The Pull of Destiny

by Hotcheri

  All I could think of to say was, “Your plane is boarding.”

  “I know, but let me say this first, okay? It’s important.” He stepped back, wiping my cheeks gently before cupping my face as I wondered what he was going to say. “I love you. I’ve never felt like this about any girl and I want you to be happy no matter what.” His voice was so earnest, so filled with love and raw emotion that the tears started trickling down my cheeks again. “I’m so grateful I had the chance to be with you, Celsiana Sawyer. You changed my life.”

  Sobbing openly, I whispered, “Oh, Luke. I love you too.”

  He kissed me again, soft lips melding against mine. “I love you so much. Being with you, kissing you, holding you is- indescribable, Celsi. You took me as I am and I’ll forever be grateful.” His eyes glimmered with sorrow as he clasped my hands in his. “You might date other people and I might date other people but you’ll always be my CiCi. You know that, right?”

  I nodded, my lips trembling. “Is this the part where we break up?” I asked him, my voice shaking.

  “I don’t want to break up,” Luke said simply.

  Trying to lighten the mood, I quipped, “We can have an open relationship.” Unfortunately, that just made me cry even harder.

  Kanye West was right- what I want so much should never hurt this bad.

  “I don’t want that either, CiCi. I just want you. But since I can’t have you, I’m not gonna be selfish and say nobody can have you.” His breath came out in a shuddering sigh. “I love you too much for that.”

  Oh, how I respected him for that.

  “That’s so honest of you.”

  I kissed him again as the boarding announcement came over the speakers again.

  “I love you, Celsi Sawyer.”

  Sniffling, I said, “I love you, Luke Astor.”

  “I gotta go.”

  He held me tighter as he said that, fingers digging into my waist like he never intended to let me go.

  “I know.”

  Leaning his forehead against mine, he murmured, “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “You have to,” I whispered, trying to convince him, trying to act like I didn’t just want to stand here in the waiting lounge, my arms around Luke, forever and ever.

  Luke's voice came out in a warm rush against my forehead. “There’s still time to elope.”

  “Luke-,” I started, leaning back to look into his eyes. He gazed back at me, seriousness etched into his face.

  “I could trade in my first class ticket for two coaches. Then we could go to Vegas and get married. Will you marry me? Make me the happiest man in the world?” He gave me an adorably imploring look that tugged at my heart strings.

  “You’re a goof and I love you. But you have to go.”

  His face fell. “I know. Remember, five years. Liberty Island. You better be there because I swear this isn’t the last time I’ll ask you.”

  Ask me what?

  “I’ll be there with bells on, Luke.”

  We kissed again, hungrily, trying to prolong our time together but as the final call to board came over the PA, we knew it was a wrap. With a final sad smile thrown over his shoulder, Luke walked over to the boarding official and showed her his ticket. I stood there for a second, watching his slim back in the green GNR band t-shirt he was wearing. The boarding official handed him back his ticket and he turned to look at me, blinking back tears as he mouthed the words ‘I love you’ at me. Then he walked through the gate and disappeared.

  Wiping tears away, I walked outside to where the El Hamed’s limo was parked.

  “How’d it go?” Shazia asked, handing me a box of Kleenex.

  I took one, thanking God for waterproof mascara. “Not good,” I sniffed, my shoulders heaving with sobs. Shazia patted my shoulder as I cried.

  “He’ll come back to you,” she said comfortingly, stroking my hair as I cried on her shoulder. “I know it. You know it.”

  At that moment, I didn’t know anything.

  All I knew for sure was that the love of my life was in a plane taxiing on the runway and I wouldn’t see him for a year.

  Luke was gone.

  CHAPTER 35

  right back where we started from.

  Liberty Island. Five years later.

