Doves for Sale

by Lila Felix

  I laugh but he didn’t.

  “I’ve never thought that far ahead with Ezra. Do you think?”

  “You should talk to him about it.”

  “Where’s my diploma?”

  “Diploma?”

  “Yeah, I need a certificate or at least a handshake for putting up with you so long.”

  “I’d better not see you in the church on Friday nights anymore.”

  I make my chin quiver and pout out my lip. “Are you breaking up with me?” It would’ve been funny, except when I see Knox’s face level with someone at the door, I know that maybe I’d gone too far.

  I turn to find another priest standing in the doorway, a stuffier version of Knox with salt and pepper hair.

  “Should I come back later?” His question is directed at me and in a fit of nervousness, I giggle.

  “Nope. I’m leaving. Just so you know, Knox is my friend and my—well, he’s the brother of someone I know very well. I was just kidding about the breakup thing.”

  The solemn man looks down at me with a grimace. “Ma’am, believe it or not, I’ve been broken up with more times than I’ve actually dated.”

  Priests are funny people.

  I dart out of the office and decide against sitting in a pew, no matter how loudly my old friend calls to me. I stop at the grocery store and go through aisle by aisle with a shit-eating grin on my face the entire time.

  ~~

  Ten minutes before seven and my body is shaking.

  So when Ezra knocks on the door, I let out a sound that would rival Mariah Carey.

  “Hey!” I rub on a little fake enthusiasm. I’ve become quite the cheerleader when I want to be.

  The only thing I can see is flowers.

  There are orchids and broad green leaves everywhere. Ezra is hiding his face with them.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Sir. I’m expecting my…date.”

  I’ve got to get over not knowing what to call Ezra.

  What’s the word for someone who has invaded your very soul?

  Boyfriend?

  Seems ridiculous.

  He puts the flowers down in a huff. “I was trying to be silly.”

  “Ezra knows how to be silly?”

  “Ezra is trying. Can I come in?”

  I realize I’ve barricaded the door. “Of course. You look handsome.”

  All of this small talk felt like riding one of those carousels where all of the animals are a little bit on the child molester side. It felt off, but you just kept riding.

  Because it is a carousel and you were supposed to enjoy it.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m skipping the formalities.” The flowers are tossed to the coffee table and then I am wrapped in his arms again. The scent of rain and pine swirls in my senses and overtake me. He smells different.

  For a split second, I wonder if there’s anything about Ezra that is still the old him.

  “You smell good.” He whispers in my ears, but doesn’t relent from fulfilling my need for his touch.

  “Did I stink before?”

  He exhales. I feel his chest concave. “How long is it going to be that way?”

  “What way?”

  Ezra pulls back, and with his fingers, pushed my hair out of my face. “This before and after game we play. You’ve always smelled like heaven. That hasn’t changed. You’ve always been beautiful, but it seems like you are more so now, but that’s because I haven’t seen you in so long.”

  The timer in the kitchen goes off, but neither of us budge.

  I don’t know what to say. The before and after is something we have to deal with in one way or the other.

  “But there is a before and after. One day this is going to be a story we can tell…people.”

  I don’t have the guts to tell him what I really mean.

  “I guess so. I just want to be right now with you. I don’t want to talk about who I was—I just want to make up for lost time.”

  “You know we will eventually have to talk about it, right?”

  “Of course.”

  A thought pops in my mind, something Roman once said to me. He told me it would be so much easier to just date him—to force the attraction—to pretend.

  It is way too late for pretending—I am in too deep—down in the depths with Ezra Mason.

  I would be content to never breathe again.

  Breaking out of his hold, I pull the chicken out of the oven and set the table, that damned table and every memory it held.

  We eat in silence. We’re skimming the surface.

  I want to dive in head first.

  “There’s so many things I need to say. I changed my mind. Let’s clear the air.”

  I back my chair up and it protest with a nails down the chalkboard noise.

  “Let’s go somewhere else. There’s enough memories here.”

  “Where?”

  “Where it began.”

  He doesn’t ask which place I mean and I don’t have to tell him. There are a myriad of unspoken words between Ezra and I, but there are things that need to be spoken aloud.

  We’ve had our share of misunderstandings.

  I insist that we don’t go in, not wanting to alarm the police or the neighbors. We sit on the steps of the porch and I smile to myself at the coagulation of the wisps of fantasies I had as a teenager—dreams of sitting on this very porch at night, with a boy.

  This boy with black hair and a new beard, but the same entrancing gray eyes.

  The glow from the street lights made them look ethereal.

  “Tell me everything. I can’t handle a lie from you—not even a little one.”

  Ezra sits a full foot away from me. The distance is palpable. I can feel it in my chest, like a tether stretched too thin.

  “Knox counseled me for a while, maybe a month, but then he referred me to this devilish woman. She beat me to hell. The first day, she made me write a list of things I wanted to accomplish through counseling. It was that first day I realized that my problem wasn’t Mara or Gray, it was me. I’d been holding myself back the entire time. We blame our problems on others, but the way we handle shit is in here.”

