“Yes, I did. Of course I did. He wasn’t happy about it," she paused, and her voice caught for just a moment, “but didn’t fight me. He always told me that he wanted me to follow my heart, even if that meant leaving.” A few tears formed at the corners of her eyes then, but she smiled before they could fall. I loved her for that. My Aly wasn’t cruel and even I had to admit Ethan was a good guy. He might have even really loved her. Hell, he must have, he had asked her to spend the rest of her life with him, and God help me, she almost did. Hurting him couldn’t have been easy to do. I mustered what I hoped was an appropriate reply. “How’d he take it?”
“He said he felt like he’d been knocked out and didn’t get to throw the first punch,” she said and I watched her move as though my mind, my spirit floated above me, observing how smoothly Aly came to me, messing with my collar, distracting herself from my silence by straightening the lapel on my jacket. She smelled like lavender today, a mix of flowers and the sweet scent of her skin. But when she reached for my face, Aly’s gaze jumped to my fingers, holding her hand still, because I needed to feel the pulse under her fingers just to know if she were real. To confirm for myself that it all wasn't just some twisted dream.
“Ransom. What’s wrong?”
“You really did give him the ring back.” She nodded, but didn’t smile, slipping a little closer to me as though she worried I’d knocked myself in the head. “But…you kissed him.”
She looked at me for a moment, puzzled, then let out the most beautiful, most wonderful, most happy laugh I'd ever heard—or maybe it was just my mind that heard it that way. “That was a goodbye kiss, shoushou. He deserved at least that. Ethan’s a good man, a wonderful man. Just not the one for me.”
My rational mind realized she had a point, but my heart didn’t care why she let him kiss her. Goodbye. That was all I needed to hear. I cast about for something to say, and all I could come up with sounded idiotic even to me. “Suppose he hates me.”
“Definitely, but he still has a man crush on Kona.” She smiled, and I couldn't help but smile with her.
“And,” I said, tugging her closer so she had to rest her hands against my chest. “You aren’t going to change your mind later? You aren’t going to do something stupid like convince yourself I only want you for what you can give me? You aren’t going to make me chase after you because you think I’d somehow be better off with someone else?”
“I can pretty much guarantee that you’re not gonna get rid of me again.”
“Nani…” The word came out in a whisper and I didn’t care if it made me sound stupid. She was to me, always. Beautiful right then on the side of the road. Beautiful always, then, as when I first loved her with a desperation that scared and thrilled me, and now, loving her without limits, and even sometime in the future when we’re fifty and eighty and broken shells of who we were, even then she would be beautiful.
Still rocked from the realization that Aly had chosen me, I pulled away from her, unaccountably happy and laughing. “I…I thought.” I shook my head, exhaling for the first time, it seemed, in months. “I thought you chose him, when you walked away…went inside that building, I thought…”
“Ransom…oh my cheri. How could I?” Aly pulled me close, working her lips in a brief, teasing brush against mine, that soft, perfect tongue sliding softly against my bottom lip. “You’re all I ever wanted.”
You fit everywhere
Inside my body.
The cells that become platelets The platelets that congeal.
Harsher than poison,
You crawl inside me, thick pumps draining me, filling me Making me whole.
And when I feel you
When my bones crumble under the strength of your hands, The weight of your body, There is breath enough for only two words.
Spoken true,
Real,
Raw,
Glorious.
Glorious.
Twenty-Two
It was there, right with us, all night. Through dinner, with Mack and Koa laughing, forgetting their earlier irritation with each other, their bickering, to keep the smile on Aly’s face. They, like me, were happy for her choice. But even as we told jokes that were a little rude, even as we ate too much, were too indulgent with our desserts, that hum of suggestion remained. I caught it as Aly listened to Mack explaining her ideas for a new competition number. She gave my sister her full attention, never losing focus, except when Aly’s darkening irises swiveled with a hunger that Po-boys and chocolate sundaes could not quench.
It was there between us as we drove Koa and Mack to the Omni Royal Orleans where Mark and Johnny waited for us. They’d take the kids to Mandeville and I would follow, though Mark suggested I didn’t, after dropping Aly off at her condo. Even as my godfather listened to Koa’s animated story about the homeless girl who followed us through the Quarter, Aly laughed in the right spots, humoring my kid brother, even then, it was there too: the hunger. The desire. The lingering connection that we had not been able to quell.
“I’m waiting,” that look she gave me said. “Come and take what’s yours.”
It only took five minutes.
Aly asked me inside her condo. She wanted me to see the changes she’d made since the last time I’d visited. I didn’t care about how she kept her house and neither did she. She wanted the waiting to end.