Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

Different Realities

Summer

“Eat.” Isolde nudges a plate of meatloaf into my hand on the mini bar with a motherly look that gives my eyes a fresh sting.

“Are you eating?” I nudge back with some emphasis, and she spins toward the counter, then spins back to me with a plate of her own.

“I am.” She proves it by taking a bite, and I manage a smile, blinking down at the steam rising from the meal that does make my mouth water.

But I still don’t have an appetite. My stomach is too sick, with a more pleasant side effect of bubbly, to eat. Bubbly anticipation and bubbly paralysis.

I needed a mom as I held onto the box of my mom, so I didn’t stop moving until I ended up here. The box is on the mini bar, too, next to my other hand. It’s like a limb. I can’t let it go. But I can’t open it, either. My fingers freeze on the tape when I try, thinking I won’t recognize a piece of her, and shaking over what that could do to me. Or I’ll become too overwhelmed with flashes of the little memories I have, blinding me with grief all over again, when I’m already rotating through the stages.

“This is Elliot’s favorite,” Isolde says, her lashes wet, a small lift in her lips as she takes another bite, licking at the ketchup on her fork.

“Yeah,” I say back, my smile now a more natural tug to hers. “He used to try to take the whole thing so none of us could get any.”

Memories of Elliot flash randomly, and when they do, Isolde talks in the present and I talk in the past. She doesn’t correct me, as she’s stopped correcting Levi. He mentioned she did that before she started therapy and worked on accepting their different ways of dealing with their loss. Levi had to work some too. Neither of them are wrong, especially given the specific situation. It makes sense to both hold on and let go.

Two different realities that still sometimes clash, but Levi and his mom take such care with each other. It’s given me that sweet-and-sour feeling when I’ve seen it, a fullness in my chest for them, with a tangy need to have that in my own life, in my own situation.

“He loves to tease,” Isolde says low, and I swipe some ketchup onto my finger like it’s icing and suck it off, just to get a fix and put another lift in her lips. I still can’t take a whole bite, but she’ll make me take the meatloaf with me.

She has a couple secret ingredients that, to this day, are still secrets.

The tape calls to my fingers again and I touch it, wondering if my mom has secret ingredients in her recipes as my mouth now waters for those. I know her recipes are in here. They have to be, I think, as both a fact and a demand of my father.

Isolde traces a frayed edge on the box, her chest deflating slow with her exhale. “It must’ve been so hard for your father to have to do this.”

To have to… put my mom in a box.

Isolde speaks with sympathy, a kind of soft pity, like she can’t relate. Because she can’t. But also like she won’t have to relate. She won’t have to do this with Elliot.

I slide my hand along the tape to hers, two of our fingers touching like a hug, as I picture some of the things of his that are still in the spots he left them before he sailed the Gilligan and never came back. The things Isolde is leaving for him. Unwashed clothes. Unwashed dishes. She even has some of his other favorite foods in containers in the fridge for leftovers, as if he’s going to eat them, maybe not realizing a lot of them have spoiled.

Levi has to see all of this, too, when he visits his mom, every day. And as I think about it, I can feel the stab of loneliness those different realities can breed. But at least, for them, while they’re facing their own direction, they are in the same boat, holding to each other.

I can say Adam and I are in the same boat, but it’s more like we’ve been floating on the shrapnel of our life together, separated, witnessing the other get smaller and smaller as we’ve drifted.

Isolde gives my finger a squeeze before she drops back against the counter to take another bite of her meatloaf. “Are you gonna open it?” Her smile is one I’ve felt on my own lips too many times, and still do, something a bit mechanic, but her eyes are encouraging.

My jaw bobs around a response I can’t find, when the click of the front door reaches us and feet pound toward us.

Levi sighs like he’s relieved when he sees me. My own breath catches as our eyes lock, then rushes back in at once as he stops close beside me. He reaches out his hand like he’s reaching for mine, before that hand falls like another sigh onto the mini bar, but still near mine. Stopping himself like he did the first time we were in this kitchen together, before he eventually stopped stopping.

