Heart Stronger

by Rachel Blaufeld

  My nose was a faucet of mucus, my mouth a waterfall of feelings. “Why didn’t her dad go to the police?”

  “I guess he was as smitten with my mom as my pops. Lived in hope she’d be back for a happy life, or whatever.”

  “Oh my God, I can’t make sense of this. What the hell was with your mom?”

  “It took me a while too.” His hand smoothed my hair behind my ear.

  I wanted to sink deeper into him.

  I wanted to run away.

  I wanted to die.

  I didn’t know what the hell I wanted.

  But more than anything, I wanted to live the happily-ever-after I’d never thought was possible.

  “You said we’d move in together. You loved me, yet you were doing all this behind my back…on the web? How were you going to keep these secrets from me?” The last part was hushed, words I didn’t want to say aloud.

  “I found a way to get into the boards, followed some old conversations, pieced some shit together, hacked into newer conversations. Shit started making sense, especially after Abbie told me. Then I found the name with the extra A. I was close to understanding it all when I found something about the new explosion, and I knew I had to blow the whistle.”

  “Again, what about me? Why did you leave?” I couldn’t bring Abby back. I needed to make sense of why I’d lost someone else. How did I let Aiken slip through my hands, or why did he want to escape?

  “I didn’t want anything to blow back on you. I left because I wanted you to be in the free and clear. I never imagined I’d fall for someone while here, let alone you. My feelings were in so deep with you, so much more than I could reconcile with what I was finding out. I separated them. There was you, and then there was this, but they’re not separate, and I had to choose. In a way, I felt like I chose you because I wanted to keep you safe.”

  “And my paper? My job, all the extra work Mary’s been throwing me?”

  “Mary’s been helping me.”

  Squeezing my eyes shut, I inhaled and exhaled, my body limp with fatigue. I couldn’t feel my limbs or my heart, and I decided I liked it.

  “Thing is, I don’t know how we move forward. It’s not possible.” It was a whisper from the back of my throat. Hushed. Maybe if we didn’t hear it, it wouldn’t be true?

  “I know, but I’m not my mom. I’m me. I didn’t even know what she was doing, and you know I don’t condone it. Right?”

  There was a string tethering us together, and it was shrinking with every one of his words.

  “And you’re you,” he said. “My heart beats stronger when it’s with you. I’m afraid that without you my heart will shrivel up. You have to believe me.” His words continued to draw me near.

  “I need time. Time to understand, digest all of this. You have to let me be.” I couldn’t look him in the face, couldn’t forget what a horrendous mess I must’ve looked like. I needed physical space. When I was close to him, I couldn’t think straight. I was too close as it was.

  “I get it. I don’t want to, but I do.” His words were a whisper of defeat, his eyes flat.

  “How did you think I would act? Happy? I need time alone. That’s what I need.” I slipped out from his hold and moved to the other side of the couch despite his furrowed brow.

  Looking worse than a dejected Smitty, he stood and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll be next door.”

  And then he was gone.

  Claire

  My knees ached, and my spine felt like a steel rod in my back as I stood from the couch. I’d lost track of time. It had to have been hours, not minutes, since Aiken had gone. Now, Smitty whined by the back door. I let him out, my eyes betraying my heart by glancing next door. The lights were on, the back door slightly ajar, the screen door closed.

  What was he doing?

  I wanted to rush to him.

  I needed to stay away.

  My brain was broken. It wasn’t operating as well as it could.

  My heart was shattered, small fragments of it floating around my chest, seeping into my veins and arteries.

  You must be put back together before you see him again. Otherwise, you will stay splintered forever.

  I told myself to slow my thoughts, pace my decisions, but the reality was my heart didn’t want to. It beat with his. His presence alone, being back next door, was beating life back into me.

  Whoosh, whoosh. I felt his energy.

  “Come on, Smitty,” I called, letting the screen door slap closed behind us.