  A lot can happen in five years. Things (and people) fall apart. Hearts get broken, healed slowly, and then shattered again. People change, some for the better, some for the worse. Soul mates are found in the most random places. Dreams are chased and, in some cases, realized. Friends become strangers; enemies become friends, and sometimes more. Many tears are shed, smiles brighten faces and serial daters settle down with the one person everyone thought would never last. Most importantly, life goes on, no matter what.

  The years that had passed since I bade Luke a tearful farewell at JFK International Airport had been eventful, to say the least.

  Shazia, Robyn and I made it a point to get together at least once a week for dinner and gossip after high school. I never really had much to contribute to the conversation in regards to relationship talk (more on that later) but that had never hindered us before. Shazia and I mostly listened to Robyn as she gushed about Todd before we got a chance to talk about ourselves, but we were used to that, even expected it.

  Robyn surprised us all by dating Todd for far longer than anyone (herself included) could have imagined. I had been forced to eat my words (Mr. Interchangeable of the Month) and concede that Todd was probably the best thing to happen to flaky Robyn for a long time. Sure, he was staid, overly responsible and slightly boring (let’s hope that my opinion doesn’t get back to Robyn) but his calmness kept Robyn’s ditzy nature in check. Still, sometimes, (like at their fifth anniversary dinner, which me and Shazia were invited to by Robyn) Shazia and I would look at each other, clearly wondering what had happened to our serial dating friend.

  “I never thought I would see the day when Robyn would be having a five year anniversary of anything, let alone a relationship,” Shazia had muttered to me as we watched Robyn and Todd whisper to each other across the table. But they were crazy in love and happy, which was all that mattered to us. Trust me; an unhappy Robyn is a force to be reckoned with.

  Todd was successful in his own right; nobody could accuse him of being a male gold digger, even with the expensive gifts Robyn showered him with. He went to university on a football scholarship and got drafted in his freshman year and went on to play for the New York Giants. Of course, Robyn dragged Shazia and me to several of his games to ‘support him’. Robyn ended up taking a makeup artistry class after high school, surprising nobody when she graduated top of her class. If there was one thing that girl was passionate about, it was makeup. Her reason for taking the course?

  Rolling her eyes when I asked her, she explained, “So that I can look like a celebrity when I put on my makeup. Duh!”

  Classic Robyn.

  Shazia shocked her parents by choosing to go to university to obtain a bachelor’s degree in Sociology rather than hang out at home and ‘live like a Kardashian’.

  Her words, not mine.

  “You don’t have to work, you’re an heiress!” Mrs. El Hamed, trying to reason with her stubborn daughter, who was immovable.

  Shazia wouldn’t hear of it. “But I want to help people who need my help.”

  Finally, after a long and protracted argument with her parents, (and grandparents, who didn’t understand why in the world Shazia would want to pursue higher learning after she had graduated high school) Shazia got her way and attended Cornell University at the behest of her father. Mr. El Hamed might have been reluctant about Shazia’s future plans, but if she insisted on following her dreams, she was going to follow them at an Ivy League school. Hell, he definitely could afford it!

  Over dinner the summer before we started university, Shazia explained to me why she wanted to study Sociology and have a career when she didn’t need to.

  “If I can help just one child who is in a situation as bad a
s yours was, Celsi, it would set my heart at ease,” she admitted to me, the heartfelt emotion on her earnest face bringing tears to my eyes. “You’re probably my biggest inspiration. I always wanted to be as brave as you.”

  When she was in her second year at Cornell, Shazia was coming home on the subway one night (I know, right? Props to me for finally being allowed to teach her the ins and outs of subway etiquette) without her bodyguard (she finally convinced her parents that she wouldn’t be kidnapped because since the El Hamed’s stayed out of the newspapers, tabloids included, nobody knew who she was) and her MetroCard slipped out of her pocket as she walked off the train. A random guy who saw it happen picked it up from the floor and ran after her. They ended up grabbing a coffee together and talking until the café they were chatting in had to shut down for the night. It was, to quote Shazia ‘love at first sight’.

