15. In Which Aiden Remembers #2
So no matter how intriguing I find her, no matter how my eyes linger sometimes, it can’t happen.
I press my hand over my chest, frowning as I feel my heart pumping faster. I think I must have had too much caffeine at lunch.
The scraping sound from the lock stops, and I turn to look at the door just as I hear her call, “Hey, wait—no underwear drawer.”
I smirk, my gaze jumping to the small chest of drawers in the corner. “I’m not interested in your underwear.” Is there a drawer where she stores her thoughts? A drawer for her temper, a drawer for the smiles that promise trouble? A drawer where she keeps her utter disregard for personal boundaries?
“Rude,” she says, though it’s muffled. “But also reassuring, I suppose. Have at it, then.”
For a moment I just stand there, looking around, seeing what catches my eye as I listen absently to the resumed clinks and scrapes coming from the door’s lock.
The sun streaming through the skylight has a chilled quality to it, a cold brightness that casts the room in a frosty light and leaves a large rectangle of illumination on the neatly made bed.
This room came furnished, bed included, but Juniper has made all the furniture her own. Her comforter is pure white, but her sheets and pillowcase appear to be striped in various shades of blue and orange and red and yellow—a sort of bohemian pattern that suits her well.
The desk, nightstand, and chest of drawers were already here too, but her personal touches make them seem like they belong to her.
There’s a pink file box under the desk; I crouch down and crack it open, expecting to find file folders or papers or something similar.
Instead, though, I see several sandwich bags with various different foods inside—half of a sandwich, a few dinner rolls I recognize as leftovers from the other night, a handful of baby carrots that will probably start to shrivel soon.
I shake my head, closing the box again and standing up. Then I continue my perusal.
I open the closet and peek inside, but there’s nothing of interest; clothes and shoes and a cardboard box tucked back in the corner. So I move my attention to the top of the desk.
A laptop, a little vase of flowers, and an army of sticky notes. Those are the contents. I smile when I see that the vase is a little grinning skull; maybe that’s why she liked the one on my desk so much.
“Does your skull have a name?” I call without turning around.
The grinding and scraping and clinking sounds stop. “Catherine Earnshaw,” Juniper says from the other side of the door.
A bark of laughter escapes me at this. “Is Heathcliff around here somewhere?” I say.
“Just Cathy.” I can hear the smile in Juniper’s voice. “I thought she seemed like a character who would enjoy having her skull turned into a flower vase.”
I nod, still smiling. I run my fingers over a few of the sticky notes, reading the snippets scribbled there.
Remember MC’s eyes are green , one of them says—do authors forget that kind of thing?
? * —and another one reads, Foreshadow knife reveal starting chapter three.
Yet another has a quote I’ve heard before scribbled on it: Well-behaved women rarely make history.
Interestingly enough, though, directly beneath this quote is a line Juniper has added: I have no desire to make history. I want to live a quiet, happy life. ? *
Huh. That’s…unexpected.
Then there are a couple Post-its that simply have little doodles, like a flower with lopsided petals and a few tiny hearts, and still more that have snippets of what I assume are Juniper’s own words.
And it’s there, in my perusal of these last sticky notes, that I make another discovery: Juniper Bean writes poetry.
I don’t know if she calls it that, or if these are simply lines she plans to use in her books later. Regardless of what she names it, though, it’s undeniably poetry. Some of it is short, no more than a line or two; some of it is longer, two or three stanzas.
Up until this moment, my attention has been floating easily around the room; now it anchors firmly to the desk. My eyes dart hungrily over every Post-it I can find, devouring her words.
They’re stark and blunt in places, meandering in others, full of visceral imagery. It’s her naked mind on display, both light and dark, strange and familiar, and she’s done something incredible with it. She sees her shadows; she weaves them through her fingers. She knows their value.
But she doesn’t drown in them. She remains sunshine—not soft, gentle sunshine, but abrasive sunshine with sharp edges. That’s how she channels her demons, both in her poetry and her life: she uses them to make her light shine brighter in contrast.
I read them all. Lines and stanzas and snippets of phrases, words that rise and words that fall, melodic and dreamy and evocatively beautiful.
And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but—I rest one hand on my chest, feeling my heart race—I have never been more attracted to anyone in my life than I am to her, here and now, in this moment. ? *
“Get a grip,” I mutter, stumbling away from the desk. I press both hands to my cheeks in an attempt to cool my body down, but it’s not working.
I’ve always been this way. Show me the most beautiful woman in the world and I’ll acknowledge that she’s pretty, but show me a beautiful mind if you want that prettiness to really affect me. Beauty alone is not enough to make my pulse race and my body react.
It’s reacting now.
I pat my cheeks a few times, trying to restore order and regain the upper hand over my physiology.
As I sit on the bed, I take a deep breath, hold it, and then exhale.
I repeat this process several more times before checking my pulse, sighing with relief when it slows down.
My cheeks aren’t as warm to the touch now either.
Good. Very good.
I’m setting strict boundaries for myself, effective immediately: no more poetry from Juniper Bean. In fact, no more desk area, period. It’s time to move on.
There are two small pictures on the nightstand; when I realize they’re photographs, I cross the room and lean down to get a better look. I can handle photographs, no problem.
The first one is a shot of Juniper and a guy who can only be her brother; they have the same light hair in this photo, with similar face shapes and the same wide smiles. Despite the lack of pink hair, it still looks to be fairly recent.
“Is this your brother?” I call over my shoulder.
