Tangling Hearts

42. Annie

Chapter Forty-Two

ANNIE

T hey’ve got a plan and I’m not into it.

T aryn follows and jerks her head to Manny.

“We’re not going to the hospital.” I watch them pick up their bags while Manny pulls his keys from his pocket.

Taryn grabs my recovered, money-filled bag from where it sits in front of me. The leather rubs against my arms. I watch it, but I stay put. Then she picks up his jacket. That gets my attention. “Perfect excuse to see him. We’re going to the hospital. He needs his phone, doesn’t he?”

I smooth down my hair. “What if he doesn’t want to see me? What if his girlfriend slaps my face? What if she’s really an alien and she’s trapped him in a pod?”

“Never know until you find out.” Laura throws up her arms, bracelets jangling. “Oh, I can’t wait to lay eyes on the guy who’s got Annie smoothing down her hair five times in a row when not a piece is out of place!”

Embarrassed, I smile. I shouldn’t go. I know I shouldn’t go. “I really don’t think this is a good idea.”

“You’ve just said the beginning of every great thing that ever happened.” Taryn throws both her palms up like she’s checking for rain.

I hop off the barstool, still smoothing my hair. “Can you hand me my bag so I can stop doing this?” Taryn swings it to me and I catch with a dip of my knees. “Yikes. Okay. Let’s go.” We start for the door.

Manny opens the register. “We should clear this out first.”

His voice turns me. I catch site of his face and stop walking. “No, don’t do it, Manny.”

With a handful of quarters weighing down one arm, he turns. “Do what?”

Tilting my head, I walk over, holding his eyes like I understand. He stares at me as I put my hands on the bar and get very still. “Don’t blame yourself. Please just don’t. This is all on me.”

His arm drops and a few quarters slide to freedom, tiny clinks hitting the ground below, bouncing through the rubber mat. “I had a bad feeling last night.”

“I know you did. I didn’t listen. This is not your fault. Do you hear me?” He nods but I can tell he’s not convinced. Too tired to try harder, I push off the bar and mumble, “I should empty the safe, too.”

Laura calls out quickly. “Annie, it’ll be fine.”

Taryn’s worried, too. “Yeah, just leave it. Come on.”

I turn and walk backwards. “I’m going to the hospital, okay? Nothing could keep me away. Believe me.” With my hand on the doorknob, I add, “And I know he’s got a girlfriend. I’m just going to see if he’s okay. That’s it.”

They nod, but they both doubt the fates. It's like they think something's going to happen to stop me from going if we don't go right now.

“Stop it, you guys. I’m going to the hospital. I promise. Grab a chair. I’ll be right out.”

Reluctantly, they head over as my phone rings in my purse. Taryn mumbles, “Oh no.”

Laura yells out, nice and loud, “We’re so not going.”

Ignoring them, I pull out the phone. Christiano’s name and photo are staring back at me again. Him, beautiful, shirtless, smiling with the spatula in his hand. I stare at it and realize he’s called twice. He never does that. Something must be wrong. I swipe to answer, scooting into the office as I call out, “I’ll just be a second, everyone. Hey. Everything okay?”

“Bella.” He’s been sleeping and his voice is sexy, low and hoarse. “I was dreaming about you.”

It’s way before dawn where he is. I’m still not used to the time difference. I walk to the safe, but my feet are moving slower. “Was it a good dream?”

Still half in it, he mumbles, “No. It was bad. Worried me. I miss you.”

I can hear the pillow crinkling under his shifting head, hear him stretching. I can picture it all as if he’s right in front of me. I want to lean over and kiss him. Tell him I’m scared. That I almost died. That I need a hug. That I made a huge mistake. How huge, I don’t know yet.

“I miss you, too.” Closing my eyes, I push my forehead into the door. “Christiano, something bad happened.” My voice catches because I know I can’t tell him everything and even saying this, feels wrong. But he’s been my best friend for years. How could I not tell him, and so I say on a reluctant whisper, “I was robbed last night.”

He wakes up fast. I can hear him sitting upright in our bed. “Cosa é successo? You hurt?”

Slinking down to the floor with my head in my hand, I go over some of the details, wrapping myself in a spider web of half-truths that I will never get out of.

“I can’t believe I wasn’t there,” he says when I’m done, his voice so worried it sounds angry.

“You couldn’t have done anything,” I say quietly.

“Did he break in?”

