She smiled at Mike as she bit back tears. It was a pleading smile, begging him to understand her on her deepest level.
Mike did. More than she knew.
“You have to understand, I’d wanted you forever, and you were the only one, but I was so scared because I knew what caring too much about another person could do. To me, Mom was proof of it. When you made love to me in the cellar…” Her smile was bright and whimsical and unseeing like she was back there. “I knew you were the only person with the power to strip me down. So, I pushed you away after, and prayed I wouldn’t regret it for the rest of my life.”
Wow. Did I really read the situation that wrong?
“Zo?”
“So much for that right? I’ve been reduced to dick pics and drought. Such great choices.” She laughed despite her tears.
Mike lifted his hand and caressed the soft curve of her cheek before drawing her into to him, dismissing the war going on in his head. The raw emotion in her voice hit him right in the heart. Gently, he brushed his lips over hers before kissing away her tears. So long ago, he’d done the same.
He only hoped history wouldn’t repeat itself.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered, holding her firmly in his arms. “I’m not going anywhere, Zo. I’ve always been right here waiting for you.”
The hum of the heater whirred to life.
Her head rested on his chest for what seemed like forever until her sobs subsided. They lay in each other’s arms—him flat on his back, her nestled between the wall and the crook of his arm. Mike felt no need to fill the silence. There was nothing more to say, nor anywhere else he wanted to be. For once, he wasn’t in limbo between the past and the future.
As much as it scared him, he was loving living in the moment with Zora.
When his eyelids were too heavy to keep open, Mike glided his fingers down the delicate nape of her neck and back up into her short hair.
She moaned her satisfaction.
“You want me to leave so you can get some rest? I know you said you needed to work on your book stuff tomorrow.” Mike peeked at his watch. It was past two in the morning. “Or rather in a few hours. It’s close to three.”
Zora shimmied her body closer to his. She was staring off to the side of the bed. “What’s the deal with the Disney snow globe? How come it’s not on the shelf with the others?”
Mike groaned. “Haven’t we gone far enough down memory lane for one day?”
“You started it. I was ready to go straight to sleep.” Her chin popped up off of his chest and she looked at him with her determined whiskey-colored eyes and a shaky smile. “It’s fine for me to pour my heart out and you get to take yours to the grave? Nope. Not happening. Out with it.”
Mike sighed.
He shook his head and rolled his eyes then picked up the snow globe. The smooth glass was cold and soothing in his hands. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for Zora to know exactly what he was made of.
With another sigh, he closed his eyes and got lost in the watery storm. “I went there once, by myself.”
Zora rested her chin on both of her hands on his chest and listened intently.
“My little brother Lucas always wanted to go to Disneyland,” Mike said. “He begged to go all the time. He wanted to meet Mickey Mouse, but we didn’t have a lot of money, so my parents just kept telling him ‘when you’re older, when you’re older.’ Before he ever got to go, he took a fall.”
“I’m sorry,” Zora said. “I knew he passed away, but I never knew the story. What happened?”
Mike’s shoulders tensed and his grip on the globe tightened.
You have to be open if you want to heal.
Though she never practiced what she preached, Mike’s mom said those words to him almost daily after the accident. She heard it from the family therapist and made it her go-to advice. Mike hadn’t thought about those words in years, and he didn’t know why it came to him now, but lying there under the weight of Zora’s expectant stare, it seemed the only way to go.
His eyes were still closed, and the familiar scene reeled across the back of his eyelids. He started to tell Zora one of the two worst moments of his life.
“We were playing tag upstairs.” He smiled widely before it slowly faded. “Lucas was running from me and I was right on his heels when he tumbled headfirst, down the staircase. We thought he was going to be fine because he jumped back up ready to play, but it turned out he wasn’t fine. There was bleeding on his brain and he died in his sleep the same night.”
“Mike.”
“When I was old enough, I went to Disneyland by myself…for him. The snow globe was for him.”
Mike felt wetness on his shirt. When he opened his eyes, she looked crestfallen and pained, and his own agony reflected back at him. Her bottom lip trembled and her skin was flushed.
“I’m so sorry, Mike. I knew you lost him when you were young, but you never talked about it,” she sobbed. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
He swallowed over the lump in his throat and shook the snow globe, sending teeny Mickeys swarming in a flurry of iridescent glitter.
“Like you, I didn’t want to get close to anyone after Lucas. It hurt too much to even talk about it and relive the pain every time, so I kept it bottled up. I’ve never told anyone, but I always felt like I let him down…let my parents down—“
“No.”
“I lost my brother, but they lost their child, and it broke them. His untouched bedroom with the Mickey Mouse sheets and Legos on the floor where he’d left them…the scent of Play-Doh and crayons in the air... It got to be too much. Two years later, they divorced and they’ve been fighting over me ever since. Both of them are determined not lose another son, but all it ever did was drive me away. It’s why I gravitated to your family. I could just be a kid again.”
Zora kissed Mike’s hands.
“I’m sure he’s looking down on you, smiling. He was there with you at Disneyland—in your heart—every step of the way. That’s what Babs used to tell me about Mom when I needed her to be there for me.”
“I should have been there for him.” Mike stressed the word because not being there was what really churned his heart. It was why he often took the designated backseat in life when he should be driving. He needed to be the lookout, always watching for signs of peril ahead. Meanwhile, life was passing him by.
Zora jolted upright, her legs straddling either side of him. Her body was square to his and her expression was deadpan, dire.
“Don’t do that. Don’t blame yourself. It’ll only stop you from healing. Remember, He died dreaming about playing with his big brother who loved him with his whole heart.”
At this Mike sat up, too. Their faces were only inches apart. He could feel Zora’s light breath on his neck. He circled his hands gently around her arms.
“Zo, I’d been so determined not to lose anyone again, I shut everyone out. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to open up. I had this great, big gaping hole in my heart. Then…you sort of crawled in and never left, so when I saw you hurting, breaking down over you mother—”
“Don’t.”
“I panicked because I knew what you were going through and I couldn’t bear to sit by and do nothing while you suffered.”