“On the bedside table?” she calls back. “With the blond hair? Yeah, that’s Roland.”
I nod, moving on to the other picture. My lips turn down as I study this one, something I can’t quite define tugging at my mind.
It’s a young girl, maybe seven or eight years old, although she could be older.
She looks underfed, to be honest, and that can make it hard to tell someone’s age.
It’s clearly Juniper, that much I can tell—the same blonde hair, the same blue eyes, and enough similarities that I can recognize her.
But she doesn’t look healthy in this photo, despite her bright smile.
Her hair is a little stringy, her cheeks a little gaunt.
That tugging in my mind intensifies—flashes of something familiar.
A breakfast sandwich. A large Band-Aid. Two little hands and a messy head of hair, peeking over the top of…
A dumpster.
I snatch the photo up, bringing it so close to my face that my breath fogs up the glass. I stare at the girl, racking my memory. Plucking images out, dusting them off, holding them up and comparing them side by side.
“No,” I breathe. “No.”
It’s not possible. This isn’t possible. There’s no way that little girl dumpster diving was Juniper. There’s no way I would have then ended up tutoring her, no way we would have ended up living together. That level of coincidence simply isn’t possible.
Except…
Except.
It isn’t coincidence, is it?
I sit down on the bed, my mind reeling with thoughts and implications, staring blankly at the photo until one clear thought emerges:
None of this would be coincidence. If that little girl was Juniper, none of this would be coincidence.
I tutored Juniper as part of my pedagogy course.
I took that pedagogy course as part of my major in social work, which I first became interested in when I helped that little girl out of the dumpster.
So, in essence, I became Juniper’s tutor because I first fed her when she was just a hungry little girl.
And she needed a tutor for the same reason she needed food that day in the alley: those needs weren’t being met in her home.
She was recommended by the school as a student whose family couldn’t afford extra reading or tutoring.
I let the picture slip out of my hands and clatter to the floor as my brain keeps making leaps, bounding on ahead as the dominoes keep falling, knocking each other down faster than I can keep up.
My unimpressive salary—for the profession I chose because of my experiences with Juniper growing up—is the reason I’m living in this rental.
She’s living in this rental because it has the loft bedroom, separate from the main levels. She said it gave her a quiet place to work and write. And she works as a writer because she said my tutoring helped her fall in love with storytelling and literature.
And I ended up tutoring her because I was studying social work because I found her that day in the alley?—
I stand up abruptly, shaking my head like a dog emerging from water. Cause and effect, cause and effect, running through my mind on an endless loop as I pace, my footsteps nearly silent on the wooden floor.
It’s impossible. Impossible.
And yet, incredibly, it also seems to have been inevitable.? *
I swing my head around to look at the closed door—behind which I can now hear Juniper swearing, by the way. I stare at that door as though I can see through it, considering the woman on the other side.
How tightly wound are our fates, and we didn’t even know it? How joined are our lives? I am who I am partly because of her. And she is who she is partly because of who I became after knowing her.
And again her words come, a distant echo in my memory: Is this fate? Do you think this is our second chance?
I don’t believe in fate.
But I do believe in Juniper.
I believe in that woman’s ability to make waves wherever she goes, to force people to grow around her, their own lives changing as they make room for her.
My gaze jumps back to the sticky note on her desk—the one that proclaims her desire to live a quiet, happy life.
I don’t know that a quiet life is in the cards for Juniper Bean.
She is the stone in the stream that the water must rush around.
And those people, whether they want to be or not, are history-makers.
Any time your presence causes people to change, you’re making history.
Sometimes small history, sometimes grand—always worth paying attention to.
I sigh, sinking back onto the bed and running my hand through my hair. I place the photo of young Juniper back where I found it. Then I pick up my book and spend the next ten minutes reading the same page seventeen times in a row.
When the lock finally clicks and I hear Juniper’s cry of excitement, I get up and open the door.
I look her dead in the eye and say, “You don’t need to keep all that food under your desk. You’ll attract ants.” I pause at the rapid blush that climbs her cheeks, her look of triumph dying. “As long as you live in this house,” I finally go on, “I promise I will not let you go hungry. Okay?”
It’s not much of a vow; it shouldn’t feel as momentous as it does. But the gravity settles on my shoulders all the same—not stifling but grounding, like the comfort that comes from lying under a weighted blanket. I give her one last nod before making my exit.
The last thing I see is a pair of blue, surprise-filled eyes—the same eyes I first saw twenty-something years ago, peeking at me from over the edge of a garbage-filled dumpster.
* ? The easiest things for me to come up with: children and their mischief.
* ? These little details brought me so much joy to write!
* ? I always have to double and triple check when someone gives directions in my books, because I know I’ll forget later and write something different instead.
* ? The answer to that is a solid yes. All the time. I forgot a character’s last name once and had to look it up from the previous book.
* ? A thought and feeling of mine that I couldn’t help but weave into Juniper.
I don’t want or need to make history. I’m grateful for the movers and shakers of the world, because we need them.
But I’m also glad I’m not one of them. Am I allowed to admit that?
I just want my heart and my family and my soul to be healthy and happy.
I want to do good where I can. That’s what I feel most inclined to do with my personality and likes and dislikes and introvertedness!
* ? Although this isn’t always true, Aiden is someone who usually will not find a woman attractive until he begins to fall for her brain and personality. That’s when he will become attracted to her.
* ? My favorite part of this story. My very, very favorite.