  I had to keep him out. He couldn’t patch me up this time.

  With the back door locked, I slid to the floor, my back against the wood, my legs out in front of me, and closed my eyes. This was how I woke up the next morning, Smitty’s head heavy on my legs, the sun peeking through the kitchen window.

  The clock read seven o’clock. It was almost an hour past my usual wake-up time. Racked with emotion, my body broken, I stood and opened the back door for my dog. This was becoming a pattern. Me in the door, Smitty outside, neither of us where we wanted to be.

  I thought back to a few weeks ago, when Aiken asked me to ask him to move in. It had seemed sweet, sincere, and caring. He had been concerned for my loyalty to this house. All of a sudden, I realized the house I lived in didn’t matter.

  He did.

  I didn’t need time alone. I’d had enough of that.

  I needed to live with Aiken.

  To err is human, to forgive divine, I recalled learning in my poetry elective back in school.

  Yes, Aiken had done something a bit more than erring, but he’d also brought me back to life.

  My eyes were sore from crying. I closed them against the daylight. I was in a daze. I needed to shower, get my act together. When my eyelids fluttered back open, I was determined to face the day, and I saw a freshly showered Aiken.

  “Here, even if you don’t want to see me, I know you want this.” He handed me a disposable coffee cup from the place I used to go to with Abby, vanilla-scented steam wafting from the tiny hole.

  “Aiken.”

  “Don’t argue with me.” He took my hand and secured it around the cup. “I can’t stay away. I wanted to check on you. I had to check on you. Fuck it, I know you’re mad, but I had to know you’re okay…breathing—”

  “Hurt,” I interrupted. “Not mad, but hurt. You hurt me when you disappeared. I didn’t understand any of it. Why? Who? Nothing. You up and left, and I was an emotional mess. It was like losing someone again, losing someone so crushingly important. That’s all I seem to do is lose people.”

  “I hate that I did that to you, but you have to know I had my reasons. Whether you agree or not, I’m not a hurtful person. I’m not my mom. I’m gentle and kind. And patient. I went to a hotel to get my head straight and make sure none of this came back on you. Except when it comes to you. I want you back, along with everything we talked about. I want all of it now. I don’t want to wait.”

  My heart broke for the young boy at heart, who came here searching for his mom, only to find she was a wanted criminal.

  She was nothing like the woman his father had described his mother as being. Wasn’t that traumatic enough?

  But I couldn’t forgo all the other layers or complexities of us. It was impossible to imagine a happy ending for us.

  Or not? Maybe we were brought together for a reason?

  “I see your wheels churning. The smoke coming out of your ears, your tough mind trying to make sense of the world around you, is usually a turn-on. I turned my mother in, she’s done. I’d been feeding the authorities little bits of information along the way, so when it all went down, there was very little left for them to know. That wasn’t easy, going against the ideal of who my mom was, keeping it all from you, but I did it. Period. I helped, and now you can have closure and so can I. It wasn’t the best way or the right way, I know. But I had to come to my own terms while this was all happening, so then I could help you. Maybe there’s a reason behind us being neighbors.”
r />   That was my exact sentiment.

  “But your mom. Can you look at me every day and know how I resent her?”

  “Let’s take this somewhere more private.” Aiken gathered me close and turned me, coffee cup in hand. I hadn’t even realized I was shivering, but once inside, I felt the tremors racking my body.

  “Come on.” He guided me to the pink couch.

  “Sit and drink your coffee.” Aiken moved to get some food for my dog. Smitty, again desperate for Aiken’s attention, faithfully followed him.

  When he was back, a sip of vanilla latte warming my belly, I asked again, “Can you look at me every day and know how I resent your mom?”

  “I resent my own damn mom. I despise what she did, hate what she stood for, and I don’t condone how she destroyed lives. Mine too. Not as violent or final as Abby’s, and I’m sure it’s no comparison, but she took a lot of life away from me. I’ve been a four-year-old kid who needed his mom for a long time. Now I’m an adult, a grown man, who knows I wasted my time waiting for her, dwelling on her, looking for her…and I desperately want to leave her where she belongs. In my past. Deep in my past.”