Before he then stopped any physical contact.

The perking of my spine turns back into a slump.

“You weren’t answering your phone,” he says, with a half breathless concern in his voice. “So I called Floyd, and he said you left. I was worried…” The word’s a trailing off as his eyes scan my body like he’s looking for wounds. Every part of me that his gaze touches comes to attention under his focus.

His search travels back up, slowly, like he notices, until our eyes are locked again, a small flutter in his lids.

“And ready to rip into him?” I follow his trail with a low tease, one that tugs the corner of his mouth, but that he still takes seriously.

“I will if I have to. Do I have to?”

“No,” I assure him, and this time, we both sigh with relief, mine from his presence, his worry for me, his protection over me.

As his eyes shift to his mom and they go into a greeting hug, I give myself over to the warmth of him, let myself feel it for this moment.

Levi

Mom’s hugs aren’t a bolt to my bones anymore. Her arms became a vise after dad’s crash, holding me tighter and longer, to keep me on land, so I didn’t go missing at sea too.

Go missing, not die.

The ache wakens me, attunes me to her needs, when, now, it’s more of an ache in me to get back to Summer’s needs.

There’s not a shine to her cheeks, but I know that wane of her voice and the faint way her lashes darken from tears she kept at her lids.

I shouldn’t have vowed I’d remove myself from her life if Floyd fucks up, because it’s another vow I’d have to break, but I needed her to trust that I took that chance for her, to restore her trust in her father through my formed bond and trust in him. And although I’m still confident he wants to fix their relationship, something did happen to bring Summer here and not keep her there, and my body is pulling from my mom’s grasp too soon in my pining to find out what it is.

My pining for us to not be pulled from each other again.

My pining for breath. My pining for motion. My pining for her.

Mom clings to me and I circle her back in with a tinge of guilt that tampers off as she says low at my ear, “I don’t want to see Adam get hurt over this. But I’ve seen you hurting over this for too long. Enough pain.”

She pulls back to look me in the eyes, hers widened and her mouth set on me choosing me, as I’m stunned to just staring back, my guilt slinking through me like slime for wanting my mom to say enough to her pain. Pain that tries to drag me down again every time I see it casting back from her, and I break the wrists of its clutches by repeating the word to myself. Enough.

Dad would agree. Enough pain. Enough staying down. He’d want her to grieve and let go too. He’d want us to hang onto each other in a way that doesn’t feel like an apology.

But I let that go, too, as Mom’s hands wring the sleeves of my shirt like a plea as she points me toward Summer, and I exhale a breath that parts my lips, shakes the corners of my mouth into a sort of smile.

Dishes clink and water runs and I’m drifting back to Summer with another question, now about her uneaten food, except the fingerprint in the ketchup.

“Not hungry?” I’ve had these pains, too, and I feel an emptiness in my gut for how often she can lose her appetite.

Her eyes flit a fast glance down to my hand, back on the bar next to hers. If she knew how much tension was running through my arm to keep from touching her. . .

“I’m fine.”

I’ve also heard that before, just recently, again, from her father. “Have you eaten today?”

“Are you gonna feed me to make sure I do?”

My hand glides closer to hers at everything I hear in that question. A challenge. Some frustration. Teasing. Enough gratitude to put more of a threat in me to, yes, make sure she eats.

She sees it in every tensed feature of my face, because she quickly assures me, “Yeah. I had an egg biscuit earlier.”

My hand moves more, a forced curve toward the plate, around her fingers, uncurled, the spaces between like an opportunity for mine to fill them. . .

That’s when I notice the box.

Floyd gave it to her like he promised me he would.

But she still has it taped.

I juggle the idea of masking like I don’t know what’s inside, but I don’t want to keep more from Summer than I already am, and nothing about her father. I helped reopen this door and I’m staying by her side.

