Sex is the answer. Sex with her will make every second better.
She seems to have the same idea, but then her hands slam on my chest, and she pushes me.
I rise, breathing hard, breathing recklessly. “Are you okay?”
She nods, panting. “I want to, but we can’t.”
“Why?”
“Andrew,” she says, like I should know.
“Why?” I ask again.
She shakes her head, doesn’t answer me.
“Are you sorry we kissed?”
“No.” She straightens her shirt and sits up. “But there’s something you need to know.”
Nothing good has ever come of those words. My shoulders slump. “What do I need to know?”
“I was already planning to go back. To Tokyo.”
I don’t process the enormity of her statement. Only the immediacy of it. “You were?”
She nods. “The job I mentioned? The one that was looking promising?”
“Yeah?”
“I got it, and it’s in Tokyo.” A sneaky smile spreads on her face.
I’m not clear on how to read her. “Is that a secret or something?”
“No. I wasn’t sure how to tell you I might be returning.”
“Why?” I raise an eyebrow.
She shakes her head but doesn’t answer me directly. “The job sounds great. One of my former coworkers referred me to another medical center. They have some new shifts opening. They want nurses who speak English and Japanese.”
“Sounds like exactly what you do,” I say slowly, because there’s not much blood rushing to my brain to help make sense of her words.
“Andrew,” she says, demanding my attention, “the reason I said I wasn’t sure how to tell you is . . . because I’d have missed you.”
My heart squeezes. “I’d have missed you.”
“And I didn’t want to face saying goodbye to you again.”
My heart lurches toward her. Don’t say goodbye, I want to tell her. Instead, I say in a dry husk of a voice, “Saying goodbye is hard.”
I can’t say another fucking goodbye.
“But maybe we don’t have to yet,” she says with a hopeful smile. “Since I’m going back there, and you’re going, I want to go with you. Help you when you need it. I don’t start my job for a few more weeks, so I can be”—she pauses, quirks up her lips—“your sidekick. Will you let me?”
For a moment—no, for several long moments—I’m not sure I heard her right. I suspect I’m hopped up on too many pills, but I count back through the day, and I haven’t had any.
Is she really saying this? Truly meaning this?
Her and me? Figuring shit out?
We didn’t do that before.
This is a brand-new agenda. A temporary one, but at least it’s something.
For now.
Those two conditional words reverberate.
This is for now.
But for now is all I have.
Besides, when I look back on my life, am I going to regret not going surfing, not taking a trip to Italy, or not saying yes to having Holland by my side as I try to understand the person I loved most?
Like I could say no to her.
“Yes.”
* * *
We don’t make out again. Instead, we make plans, booking flights and emailing Kana. I let her know I’m heading to Tokyo and would love to see her. As we go into full-on practical trip mode, we turn on a movie in the background. As the hero races a motorcycle down the steps of a historical building, Holland falls asleep on my couch.
It’s not cold, but I cover her with a blanket. I watch her doze for a minute, a strand of her long hair falling over her mouth. Her lips flutter, trying to blow the hair away. I adjust her hair for her, tucking the strand behind her ear.
My lips form words, quiet, nearly silent words.
I love you so much it hurts, and it hurts so good. Keep making it hurt. I need it. I need you.
When I get into my bed, I’m keenly aware of her in my house, as if I can somehow hear the rise and fall of her breathing, the flutter of her sleeping eyelids, from a floor above. I imagine her waking, walking up the stairs, heading down the hall, and standing in my doorway, a sliver of moonlight through the window sketching her in the dark. I would speak first, telling her the truth—that I’m still completely in love with her. That nothing has changed for me.
Everything else is frayed around the edges. This—how I feel for Holland—is the only thing in my life that has remained the same. Everyone I have loved is gone. Except her. Holland is the before and the after.
She’d say the words back to me, that she feels the same. Like she’s found the thing she’s been looking for.
Come find me, come find me, come find me.
* * *
In the morning, I find her in my kitchen making toast.
“I am the world’s deepest sleeper,” she announces by way of a greeting. “I didn’t wake up once.”
“Sometimes you need to sleep through the night.”
“I might be in love with your couch.”
I look away as I sit at the counter on one of the stools. The toast pops up, and she begins to spread butter on it.
“Are we doing this?” I ask.
“Going to Tokyo together?”
“Yes.” I clench my fists, waiting for her to tell me it was all a fevered dream.
She nods, and I exhale all the breaths in the county. “We are, but there’s one thing I need you to know.”
I groan. “Stop saying stuff like that.”
She puts her hand on my arm. One touch, and I’m lit up. “The reason I stopped you last night?”
“Right when it was getting good?” I ask, lifting a brow.
She smiles, a flirty little grin that threatens to destroy me. “It messes with my head too much.”
“It messes with mine in a good way.”
“I mean it,” she presses.
“How does it mess with your head?”
She takes my hand, threads her fingers through mine. “It makes me think we can go back to how we were. But I can’t take advantage of you right now.”
