16. La Isla Bonita #2
“Well, good for you. Beauty standards are bullshit anyway. Oh, pardon my language, but they are. Beauty fades with age, my dears, and the younger you accept that, the more money and time you’ll save.
The older I get the less I fix up my face and dig out my Sunday best—this evening notwithstanding—because it’s such an expense and hassle.
I’d rather be interesting than beautiful any day,” she said.
“Good thing you’re both,” Aidan said. Even I was shocked at how suave that line was.
Great Aunt Isla jutted a shoulder forward in mock bashfulness. “You, dollface, are a smooth talker. I don’t know where you found him, Henry, but he’s a keeper.”
Aidan pressed his hand to my knee again. His palm calmed me enough that my knee quit its constant motion. My heart rolled to a low thump. I placed my hand over top of his to ground myself. “I intend to keep him,” I said finally.
“Good, good,” she said with a small smile that seemed almost pinched with a sadness I couldn’t quite place.
At some point, Aidan and Isla got to talking about Christmas movies—a topic Aidan had a freakish encyclopedic knowledge of.
I took that moment to excuse myself to the bathroom.
As I was washing my hands, I picked up the bar soap from the dish.
The insignia pressed into the fresh bar was unmistakably Alexa and Sid’s.
I thought Great Aunt Isla hated their pot soap.
When had Alexa brought this? The time she spilled all my secrets, or had she been back since?
When I returned, I had no chance to ask about it because Aunt Isla was on her feet with her arm linked in Aidan’s.
Her walker was primed by the door. “Put your shoes on, doll. This one said he’s never played bingo before.
Can you believe it? I told him we’re going to fix that right now. No time like the present!”
AIDAN
“Ms. Attenborough, you know I can’t let you in here,” said a man at the door passing out game cards. The room was packed with elderly people sitting closely around big tables.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come,” whispered Henry through the din.
Isla waved her ring-covered fingers. “Brock, you wouldn’t deny an old woman her Christmas wish, would you?” She batted her eyes at him.
“Ms. Attenborough, I—”
She cut him off. “My Christmas wish is to play a single game of bingo with my grandnephew and his new beau. I happen to know that Shirley is away visiting her children for the next several days. Stick a day onto the end of my sentence if you must, but let us play tonight. This strapping young man has never played before. Never ever.” She jostled me, our arms still linked from the short walk over.
“Is that true?” Brock asked me, holding a fan of bingo cards up.
“Never ever,” I said.
He sighed. “Fine. One game. One .”
“I’ll be on my best behavior,” Isla said, though it didn’t sound all that sincere.
She seemed a bit miffed by our rear table placement.
The folks already planted there uprooted themselves, making mild excuses about seeing friends across the room.
Isla huffed. I sensed I was missing something as she instructed me to lay out my cards.
For some reason, she insisted on sitting between me and Henry.
“Are you ever going to tell me why you really scalped Shirley?” Henry asked.
“Later, doll. Later,” Isla said.
“What happened to ‘no time like the present’?” he asked.
She shushed him, and he obliged.
The game began when the Black woman who introduced herself as Delilah into a microphone clanged a bunch of tiny white balls around inside a cage until one rolled out.
She called a letter and number combo. Almost everyone stamped their boards with a fat-capped ink blotter.
Not wanting to appear out of place, I followed along.
Isla shot me a sideways glance. “You stamp it when they call it. If they don’t call anything you’ve got, you don’t stamp at all. I can understand someone having not played bingo, but not knowing the rules…”
“I’m not much for games,” I said, which wasn’t a lie. Henry and I never played them.
“Not even growing up? Your parents didn’t teach you any games?”
Henry jumped in. “Aidan doesn’t have any family.”
“Oh, dollface. How tragic. I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s good you’re in with my Henry. The Asters are lovely people. A good family to fold into.”
I smiled weakly at her. Something strange bubbled up in my chest. Just because Henry and I could be dating didn’t mean we were automatically family.
Then I remembered what Henry had told me about the engagement ring hidden in his underwear drawer.
How he’d planned to give it to Cam on Christmas like I’d seen in the TV movies.
If we fell in love, could an engagement be in the future for us? Could I wed myself into a family?
“They’ll take you in like they did me. I’m an orphan, too, in a way.”
“G43,” Delilah called.
I stamped it out on my board. As did Henry. His eyes stayed glued to his paper.
“My parents died when I was an adult, but I never married or had children of my own. My sister—Henry’s grandmother—was my only living immediate relative up until she passed.
Luckily, the Asters are very welcoming people.
You’ll be glad to spend Christmas with them,” she said, raw emotion brimming in her voice.
Her middle fingers tapped just below her eyelids.
Perhaps this stopped any tears from forming.
She placed her right hand on top of my left one. The gesture made my heart splinter a little. “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” she said.
I felt compelled to come clean. How could I sit here pretending to be an orphan when really, I was a magicked mannequin? Isla had experienced real hurt and real loss. All I’d experienced was shopping, eating, changing, dancing, sleeping, watching, and, oh yeah, kissing. None of that compared.
“And what does eventually kill us,” she said before turning her attention back to bingo, “better be ready for one hell of a fight.”
HENRY
Back at the apartment, Aidan wore the dollar store wreath he won at bingo as a crown. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was purely for decoration because frankly everything looked good on him. He was giving Ghost of Christmas Present realness.
From the couch, I caught him googling What is social anxiety on his phone.
He closed the browser when I padded into the room, but it was too late. “You have questions…” I said.
“Just one. Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“I didn’t tell you because it’s a disorder that makes it hard to talk to people and my disorder is something I especially don’t like to talk about,” I said.
“I know I told you my parents sent me to Isla’s Attic after school but that’s not entirely the truth.