My mouth’s open to say something about the box, when my mom is back by my side, my hand an unmanned retreat to take what she drops onto my palm most days I drop by.

Her skin is warm and damp from the sink water as she releases the four chocolate kisses one by one.

I hold that hopeful pain in her eyes as I prod the chocolates around with my thumb, the wrapper still as coarse as my throat as I muster up my dad’s words.

“Best part of the day.”

Today, it’s harder.

Today, I feel each jagged edge of those words that make my mom smile.

Because today, I have Summer to feel the way I feel with me.

And I feel it in the gasp of her inhale. I feel it as her fingers push through a belt loop of my shorts in a soothing tug.

Mom’s kiss is a light touch against my cheek that causes my eyes to close as my fingers stretch away from the kisses I now have to put away, because her husband is alive and my dad is dead.

And I’m not him, and he can’t eat them anymore, and they’d stick to my throat if I tried to eat them myself.

Mom wants me to save them for him, anyway.

She still gets out eight chocolates and leaves half for him, through me.

He’ll want them when he gets home.

Every sound mounts as I start for the pantry in the wall by the bar; the thumping of my soles against the floor, the swooshing of Mom’s socks as she leaves to the hall, the creaking of Summer’s chair as she follows me on this trek.

My body is so stretched, like it’s about to fly into pieces as I add the chocolates to the stack overflowing in the designated basket.

Summer’s touch is the dismount, alighting me from the deepest force of the pressure to be able to hear my own breath and feel the mooring pressure of her fingers in my arm.

“You don’t have to hold it all together,” she tells me, low, and I come close to pouring everything onto her lap.

But I won’t add to her mess. And I’m not as messed up anymore. I have the crimp but I straighten out.

“Yeah, I do.”

But that doesn’t change how I need her. I’ve needed her. What I need is Summer, and it’s a split second, but as her hand slips away, I grab her wrist.

My eyes trail over the shudder in her parted lips before my gaze locks with hers. My hand then trails up her arm, a slow stroke and charge through my own skin over each new pebbling of hers.

I tug her to me, and it takes only another split second before she’s out of that chair and in my arms, the crash realigning our worlds, our hearts meeting and kicking to life from the parts that have felt flatlined without the other’s.

We hold each other with a sigh that presses us in even tighter. Her presence back in this town. Her face in a room. Her body near me. Her breathing. Her voice. Having her touch and touching her back. . .

It’s like no time has escaped us.

But there’s still mountains between us, hills of how our lives have changed.

We can be us, in some ways.

I don’t deserve her heart, but I deserve this chance to have her like this in my life again, if she’s willing to give it.

I can’t have her, but I can have this.

Fuck. She smells the same. Like flowers and cinnamon.

I bury my face in her hair at her neck until the feeling passes of wanting to see if she tastes the same.

Like my Summer.

I can’t have her.

Knowing this doesn’t stop me from wanting her, and the feeling never passes, but knowing that finally separates us like a cold wave, to where I can look her in the eyes again without claiming her mouth with mine like I did that one and only time, the cost be damned.

The cold wave has also washed over her, as she sits back in the chair at the moment itself passing, but the way the corners of her lips purse in with her smile tells me she wants to hold on to it too.

“Come out with me,” I say through a breath, my hands now in my pockets.

Summer’s hands are running through her hair, and they pause at my words. She blinks, one corner of her lips now in a lift. “Sailing,” she breathes, like it’s still a marvel for her, and I’m electrified to see her on a boat again.

“Sailing,” I repeat, smiling double. “It’s where I do my best work, anyway.” I’m half kidding, but I know what I said, and now I’m electrified by the pinkening of her cheeks.

“You don’t wanna be alone?”

“Not if you’re around.”

The brightness in her eyes frees another threat in me to be her company whenever she needs it.

Frees me up to ask for her company whenever I want it.