Love Beyond Words (City Lights: San Francisco Book 1) (17 page)

Julian could easily conjure her on that journey; alone, grief-stricken, and so very young. His chest tightened.

“I stayed in Santa Barbara the longest, working as a waitress in a restaurant by the beach. For two years, I lived there, hardly talking to anyone, all my time divided between working and reading on the beach. It sounds sort of like a vacation when I put it that way, but it really wasn’t. It was…terrible. I’ve never been so lonely.”

Julian longed to go to her, but she wouldn’t want his sympathy.
She’s stronger than she realizes.

“I felt like a child wandering on her own,” Natalie said. “And being a child was too painful. Children have parents to take care of them. I felt like I needed to shed the first half of my life, my home, my city…I thought if I did that, just cut it all off, like a rotting limb, the pain would fall away with it.”

She sighed and gave a kind of half-smile. “I wanted to shed my virginity because it was part of the old life, which is kind of sad when I think about it. I wish I hadn’t. I wish that I waited.” She glanced up at him. “For you.”

Julian felt the ache in his heart grow heavier. “I’m honored,” he said quietly and watched her blush and look away.

“But that boy…he was kind,” she said quickly. “More so than I had counted on. He wanted to see me again, take me out for a proper date. But no…I thought I would know everything there was to know about him in a week. I left Santa Barbara two days later.”

She huffed a breath. “So that’s the extent of my sexual escapades. A brief one-night stand and not much else. I never had a boyfriend in high school, just boys that were friends. I wanted you to know so that you don’t confuse any hesitancy on my part with a lack of…um, desire…for you. Because I have a lot… of…that.” She covered her eyes with her hand. “Stop me at any time if my eloquent seduction is too much for you.”

Julian burst out laughing and came around the counter to slip his arms around her waist and kiss her. She tasted of wine and below that, her own addictive sweetness he couldn’t get enough of. “Everything about you is an eloquent seduction.”

Her fingers wound into his hair and she drew him close for another kiss that had the potential to send them back to the bedroom until she pulled away. “Our food is going to get cold and it smells too good to ignore a second time. And I want to hear about your life, about your mother. And your father. Whatever you feel you want to tell me. Maybe,” she smiled coyly, “a little bit about the books?”

“Curious about that, are you?”

“Eh. I only have about a
billion
questions. No biggie.”

“The story of my early life is how
Above
came to be written. Will that suffice for now?” She nodded dumbly, and he could see the weight of his revelation striking her again, erasing her levity. “It’s okay,” he told her. “After I’m done, it won’t seem so strange.”

She smiled faintly. “Says you…Rafael Mendón.”

They retreated to the couch. Julian smiled to see Natalie tuck her legs under her, an attentive expression on her face, but he hesitated. He mentally scrolled over his own life history, organized it, and wondered how painful it was going to be to bring it into the light of day.
It doesn’t matter,
he realized.
Natalie’s owed every truth and my mother deserves to be remembered.
But his story started with his father. He took a long pull of wine and then began.

He told her of how his father, Kristoff, had been afflicted with wanderlust from a young age, and how he’d landed in Colombia where he met Alaina. Three years of nomadic bliss, before she became pregnant and wanted to settle down, something Kristoff could not, or would not, do.

“He was gone for long stretches of time, wiring money when he could or was inclined to. And then one of those stretches kept stretching until it was clear he wasn’t coming back. The wires stopped. We didn’t hear from him for six years. And yet my mother refused to let anyone speak a sour word about him in my presence. She believed it was a sin to blacken the impression of a parent in the mind of their child. But I knew. From my earliest years, I knew. I could hear her crying at night.”

Julian took another sip of wine, hardly tasting it, and spoke of the day his father came back, ill and ashen. “I was ten years old, and I thought it meant we’d be a whole family again, but he wasn’t well. A month later, his heart gave out and he was gone.”

“Fast, like lightning,” Natalie murmured. She gave him her hand and he squeezed it gratefully.

“During my father’s long absences and after his death, my mother worked in housekeeping at various luxury hotels in San Juan. She kept long, hard hours while I went to school, and she was determined that I get good grades and go to college. I came home from school to our shabby four-room apartment, did my homework, and then wrote. I was alone most afternoons and into the evenings, and so I created worlds that were not so empty. By the time I was in middle school, it had become evident that I was—”

“A genius?” Natalie put in, with a small grin.

“I was going to say ‘ahead of my class’,” Julian said. “But my mother couldn’t afford a private school, and scholarships for children of that age were few and far between. The public school I went to wasn’t a terrible one, anyway. One benevolent teacher —Mrs. Ruiz, in the sixth grade—bought me a stack of black and white composition books and I’ve never used anything else for the first drafts of my novels. I can’t. It may sound strange but I don’t want to change much of what began when my mother was still alive. I don’t want to lose any more of her than I have already.”

Natalie wiped her cheek. “That’s not strange at all.”

Julian nodded, cleared his throat.

“I didn’t stay in school long. I took the GED as soon as I was able so that I could work. We were living in Tampa Bay at the time and until then, she had forbidden me from working, saying I needed to concentrate on my writing. It was evidence of her encroaching illness that she did not protest when I finished school to work, but patted my hand and told me I was a good son to her. But I felt I wasn’t doing enough.