“Please,” I scoff, “take advantage of me. I should be so lucky.”
“You’re grieving. It would be wrong.”
“I don’t mind that kind of wrong. I can handle all kinds of wrong.” Apparently, I haven’t lost the ability to flirt with her.
She squeezes my fingers. She’s doing a terrible job of not taking advantage of me. I loop mine tighter around hers. Even holding her hand turns me on.
She meets my eyes. “I know, but it’s going to do a number on me.”
“Is it against the nurses’ code?”
With her free hand, she taps her chest. “It’s against my code.”
“You weren’t against it last night.” Damn, I am going to be one fine attorney after all, especially when it involves negotiating the prospect of nudity.
“It’s hard for me to think straight when you touch me,” she whispers.
This doesn’t make anything easier. She’s making everything harder. “Are you asking me to be the strong one?”
A guilty little smile is her answer. “Maybe I am.”
“You’re fighting a losing battle, but I’ll do my best. But let me give you a tip.”
She arches a brow in question.
“Maybe if you want me to be the strong one, you ought to let go of my hand.”
She drops her hold on me. “I didn’t realize I was holding your hand. It feels so normal. That’s the thing. That’s the challenge.”
Touching me is her normal.
I’m not strong enough to be the strong one, but I’m greedy enough to pretend that I will be, and it feels good.
For the first time in weeks, I feel . . . lighter.
“Let’s get out of town.”
12
Holland
I roll my clothes, lining up the fabric in little tubes.
London
grabs a red shirt, scrunching it even tighter. “You can fit even more.”
“I know,” I say, working my packing magic with my sister. “But I don’t want to exceed the weight limit.”
With her light-blue eyes, she scans my bag. “I’m betting it’s under fifty pounds by a hair.”
“Only one way to find out.”
My little sister—two years younger than my twenty-five—scurries out of the bedroom and snags the scale from the bathroom. Setting it down on the floor, she hauls the suitcase on it.
She thrusts her arms in the air in victory. “Forty-nine-point-nine.” Shimmying her hips, she sings, “I’ve still got it.”
“I hope you have it for a long, long time.”
London is a flight attendant, based here but traveling to Asia often, so my parents and I see her a lot. Packing is in her blood. She’s said to me before, “I’ve never met a suitcase I couldn’t pack better.”
London looks at her watch. “I need to take off. I have a pickup. I hardly ever get the Europe routes, but this time I’m going to Amsterdam.”
“Lucky you.” That’s her favorite city.
She says it makes her feel closer to me when she travels there. I tease her and tell her the same about all of England. If we’d had another sibling, we joke she’d have been named Vienna, and then we’d agree how lucky we are not to have been conceived in Prague or Portugal, or Kyoto and Tokyo for that matter.
She turns around, but when she reaches the doorway, she stops and looks over her shoulder at me. “Are you really doing this?”
“I am. I have a new job. I have my apartment still in Tokyo—I rented it out on Airbnb the last month, but the renters are done, so I still have my place.”
“I’m not talking about your apartment, for God’s sake.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
She sighs and comes back to me. “I’m talking about him. Be careful.”
I shoot her a quizzical look. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you think you can save him.”
I scoff. “I don’t think that.”
But I want to—to save him from all his heartache.
“You’ve wanted to save the entire world ever since you took care of Grandpa.”
“No,” I protest. “That’s just when I knew I wanted to be a nurse.”
“To you, it’s one and the same.”
I swallow hard. “But what’s so wrong with that? It’s who I am.”
I’ve known since I was twelve what I wanted to do with my life. I’ve known since I watched my dad’s father forget how to find the grocery store, what year it was, then his own son’s name.
I’ve known it since I took care of my grandpa, making his oatmeal, reminding him who I was, playing Candy Land when everything else became too hard. Then Go Fish when Candy Land became calculus to him.
A lump rises in my throat. There hasn’t been a time in my life when I didn’t want to help. It’s a cellular thing for me, and I can’t escape from it.
London clasps my shoulder. “I don’t want you thinking you can nurse your ex-boyfriend back to happy.”
“I’m not trying to be his nurse.”
“You were definitely playing the nurse with his brother.”
I stare at her. “That’s not fair. I wasn’t playing anything. I was. I was there the last week of his life, giving him comfort care. I watched him take his last breath. Don’t tell me I was playing,” I say, my voice rising with my anger. “There was nothing pretend about that.”
“I don’t mean it like that,” London grits out.
I park my hands on my hips. “Then how do you mean it?”
“You’re so willing to drop everything when someone wants help.” She places her palms together. “And that’s part of what makes you a beautiful, wonderful woman. But don’t lose sight of yourself.”
She’s wrong. I didn’t lose sight of myself. I was helping a friend. “Kana asked me to come back here and look after him. Ian was very explicit in his instructions. He didn’t want her to watch him die. He said he couldn’t bear it, so she asked me to look after him in his final days. How was I supposed to say no to that?”