  Seeing how Shazia’s eyes lit up whenever she talked about Craig always brought me back to that conversation we had back in high school when we talked about our favorite clichés. Shazia had always been partial to the love at first sight cliché and now she was living it, which made me smile every time I thought about it.

  Lord knows she deserved it.

  They were due to get married in December after over three years of dating and Robyn and I were the bridesmaids. Unfortunately, Robyn had the most grandiose concepts for the wedding and she was trying her best to push her ideas onto poor Shazia. So far, Shazia had yet to crack. Her cousin Aisha (yes, the awful fashion designer) was already begging to design the wedding dress, she didn’t need to hear about pale pink unicorn centerpieces too!

  But who would have thought that out of the three of us, my life would turn out to be the one with the most twists and turns?

  Then again, maybe not.

  Let me start with the obvious- me and Luke.

  Although we tried our hardest to make the long distance relationship work, we both decided that it wasn’t working after a couple of months and decided to let it burn and go our separate ways. Yeah, I used ‘let it burn’ in a sentence. I’m proud of myself. We broke up on Skype, and the last thing Luke whispered before he cut the video conferencing call was, “I still love you, though,” tears glimmering in his eyes.

  The breakup hurt us both, if the long phone conversations we had with each other after the fact were anything to go by. I never actually talked about our dating fail after that, going to great lengths to skirt around it and act like Luke hadn’t been the center of my world for a few all too short months. By ignoring it and burying the hurt and pain I endured thanks to us breaking up, I assumed that people wouldn’t realize how deeply losing Luke as a boyfriend affected me. My plan worked for a while, and then he moved on after a few months and started dating a girl from his school called Seiko.

  Can you say ‘devastation’?

  Thanks to the staunch support of my friends, (and poor Aunt Kelly, who had to comfort me during a couple of ‘why me’ speeches) who provided ice cream, sappy rom-coms and Kleenex whenever I needed to wallow, I managed to pull through, despite being crushed by his betrayal. Okay, so maybe I was being a drama queen since we hadn’t been dating for months before he hooked up with Seiko, but can you blame me? Although I put on a front, telling him that I was happy for him and Seiko, it wasn’t easy for me to deal with it.

  Living by the motto ‘If you love somebody, set them free. If they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were’, I left everything relationship-wise up to fate and immersed myself in my studies, becoming the proverbial bookworm. My studying and extracurricular activities (piano recitals, yearbook editor, and toy drive for ‘my daycare’) paid off majorly. I graduated from Dalton in the top 3 of my class, proud recipient of the Gates Millennium Scholarship and I was accepted to Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Aunt Kelly, Enrique and his fiancée, Raquel, Pastor Weeks and Officer Rodriquez were on hand at my graduation ceremony.

  As I walked across the stage, praying that my heels didn’t catch on my robe, I saw Aunt Kelly breaking down in her seat near the front. She later told me how proud she was of me, saying I was the classic example of someone who had nothing to believe in turning the world on its head and taking everything I was owed. When I told her that I owed every single one of my accomplishments to her, she cried even harder.

  After his graduation from Charterhouse, Luke visited his family for a week, Seiko in tow. I kept coming up with excuses to avoid him, not wanting to open myself up to the hurt that I knew seeing him with another girl would cause. But when the El Hamed’s invited us all to dinner at their house the day before Luke was to leave, I couldn’t hide any longer. Seiko turned out to be a really sweet Japanese girl with an adorable British accent. Luke- he hadn’t changed a bit. The evening wasn’t half as bad as I expected and when I left to go home, I promised to keep in touch with Luke. Encouraged by his mother’s revamped humanitarian efforts, Luke and Seiko headed to Japan to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. It was as though, now that he had the freedom to travel wherever and whenever he chose, he didn’t want to come back to New York City. I saw him twice after that, first when he flew back to watch Faith’s 1st grade play, and again when his father passed away. I attended Mr. Astor's funeral to pay my respects and Luke and I had a long talk at the repast after the burial service.

