So I told her I’d wait, and since then, I’ve been waiting. Fall has become winter now.
Endless days when we meet at her school and I watch her shy away from me. At first, she wouldn’t even let me touch her. We’d go to a café nearby and sit at a distance from each other, me staring at her because I didn’t know where else to look, and her looking anywhere but at me. She’d play with Nicky, give him hats, laugh with him, teach him words. And I’d be torn between laughing at her antics and shaking her, begging her to love me back.
Every day I watch her walk away, saying she has classes or has to be somewhere. Endless nights when I think about her, and then break down and call her. In the beginning, she ignored my calls, until one day she picked up, but the conversation was halting. It took days of my coaxing before she finally started to open up, and I realized how fucking hard it must have been for her when I refused to give in and talk to her.
Endless conversations where we talk about Nicky, about books, about things I never even knew I wanted to talk about. I never even knew I had this many words in me.
I never knew I could wait for someone like this. Until Layla.
It’s almost midnight, and she just called me to tell me she’s coming over. I told her not to. It’s not safe taking the subway to Brooklyn this time of the night. I told her I’d come to her, but she laughed and said, Midnight streets are my friends.
The knock comes at my door and I rush to open it. Layla stands there with a huge grin on her face, and I have to clutch the door to keep myself upright. Her beauty is like an explosion, sudden and jarring, but in a way that steals all my breath and thoughts. Sometimes I have to push a palm down on my chest to keep my heart from bursting out.
“I finished it.” She hops on her feet as she comes inside my dismal, one-bedroom apartment. I have more books than furniture, but she doesn’t mind. The walls are purple, and that’s only because Layla thinks white is boring and went with me to pick out the colors.
“Finished what?” I close the door and turn around to find her taking off her coat and her sweater, followed by her hat, her scarf, and then finally, her gloves. She dumps it all on the coffee table and I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.
She shoots me a glare. “What, it’s cold outside.”
“Right, and we live in Antarctica.”
“Ha ha.” She rolls her eyes and I feel like I could kiss her from five feet away.
She takes out a fur hat from her childish purple backpack and without a word, walks toward the bedroom where Nicky is sleeping. I follow her. I’ll always follow her. She tiptoes to his crib, smiles down at him and sighs, clutching her chest. I want to laugh at her dramatic actions but I press my lips together. I don’t know why I even thought for a second that she wouldn’t love Nicky or think he’d be a burden. She loves him. It’s the little things she does for him, how she brings him hats, how she always makes a point to say goodnight to him on the phone, if she’s not here.
Layla places the hat by his sleeping form, this one tangerine in color, and walks back out to the living room. She comes to a stop and faces me, beaming. Her skirt reaches mid-thigh and even though she’s wearing tights, I’m able to trace out the slope of her thighs and her calves. I remember peeling those scraps of fabric off. It feels like both yesterday and a lifetime ago, with the way I remember it so vividly and the way my fingers ache for it.
“Thomas,” she says, her breaths coming out hard and fast. I’ve never admitted it to her, but I love the way she says my name, like no one has ever said it before, like she invents me anew every time she says it. It’s fucking magical, and she calls me magic.
The shudders of her chest echo in my cock and I clear my throat. “So what did you finish?”
She swallows, appearing dazed. “Uh, my story.”
Layla has been writing a story that she hasn’t shown me. She doesn’t talk about it, not like she used to do back when she was my student. It stings, the distance, but I’ll take it. Unlike me, she likes to work on many things simultaneously, while I like to labor over one thing at a time. She likes to flit from one project to another.
Again, she bends down to root around in her bag, giving me a peek of her tits through her flimsy white top, and I whip my gaze up to the ceiling. I feel like a fucking pervert. Only Layla can make me feel both young and old at the same time.
“Here.”
I look at her outstretched hand and then up at her face, all inappropriate thoughts forgotten. “What’s that?”
“I want you to read it,” she whispers.
She looks at me through her lashes, shy and uncertain. She rubs her foot against the other leg, anxious. She is so fucking young in this moment that if I touched her right now, I’d sully her with my ancient, cynical fingers.
She isn’t giving me her story. She is giving me her heart.
I’ve thought about her heart a lot too. It’s big and fierce and soft and bright. It’s like a star or the moon or the entire fucking sky, and she’s giving it to me. She’s giving me the sky.
Everything has led to this. The fear I’m so damn familiar with rises up. I feel the physical effect of it in the way my stomach churns, in how tight my chest becomes.
I push past all of that. I push past the fear, the anxiety, and stalk toward her, stalk toward the only thing I want. “What’s it about?”
“It’s about how we fell in love.” She lowers her arm and retreats, step by step. I would’ve stopped if I thought she didn’t want me to come closer, but her purple eyes are shining. As soon as she reaches the wall, she sort of sinks into it, and I sink into her when I reach my destination. Her.
Our bodies touch and I almost groan out loud. I keep my arms on the wall, caging her in. “What’s it called?”
“The Rule-Breaker.” Her voice sounds rumbly like it does in the morning when she wakes up, and calls me about the dream she had about Nicky or about me.
“Yeah?” My voice mimics hers, as if she’s just jumpstarted my heart after months of being comatose.
“Yeah.” She nods her head. “It’s not pretty, our love story.”
“It’s not.”
“We break all the rules, and sometimes I hate that.”
“Me too.”
“But it’s ours.”
“It is.”
A trembling smile appears on her lips and I want to kiss it, but I refrain. “Where does it start?” She looks away from me and I have to chase her gaze. Blush coats her cheeks and I feel the rush of my own blood under the surface. “Where does it start, Layla?”
“Well, see, it starts at midnight when I saw you on the bench, the one by the tree with white flowers.”
I lick my lips, stunned. I never expected her to say that. I never even knew that. It’s the same spot where I proposed to Hadley.
We’re soul mates, Thomas.
I’ve never believed that until now…or maybe I did, but I’ve never seen the sheer, magnificent evidence of it. I press my body against her even more, trying to fuse our skins together, and her breath hitches.