  “Aiken.” His name came out on a sob.

  “I love you, Claire. I don’t want or need you to like my mother. I want you to love me. Fuck her.”

  I gulped the coffee in search of liquid comfort.

  “I do love you. I ache for you. That this happened to you makes me so mad.”

  A newfound freedom unfurled in my belly. There had been a tightening there, a pull to express myself that I’d pushed against for too long. Relief washed over me at having said my feelings out loud.

  “Abbie…the other one…my sister, I guess…she says she’s sorry. She wishes she’d known about all this sooner. She would have stepped up, I guess.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t deal with her today. You’re enough to handle. You’re the one who is important to me. And Pops. Did you tell your dad?”

  Air finally came and went in my lungs at an even pace, and I took Aiken in. Jeans, shitkickers, flannel shirt, white shirt underneath, scruff, and a shorter haircut. He was my gorgeous, beautiful, sensitive Aiken, except for the dark circles under his eyes.

  My hand reached out of its own volition and ran over his cheek, my finger tracing down his neck and back up. He took my cold hand and let me have my feel.

  “I told him everything. He said she’d always been good with computers. When they first met, she was working on a database for the church. But he never knew her to have a violent side, and for this, he was so sad. For you too. But he said he couldn’t renounce their relationship, because it gave him me—and now he has you. At least, that’s what he thinks.”

  “He has me.” My mouth formed the words before my brain could catch up. Forgiveness was in my blood when it came to these men.

  Not Abbie, but Aiken and Sam.

  I still felt too raw by Abbie’s lying by omission. She could’ve said something earlier, clued me in or brought me into the fold. Yes, she was part of solving the mystery and giving me closure, but I continued to feel duped.

  “Claire, be mine. Forgive me. Please, can we put this far away from us? I know it won’t be easy, but we have to try. And if that doesn’t work, try harder.”

  I leaned forward, laid my head on his chest, and nodded, afraid to express the party taking place inside my chest.

  “I love you,” he murmured against the top of my head. “I feel your heart beating strong against my chest. I hope that’s all for me.”

  “It is, all of it. Every beat,” I admitted, my lips turned up. I was happy. “I’m going to try my absolute hardest. That’s all I can promise.”

  I’m not sure how long we stayed like that. At some point, Aiken helped me to the bath, and it reminded me so much of the night he found me in the yard.

  He sat on the edge of the tub and helped wash me.

  “I’m going to have to deal with Mary,” I said. “I don’t want to, but I need to.”

  “She was trying to help. She felt bad about you getting sick, run-down, but felt it was better for everything to be over.”

  “I’m still mad at her.” I was. Sort of. Part of me really didn’t care now that I had Aiken back in one piece.

  “She probably knows that.”

  “Well, tomorrow I’m going to tell her. Right after I get rid of the pink sofa and you move your leather one here.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Aiken

  It was the end of summer session, and I wound my way down our new street. A whole year had passed since I met Claire. The first few months we officially lived together had not been easy. Emotions ran high, doors occasionally slammed, but we fell into a rhythm. We loved each other for who we were. We decided not to allow our pasts to ruin us, but to help us grow.

  These days, we lived far off campus in an old farmhouse. The land had mostly been sold off to the surrounding farms, leaving us with a midsize vegetable garden and a small orchard. We painted the house white with a purple door. There were flower boxes on the front second-story windows filled with purple impatiens.

  From afar, it seemed like we were a fairy-tale couple. And, damn, did we deserve our happy ending, but it was hard getting here.

  My mother had admitted to being the mastermind behind the blast that killed Abbie and the bombing attempt at the second concert. She’d been sentenced to life in prison.