She softens. “You weren’t. But look at you. You’re still all tangled up in their family.”
I spread my arms wide. “News flash: I’ve been tangled up in their family for a long time. It’s been that way since I can remember. You can thank Mom and Dad for that.”
She laughs. “True, that. Parents are always to blame.”
“I blame them, then. I absolutely blame them for dragging us up to Los Angeles every time they wanted to hang out with the Petersons. It’s their stupid fault I fell for him, and it’s their fault I had to go to freaking Japan to get my degree.”
“I’m with you. We can blame them for everything,” she says with a smile. She opens her arms. “Bring it in for a hug.”
I sigh heavily but step closer. “Don’t think you can make it up to me so easily.”
She wraps her arms around me, her silver bracelets jangling near my ears. “You never stay mad.”
I huff, because she’s right.
“I worry about Andrew,” she says in a soft but firm tone. “He’s a mess, and he probably thinks you’re the one to rescue him.”
I flash back to the other night, to the way he climbed over me, moved me under him. How he kissed me—like he was pouring his soul into me. I could taste his grief, salty and bitter. But it tasted like wild desire too. Like getting lost and being found. Like I wanted another serving, and then another.
Maybe I want to be needed that badly, and that’s the big risk. I desperately want to heal him, but I know I have to keep those instincts at bay for my own mental health. And honestly, for his too.
“I promise I won’t try to Florence Nightingale him.”
London brushes a strand of my hair. “Good. He’s so consuming sometimes, and you give so freely.”
“I can handle it. I’m not the one going through something.”
“We’re all going through something.”
I give her the side-eye. “Losing your rose-gold iPhone doesn’t count.”
“That was awful,” she howls. “Especially since it had my special engraving on it. No one ever found it.”
“It’s gone to the great iPhone graveyard in the sky.”
“I mourn it daily. Life hasn’t been the same.”
I shoo her to the door. “Go, or you’ll be late for your pickup, and you’ll lose a shoe while running through the airport, and that’ll be the next terrible thing you endure.”
She shudders. “I do like my shoes. That would be awful to lose one.”
* * *
That afternoon I print my boarding pass for tomorrow.
Three years ago, I boarded the same flight.
Andrew took me to the airport then, and we were those people. The ones you walk past and think oh please. The long, never-ending goodbye. The final embrace that lasts too long. The last kiss—his hands holding my face. The tears streaking down. Then the staring out the little oval window for hours.
I was only twenty-two. What did I know about falling in love at twenty-two? But what does anyone ever know?
When I arrived in Tokyo, I missed him with a profound ache I didn’t think I’d ever get over. Letting go of someone you love when you’re still loving them is a special kind of awful, like a bruise that twinges every second of every day.
But then, the ache ebbed and the longing dimmed.
We did what we promised each other. I became absorbed in my studies and the world in which I lived, and it stopped me missing him so badly. Time worked its magic, since time is the only thing that can.
But did it?
As I fold the boarding pass and slide it into my purse, I ask myself if my sister is right—am I too tangled up in him? Or have I never truly unraveled myself?
Sure, a big part of me wants to dive headfirst back into his kisses and spending all my nights in his arms.<
br />
The problem is, in a few weeks, we’ll still face the same challenge—the ocean between us.
And a whole lot more, since life is a cruel bitch, and she’s upped the ante this time around by breaking my man in a whole new way.
My man.
He still feels like mine. I don’t want him to be anyone else’s.
But I have to be stronger than my own wishes. Loving him the way I want might not help him.
And loving him truly might mean letting him heal independently of a healer.
Independent of me.
13
Andrew
Ian adopted this dog two years ago, and she’s named after the greatest Dodgers pitcher ever, Sandy Koufax, a lefty like Ian, and a fighter too.
“We should name her Sandy,” Ian said as I drove us home from the shelter while he petted the little border collie-Lab puppy sitting in his lap.
I shook my head. “Sandy is a guy. This dog is a girl.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
I rolled my eyes. “You want to name your girl dog after a guy?”
He stared at me as I drove. “Did I not teach you better than this?”
“What? What lesson did I fail to learn now?” I asked, as if I were frustrated, but I wasn’t. I liked that we were acting normal. That the cancer might be destroying cells, but it wasn’t killing his funny bone, it wasn’t damaging his sense of self.
He pointed a finger at me. “You’re not a sexist pig.”
I laughed. “I’m definitely not a sexist pig. You know that.”
Ian narrowed his mostly-missing eyebrows at me and hugged the dog tightly. “Sandy is not a sexist pig. She doesn’t mind being named after a man.”
I cracked up as I drove. “So you naming a chick dog after a guy athlete means you’re not sexist? I feel like that might be the definition of sexist.”
“Watch it, or we’ll start calling you Andrea.”
“You and the dog are a we now?”
He’d nodded, grinning wickedly. “Yes. I’ve decided this is my one chance to be totally off my rocker and do whatever weird shit I want. Including calling the dog and me a we.”
Unbreak My Heart Page 6