A Love Like the Sun

Chapter 6 The Problem with Truths

Sunlight comes through the open blinds and fills my room with morning glow. Issac isn’t here, but there’s breakfast on my bed. He always wakes up before me, and I get lucky when he cooks. I stretch my legs, trying to blink away sleep, but lately it’s been getting harder, even after a full night’s rest. I make a mental note to mention it at my doctor’s appointment tomorrow, then stare at the tray of food in Issac’s place. Who needs a man when you’ve got a best friend who makes lemon sugar crepes and blesses the bacon, even though he doesn’t eat it? Katrina would have jokes about all of this. I imagine her narrowed eyes if I told her that Issac and I share the bed without so much as cuddling. She’d never believe that it’s only good conversation and laughter before sleep.

I smile and sit up to grab the note beside the plate.

Promise to eat and drink the orange juice before you do anything else. If you touch your phone before your food, I’ll know. Had to catch an early flight, but I swear I’ll come back soon.

—Issac

The sadness hits me in the chest before it radiates everywhere else. I knew spending three days with him was too good to be true, but one day feels cheap. And he didn’t even wake me to say he was leaving. I reach for my phone but there’s a sticky note covering the screen. Eat first. You promised. I roll my eyes, take a sip of orange juice, smash my crepes in the sugar. He knows I’ll be angrier without food in my system, and he’s right.

But when I notice my phone lighting up with repeated notifications, I snatch it from my nightstand and rip off the sticky note. Issac’s slick self put it on vibrate.

My lock screen is a mess of messages I can’t explain. Ding. Ding. Ding.

Old friends texting me. Hi, Laniah. What’s up, girl? Omg, is the news true?

With a piece of bacon halfway in my mouth, I scroll through fourteen messages from Katrina that range from Freaking out to Girl to I. Am. Not. Happy. There’s one from Lex that says, Answer your damn phone or I’m heading over, and my insides twist, thinking the teens at the music store must’ve posted something. But why is everyone so worked up over a dumb video?

Right as I think it, Issac’s voice reverberates through my mind. You’d just have to trust me, and I let the bacon fall back on the plate while mentally preparing for my search on social media. But there was no way to prepare for the three thousand follow requests waiting for me. Am I dreaming? What the hell did Issac do? As I’m staring, the number of requests goes up. And up. I steady myself before checking my DMs. There are dozens of them from family, former colleagues, even a message from someone I matched with on a dating app and forgot to block.

And then there’s the one. The one from Issac.

I’m barely breathing when I click on the message. Except it’s not a message, it’s a notification for a tagged picture posted to his page at 11:58 last night. I was asleep by then, but the photo is of us. He knows I don’t want to be on social media, yet here we are. Issac between my bare legs because I had shorts on, me on the couch while I did his hair the night before, a hint of a smile on my face while he leaned his head on my thigh.

My temperature is already rising before my eyes flick to the caption. A side smile emoji sits beside the words: It’s always been her. There is no one like my baby.

A choked gasp escapes me. I read it again. And again. My baby?

I’m hot. Prickly. Skin scorching. But more noticeable is the flicker in my chest, the strange tug on my heart while rereading the words. Was this…his plan?

I scroll the caption, ready to read It’s a joke, she’s just my best friend, but find instead: And she makes the best products my hair has ever known. I’m blessed to call her mine.

Out of his nineteen million followers, over one million of them have already liked the picture. There are seven thousand comments, but I see only two before the dizziness comes.

Where’ve you been hiding her? I need me one.

DROP HER BUSINESS PAGE.

Resting on my chest is a brick, restricting my air supply, forcing me to take shallow breaths. Five. Four. Three. The world slowly stops spinning, but then my phone rings.

It’s Mom. “You need to get down to the shop,” she says. “Right now.”

Several customers are standing outside of Wildly Green when I arrive. Are they waiting for me? Mom is smiling at someone with a camera, and white dots cross my vision while imagining paparazzi have come for me. Have they? I pull my car around the side of the building and use that entrance. From the back room, I creep to check through the storefront windows and watch Mom talk to them. Part of me wants to chicken out, go home and take shots of Patrón and hide under the covers, but I can’t leave her with these people. Just as I make a move to go out there and rescue her, she comes in and locks the door, but the customers stay, press their fingers against the glass of our store window, and look inside. I shrink toward the shadows, waving at her to follow. Once we’re in the back, she leans her hip against our break table. She looks good today in her button-down and black slacks, her salt-and-pepper hair tied up in a topknot. She is the definition of prim and proper with a side of attitude.

