Maritza steps closer, finally taking a seat next to me. Drawing in a long breath, she rests her eyes in mine.
“I had no idea you were hurt.” Her voice is softer now.
Lips pressed flat, I reach for the top button of my shirt and begin to unfasten it, then the next and the next. When I’m finished, I pull the left side down my arm and show her the burned, scarred mess of skin that trails all along my left side and stops at the base of my shoulder.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
I nod. “It hurt like hell at first. They had me in a coma for a couple of weeks after it first happened. When I woke up, I was in so much pain I’d pray every night for God to just let me die, but I think it was the drugs talking. Doctors said had the burns traveled to the other half of my torso, I wouldn’t be here today.”
I don’t even touch on the fact that I almost lost a leg from the hip down. That’ll be a story for another day.
Her chest rises and falls slowly and she studies the marks that cover my flesh.
“I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to write you letters,” I say. “I lost your address. I didn’t have your number memorized. There was no way for me to reach you, Maritza, and the idea of you thinking I’d written you off fucking killed me.”
Maritza’s eyes flick to the floor, focusing on the hardwood beneath our feet. “There were so many times I had this feeling … this gut feeling that something happened to you and that that was why I hadn’t heard from you. I believed that for so long. And then when I met your brother, he said you weren’t hurt and that you’d been home for a while.”
“Of course he did. That’s what he does—he lies.”
She shakes her head. “I’m so sorry. If you had any idea what a rollercoaster these last six months have been for me … all the nights I stayed up worrying about you, wondering where you went and what happened …”
I slip my shirt back over my arm before taking her hands between mine. “I can only imagine. And I hate that I put you through that.”
“When I got back, Ma had left the guest room exactly the way it was when I’d left,” I tell her, “and I found these sitting on the nightstand.”
Reaching into the box, I retrieve a couple of small items.
“The receipt from our sushi lunch where I accidentally Back-to-the-Future’d your future children,” I say. She chuckles, taking the thin slip of paper from my hands. “And the ticket stub from the tar pits, where I kissed you in front of a woolly mammoth.”
“Why’d you hold on to these?” she asks.
Shrugging, I say, “I don’t know. Believe me, I’m not a sentimental guy. I don’t hold onto anything. But I guess I wasn’t quite ready to throw them away.”
“That’s kind of … romantic,” she says, head tilted as her lips lift in one corner.
“I don’t know about romantic,” I say, reaching for the bouquet of blue hydrangeas I’d picked up on the way here.
“Blue hydrangeas?” she asks, bringing the flowers under her nose. “I can’t believe you remembered.”
I smirk. “There’s this little flower shop over by Ma’s place. And every time I passed it these last few weeks, I saw hydrangeas in the window. They were usually white or pink or purple, but today they were blue. And this girl I know once told me to always stop for blue hydrangeas.”
Maritza’s perfect teeth drag along her lower lip and her eyes are lit, glassy almost, but the smile forming on her face tells me this is a good thing.
“I never stopped thinking about you, Maritza,” I say. “Not once. And I didn’t realize what that meant until it was too late to tell you.”
“I’m sorry I wouldn’t listen to you,” she says, exhaling. “Your brother was just so convincing … and I’d been trying for months to make sense of everything and then he came along and filled in the missing blanks and I was so sure I had it all figured out, I was so sure you were this horrible person who went around hurting people and not thinking twice.”
Skimming my palm along my jaw, I blow a hard breath between my lips. “Yeah, well. I’m not perfect, Maritza. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of. I’ve taken the low road way more than I probably should have, but there’s something about finding the girl of your dreams and then watching your life flash before your eyes that does something to a man.”
“The girl of your dreams?” She laughs.
“It’s cliché, I know.” And it’s not really a phrase that’s ever been in my vocabulary until I met her. “I don’t know how else to describe you other than you’re everything I never knew I wanted, everything I never knew was possible to have.”