—7— Wyatt
Wyatt
I can still feel Diego on my lips.
His powerful hands around my wrists, holding me to the wall.
Diego …
I have half a mind to follow him right on over to that house, to tell him it’s okay, to calm him down.
But maybe I don’t know what’s really going on here.
Maybe it wasn’t just a kiss to him.
It’s probably the first time I’ve actually been honest enough with myself to say: I do not truly know Diego Valdez.
Who he is.
What he wants.
What his life was like before he became my neighbor.
My not-quite-a-neighbor neighbor.
I pick up the roses and whatever else I dropped. Go back into the house.
And lock my door.
I do it so fast, I don’t even realize I’ve done it at first.
I can’t remember the last time I locked my door.
It feels wrong somehow.
Then I turn off the kitchen light and sink into a chair at the table, clinging to the handful of roses I dropped, to the tool in my other hand, staring at the ceiling fan in the kitchen as it slowly goes round and round.
Everything feels so far away.
Like my whole life’s a dream and I’ve woken up.
“What just happened?” I ask aloud.
No one answers.
For once, I have a problem I can’t talk to anyone about. I know right away this is something I need to keep to myself. No one can know. No one can help me. Like what just happened on that porch is news from some strange world I’ve never known before.
I have to solve this myself.
If “solving” is the right word for whatever just happened.
I spring from the chair and go to the window, as if some silly part of me expects him to be standing at his own waiting for me.
I see no one. Even though I know he’s in there.
I wish he hadn’t just run away like that. I hate leaving things unresolved. I don’t know what to do with my hands. Or the tingle on my lips he left me. Or my racing thoughts.
What now?
After finishing up with the roses—the only thing I can focus on, even though I nearly miss clipping my own fingers instead of the thorns a few times—it’s nearly four before I get myself in bed.
And barely seven when I’m up.
Only soft light touches the sky when I’m in my kitchen again.
Puffy eyes. Slouched shoulders. Staring at the house next door while waiting on the coffeemaker.
Unless he did it in the seven and a half minutes it takes for me to get cleaned up, dressed, and do my bathroom business, I don’t see Diego leave the house.
I know he walks to work, Whitaker Auto just being a few blocks into town.
The car in his driveway is totally inoperable, so I can’t use that as an indicator.
He probably snuck out the second I was away. Or is still asleep. Or calling in sick.
I’m the sick.
I’m what he’s calling in.
But whatever he does or doesn’t do, I won’t know. He’s in that house, and I’m in this one.
I notice the orchid isn’t in the window anymore. I won’t read into that too much. I did advise him to pull it away from the front sill for indirect sunlight, didn’t I?
Not like he threw it away or tossed it into his backyard to fend for itself, done with the poor thing.
Maybe I should call Lottie.
No. Terrible idea. What the hell? That’s worse than going over there to face him myself. And what would I say? Not like I can tell her what her precious nephew just did to me.
And what I did to him.
This is between me and Diego. And the roses on the ground we stepped on in our passion.
Passion? Is that what I’m calling it?
I think about Diego all morning at the flower shop.
How can I not? I accidentally lop the head off a rose in my distraction, like I’m decapitating a traitor.
Then I try to turn it into a corsage or something I can salvage, cursing myself at the back counter.
“You are blooming,” I recite, some wicked old thing my dear mom used to say to me over and over when I was a child fending off tough circumstances at school, mean classmates, unfair crap.
It doesn’t help, but maybe through some deep-seated trick of psychology, it makes my parents feel less far away, less helplessly out of reach.
I’ve been kissed before.
I’ve had boyfriends. My first one was mean. My last one was—well, he was also mean, but in a different way.
I attract a certain kind of guy, I guess.
But Diego’s different.
And he stopped himself before kissing me. Yes, I noticed. He stopped right in front of my face, as if asking for permission first.
All of that anger in him. All of that determination it must’ve taken for him to come over to my house at that hour, to march up those steps, to put himself in front of me.
Was kissing me the plan all along?
Or an accident?
And if this conundrum couldn’t get any worse: I was the one who initiated the kiss when he hesitated.
I took a bite of the forbidden papaya.
It was juicy.
And I wanted more.
Yikes, sorry, what a terrible metaphor. But seriously, can I be blamed? I’m running on an hour or two of subpar sleep and can barely hold myself back from beheading roses that have done me absolutely no wrong.
But now I’m worried I went too far. Or didn’t go far enough?
It could very well be that I should have chased him back to his house, tried stopping him, said something, done something.
Now all I can do is wonder.
And resist an urge to stop by the auto shop during my break.
To keep myself from doing just that, I take my happy ass in the opposite direction of the auto shop and park myself at Country Lovin’ for lunch.
I treat myself to the town’s best crepes, because why the hell not?
Nothing about today or last night makes any sense, so why should my lunch?
The more time I spend treating myself to these scrumptious crepes, the less time I waste worrying over who I kissed.
And touched.
And let pin me to the wall.
And flung against the railing of my porch.
And gripped his body like it was the last thing I’d ever know.
Or the first.
I drop my fork on the floor. Twice. By the fifth time I ask for a refill of juice, Ken himself comes out of the kitchen to make sure I’m okay. I’m shoving a mouthful of crepe in when I tell him I’m super. It’s clear upon my departure that neither he nor Mr. Love himself are buying it.
Then I turn the corner and reach the front of my shop.
Only to stop short when someone’s standing at the door.
Diego.
Then he turns to face me.
Oh. Not Diego. “Afternoon, Mr. C,” says Cash, a recent Spruce High graduate, swiping aside curly black bangs out of his eyes. “You look terrible.”
I stop. “I’m going to interpret that as concern for me.”
“It is.”
“Then thank you.”
