The Precious One

by de los Santos, Marisa

  I glanced up from my plate to see Luka looking down at his, with an expression of embarrassment on his face. “It meant something to me, too, you know,” he said.

  I shook my head. “You don’t have to say that. I don’t mean I’m not grateful because I am, terribly, but for you, picking me was a casual act of generosity. I know it was. I do realize that you didn’t exactly get nothing in return because, after all, I am pretty smart.”

  I raised my eyebrows, awaiting affirmation.

  “Really smart,” said Luka.

  “Thank you. But so are you. You didn’t need me. You could’ve pulled off something amazing with anyone. You were being nice because you knew no one else would pick me. For you it was a small act of kindness; for me, well, it changed my life. Right there and then, in that moment. And I’ve wanted to thank you.”

  Luka made a face. “Ugh. Okay. Enough with that. Look, whatever it meant or didn’t mean to me then, it means something now. A lot. It’s weird to think that back then, we didn’t know each other at all.”

  “We know each other now, right?”

  “Now? Now, you’re like my favorite person in the world that I’m not related to.”

  “Really?”

  He pretended to ponder my question. “Well, Mrs. Westlake, the lunch lady is pretty great. I mean she tells me I’m a sight for sore eyes every single time I go through the line, and you never say that, but—” I kicked him under the table, and he said, “Yes, really.”

  And, at this, all unexpectedly, sadness struck me like an arrow. My mouth crumpled. Tears stung my eyes. I tipped my head back, blinked, and fanned my face with my napkin.

  “Willow?”

  “Makeup,” I said. “It’s waterproof supposedly, but you never know.”

  “Hey,” said Luka, softly. “Look at me.” He put his thumb on my chin and, slowly, I lowered it until I was looking at him. Worried, he scrutinized my face, and I let him. I didn’t care about my mascara. I didn’t try to hide how sad I felt. What was the point?

  “Okay, I want to think you’re crying because you’re happy,” he said, “but I gotta tell you, it doesn’t really look that way.”

  “I’m just wondering—” My voice broke. In about thirty seconds, if something didn’t change, I would be crying my ridiculous, miserable eyes out right there in that diner, in front of Bubba the waiter and Josie the head fry cook and heaven knew who else. “I’m sorry. Can we talk about this someplace other than here?”

  Luka handed me his keys. “Sure, definitely. You go get in the car. I’ll pay and be out in a second.”

  It was a grim, grim three minutes. I sat in the dark car, shivering, fighting tears and despair, fearing, to the marrow of my bones, that I was about to ruin everything. Because I had to tell him about Mr. Insley. I’d been a fool to think I didn’t have to. He was Luka, and I loved him, and I told him everything important. To just let myself go on being his favorite nonrelative without telling him would be like stealing money from his wallet, making fun of him behind his back. It would be treason. When he got in the car, he started the engine, turned on my seat warmer, and said, “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

  “You’re so nice to turn on my seat warmer,” I said, starting to cry again.

  “Willow. Just say it.”

  I pulled the velvet coat tighter around me and leaned away from him, my shoulder pressed against the car door. “I’m wondering if there’s anything I could tell you that would make you stop liking me.”

  “No.”

  I shook my head. “How do you know?”

  “Because the only things that could make me stop liking you are things you would never do.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yeah, I do. Would you kick a puppy? Would you rob an old lady at gunpoint?”

  I couldn’t help smiling, but then I said, “It’s bad, Luka.”

  Then, that blessed boy reached over, took my hand, and pulled me closer, until our faces were no more than a foot apart. He put his other hand around my shoulders. He smelled like coconut conditioner and maple syrup.

  “It’s not bad enough,” he said. “I promise.”

  I looked out the windshield at the lit-up diner, the parking lot full of cars. “Can we go someplace else?”

  “Anywhere you want.”

  “Just someplace without anyone else in it.”

  And so my secret, fleeting, pre-dance fantasy of parking on a lonely side street with the boy of my dreams came true, except that instead of kissing him under the moon, I told him the story of the worst, most idiotic, most shameful thing I had ever done. I started at the beginning, with the day I raised my hand in class for the first time and didn’t stop until the night Taisy picked me up, my hair smelling like smoke, from the clutch of trees by the side of that awful, nameless road. I included every anonymous message and my theory that Mr. Insley had sent them. I included the driving lesson. I included both kisses. I spared Luka—and myself and Mr. Insley—nothing. I asked Luka not to say anything until I was finished, a promise he kept until we got to the part wherein Mr. Insley ran out of his house without me and then shooed me away like a stray cat. At this, Luka said, in a low, angry voice, “Fucking coward.”

  When I finished telling, Luka said, “I’m really sorry, Willow.”

  “You? Why would you ever be sorry?”

  He pushed a hand through his hair in frustration. “I don’t know. There were rumors. Bec and her friends.” He let his hand flop into his lap. “I saw the way he looked at you. I should have just asked you about it. I’m sorry. Listen—”

  “Shh,” I said. “Stop.”

  “But if I’d talked to you, maybe you wouldn’t have gone there the night of the fire.”

