Chapter 21
21
ZARA
T he plane touches down, and I look out the window at the gloomy sky. My head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds, my eyes itch with dryness, and my chest feels as if someone is sitting on me. I grab my purse, putting on a smile to the flight attendant who saw me sob as soon as the doors closed. I tried to keep it in me, tried to hold it together, but the minute I heard the click of the door locking me in, I lost it. The past three days of being on cloud nine feels like thunder just ripped through them.
I walk out of the plane, the drizzle of rain falling on me, and see my parents at the chain-link fence waiting for me. My mother waves with a big smile, and my father has his arm around her. I grab my suitcase, wheeling it to them. The sound of sirens in the distance is foreign to me now.
“Welcome home,” my mother greets me when I step out, and she can hug me. “Wow, I expected you to come back all skinny and your face sunken with black bags underneath your eyes, but you came back glowing.”
“Um…” I try to take in what she is saying. “Thanks, I guess.”
“What your mother is trying to say, and failing miserably at, is we are happy you are home.” He grabs me in his arms, and I look up at him, smiling tightly.
“It’s good to be home,” I lie to them because it’s not good to be home. I don’t want to be here. I want to be at Gabriel’s house, sitting on his couch, wrapped in his arms.
“Let’s get out of the rain,” my father urges, grabbing my suitcase and making his way over to his SUV. My mother gets in the front while I get in the back, waiting for my father. “It’s going to come down hard soon.” He looks up at the sky, and I have to wonder if the sky is a mirror of what I’m feeling inside.
We pull up to the brownstone my family owns, and I get out, the rain now coming down hard. “Go inside, I’ll get your things,” my father says to us. My mother and I run up the steps to the front door, where she unlocks it and steps in, followed by myself and my father, who is dripping wet.
“Are you sure you want to stay here?” my mother asks when she slides out of her jacket. “You could stay with us for a few weeks.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Time to get back to normal. Or whatever my new normal is.” I kick off my sneakers before going into the house.
I see it exactly like it always is. “We put all your stuff in storage, but if you want, we can go and get some things this week so you can make this space yours.”
“We’ll see,” I reply, the sounds of honking horns blare from outside. “It’s so loud.” I walk to the back of the house, where the kitchen is, opening the refrigerator and grabbing a water bottle. “Do you guys want to stay for dinner?”
“No,” my mother says, “we are going to get out of your hair so you get yourself unpacked.”
I nod at them as my father takes my suitcase up to the bedroom. “We did put a couple of your throw covers in the living room and on your bed,” she mentions as I walk her to the front door. “You have a walk-through scheduled tomorrow at the house at ten a.m. Daniel’s broker will be there to ensure you don’t destroy anything.” I snort.
“If I wanted to destroy anything, I would have done it when I caught him balls deep in his coworker.” The minute the words are out, I catch my mammoth mistake.
“What?” my father yells from behind me at the same time my mother shrieks, and I close my eyes and ball my hands into fists for fucking up the way I did. My eyes go big but not as big as my mother’s. “Excuse me?” he retorts, and I see my mother freaking out internally about it and wanting to say all the things. We both know that if one of them has to be contained, it has to be my father at this point. We both look at each other thinking about what to say, when I turn and look at him. “What did you just say?”
“I—” I stop talking. “What did you hear?” I ask him, thinking maybe he didn’t hear what I think he heard, or maybe he heard a bit of it and not all of it.
“He cheated on you?” he asks me in bewilderment.
“Okay, so you heard the whole thing.” I wring my hands, and he looks like he’s about to come out of his skin. “Don’t freak out and call in reinforcements.” I hold up both hands, turning to my mother also. “You either.” She rolls her eyes. “But yes, he cheated on me.”
“That motherfucker,” she hisses out. “That pencil-dick motherfucker.” I roll my lips to stop from laughing at her saying that to my father, who is quiet—too quiet.
My father says quietly and almost deadly, “That’s why you called off the wedding.” His tone is scary.
“Obviously, that’s why she called off the wedding!” she shouts. “You should have burned the whole house down.”
“Dear God.” I put my hand to my head, and it’s the wrong thing to do because I get a whiff of Gabriel, which makes me want to feel his arms around me. “Can we just”—I look at both of them—“not say anything about this to anyone?”
“They know?” my mother asks. “Your cousins who were at the house with you, they know.” She glares at me.
“They do, and I swore them to secrecy, so there’s that.” I turn to my father. “It’s over now. It’s in the past, and I’m moving on. I’ve moved on.”
“If I see him—” my father threatens.
“If you see him, you don’t give him the time of day. He’s not worth your time, and he’s not worth your time.” I point at my mother, who glares at me. “And he’s not worth my time.”
“I’m not as mature as you,” my mother replies, shrugging. “Sorry, not sorry. If I see his face, he’s going to know exactly what I think of him.”
“Zoe,” my father says her name, and she turns her glare to him.
“Don’t you Zoe me, Viktor Petrov.” She spits out his full name, and we share a look as she points at my father. “This, this calmness is all you.” Her hands fly through the air. “But if she had a bit of me in her?—”
“We would have been posting bail.” My father laughs.