“I’ve heard you shouldn’t write—or make art—solely for the money. I understand the gist; writing is something I have to do. I would do it for free. But not that first book. That first book was both a story I needed to tell and a way to make money we desperately needed. Or so I hoped. That’s when I wrote
Above.

“I worked all day at a grocery store, bagging groceries and stocking shelves, and at night I wrote obsessively, furiously, through blisters and burning eyes and headaches; fueled by resentment toward my father for leaving us and a panic that time was slipping away. And it was. When it was finished, my mother’s cancer had progressed to the point where doctors begin speaking in weeks instead of months. It was in her lungs despite the fact she’d never touched a cigarette in her life.”

Julian heard his voice grow hard with bitterness.

“I walked into the offices of Underhill Press in Tampa and slammed the five notebooks on the desk of the man who is still my editor to this day, and I said, ‘How much will you pay me for this?’ Naturally, he thought I was insane. I was seventeen years old, wearing a grocer’s apron and had dirty fingernails. But Len—Len Gordon is his name—told me later he saw something in me that intrigued him. I left him the books and my phone number and walked out.

“Len called me that same evening, at the hospice, and offered me a contract right there, over the phone, provided I could prove I wrote it myself. I quoted him whole passages at his discretion and he was sold. Or rather,
Above
was sold.”

“For a huge pile of money, I hope.”

“Huge to my mother and me. Len came over two days later with a contract. Underhill Press offered me a thirty thousand dollar advance—an astonishing sum for a debut novel by today’s e-book-friendly standards, and enough to give my mother a few weeks’ or months’ peace and luxury.

“Between the contract signing and the release of the book, I took her to the Bahamas. There, she sat by the beach or the pool in a fancy hotel reading
Above
while others waited on her, hand and foot. It was the best and worst time of my life, as I could see she enjoyed the sun and rest, but it was too little too late. She didn’t have the strength to stay longer than a handful of days. We returned to the hospice and she…”

Julian felt as if he’d been suddenly dragged backward through time. He saw everything clear as day; the dingy room, the smell of the air freshener the hospice used to cover the scents of disinfectants and illness but never could manage to conceal entirely, and his mother’s bone-thin body on the too-big bed. He heard her every word, echoing across ten years, in a wasted voice that had once been rich and full.

“…And she pulled me close to her and said, ‘
Mi hijo
, you have to be very careful. You are only a boy and soon I will not be here to take care of you. Your book is going to splash on the world and make a tidal wave. You have to keep yourself safe. You are so very young. Low men will try to take advantage of you, steal your money. Women will want you for your name and not your soul. Promise me you won’t pollute your beautiful mind with drugs or liquor; that you won’t let money turn you into something that you are not. Promise me you will tell no one that you have made this book. Promise me, so that I may leave his world in peace.’”

He looked at Natalie. “Of course I said yes.”

“Of course,” she said, her eyes shining.

“This didn’t sit with Len,” Julian said, clearing his throat. “He thought he had a prodigy on his hands and the publicity to go with it. But he acquiesced on the condition that it would not be published anonymously. We had to give him a name.

“Out of anger with my father I had been going by Rafael since I was four. But my writing was for my mother, so I chose the names she had given me for the world to hear, and used my father’s names in life, where I was alone and no one knew me.”

“They’re all beautiful names,” Natalie said in a small voice. “Your mother must have been touched by the gesture.”

“I’d like to think so. By then there wasn’t much left of her. She…she died. She died before she saw
Above
in print, before it became a bestseller or an award-winner, before it made me enough money that I could have taken her anywhere in the world, or gotten her better medical care, or bought her anything she wanted, or…”

He wiped his hands over his eyes, and took a deep, fortifying breath. He heard Natalie sniff and couldn’t look at her.

“So there you go. Not a very glamorous story, but I’m glad you know it. I’m glad to have told you about my mother, so that she doesn’t exist solely in my mind and heart.”

“No, now she lives in my heart too,” Natalie said softly.

Julian’s chest tightened and he turned to the cityscape outside the windows. The brilliant spread of lights blurred in his vision.

He felt Natalie slide onto his lap, felt her arms go around his neck and she held him. He buried his face in her hair that smelled like cinnamon and flowery shampoo and even his own bed sheets from when she’d lain with him. She pulled away enough to kiss him. Her mouth was soft on his, and so very sweet.

“Thank you,” he said hoarsely. “I needed that.”

“There’s more where that came from,” she said in just the right playful tone to pull him from the melancholy of his story. She got to her feet and tugged his hand. “Come on. It’s late and we still have unfinished business.”

“We do?”

“We do.”

Natalie lay back on Julian’s pillows, her thumbs flying over the keypad of her old flip phone.

“What are you doing?” Julian asked, drawing on a pair of jeans. “You’re not selling my story are you? Already? It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning.”

“Of course I am. It’s been my plan all along.”

“Damn. I feel so used and dirty. And not in the good way.”

“I’m texting my friend Liberty to let her know that you’re not a serial killer after all.”