A Love Like the Sun

Chapter 16 People Are Magnets Too

I’m dripping with sweat at six thirty in the morning. Not the cute trickle-on-the-forehead kind, the shirt-soaked, in-need-of-a-shower-before-seeing-another-soul kind of sweat. I tried to run today. It was a horrible experience. I probably looked silly out there, worse than silly when I had to pull out my inhaler to take several puffs as the real runners cruised on by. But when I woke up with nagging flank pain and a racing heart, I decided to make exercise a consistent thing to lower my chances of developing heart disease like my dad and help with worrying over it. Issac had already gone to meet with his trainer, so I couldn’t join him in the gym. Hopefully my effort today counted for something. Though I’m not sure I’ll ever become a runner. I’d rather hike through a forest with a demanding Lex, who barely breaks a sweat, than attempt that form of exercise again.

Back at Issac’s, I make us both smoothies and smile at my accomplishment. By the look on his face when he walks through the door, I can tell he’s pleasantly pleased. Or maybe that’s shock I see. I’ll take it either way.

“Since when do you wake up early?” he asks, putting his gym bag down and examining me. “Wait. Did you work out? What’s going on with you today?”

“I’m changing for the better,” I say, sticking out my tongue. “And now you don’t have to drag me out of bed to be a cheerleader at your photo shoot.”

He sighs. “Yeah, well, you might still have to rush. My shoot got moved up to nine a.m.”

“That’s two hours from now. Don’t tell me the frown on your face is because it’ll take you longer than that to make yourself pretty,” I tease. But then realize Issac is seeing me drenched and gross, hair in a huge messy bun at the top of my head, probably looking like I’m close to death after attempting a mile and barely making it a half. I wrap my arms around myself, unwrap. Remind myself this is Issac and he’s encountered my morning breath more than my ex-boyfriend ever had.

“You’ll insult me till the end of time regardless of how I answer,” he says before snatching the portable blood pressure cuff off the counter. Mom sent me with it, and I forgot to put it away. “You’re recording your blood pressure again? Thought you had it under control.”

I take the machine from him, attempting to jam it into the little bag it came with. Why do they make them so small? Issac comes over, pushes me aside, and uses that patience of his to put the cuff back in the bag.

“Evasive is one of your cute quirks, until it’s not,” he says. “Are your meds not working?”

I lean against the counter, pick up my smoothie, and take a sip. Immediately regretting my decision to add spinach. I wonder if I can dump Issac’s in the sink before he tries it.

“Ni, I’m waiting.”

“You’re a persistent prick,” I joke. “But I’m still having headaches, and my blood pressure is up and stuff.”

“And stuff?”

“Yes, let me finish.” Another sip makes my throat thick and grainy. I shift away so he doesn’t notice me gag. How does he drink these daily? “I’ve been getting dizzy here and there,” I say, “so my doctor told me to keep track of the readings for a few weeks and report back. Other than that, everything’s looking great. I’m mostly trying the whole healthy thing to help with my anxious brain and because…you know, because of my dad.”

Issac’s eyes soften before he takes my smoothie from my hand and sips on it. His face twists, he spits in the sink. “These are the kinds of things you don’t keep from me,” he says. “I could help. Starting with teaching you how to make a proper smoothie. This is disgusting. Did you use garlic or something?”

I cover my mouth to hide my smile. “You’re so damn overbearing, which is why I waited to tell you. You’ll probably be checking my blood pressure yourself the rest of my stay.”

The joke doesn’t land. His face grows serious, he puts the cup down and moves toward me. “You wait to tell me too many things, Ni,” he says. “I hope you break that habit, for my sake. I don’t want to be kept in the dark. Please try?”

Issac’s never pushed me on this before. Not even after my dad died and I found it even harder to tell him what was on my mind. He takes another step. We’re only inches apart. I could reach up and touch the Adam’s apple in his neck.

“I’ll try,” I whisper into the space between us.

He brushes a loose curl from my shoulder; my skin tingles where his fingers touched me. “Thank you.”

I wonder if he can hear my heart race as he stares into my eyes.

I hope he can’t tell that I’m documenting each time he avoids touching me and each time he doesn’t.

I’m finally able to breathe when he backs away.

“Overbearing, huh?” he says with a smile. “Wait until I start steering you away from all that pho you’ve been eating. I doubt that much salt is good for your blood pressure.”

I laugh. “Don’t start.”

“I’m going to start and finish. Just like I always do.”

The first and last time I was at a shoot with Issac he was up-and-coming, but they treated him with so much respect I was astonished. I’d watched him ask for scraps of attention from his foster parents throughout our childhood, and all they ever did was complain about him bringing so much junk into their house to do his artwork. The people working the shoot we’re at today treat him like he’s a legend, looking for his attention at every turn. They let him set up his tripod to record clips for his followers. They pamper him, laugh too loud, and smile too much. Others seek his opinion: Is the furniture arranged right? How does the lighting work for your skin tone? It’s like the shoot is his vision and everyone else is only here to make that vision come alive. But even though his artistic instincts kick in while working, even though he always fights to control his own narrative, he’s so kind. He looks people in the eyes, is a well of pleasantries, remembers everyone’s name, asks the stylist who’s dressing him how her aging parents are doing and wants to see pictures of her dog.

Issac is a magnet made from star matter and ocean reef, plant soil and old magic. Everyone in the room pulls toward him, including me.

As soon as the shoot starts, my throat grows thicker. When he’s in his element like this, zoned out and in front of a camera, that ethereal energy about him becomes magnified. There are things the world doesn’t know about his life, but it doesn’t matter because he wears everything he is on his skin, and it gives him the beauty of the sun.

Seeing the way his love of art translates to the work he does here makes me appreciate it for him even more. I feel the sting of tears in my eyes remembering all the nights we spent lying on my old front lawn when we were kids, dreaming of futures in different dimensions. We were thirteen and he wanted to be an actor to my math teacher, the president to my writer, an astronaut to my florist. We were fourteen and he had just found a love of watercolor and scrapbooking through our freshman art class. We were fifteen and he was dreaming of what his future home might look like with a longing in his voice because he had been living in a house that never felt like his. Without caring parents to guide and love him, a boy having to be a man early. And then there was me. Trying to hold on to the family I did have, wanting nothing more than to stay in the small apartment my mom and dad made a home. My dreams were of rooting myself forever to my old bedroom, remaining a child there, building a time machine between four walls so that life could be the way it was before my dad got sick.

But things changed, we grew up, and Issac was eighteen, waiting for Burger King checks to keep his cell phone on because maybe…maybe one of his videos making art on the internet would take off and he’d get paid for his content. And I was still beside him, wishing and praying and hoping that the magic I had always seen in his eyes could pour out of him, touch the earth, and give him everything he ever wanted and never stopped believing he could have. Until dreaming things for him made me start dreaming for myself again. And I realized all I had to do was tell my mom that her love had become mine too.

I’m so caught up with the memories, the tangible evidence that Issac made magic out of his life, and that I might be on my way to making magic out of mine, that when a woman with glistening skin walks in from hair and makeup, I don’t even notice who it is at first.

But Issac does.