  “Hey there, tough guy.” I patted Smitty on the head as I wandered around to the back of the house.

  I looked up at the selling point, the balcony off the master bedroom, and there she was, looking over the backyard. She was standing next to the railing, drinking coffee, and watching the progress on the in-ground pool.

  “I see you were rolling in the pond,” I told the sopping-wet dog.

  “Don’t let him back in the house,” Claire called down.

  I nodded and pointed toward the outdoor doghouse we’d set up for Smitty. He’d spent many days drying off in the pretend igloo.

  “Can I come in?” I teased up to the balcony.

  “Yes, but I have work, so you can’t distract me.” Claire winked.

  She was going to have a hard time selling that to me in her white tank, jean shorts, and messy bun. My sexy professor, casual and gorgeous, and all mine.

  When I made it upstairs, she was settled in a chair on the balcony, looking over papers.

  “Is that important?”

  She nodded. “Potential grad students for internships at the preschool. They have me working on the initial selection committee. There are some great ones, but I’m going to have to recuse myself, which kinda makes me sad.”

  “Why?” I sat down across from her, taking a sip of her sweet coffee.

  “Abbie. She wants to interview, and she deserves a fair chance. I just can’t be the one to decide.”

  “Got it.” I knew better than to argue. We’d met with Abbie once, but Claire just wasn’t there yet. She wasn’t ready to make peace.

  “I know being involved with the preschool is a dream for you. Should I tell Abbie to back off?”

  “No, I don’t want you to do shit like that. I’m a grown woman.”

  “Oh, I know. And a gorgeous one.” I leaned forward, my hand tracing her shapely calf.

  No reason to poke the bear. Plus, I wanted in her pants.

  I got up and snatched her paperwork and set it on the table.

  “Hey, don’t you have homework?”

  “I can balance my own schoolwork, Richards.”

  I’d enrolled in a few computer classes, but I’d already been accepted to an elite segment of a federal agency, helping to hack into the dark web and secure information.

  “Well, then, distract me, farm boy.”

  Aiken

  April

  Tiny beads of sweat beaded across Claire’s forehead. There was a small blood vessel that had burst under her eye. I took in the slight reddish-blue vein marking her other
wise flawless skin.

  She was still fucking gorgeous.

  Stunning, with her dark hair tied back, no makeup, cheeks red from exertion, pink nightshirt falling off her shoulder, no bra, her tits full and loose under her shirt.

  “Want an ice chip?” I was a fool to ask, but I needed to know.

  “Nooo,” she growled. “This is ridiculous, Aiken. I’m too old for this. I’m not supposed to be doing this, or anything closely related to this. This isn’t natural.” She grunted the last part, gritting her teeth, and I tried to subdue my laugh.

  “Yeah, I know. For fuck’s sake, I just turned thirty-two. I should be anywhere but here. I should be at Juicey’s.”

  She glared at me in the most evil fashion, and then she gave a yelp.

  “By the way, watch your language.”

  I didn’t have time to apologize…

  “Ow, it hurts.” She arched off the bed. “Aiken.” My name was a whimper from her lips.

  Moving closer to her side, I ran an ice cube around her lips and along her brow.

  “Give me your hand,” she barked, and I did just that.

  She squeezed hard, and I didn’t dare say another word about my age or hers—I never mentioned hers.

  “I need a doctor, not you. Sorry. I need someone who knows what they’re doing. I need this thing out. Now.”

  “I can’t go get one…love.” She rolled her eyes at me. “Unless you let go of my hand.”

  “Go.” She immediately released me and shoved me off the bed.

  After sprinting to the nurses’ station, I hurried a nurse back to my wife, who declared it was time.

  Go time.

  Time to meet our baby.

  Our son. We knew it was a boy after all the tests we’d endured.

  Because of my age, Claire had reminded me every step of the way. Don’t you want to do this with some young thing who will bounce back like nothing, be romping around in a bikini in no time? she’d asked too often.