  I shook my head. “No. No more apologizing, and no more talk about what you did or didn’t do because you did the very best thing.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You were friends with me. I had been so lonely, lonely like I can’t even describe.”

  “He saw that,” said Luka. “He used it. None of this is your fault. He’s an adult. The way you grew up, you were practically Amish.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Okay, but you didn’t know anything about creepers like him, and he knew it.” He added, viciously, “I hate him.”

  “No,” I said, quietly. “Well, it’s okay to hate him, but don’t think I was just an innocent victim. I made choices. Yes, I was lonely and lost, but I was also flattered. He seemed so sophisticated. He told me I was smarter and better than anyone else my age.” I paused, thinking. “You know, more than anything, it was the words he used that made it so hard for me to say no to him. One time, he told me I was spun out of moonlight. That sounds corny now, but when he said it, I felt like a character in a book.” I shut my eyes. “Oh God, I was an idiot.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Luka.

  “Honestly, in those last days, more than anything, I just did what he wanted because I felt sorry for him. Which is just stupid.”

  “You didn’t do what he wanted in the end, though. You told him it was over, even before the fire. And I know that scumbag didn’t make it easy. You should feel proud of yourself that you got away from him.”

  I drew closer to Luka.

  “You know what?” I said. “You helped me so much. Being with you, that’s what made me see him differently. Talking in the hallways. Making the film. It all felt so normal and happy and not scary. Not like a novel. Better.”

  Luka gave me a wan smile. “Better than Middlemarch?”

  “Better than anything. Do you still like me?”

  My hand was lying on my leg. Luka looked down at it and then held it. “Yes. Do you still like me?”

  I leaned over and kissed the high, curved dune of his cheek. I didn’t want to tell him that I loved him in the same night I had told him about Mr. Insley. But I loved him more than ever.

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, yes, yes.”

  ON THE WA
Y BACK to my house, I invited him to Thanksgiving dinner.

  “I realize you probably won’t be able to come because you’ll have your own dinner, but I wish you could.”

  “What time do you eat?”

  “People are coming in from out of town, so late. Six.”

  “We eat at two, so that we have time to get a second wind and eat again,” said Luka. “So I could just come to your house for round two.”

  “Isn’t that, um, quite a lot of food?”

  “Nah, not that much more than usual. Hey, you want to come to mine? Jackson’ll be home.”

  “Will he be home for a few days?” I asked. “I would love to, but I should help my mom and Taisy get ready. My father is not altogether enthusiastic about this family dinner, to put it mildly. He may be a bit of a stumbling block.”

  “I get it,” said Luka, “but, yeah, Jacks’ll be home all weekend and then again at Christmas. Don’t worry. You’ll meet him.”

  “Okay. So come as soon as you can. You can meet my brother and my aunt and my uncle and my dad’s ex-wife and—oh wow.” I groaned.

  Luka glanced over at me. “Meet them at the same time you do? Is that okay?”

  “Very, very okay.”

  “You want the moral support, huh?”

  I squeezed his hand. “I want you.”

  “Good,” he said, looking straight out the windshield. “I want you, too.”

  WHEN WE GOT TO my front porch, I said, “Thank you for going to the dance with me. I loved it. I loved the diner, too.”

  Luka put his arms around me.

  “I think you have a crush on Bubba,” he said. “Not that I blame you.”

  “Bubba is a prince among men. He told Josie to put my bacon exactly where I wanted it.”

  “But I told Bubba.”

  “Which is why I have a crush on you, too. Obviously.”

  Luka leaned his forehead against mine. “Thank you for wearing this dress.”

  “Thank you for using conditioner. Coconut is my favorite.”

  “Thank you for skipping the party with me. You are my favorite.”

  I hugged him harder. “Thank you for listening to my story.”

  “Thank you for trusting me with it.”

  I felt so held. I felt so peaceful. I took this tiny, glowing, breathing space of time, this threshold between his saying the last thing he’d said and my lifting my face to kiss him, and I cherished it and thanked it, and then I lifted my face, and there was Luka. Luka’s mouth and his chest against mine and his hands in my hair and on my neck and mine on his back, and, all the while, his mouth, his mouth, his mouth. I’d never been so with someone; I’d never been so with myself, right inside my own skin. I was nerve endings and a melting core. We kissed until we were breathless, and then we held on to each other for a while more, his chin resting on the top of my head, not saying anything.

  “I wish—” I stopped.

  He dropped his head so that his cheek was against mine.

  “What do you wish?” he whispered.

  “I wish that was my first kiss.” I shouldn’t have said it. How could I have said that? How could I have brought up my real first kiss at a time like this? And, God, Luka must have had hundreds of other kisses, which just didn’t matter at all. “Oh, Luka, I’m sorry I said that.”

  But when Luka pulled back so he could look at me, he was smiling. “Hey, it is your first kiss. Remember? It’s like the dancing. You haven’t really been kissed until you’ve been kissed by me.”

  I pressed my lips to the side of his neck and whispered in his ear, “And you haven’t really been kissed until you’ve been kissed by me.”

  He whispered, “Believe me, I know.”