  “I’m just glad we sorted out everything before this happened,” he told me wistfully, staring at a blown up picture of a laughing Mr. Astor, a cigar in his mouth. “At least I’m not bitter about anything that happened in the past.” He shot a crooked grin my way which threatened to release butterflies in my stomach. “I guess I have you to thank for that.”

  My eyes bulged at his cryptic sounding voice. “What- what do you mean? I didn’t have anything to do with- anything!”

  Of course I knew that he was talking about my heart-to-heart with Mr. Astor the day I accompanied Luke to Shane’s grave, but Luke couldn’t prove that I had anything to do with his father’s little 180, could he?

  Another grin, just as Seiko walked up, balancing a tray of sandwiches precariously with one hand while texting with the other. “Sure you didn’t.”

  Case closed.

  My relationship with Enrique and Raquel kept getting stronger with time. When I visited them during the summer of that dramatic year, his entire family embraced me into the fold. My new grandparents simply adored me and Tia Mariela, Enrique’s sister, was enthralled by how much we looked alike. When Enrique and Raquel got married, I was a bridesmaid at their wedding.

  I still volunteered at the Mount Sinai daycare two days a week. Miss Campbell finally quit before the kids turned her hair white (I was still surprised as to how she lasted so long without snapping) and Vanessa Ruiz, her replacement was far more children friendly. I also found time to mentor William though the Big Sister program. He was the only little boy who had a female mentor and he claimed it was ‘awesome’!

  With my busy life, I didn’t have much time for romance. My track record backed me up, because since breaking up with Luke, I had only had two relationships. One was little more than a winter fling with an exchange student during my freshman year at Eastman but it fizzled into nothing. He went back to Australia and I moved on easily.

  The other relationship was with Ahmed.

  It wasn’t premeditated at all, far from it. In fact, I hadn’t seen Ahmed for months when I bumped into him (literally) outside the El Hamed’s building during my second year at Eastman. We exchanged numbers; he called me and took me out for coffee. The next thing I knew, he was sitting across from me at our little corner table, telling me how much he’d always liked me and that know-it-all voice in my head was going ‘I knew it!’

  I had to ask for Shazia’s approval before we started dating but she was cool with it because according to her, “He’s been a totally different person since he ran into you again.”

  So we started dating, even though it took me a while to tell Luke about it. I mean, Ahmed was de
finitely going against the guy code, right? You surely weren’t supposed to date your best friend’s ex-girlfriend, were you? But I decided that it would be better if Luke heard the news from me. He took it pretty well and I’m sure I was just imagining the tightness in his voice when he told me, “Tell Ahmed he’d better treat you right or he’ll have to answer to me.”

  His threats were unfounded. For the year that Ahmed and I dated, he did treat me right. But we clashed over the most ridiculous things and eventually I couldn’t take it (or his drinking and incessant partying) anymore. I had the whole ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ talk with him and we decided to just be friends. It was better that way.

  After Ahmed, I was more than a little bit disillusioned with the mess that was my love life (especially since all my friends were happy couples and Luke had been with his girlfriend for over two years at that point) and decided to put it on hold while I focused on important things. After graduating from Eastman with a Bachelor’s degree in Music, (with honors to boot) I got a job teaching music to impoverished inner city kids at a community center. It was hardly glamorous but I loved every second of it. I’d always had a soft spot for kids and getting paid to teach was a dream come true for me. Within two months, I moved out of our East Harlem apartment (along with Aunt Kelly, whom I practically had to drag out of the building) to a modest two bedroom apartment in Washington Heights. It was hard to leave the old neighborhood, but at the same time I was glad to start afresh.

  At least I made good on my promise to move Aunt Kelly out of the hood.

  But I couldn’t start afresh without admitting one very important fact to myself- I was still in love with Luke. I had never stopped loving him. Some days I would lay in bed, just reminiscing over our brief past together, wondering what might have been if Mr. Astor didn’t send him to the U.K. Would we have still been a couple?