“You better start talking,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest.

I open my mouth, close it. Open again. “You’re looking nice today, Mom.”

She ignores me. “Are you…is Issac?” Even Mom can’t wrap her mind around it.

“No. We’re the same as we’ve always been. Just friends.”

Mom’s shoulders slump. “Okay. Here I thought something crazy happened and you told the damn internet before you told me. I’d kill you both.”

“Oh, ohh…You should still kill him,” I say, taking out my phone and giving him another call. Voice mail. “I’m going to. I know that. And so does he, apparently.”

“So, what is all this?” Mom asks. “Your aunties were calling me at midnight about it.”

“Issac thinks this…thing he has done is going to save the shop somehow,” I say.

Mom raises a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “You asked him to do this?”

“Of course not. Seriously, Mom? I’m panicking inside.”

Her facial expression changes from confusion to…amusement? She smiles just a little, and I squint at her, suspicious. “I can understand the panic,” she starts. “But, baby, he was right. All those customers out there…they want product.”

I blink at her. “Do they want product, or do they want to interrogate me?”

“Both, I think.”

“And did you tell them we’re closing up shop?”

“I told them we were redecorating,” she says. “And to come back in an hour.” I gasp, horrified that she already thought to run with this and that someone else is making decisions without me, but she shrugs. “What? The opportunity is here. I see no reason not to use it.”

I try to process what she’s saying, but my mind keeps flashing back to Issac’s post, him calling me his baby. “But Issac and I are not together,” I whisper.

She points toward the front. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them, but it will help us.”

I can hear the relief in her tone, can see the hope in her eyes, and realize Issac has truly tricked people into thinking we’re together and my mother is considering it a win for Wildly Green. Is it? There’s no denying the attention that a day of being his has caused, but does that really mean a long-term solution? Are star power and social media truly that powerful? And how do I know exactly what Issac’s playing at, how far he’s planned without me, if I can’t get him on the damn phone?

Oh. He must know how much I want to throttle him right now.

But something shifts inside of me while staring at my mom’s eager expression, and I wonder if she’s right to be hopeful. I want to be hopeful about saving the shop too, but I can’t help feeling cautious over her excitement. Images of us during our first year, when money was rolling in and we’d dance in the shop after getting a product perfectly right, flood my mind. She hasn’t wanted to dance like that in a long time, and I find myself afraid of failing her again.

“What if this plan of his doesn’t work the way you want it to? What if it doesn’t work for me? I don’t want to disappoint you,” I say, honest, vulnerable.

“You could never,” she replies, and I want to tell her we both know that isn’t true, but she squeezes my shoulder just as the shop bell rings up front. She doesn’t look fazed by the sound. She holds eye contact, and I need to hear her speak again. For her to tell me she’s not going to count on this when I don’t even know what we’re counting on yet. And then she does: “Emotionally, you can deal with this situation however you’d like. But if we can sell what’s still in stock today, I think it’ll put us in a good place regardless of how long this lasts.”

“Thanks to Issac and Laniah’s inevitable love affair, I have no doubt that we’ll sell what we have in stock,” Lex says, standing in the doorway, his faux-fur pom-pom key chain in hand, the key to the shop dangling from it.

At the sight of his face, sharp angles and soft eyes, I finally feel some relief trickle in. Lex Chen is our calming balance. Me sometimes too realistic, Mom overly hopeful, Lex a little bit of both and not easily swayed one way or the other. I’ve missed seeing him here. And I’m so tempted to tell him the truth about what Issac did, especially after he used the words inevitable and love affair in the same sentence, but my dear mother shoots me a look that makes me think silence is the best course of action for now.

“Vanessa here told me it’s all hands on deck today,” Lex explains. “And I have two with freshly manicured fingers, but they’re still ready to get to work when the both of you are.”

I huff out a breath, worried about what I’ll be agreeing to by opening the shop, annoyed that Issac’s ignoring my calls, nervous for the crowd and the questions they may have and the answers I won’t. Still, I recall Lex’s words about having no doubts, and a smile tugs at my mouth. When Mom sees it, she skips out of the room right behind Lex, both overly excited and screaming happy things as they get ready to open the store.

I stay in the back for a few seconds, almost composed, nearly calm—until I hear the music kick on from the shop speakers and picture Mom swaying to it.

You really should’ve talked this through with me first, I text Issac.