  He rubs his fist against his chest.

  “That was when Knox called me. It was a little over a month after we’d—you’d…”

  “After you threw me out.” He shrugs as if to say, ‘You said you wanted truth.’

  “He never called it counseling. He asked me to dinner one Friday night. But it’s pretty impossible not to spill your guts to Knox. I think he enjoys it. It’s like a soap opera for priests. The Listless and the Self-Depraving.”

  “These are the Days of Our Ignorance.”

  I laugh through my nose. I hate when I do that. Even more, I hate doing it around him.

  “What was on your list?”

  He breathes hard. An exhale that holds the weight of a thousand hours of pain billows out a cloud in front of his face.

  “Honesty, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “First was to get ahold of my crazy, which meant sifting through Mara’s journals and talking to her parents, things like that. Objective complete.”

  “Jury’s still out.”

  “The third was to get back in school, actually get a college degree.”

  I lean back on my elbows to get a better look at the stars through the lens of the Cypress trees. It feels appropriate to look at the stars through this conversation.

  “And?”

  “I’m in, only part-time, and it’s all online, but that counts.”

  He’d skipped number two on purpose. I may not know much about this new Ezra, but I can count.

  “Why are you purposefully leaving out number two?”

  He huffs out a laugh and mirrors my posture. “I wasn’t leaving it out. I was saving it.”

  “Must be good.”

  “It’s a work in progress. It’s something I will have to work at for the rest of my life.”

  “Sounds rough.”

&n
bsp; “Nah. It’s a job I’ll happily take. But that all depends on you.”

  I hear the faint noise of an owl over the pounding of my heart. It knows, before my brain can register, what he speaks of.

  “I thought counseling was about you.”

  “Come on, Ace. Everything is a little bit about you. I wanted to get straight for me, but a little bit for you. I wanted to go to college, mostly for me, but a little bit to impress you. And the second thing, getting you back, well, that’s all about you.”

  He turns his head in the opposite direction when all I really want him to do is look at me. I think I’d give a little bit of my soul if he would just look at me.

  “That was really one of your goals?”

  “Yeah.”

  I have to make him look at me.

  “That was stupid.”

  No dice.

  “I know.” He shrugs.

  “It’s stupid because you never really lost me.”

  Every breath I take belongs to him—he can’t see it yet.

  “You’d be better off with Roman. He’s not a mess. He doesn’t still struggle with shit every day. He doesn’t question every move he makes.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  He grins, ear to ear, and it makes my breath stop.

  I belong with Ezra Mason.

  “She tried to convince me that I didn’t really want you. That I was in love with you because you saved me. She called it a pedestal love. I’d put you on a pedestal and couldn’t help but love you because I couldn’t see anything else. She made me date, trying to make me understand it.”

  “Who made you date?”

  “The Devil of a counselor that Knox sent me to.”

  “Devil’s not really the word that’s coming to mind.”

  “I made it to seven before I gave up. I was on a date with a girl I’d met at a Starbucks of all places. She made fun of my name and she had nail polish on her teeth. Then I looked out the window. I saw a girl with red hair and I almost shot out of my seat. And I knew. I knew that no matter how many dates she prescribed I go on, that there would be no one who could compare to you.”

  My throat constricts, following my lungs’ example.

  It is everything I want to hear and everything I never want to hear in the same breath.

  At least I’m not the only one haunted by who we were—what we could’ve been.

  “I’m so sick of talking about me. All I do is talk about me. Tell me about you. Tell me everything.”

  I am exposed, there on the porch with nowhere to hide and everything to hide from. The moon shines its light on my chest trying, in vain, to illuminate my heart.

  I start to tell him the abridged version. The part where I made it day to day until one day I made it a full hour without thinking about him. That’s the day I knew that I would be alright.

  And by alright, I mean still living, not just existing.

  But the petty part of me wanted him to know the pain—the struggle just to smile when I was supposed to, eat when I was told, and wake up without crying.

  “I don’t even remember the first two months—after the last time I saw you. I went to work. I ate what Roman gave me to eat. I pretended to sleep. Roman slept on my couch. Neil and Leon tried to cheer me up. I laughed when I thought I should. I kept waiting for you to call. I waited for any piece of you.”

  “You didn’t open my Christmas present.”

  “How could I? Opening that present meant I wouldn’t have anything left of what was us. I opened it about two weeks ago.”

  I pull the necklace out of my oversized sweater that I threw on before we left.

  “Why did you think I was going to call? You told me…”

  I roll my eyes with enough effect for him to notice. “I know. I did that for your own good. That’s what you do when you love someone. You put their needs before your own. The choice was easy—living with your choice is skin-burning hell.”

  “You shouldn’t have to live with any choices. Love should be easy.”

  The foot between us was like a mile.

  “Don’t say that to me, Ezra Mason. Don’t you dare. If I had any inclination that love was easy, I would’ve given up on you a long time ago. If it’s not worth fighting for, then it wasn’t love in the first place.”