  And then that precious, precious boy of mine kissed me again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Taisy

  ON THE EVE OF Thanksgiving, when I picked up my mother at the airport, she took one look at me and said, “Oh my sweet child, you’ve decided to stay, haven’t you?”

  “What?” I said.

  “I told Grampa Pete you were going to.”

  “You did?”

  She started walking at her usual fast clip, her wheeled suitcase gliding along behind her.

  “He thinks you should wait until spring to put your house on the market, and I have to agree. We’ve had so much rain this fall, and no house shows well in the rain.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Although I did run into a young couple at the coffee shop who are thinking of upsizing.”

  “You did?”

  “I got their number, should you want it.”

  I tried to take the handle of the bag from her, but she marched on.

  “Mom.”

  “You know what they say about a bird in the hand,” she said, cheerfully, “although it may be wiser to wait and see what a Realtor has to say.”

  “Mom.”

  “Of course, Marcus said there was no way in hell you’d stay up here, this close to Wilson, but that’s just more of his projecting his own state of mind onto you, like always. Not that he isn’t right most of the time. I always thought that was a twin thing, your being of the same mind about so many things, without so much as conferring. I read the most fascinating article about twins the other day—”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Mom!”

  She turned around, puzzled.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did you forget something back at the gate?”

  “Listen to you!” I said, throwing up my free hand. “You can’t just step off an airplane, declare I’m selling my house, and then sail right on to other things like it’s all settled. What made you even say I was staying? I haven’t said a word to you about the possibility of relocating.”

  My mother gave me a startled stare. “Are you saying you’re not?”

  I groaned. “Just answer the question, please.”

  She shrugged. “Well, I thought so from how you sounded during our phone conversations and our texts. You had the—what do I mean?—syntax of a person who’d made up her mind. And then when I saw you, radiant and pink-cheeked like I swear you haven’t been in forever, I knew. Is it Ben or Willow?”

  “What?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Oh, come on, Taisy,” she said, impatiently. “Keep up. You’d never be so incandescent on Wilson’s account. And from what you’ve been saying about your—finally!—evolving relationship with him, I’m guessing you wouldn’t stay on his account either. So is it Ben or Willow?”

  “You just zero in, don’t you?” I said. “You’re like one of those drone bombers.”

  “Well?” said my mother.

  Sometimes, it’s best just to give in. “Both,” I said. “Sort of.”

  This time, it was my mother who stopped in her tracks. She put her arms around me and squeezed, before she pulled back and gave me a piercing look. “Only sort of? Sort of Ben or sort of Willow?”

  My eyes got damp. “Willow and I got off to a rocky start, but I expected that. What I didn’t expect is that I’d keep discovering more about her to love.”

  My mother squeezed me again. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart. I hoped the two of you would find each other one day.”

  “If it weren’t for Wilson, we might not have,” I said. “Which is—weird.”

  “All the same, it’s wonderful. And what about Ben?”

  “I love him.”

  “Well, when did you ever not love him?”

  “I know,” I said. “But I love him better than I did before. Fiercer. More fiercely, I guess I mean.”

  “You did your best. Wilson was just always like a force of nature in your life. Well, until now.”

  “Now, I’m the force of nature,” I said, with a smile. “I told Ben I loved him like a hurricane.”

  “He loves you back?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He isn’t quite ready to know it yet, though.”

  “But you know he does? You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

>   She made an impatient click with her tongue. “Well, what is he waiting for? You’ve already spent seventeen years apart.”

  “He said that after what I did to him, he boxed up what we’d had and put it away and promised himself he’d never go back.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I suppose he thought he was doing what he had to do.”

  “Mom, he didn’t even read my letters. Not one of all the dozens I sent him.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, frowning. “Now that may have been self-protection overkill. So he promised himself he’d never go back to you, and he’s holding himself to that? Seventeen years later?”

  “We had a fight,” I said, sadly. “A big one.”

  “I see.”

  “We haven’t spoken since, but last night, I sent him a text inviting him and his dad to come today to help with Thanksgiving and then come back tomorrow for dinner. I told him it wouldn’t have to mean we’re back together. It could mean whatever he wanted it to.”

  “That’s awfully accommodating of you,” said my mother, crisply.

  I knew it was just worry that was making her snippy, but her tone bothered me, anyway.

  “I’m not being a pushover, Mom,” I said.

  She softened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just want you to be happy.”

  “I want to be happy. I want him back. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “You’re a force of nature, are you?” She smiled.

  “Hurricane Taisy,” I said.

  “Well . . .” Her smile broadened.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, then that boy had better board up his windows,” she said.

  I KNEW THAT HE would either come early on or he wouldn’t come at all. Mad or not, he wouldn’t keep me waiting or toy with me, not because he was in love with me, but because he wouldn’t have treated anyone like that. It just wasn’t in his nature. I’d told him two o’clock. Between two and two fifteen, I dropped an entire carton of milk on the floor (luckily, it bounced) and cut my thumb with a paring knife, so that I had blood running down my arm when the doorbell rang and could not answer it.

  My mother gave me a significant look. “Shall I?”

  “Yes, please.”