Nodding, “Yeah, I do. Zac adores Lily. It’s wonderful to see him put someone else first.” Turning to Berto, “He’s very protective of her.”
“They share a bond none of us will ever truly understand. It’s one thing to say you’d die for another person, it’s another thing to actually put your life on the line for them and then watch it all unfold.”
Nodding, Schooner conjectured, “My guess is that in a period of just a few moments those two quickly segued from childhood to adulthood and lost a lot in the process. It’s been a long haul back from Hell.”
Agreeing, Berto concluded, “I’m glad they have each other.”
“I know Lily is concerned about being apart, but Zac’s not going anywhere. His plans for the future are all centered around her.” Schooner had watched his son, and not only did he treat Liliana with love and respect, he put her first, in everything. Her happiness was of the utmost importance to him. Her happiness made him happy.
Berto smiled as he stared out over the ocean, “I can rest easy, Schooner, knowing your son is taking care of my little girl.”
There is nothing like an oceanfront clambake on a summer’s night in the northeast, and that is what the Moores planned to celebrate the Castillo’s visit. Once the sun goes down and the breeze kicks in with the tide, sweatshirts and hoodies come out, as the cool air chills sunburned cheeks and sun-chafed lips.
Marit had continued to give Zac the cold shoulder and he decided it was time to take a different tact with her. Step one was that he was no longer going to call her Mrs. Castillo. By allowing her to be aloof, he was giving her power he didn’t want her to have.
“Marit, is there anything I can get you to eat or drink?” he approached her at the railing of the deck where she stood alone watching the ocean.
“No, I don’t think so.” She never looked at him or thanked him for the offer.
Nonplussed, he remained by her side, quietly taking in the view.
“Johns Hopkins has always been her dream,” Marit was the first to speak.
Score. Never speak first.
“We want the same thing for her, Marit. So, I need your help.”
The older woman turned to him, her brows knit together, distrustfully.
“I wake up in fear every day that Lily is going to announce to me that she’s withdrawn from Hopkins. I’ve told her on multiple occasions that under no circumstances do I want her following me to California. She needs to go pursue her dream.” He ran a hand through his thick hair pushing back the irreverent lock that had an affinity for his forehead.
“And what do you want of me?” her tone was leery.
“Convince her she needs to go to Baltimore and that anything different would be a mistake.”
“Of course it would be. How can she trust you after the way you hurt her?” Her eyes narrowed as she delivered her verdict.
Outwardly smiling as if she had just given him her blessing to marry her daughter, Zac locked eyes with the woman, “We’re on the same side here, you do realize that, don’t you?”
Without waiting for a response he turned, calmly striding across the deck and into the house.
Watching, but not being able to hear the exchange from where she was seated, Mia saw the look on her stepson’s face as he made his way to the house. Excusing herself from her guests, she followed Zac indoors.
Leaning with his shoulder against a wall, he appeared deep in thought as tapped the heel of his left foot repeatedly against the floor.
Standing before him, she asked, “Are you OK?”
He shook his head no without even looking at her. “She’s never going to forgive me for hurting Lily. She just doesn’t get it. I couldn’t leave her there. I couldn’t. It wasn’t safe. It was the only thing I could think to do to get her out of there. I could not leave her there, Mia. Why doesn’t she understand that? I did it because I love Lily.”
Reaching out, Mia rubbed a hand up and down his strong upper arm, “I know,” she said softly, “I know.”
“I’m not the enemy. She and I want the same thing for Lil. I want her to go to Johns Hopkins in the fall. I don’t want her not to go to her dream medical school because of me.” Zac looked distraught.
“You up for some slightly dirty pool?” Mia smiled at him.
Laughing, “You’re seriously asking me that? We can go past slightly, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Good,” Mia was smiling her devil smile, “You didn’t come out of this unscathed either. She needs to recognize that.”
Zac nodded. His whole life was demolished and building it back to where he was today took work, determination and courage. He fought his ass off to get it all back and have the strength to move forward.
“Here’s what I want you to do. Tomorrow morning when I’m out there with her having coffee, I want you to come join us, wear a bathing suit and a shirt and bring a towel. Sit down and have coffee and then tell us you’re going for a swim. Take your shirt off and leave it on the chair. Grab your towel and go. I’ll take it from there.”
Zac looked at Mia with an amused look on his face. “Wow,” was all he could say.
“She needs to see how you have suffered. And what she sees once you take your shirt off is just a fraction of what you endured. Liliana did not go through trauma and heartache alone and she needs to understand that her daughter is here today, alive, because of you. You deserve every last ounce of her respect, and I think we just need to bring it home for her by showing her how real it was for you and for our family.”
Turning to go rejoin her guests, Mia was stopped by Zac calling her name.
“Mia,” his eyes welled up, “I love you.”
Smiling back at her handsome stepson, “I love you, too.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
End of Summer
LaGuardia Airport
Queens, New York
Carrying an oversized beach bag stuffed to the gills and a backpack that felt like it had been filled with rocks, Zac walked Lily over to the entrance of the security line.