“No,” I pause, struggling for lies. “I guess I forgot to lock it. It was a mistake.” In so many ways.

“Bella, you need to be careful.”

I close my eyes and lightly pound the back of my head against the door, my toes turned in and my knees bent. “I know. I should go. My team is here helping me clean. They’re waiting for me.”

“Annie, this is all on me now and then you go?” The language barrier sometimes skews his words, but since I know him so well, I know what he means.

“I wish I was sleeping next to you. I wish none of this ever happened.” It feels good to say something honest. And really… what am I doing in this city?

“Come home, Bella.”

“I don’t know.”

“Please come back.”

I should go. I could close Le Barré and call it a learning experience. My employees will find other jobs. They’re not going to be making money while we’re closed anyway, and how long will it take to reopen? Why am I here? The universe obviously doesn’t want me here. I was about to go to the hospital and Christiano wakes up to call me at that exact moment? I finally see Brendan after all these years and we’re held up at gunpoint? He nearly dies? None of this is supposed to be happening.

It can’t be this hard.

I open my lips to tell him yes, feeling the weight of failure and defeat.

Christiano sighs. “Just let me help you.”

I freeze and close my mouth. Like a rubber band snapping, defensiveness rises. We’ve had this argument too many times for me to not feel the old familiar surge of pride. “I need to do something on my own.”

He’s exasperated, as he is every time we talk about this. “I know. But this is more than standing on your feet. When a ship is sinking, you abandon it.”

I straighten up on the floor, rise to standing. “At least I have my own ship. I have to go. I have people who need me,”

“Annie, it is not bad being helped. Are your employees helping? How different is this?”

“It’s different!”

“How, Bella? How?”

“Because they’re helping me fix something I created. Your life, Christiano – you created it! I just fit myself into it. It was your house. Your furniture. Your friends.”

“You took them when it suited you.”

A pause hangs as wide as the miles between us. “Christiano, I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you by leaving things so ambiguous like this.”

“Ambiguous,” he asks with that tone he uses when he doesn’t understand a word.

“Leaving things up in the air, unsettled. Am I coming back or not…”

“You always say you are.”

I don’t speak. “I want to. I wish we’d stop fighting about this.”

His voice is filled with pain as he says on a tired whisper, almost to himself, “How can I hold onto a bird?”

Oh God, it kills me when he says things like that. He’s so poetic, my Christiano. Why don’t I run to him and forget all about this stupid need to stand on my own? I go to the safe to do what I came here to. “I feel like my heart is pulled in two directions, but my soul in only one. I have to try. I'm sorry. I so appreciate your giving me the space. And please, I know you’ve said you don’t want to, but…”

“Don’t,” he interrupts. “Don't say it, Bella,”

It takes me two times to get the code right, I’m so overwhelmed. “What?”

“Do not say for me to see other people again. I don’t want to hear it!”

My hand is shaking as I slip the bank’s canvas lock bag into my purse. “Okay.”

“I should come to San Francisco.”

“You can’t leave work, baby. Am I scared? Yes! Do I want your help? Yes! But don’t you see, that’s exactly why I can’t take it!”

“No. I don’t see.”

“I know. And that’s been our biggest problem.”

A long sigh comes through the phone. “I am going back to sleep.”

“Okay. I’ll call you later.” The phone goes dead. I stare at the calendar on the wall, thinking, that’s the first time we didn’t say, I love you. Staring back at me is a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, its base surrounded in fog. The fog makes me think of last night. I’m drowning in uneasiness. It takes too long to find the doorknob. The door feels heavier than it was. I want to rejoin them, but I’m walking slowly. The phone is hanging from my hand. My bag, filled with too much money for all the wrong reasons, is hanging off my limp shoulder.

“I’m not going to the hospital. I need to go home and make some calls to repair this window.” Standing in the center of the room, I’m staring at my phone, seeing me dialing 911 with it. Running to him. Scraping my knees as I slid to the floor. There’s Christiano’s face also and he’s yelling, a memory of a dozen arguments always over the same thing. “I need to call the insurance company,” I mumble, swaying to my right towards a table. Something. I need something solid to hold on to.

“Annie?” someone says.

I whisper, “Plus, I think I need to sleep.”

Color trails sweep in drug-like zigzags.

The room spins.

Finally… darkness. Sweet, forgiving, darkness.

For a flash of a moment, faces are above me. A mask is on my face. My body sways. The roof of an ambulance.

Darkness again.

Then there is nothing. Not even a dream.