like the only place I was ever meant to be…is next to you.”
I felt her pulse increase under my fingers, the thumping pattern matching my own.
“You can’t say stuff like that when we hardly know each other at all,” she whispered, as if what I’d said was both the best thing she’d ever heard and the most impossible.
I nodded, because it was true that we hardly knew each other. If you looked at the total sum of hours we’d ever spent in each other’s company, it wouldn’t fill a week. It was a blip in the number of hours of our lives, and yet, they felt like the most important hours I’d ever had.
“Tell me it doesn’t feel the same, and I’ll stop saying stuff like that, but even then, I can’t promise to walk away without trying. Trying to see what the waves are telling us.”
She watched me in that old way she used to, but she didn’t answer how she felt. Instead, she asked a question. “Do you know why I used to stare for so long?”
I wanted to hear her say that her body felt the same way as mine, but I let it go and just shook my head in response to her question because I didn’t know the reason she’d stared so long.
“One of my favorite authors, Jessica Park… she wrote a book called 180 Seconds.” I frowned, trying to remember if I knew the book from the bookstore I’d helped my mom with growing up in New London; it didn’t ring any bells. “In the book, they do this social experiment where you stare into someone’s eyes for three minutes. And the main character says that it’s like the person is taking in pieces of you, just as you are taking in pieces of them. That they can find value in each other just by sharing that simple, unguarded moment. From the moment I read that book, I was searching for someone who could meet my gaze and see me for who I was with no walls—no barriers—and who I could see back…the them inside. And when I found that person, we would promise not to drop each other. To not let the other drown in whatever had happened to them. To keep them safe. I wanted to find all of that through a simple stare.”
I watched her as she watched me. Unguarded. Letting her see whatever it was she thought she needed to see in my eyes as I searched her own, the seconds pounding away. I wasn’t sure it had been one-hundred and eighty before she spoke, but it had certainly been a lot.
“I never did. I never felt a connection…until you.”
Those words took every breath I had and knocked them out of me, just like the seal knocked them out of me. Just like she’d had the air knocked out of her when she’d done a crazy stunt off a dock one summer long ago.
My hand went to her cheek, and despite the pain that pulled itself through my lower half, I sat up and took her lips with mine. The soft pinkness bent and flowed beneath me. It molded itself to my own softness until they shifted and pushed back, demanding a return.
Just like the moon called the tides, she had called me home. To her. I hoped that in calling me to her, she’d allow me to save her as I promised myself I would. And I hoped that I’d get my own little miracle that I now needed.
Chapter Eighteen
Ava
I THINK I FELL IN LOVE TODAY
“Looks like forever in his eyes
That don't happen all the time
But when it does, it changes everything
I think I fell in love today.”
—Performed by Kelsea Ballerini
—Written by Ballerini
Eli was kissing me. I felt the kiss not just on my lips, but I swore I felt it in the very fabric of me. The molecules and the DNA that made up my body. The body that was no longer mine. Instead, it was as if somehow our negative and positive ions were finding their rightful positions next to each other. Part of each other. That we were one.
His hand moved from my cheek to the back of my head, as if, by that motion alone, he could somehow bring us even closer together. His tongue whispered against my lips, and I let him in where he found new parts of me to explore.
I responded by placing my hand behind his neck and pulling him closer, finding solace and peace within a kiss that was always meant to be. It was no wonder that other boys’ kisses always turned me off, shut me down. I had experienced this kiss once before, and my body knew the truth. There was only one man who should ever kiss me.
A throat clearing near the doorway brought our lips apart, but our eyes still found each other, our hands still held our heads together. He rested his forehead on mine, and a glorious smile lit his face—the one that I’d said changed him back when I was nineteen and clueless. I was obviously still clueless because I hadn’t realized that this was all I needed.
“I was just checking in before I left. Do you need any more ibuprofen?” the voice behind me said—a nurse, obviously.
“I have everything I need right here,” Eli responded, his words a kiss to my heart that I promised to keep forever. His voice was so low, so thick with emotions and desire that I was sure the nurse would be blushing all the way home, but I didn’t care. I only cared that Eli was there. In my hands. In my soul. In my life.
“Oh. Okay.” We could hear the whisper of her scrubs and the squeak of her shoes as she left the room.
His smile widened. I didn’t think it was possible. What was impossible was to keep from smiling back. “Did I answer your question?” I teased.