“Notice how I’m still your schlepper,” he kidded.
Lily tried to smile, but her emotions would have no part of it. Looking up at Zac, her eyes sad and pleading, “You know, I didn’t tell you this, but all summer long I had this fantasy that we would get to the airport and you’d get on the security line with me and pull out a plane ticket and tell me that you were coming with me to Baltimore, and that you’d applied to the Whiting School of Engineering at Hopkins.”
“Oh Lils,” he reached for her, but she just stiffened.
“I know, it was a stupid fantasy. I just held onto it until this minute.” Tears slowly started to stream down her face.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Whiting is great, but the Berkeley program is for me what Hopkins is for you. I know it doesn’t feel good right now, but we’re doing the right thing.”
“It doesn’t feel like the right thing, Zac.” She searched his eyes.
“It is. Neither of us will have any regrets that we had to give up something that we dreamed of.”
“But we’re going to be apart.”
Slinging an arm over her and pulling her to him, “No, we are not going to be apart,” he whispered into her hair. “We are going to talk, Skype, FaceTime and text every day. There is not a day that is going to go by that I’m not going to know every detail about your day. I’m going to hear about your classes and you’re going to hear about mine. We’re going to know all about one another’s professors and classmates. We’re going to communicate so much that it’s not going to be that bad.”
“But I won’t feel your arms around me,” and a new rush of tears cascaded down her cheeks.
“Baby, baby, baby, yes, you will. I’m going to be with you every step of the way. It’ll be Thanksgiving before you know it and Christmas right after that.”
Holding her tight, he let her cry, knowing that the moment she stepped into her first class on her first day of medical school, sh
e’d know deep in her heart that they’d made the right decision.
“And just think,” he chuckled, “I’m going to get to be a total creeper. I’m going to get to ask you things like ‘What are you wearing?’.”
Choking on her tears with a laugh, “I think that might be more creepy than creeper.”
Tightening his hold, he sang into her ear a line from the Radiohead song, Creep, and she laughed.
“I don’t have to get on this plane, you know, I could come with you.”
“No, Lils, you can’t.”
“You promised you wouldn’t make decisions for me.”
Laughing, “Um, no. I told you if there was something that I thought was in your best interests that I was going to do it my way. This is in your best interests.” Wiping away her tears, “Lily, I refuse to do anything that is going to ruin your life or mess up our chances of having a successful life together.”
Taking her face in both hands, he softly kissed her lips. “I love you. Now go get on that plane.” Turning her by her shoulders, he gently launched her onto the security line.
And for the first time, it was Zac Moore who walked away from Liliana Castillo.
Epilogue
Second Year of Medical School Spring Semester
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Baltimore, MD
It had been another long day, made even longer by a rare, early spring heatwave. With temperatures soaring into the low nineties and humidity to match, a full day of classes and clinical rotations had really zapped her energy.
Lily laid the textbook down on the bed and rubbed her eyes. Break couldn’t come soon enough. Looking at the clock, it was a little before midnight. Definitely enough studying for one night. Seven-thirty would be upon her soon enough and tomorrow was another day of back-to-back classes in the morning and early afternoon, followed by her clinical rotation from mid-afternoon through the evening. Finals were just around the corner and there were not nearly enough hours in the day. She just needed to get through finals. Two more weeks. Just two more weeks.
With a sigh, she swung her feet to the floor and dragged the ten steps into the small bathroom. Flicking on the light, the pale blue and turquoise cabana shower curtain always made her smile. Maybe it was the pattern that made her feel like she was out at the beach, a place they had created such wonderful memories, or maybe it was the pale blue that reminded her of Zac’s beautiful eyes.
As she washed her face and brushed her teeth, she assessed the counter space in the bathroom. It was definitely time to go to IKEA to buy some kind of shelving unit. There just was not enough space, even with hanging her blow dryer and flat iron on the wall.
Walking back into the bedroom, she turned on the ceiling fan and pulled off the scrubs she’d spent too many hours wearing. Stretching out naked on the bed, the soft, cool comforter against her skin felt sublime as she wriggled against it, smushing herself in. Within minutes, she had begun to doze, pushing away the thoughts of everything that needed to be accomplished within the next two weeks. Her last thought before surrendering to sleep was that she really needed a foot massage. Badly.
When her cell phone began buzzing, she reached over to the pillow next to her. That’s where she always kept it. On his pillow.
“Hey you,” sleep filled her voice.
“Baby, baby, baby, I’m sorry it’s so late. I was in the library studying. Are you too tired to talk?”
“No,” she settled in, his voice wrapped around her in the dark, caressing her as if his arms were pulling her close.
“How did rotations go today?”
She could hear him settling in and could picture him propped up against his Mission-style headboard, shirt off, jeans unbuttoned and half unzipped with his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles.
“Really interesting. Every day I’m leaning more and more toward environmental disease as the direction I really want to go.”
“I can only imagine that the correlations between disease and environment are going to continue to grow exponentially,” and then he laughed. “Which means you’ll always be employable and can support my lazy ass.”