I chose to go there, over joining a club or trying out for a sports team or even taking drawing lessons.
I didn’t want to talk to kids my own age or risk getting picked last. I was comfortable with Great Aunt Isla. I was comfortable in the store.”
“Are you still comfortable in the store?” Aidan asked.
“When you’re there with me,” I said, not wanting to rain on the parade of our night.
Great Aunt Isla pulled me aside before we left her apartment and whispered, “You’ve got yourself a true gentleman.” Her approval meant a lot to me. It confirmed something I already knew to be true. Though I secretly wanted to tell her how I’d gotten him. About the wish and the woo-woo of it all.
I went to sit beside Aidan on the couch. Topher burrowed in closer to Aidan’s leg. “Sorry, Toph. It’s my turn.” He sank his indignant claws into the couch fabric, yowling, until he finally gave up. “Great Aunt Isla really liked you, otherwise she wouldn’t have opened up to you the way she did.”
“I really liked her, too. From the sound of it, your family seems… great,” Aidan said with a hint of melancholy tapping into his voice.
“Family isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be,” I said, tempering expectations. His or mine, though? I couldn’t say.
“At least you have one,” he said, melancholy cranked up several notches.
The truth smacked me upside the head. Complaining to Aidan about family was like complaining to Little Orphan Annie.
The last thing I wanted to do was extinguish his optimism.
Even if I often felt like the odd man out with the Asters, I could stand to count my blessings.
“You’re right. They are around, and they are sometimes great.
Anyway, Isla hasn’t liked any of the men I brought around until you. ”
“I’m not like other guys,” he said, once again sounding sincere yet scripted.
“You can say that again.”
“I’m not like other guys.”
I laughed along with him, my head bouncing from the place where it rested on his well-padded chest.
“Am I your boyfriend?” he asked.
“We’re dating,” I said, inhaling the scent of his shirt. He always used too much detergent when he did the wash so the fabric smelled like a freshly bloomed lilac field even after being worn for hours.
“But am I your boyfriend ?” he asked with a serious tone.
My heart set itself to vibrate. “Do you want to be my boyfriend?” I asked in such a small voice.
“Very much so,” he said. His smile glinted in the reflection of the turned-off TV. It was getting late. I yawned against him. “Should I let you get to sleep?”
I sat up. “I think so. But, um, you know… boyfriends share beds.”
His head snapped in my direction. “You want me to sleep with you?”
“Sleep beside me, yes. If you, um, want that,” I said, worry sitting on my windpipe.
Without a trace of hesitation, he joined me in my bedroom.
Funnily enough, I don’t think he’d ever been in there.
Maybe once to chase after Topher, but never to stop and look.
He did that then. Glanced at the walls where I’d hung art I made ages ago, the pieces I was proudest of from high school and college.
“Did you make all of these?” he asked. It had been eons since someone looked upon my artwork with wonder, unless you counted the window displays, which I didn’t.
These pieces—the collages of movie ticket stubs and restaurant receipts, the portraits made of wine corks and disassembled candy boxes, and the sculpture of a dancer I made out of old pointe shoes and battered ribbon inspired by Degas and a dance major I had a crush on—served an entirely different purpose.
“Yes,” I said, only now realizing I’d turned this room into a quasi-gallery after Cam left.
When I asked him to move in, I’d given him the wall space for his collection of boudoir photography. It was tasteful, all black-and-white. Thematic and suggestive. But it never felt personal. To me, at least.
After I caught him hooking up with Sam, I prepared a box of his things for him to take, yet I secretly stashed a few others in a box of my own.
A stray sock, a stuffed animal I’d won him at the boardwalk, a candle whose wick had burned down to a useless nub.
I even conveniently “forgot” about the toothbrush and razor he’d been using so I could repurpose the bristles and blades for an assemblage piece already forming in my head.
But anxiety had gotten the better of me. What if I’d lost my touch? What if I had nothing left to say? The closest I came to reclaiming my artistry was this—displaying some pieces on the walls of my bedroom in the hopes the old me might inspire a new one.
It hadn’t worked.
Aidan stood before a painting I’d done of the sunrise as a high school senior for a class assignment.
This was before my big assemblage period.
It was nothing more than a simple watercolor.
Still, tears beaded in the corners of his eyes.
“It’s like I’m there all over again. You’re amazing,” he said.
While I didn’t agree, I let his words drizzle upon my creative drought.
“Art is powerful,” he declared, doing a spin and a scan of the whole room. “I’d like to see more of it.”
“I’ll take you to see some tomorrow,” I told him before letting rip a big yawn.
After the bedtime routines, trading off in the small bathroom to wash our faces and brush our teeth, we stood on opposite sides of my bed.
I didn’t want to be the first one to make a move, which proved not to be a problem because Aidan easily stripped off his shirt and slid under the covers. He stared at me.
“Are you waiting for something?” he asked.
A meteor strike. An eclipse. A cataclysmic apocalypse. Anything to explain the presence of this flawlessly smooth and sculpted man lying in my bed.
I shook my head. Quickly, I turned off the bedside lamp to hide the shabbiness of my matted pajama pants and oversized sleep shirt. I looked better in the dark. Under blankets. Pulled up to my neck. My skin thrummed from Aidan’s nearness.
“Am I okay here?” he asked.
I nearly shouted: More than okay! Incredible! Transcendent! Perfection!
Instead, I squeaked out a “Yup.”
“I’m not crowding you, am I?” he asked.
“Nope.” I let out a shaky breath that I hoped conveyed: Crowd me more. Come closer. I’ll beg if I have to.
“Just let me know if I—”
Unable to voice it, I grabbed for his nearest wrist and rolled us both over, so his lengthy, muscled arm cocooned around me. “All good?” I rasped.
His enthusiastic nod rocked my pillow.