  “You still love me?”

  His tone is pitiful. I wish he knew how deep my love ran. If only words would do it justice.

  “If I loved the mess you were then, what makes you think I wouldn’t love you now?”

  Ezra

  She is saying she loved me once and it takes a minute for the notion to settle in.

  “Maybe you loved the broken Ezra. Maybe you’re a magnet for cuckoo.”

  “A magnet for cuckoo. That sounds like some Knox shit.”

  “Stop cussing.”

  “I can’t. It’s me being super badass.”

  Aysa makes some hand motions while she talks about being a badass and I’m afraid for a second that she’s initiated me into a secret gang where the girls look like angels and cuss in the most awkward way imaginable.

  “Sorry, sweetheart, you’re too good to be badass. Anyway, you don’t have to prove anything to me.”

  She waves me off. “Who said I’m trying to prove anything to anyone.”

  “Me. You’re eating soup. You wore that dress to Roman’s party. You looked more awkward than Knox in a strip club. And you’re pretending to be badass. It’s just another form of hiding.”

  She takes my observation under consideration with a ‘huh.’

  “I lost my hiding place. I had to defend myself.”

  “You don’t anymore. Not against me.”

  She leans over and clunks her head in my lap, like she’s given up on being so far away. I run my hands through her orange clouds atop her head and am content with her there. As usual, we can’t have a regular date, it has to be intense.

  We decide, without words, that it was time to go. I drive us back to her apartment with a lightened heart.

  “You have to work tomorrow?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m not ready to let you go. You’re going to disappear.”

  “No. Never again. This is me guaranteeing you that you’ll never want for me again. I’m here for you, always.”

  Nothing but time would be able to erase the look of distrust that crossed her features.

  Time is all I have.

  “Where have you been?”

  “With Aysa.”

  There is no point in lying to Roman. I don’t know how we can all be friends, but if I know Aysa, she will want that for us.

  He takes a deep breath, not even trying to disguise his disgust.

  “I swear to God, Ezra, if you hurt her again, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

  “You won’t need to. I’ll do it myself if that happens.”

  “Neil and Leon will be here soon. They got the new Lego whatever game. They swear it’s the best one yet.”

  I sit down on the couch and try to get my heart to slow down.

  “They swear that with every new Lego game.”

  “Yeah.”

  I wait a few minutes and then ask the question that’s killing me.

  “Are we ever going to be okay?”

  “You and Aysa?”

  “No. We are okay. I’m talking about me and you.”

  “One day. The thing is, I knew all along, deep down that she’d never look at me the way she looked at you. But I couldn’t help myself, she just cries out for help without even knowing it.”

  I know what he means. Aysa has a way of asking for help without saying a word.

  “Probably not good idea to base a marriage off of saving someone.”

  “You think?”

  Neil and Leon come in later. After four downed pizzas and the neighbors complaining twice about the noise, we call it a night.

  I’m not sure if everything will ever go back to being the same between Roman and me, but maybe it’s just
the natural progression of the friendship. People grow up. People grow apart.

  That’s the one good thing I learned from the devil. Friendships evolve—they change. It was natural and normal.

  Which is why Gray and I, Roman and I, all of our friendships were so dysfunctional.

  We have been stagnant since high school.

  Maybe some friendships should be left right there in the hallways amongst the football banners and prom flyers.

  ~~

  “That wasn’t the plan we agreed on, Ezra.”

  I am less afraid of confessing what happened with Aysa to the red-heeled woman than I thought.

  “I thought the plan was for me to decide when I was ready.”

  She crosses her legs at the ankles. “And were you, ready?”

  “It doesn’t matter. She needed me.”

  She huffs out an arrogant acknowledgement. I hate when she pulls that shit. She might as well say ‘typical’.

  “Isn’t that what attracted you to her in the first place? Someone needing you?”

  No. I think it was her hair—maybe that thumbprint in her right eye. It was the way she spoke and cowered from shadows.

  It was the way she held the troubles of the world on her shoulders and blamed herself for them.

  Mostly, it was that she allowed me to be her shoulder when she needed one.

  “Maybe. But I needed her too.”

  “That’s where it gets unhealthy.”

  And this is where I get angry.

  “How the fuck would you know? What’s the point of being with someone without a degree of need? I need her in my life. Everyone needs someone. Don’t feed me that unhealthy bullshit. From the time we are born we need someone. Our mother—our father—friends—siblings. Everyone needs someone.”

  “I think this session is over. You’ve become hostile.” Her arrogance saturated the air around us.

  “I think this…” I gesture between her and me. “Is over. I’m done.”

  I walk out of the office and have an overwhelming need to tell Aysa. Like I’ve graduated something important and it’s a milestone.

  “Hey, Ezra.”

  “Hey, how are you?”

  “I’m good. I’m done for the day. Four school tours back to back.”

  “Nice. I bet you enjoyed that.”

  “I did. What’s up?”