Laughing, “Lazy? Oh please, Mr. Entrepreneur, you will always have like three businesses going at once.”
“She knows me too well.”
She could hear the smile in his voice and could picture the look on his face, that gorgeous smile that still made her heart skip a beat. When he looked at her with those eyes and smiled, it was like every cell in her body started to buzz on a higher frequency. It had been like that from the first time she had laid eyes on him. She was so shy that night, she couldn’t even look at him. And he had kept staring at her. It made her even more self-conscious than she already was around good looking guys. Guys like him never paid attention to girls like her. Geeky guys were all over her. But guys like Zac Moore, they went for the vapid cheerleader type.
“Two weeks,” he whispered.
Coming out of her reverie, “Two weeks,” she whispered back, knowing her smile was now matching his.
“Oh, I made reservations at Chez Panisse.”
Laughing, “My stomach just growled at the mention of it.” Chez Panisse would always hold special memories of one of the most wonderful nights of her life.
“So,” he chuckled, “what are you wearing?”
Shaking her head and smiling in the dark. He was so damn cute. “I’m wearing two things.”
“Two things? Well, take them off.”
“I don’t think you want me to take these things off.”
“Hmmm, are they black and lacy?”
“Nope. Neither one is black nor lacy,” she laughed.
“Damn.”
They laughed together.
“Oh,” he just remembered something he needed to tell her, “I shipped out four large cartons to you. They should get there next Thursday.”
“I was looking around the bathroom tonight. Where are we going to put all your stuff? We’re going to be really space challenged, Zac.”
“I know, I was thinking about that. We’ll start looking for shelving units when I get there. If we can’t find anything, I’ll just build us something.”
“Oh right, you can do that.” She was impressed.
Laughing, “Yeah, schlepper, carpenter, lover. I’m just an all-around talented guy. Red and lacy?” he was back to guessing.
“Nope. You’re not even close.” His guess was so far off.
“I’m going to be close very soon.”
“Yes, you are.” Just that thought, the thought of waking up with him every day, of falling asleep in his arms, of listening to him breathe when she awoke in the night, filled her with overwhelming joy and solace.
“It went fast,” he observed.
“I have to admit you were right. It did. It really does feel like yesterday that I was at your graduation in New York and now only two weeks until your graduation from Berkeley.”
“Me with a master’s from UC Berkeley, whoever would have guessed it,” he sounded amused with himself. “I know my dad certainly didn’t that day in the Dean’s office at Bryson when they were kicking my ass out.”
“I think you are probably a very different person than the one you were back then.” She hoped that she had more than a little to do with that.
“Yes and no. I definitely think I’m a better person. But I also think I was pretty misunderstood.”
“How so?” Even after all this time, she was constantly learning about him, and on more than one occasion, he still surprised her.
“I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted to help those I cared about. I guess I was just limited in understanding how.”
Shaking her head no in the dark, he would never understand how much those who loved him really got who he was and appreciated how time after time, he put himself on the line for them. He was such a dichotomy going from selfish boy to selfless man that she worried for him. Somewhere in between was the sa
fe place to be, but Zac Moore was never, ever going to play it safe. It just wasn’t who he was.
“So are you still wearing those two things?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she loved torturing him.
“You’re really not going to take them off for me?”
He was pulling the “come on, please do it for me” card that he knew she couldn’t resist, and it made her smile even more, just knowing how crazy she was driving him.
“No. I’m not taking them off,” she was adamant. “And trust me, you don’t want me to.”
He groaned, “This is going to be the longest two weeks ever. You’re killing me, Lils. Ok, so is it nipple clamps?”
“Zac!” her tone was somewhere between amused and appalled. “No, it’s not nipple clamps, you fool.”
Lily could tell how amused he was by his laugh. It was his bad boy laugh tonight.
“Ok, it’s a thong and one of those corset thingies.”
“You are not even close.”
“Please take whatever it is off,” his voice a seductive whisper.
“Not a chance,” Lily giggled.
“You are a cold-hearted woman, Liliana Castillo, torturing me this way.”
Shifting in bed, she pulled her hair over one shoulder, “Get used to it,” she teased. “I plan on torturing you for the rest of your life, Zachary Moore.”
“You know I’m going to hold you to that promise.”
“I know,” and she couldn’t wait.
“Please tell me,” his tone was now pleading and sweet.
“You’re a terrible creeper. I can’t believe you couldn’t guess,” she sounded disappointed.
“Two more weeks and I don’t have to creep anymore. Now, please tell me. You’re driving me wild.”
“Ok,” she conceded. “Are you ready?”
“I am.”
“Ok, well I’m just warning you, I’m not taking either one of them off.”
“We’ll see about that,” he was rising to the challenge.
“Ok, here goes. A smile and a ring,” she confessed.
With a smile that radiated both happiness and deep, deep love, Lily Castillo held out her left hand and reveled in the beauty of the colors emanating from the Moore family heirloom diamond ring that he had given her that night in Chez Panisse, totally surprising her.
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