He adjusts the strap of his backpack and peers past me into the shop. “Need help today?”
I frown. “You work Saturdays.”
“I know.”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Also know.”
I nod as though I understand (I do not) and unlock the door, letting us in.
Cash drops his backpack behind the front counter like it’s his bedroom.
Been doing that for years. First as a kid who wandered in after school one day to look at plants and avoid some teenage drama that awaited him elsewhere, and then finally as a Saturday employee when I gave in last spring and put him on payroll.
“I can’t pay you for twice a week,” I remind him.
“Didn’t ask.”
“Cash …”
“I’m bored.” He looks around. Gently flicks a leaf. Pokes at one of the ferns. “Nico’s being a dick, Tice is useless, and Savannah just thinks the whole thing’s hot.”
“I know none of these people.”
He points at the roses in the front bucket. “Those need to be, like, misted or something?”
I’ve learned the guy likes keeping busy. Especially when he’s about to turn my store into his therapy couch. “You can pull the bruised petals, if you want. Gently.”
“How do I know which ones are bruised?”
“If they look tired, sad, or like they had a complicated night.”
He looks at me.
I look at him.
“The rose petals,” I say, frowning. “Not me.”
“If you say so.”
He pulls over a short stool and situates himself by the roses. That seems to quiet him. I pull from under the counter a box of delivery cards to stamp.
Each card looks like Diego’s face.
Each time I stamp, a kiss.
I shut my eyes. Maybe I’m the one who needs a therapy couch. “So, um … this Nico guy. He’s being a dick ... how?”
Cash sounds grateful for me initiating the chat. “Keeps acting like I’m embarrassing him in front of Savannah.”
“Are you?”
“Obviously. But that isn’t the point.”
“Of course it isn’t,” I mutter, trying to follow along.
“The guy’s cool when it’s just us. Then other people show up, and he becomes this …
this whole other weird person.” He plucks a bruised petal and lets it drop into the trash bin, fluttering in the air for a second like it’s about to take flight.
“Like, okay, congrats, bro, you got yourself an audience. But why be such a clown?”
My mind wanders inexplicably to Diego last night.
Stamp.
Then to him pressing my wrists to the wall.
Stamp.
Diving onto my mouth with his own.
Stamp, stamp.
His body against mine.
And then suddenly I stamp a card too hard, blotting the ink.
Ugh, crap.
“You good?” asks Cash over his shoulder.
“Super.”
“Your eyes are so baggy. You should do, like, a skin regimen, or something.”
“A skin what …?”
“Nico brought these skin masks over once, and we did them, and it was so funny.” Cash chuckles to himself, then goes gloomily quiet. “Now he does them with Savannah.”
“My eyes are always baggy when I don’t sleep well. I … I don’t need a regimen.”
“Something keep you up last night?”
A flash of Diego again.
His furious eyes opening, then closing as he goes for my lips.
And the whimper I let out into the night when he kissed me.
Wait. Did I whimper?
Am I misremembering that?
“What keeps me up or doesn’t ain’t your concern,” I say in as polite a tone as I can manage.
Cash shrugs. “Fair.” Then he sighs. “I guess I just keep thinkin’ maybe one day Nico will stop being weird. Just be himself. Just be the guy that I know and … and …” He grips a rose and goes silent.
I look down at the ruined delivery card.
There’s nothing wrong with hoping someone becomes kinder.
Even if it seems utterly hopeless.
But that feels a bit heavy for a Thursday afternoon chat, and I’m not about to pretend like we’re still talking about only Nico if I were to say that out loud, so instead I tell Cash: “Maybe give him a little less access to you for a while. Might make him think.”
Cash still clutches the rose for a moment, as if in thought. He turns to me and points at a petal. “This one okay?”
I come around the counter to check.
The petal he’s pointing at is soft at the edge, a little off, not a lost cause. Salvageable if handled carefully.
Aren’t we all?
“Let that one be,” I tell him.
He nods and moves on.
I stand there a second longer than I need to, staring at it.
Totally not thinking of someone else.
It’s hours later that I’m home outside my car, and all I can do is stand here staring at the house next door with a mouthful of unasked questions. What’s he doing? How’s he feeling?
No response. Closed garage. Closed blinds.
Not a sign of life whatsoever.
Even the hood of that clunker in his driveway is shut.
For a man who spent his first few weeks here making himself impossible to ignore, Diego Valdez’s absence is amazingly loud.
I notice something else:
No tools out.
Did he actually put that toolbox I gave him to use? Is this his way of communicating to me that he’s okay?
No. I won’t read into it. All I’ve done today is read imaginary writing on every wall I walk past. This is just how he says he needs space: by removing nearly all evidence that he exists.
I can accept that.
Maybe he’s moved all his car work to the middle of the night, not wanting a chance of running into me too soon.
I’ll have to accept that, too.
But even a quarter past midnight when I wake up with a start, sweaty from head to toe, and drag myself into the kitchen for a glass of water, I don’t see him in the driveway. Hood still closed. Garage, too. It’s like he’s gone.
Except he isn’t. He’s still very, very much here in my head.
I stand here in the dark and all I can do is think of Diego’s lips as I lift the glass to my own, sipping slowly, distractedly.
How much I could see him holding back in his tortured eyes.
Then giving in.
I’m standing here reinterpreting every single interaction we have had since the moment he first arrived to town.
His coldness. How he reacted to mowing over the flowerbed.
When he showed up to my shop to buy flowers and walked away with an orchid.
I’m trying to piece together the story he wasn’t telling me all this time.
A story I’m certain even Lottie and Marcos don’t know.
A story that, for one incredible instance, became ours.
A story he let me in on.
Just a flash of the first page.
Before the book slammed shut.
But I’m not satisfied with that. I refuse for that to be it. I want to read so much more.