“Gladly,” she snaps. “I would have gladly posted that bail, and then you would have had to bail me out. If I catch his mother—” She laughs, but it’s a scary Cruella de Vil laugh. “She’s going to know what a scumbag of a dick her son is.” She mimics his mother, “‘My son is so in love with her, I’ve never seen him like this before.’ Gag me.”
“Okay,” my father soothes, “we should discuss this calmly.”
“Viktor,” she hisses, “he cheated on her.”
“He did and, luckily, she caught him before she got married.” He grabs her arms. “Can you imagine then?”
“No,” my mother spouts, “because then we would have to bury him under a pool liner.”
“You have to stop watching those mob shows.” He shakes his head. “Now look at our daughter. She looks amazing. She is thriving without him. He’s probably curled in a ball, the rat bastard.”
“I think you both have to stop watching those mob shows.” I bite my tongue when it earns me a glare from both of them. “Anyway, this was fun”—I clap my hands together—“but I have to go and…” I try to think of something I have to do, and when I can’t think of anything, I go with the truth. “Well, nothing, I just don’t want to do this…” I motion my hand in a circle. “Anymore.”
“Fine,” my mother huffs, grabbing her jacket. “I’ll meet you at the house tomorrow at ten.”
“That’s not a good idea,” my father says.
At the same time, I reply, “That’s not going to happen.”
This makes her slap her sides. “If his broker can be there, your broker can be there to make sure you don’t have to see his ugly-ass face.”
“Mom.” I laugh, holding my forehead.
“If I’m honest, you could do better.”
“Thank you.” My eyebrows pinch together. “I guess.”
I kiss them both and watch them get into the SUV while sirens blare from a couple of streets over. I look up at the sky, seeing it’s clouded over without one star in sight. I take a deep breath in before closing the door.
I think about ordering some food, but instead, I just head upstairs to the bedroom. The thought of eating is not appealing at all. It’s only when I slide into bed that I wonder what he’s doing. My hand itches to grab my phone and text him, but I think it would be a bad idea. We didn’t speak about what would happen when I left. I was a coward. Even though I knew I should, I didn’t bring it up. Instead, we both danced around it for three days. I just wanted to soak in every minute I had with him. Leaving him was hands down the hardest thing I think I’ve ever had to do, which makes no sense to me. “No one falls in love with someone in two weeks,” I tell myself, turning to the side, listening to the noise coming from outside. “You like him and the sex he gave you.” The conversation I’m having with my head is one-sided. “It’s because you miss him,” I huff, turning to the other side, “and now you are alone.” I curl my knees into my chest. “In a week, you won’t even remember him.” That’s the last thing I say because I can literally hear myself laughing at me.
Sleep doesn’t come easy for me that night, and when I finally give up and look at the clock, it’s after six in the morning. I blame the noise from the outside instead of the fact I’m miserable being here. I’m making myself coffee when my phone beeps with a text message, and I rush to it, thinking it will be him. I'm hoping he’s just as miserable without me as I am without him. Instead, I see it’s from Sofia, so my heart that was soaring is now sinking again.
Sofia: Care to explain why I got a scathing call from your mother about not sharing certain information with her?
I look up at the ceiling, and instead of texting her, I call her, and she answers after one ring. “I’m not talking to you,” she answers, and I can hear cooing in the background. “Yeah, my precious, I’m not talking to your auntie because she threw me under the bus to your gigi.” She mentions the name my mother decided to use when Sofia gave birth.
“I’m sorry,” I say, making my coffee. “It literally just slipped out.”
“And you couldn’t, I don’t know, warn me that she knew?” she hisses.
“I know, but after they left, I went upstairs to unpack and forgot.”
“You forgot? You forgot.”
“I just got home,” I remind her. “I had other things on my mind.”
“What other things?” The burning starts in my eyes this time and moves to my nose.
“I was just—” My voice comes out shaky. “It was a lot.”
“Oh my God!” she shrieks. “Do I want to know?”
“There is nothing to know.” I clear my throat, swallowing down the lump. “I’m here; he’s there. I live here; he lives there.”
“Zara,” she whispers.
“It’s fine.” I shake it away. “It’ll be fine.”
“Zara,” she whispers again, and I can hear the pity in her voice.
“I said it’s fine,” I snap, the lone tear escaping. “It’s all good. It was a vacation fling, and hopefully, if we ever see each other again, it won’t be awkward.”
“I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“No, I have to go and get ready to do a walk-through at my old place.”
“It’s five o’clock in the morning,” she reminds me.
“I know. I’m going to go and mentally prepare for it,” I hiss. “Now give my nephew a kiss from me and tell him I’m his favorite aunt.”
“Obviously,” she says, making me laugh. “Call me if you want to talk.”
“Will do,” I reply, knowing full well I will never call her to talk about this. There is no one on this earth I want to talk to about this, except well, obviously, the man I want.
I have my coffee in the living room, opening up the drapes, but instead of seeing the forest I’ve grown to love, I see a brownstone that looks like mine but only a different color. All the lights are off in most of the houses up and down the street. The streetlights look like they are still on but on dim. In the matter of seconds it takes me to look up and down the street, five cars have zoomed by the front of my house.
I shake my head, closing the drapes, and instead go up the stairs to have coffee in my bed and not think about the quiet little house I left behind or the man who somehow took a hold of my heart without me even knowing.