The Light of Day (4 page)

              “This isn’t smart,” she says and I talk over her protests.

              “Mia’s moving out.  Who’s going to move in with you when she does?”

              She blinks at my odd transition.  “What?”

              “You’re going to be alone, and I need to get out of Arizona and everything my life used to be.  Since Mia’s moving back here to take up residence in my apartment, why don’t I move to San Diego and live with you?”

              Now she does stand and I can see the panic on her face when I stand with her.  “No.  Are you crazy? We just met, and even if I was looking for a roommate, it wouldn’t be in San Diego.  I’m moving back to Portland,” she says.  “There’re some things there I need to take care of and I think it’s time I got out of San Diego and started my own life.”

              “I can do Portland.”

              “I wasn’t asking,” she snaps and I grin, unfolding myself and standing with her.

              “Think about it, Blue.  I haven’t lied to you, and I’m not a stranger, but I’m not a part of your past, either.  You can say whatever you want, but I know you, Cora.  For whatever reason, the minute I saw you I knew you and, despite what you tell yourself, you know me too.”

“Jake,” she says, but this time it sounds more like a plea.

Reaching out, I ignore her skeptical look and take a piece of hair that’s slipped from the pin she’s used and tuck it behind her ear.  Her eyes never leave mine, and her breathing is too fast.  I can see that she’s panicking a little, that I’m pushing her too hard. Murph’s warning from the first night after he noticed my interest in her floats through my brain, but I can’t focus on it right now.  Knowing I’m asking for too much doesn’t matter.  I can’t stop myself because there’s something pushing me, telling me that it’s this girl who’s going to save me.  Hating that doesn’t make it less true, so I’ve given in and am now convincing myself that, once she agrees, I’ll think of her first from then on out.

But she has to agree first.  Taking a chance, I trail my finger down her arm until I’ve linked our fingers together.

“I need to get out of here, Blue.  Things have changed for me and I need something new.  You’re starting over, too, or you wouldn’t be moving.  What do you say we start over together?”

Chapter Eight

Cora

Over the past year, I’ve turned a lot of corners, erased a lot of lines I had drawn in the sand before, and become a different person.  Some of it had to change because what I was doing (or sometimes who I was doing, if you want to get technical) and who I was becoming was destructive and harmful.  And some of it changed because once you stop partying, stop thinking about where you’re partying, about what you’re wearing, who you’re going out with, and how you’re getting over your current hangover, there’s a lot of fucking time to fill.

              After my thirty days of counseling, sobriety, and reflection, which were some dark days, let me tell you, and then the subsequent group counseling that followed, I figured out two things.  The first was that I needed friends, and if not true friends, then at least people I could hang out with who didn’t make me want to punch them in the face or go one further and drink a bottle just to get away from them.

I know, my life is gorgeous.  What I needed was someone to help me quiet the craving for life, noise, excitement in my head that I had begun to associate living with.

The second thing I learned, perhaps more necessary than the first, was that I needed a hobby, one that could take up a considerable amount of time as now that I was sober and aware of my life twenty-four hours a day, I was also aware of the fact that I didn’t really do anything (other than boys, but new leaf and all that). 

So, in an attempt to not just be clean and miserable, but clean and healthy since happiness is overrated in my book and will come when it goddamn feels like it, I did what the counselor called trading one obsession for another, and I began to work out.  After one week of burning lungs, overused muscles and intense physical pain, I gave in to Mia’s suggestion and hired a trainer to actually show me what I was doing instead of continuing to rip myself to pieces each day.

After that, it was still tough and painful, but it was manageable, and after the first month of pain, embarrassment and downright horror that the sixty-year-old woman next to me could lift more weight and run longer on the treadmill than I could, it got better.  The first three months were all about training my body to stretch, lift, climb, run, and move, when previously all I’d done for it was drape clothing over it and consume substances that weren’t quite this side of legal.

After those twelve weeks, I spent another twelve shedding the excess flesh that I had gained when I replaced my alcohol with sugar.  I lost ten pounds and put on some muscle.  My body started craving things that I had never eaten, so along with my fitness craze I added a health craze, learning how to cook, how to eat, how to grocery shop instead of just ordering off of a menu. 

Through it all, Mia was with me, going to the gym when she wasn’t in class, taste testing my meals, though some were undeniably inedible.  She never let me down, never teased me for finding myself consumed with something so clichéd.  Instead, she joined me so at month six, when I was getting bored with the inside of the fitness club and the monotony of the same routines each week, she found us the outdoor club that provided a new challenge each day.

We’ve climbed hours of stairs in every stadium in and around San Diego, we’ve run hills, done sand relays and beach yoga.  Despite the awkward and painful learning curve I endured, I kept going because, for the first time in what felt like forever, I wasn’t just drifting anymore. I was determined; I had a goal, and it felt good.

Which is why at just six a.m. on the day of my cousin’s wedding, I’m awake and tugging on running shorts and a sports bra.  We have a full schedule of hair, make-up, nails, and everything else that my life used to be about, but before the whirlwind, before the hurricane and the fluttering and worrying that can be my Aunt Margaret, I’m going for a morning run. I’m replacing my normal sand and surf with the dry desert.

In my room at The Authentic, the inn in Verrado owned by Mia’s parents, I slip on my running shoes and make quick work of the laces before easing open my door.  A second before it closes behind me I think of my key and slap a hand on it, wincing at the echoing sound it makes as I dart back inside.  I spend ten minutes looking for my room key, which I find in the bathroom drawer with my toothbrush.  Puzzled, I try to recall events from last night that would have landed them there, coming up with nothing.

Ninja bastards are getting more creative in their disappearance acts.

Armed with a way to get back inside, I finally exit my room, slipping past the other doors I know to be occupied by family as I make my way down the hallway and toward the stairs.  My stealthy actions are more out of self-preservation than courtesy, as my biggest fear is that someone will wake up and want to talk to me or worse, come with me, before I take this one hour to be selfish.

I’m almost to the top of the stairs when I hear another door open, followed by quiet voices and a light laugh — a laugh I would know anywhere.  Tongue in the side of my cheek, I turn to the left instead of heading downstairs, and low and behold, standing at the entrance to my cousin’s suite (where I stupidly assumed she would be getting her beauty rest for her day as the bride) is one hot piece of ass kissing the lights out of his fiancée. 

“Jesus, get a room.  Oh, wait, you have one.  Try going back inside of it.”

Even though I keep my voice down, Mia startles enough to break away from the kiss, but I give points to Ryan since he just turns and offers a lazy smile before attempting to get back to his business.  Mia slaps at him, but he keeps going, leaning into her until she has no choice but to grab onto him or topple over into the room.  The kiss he gives her is brief, strong, and everything a girl who’s loved understands, I’m betting.

It says
hold onto that, because there’s more to come
.  For a second my body tightens and I wonder what it’s like to feel that amount of affection from someone.  Shaking it off, along with any lingering thoughts of love, I raise an amused brow and cross my arms as dopey one and two stay wrapped up in each other.

“You better put a move on, lover boy, since I’m guessing Auntie Mags didn’t lock her daughter in the tower so you could scale the walls.  In fact, I think the purpose of moving us all here was so your bride was further away from you, not in the same bed.” 

“No tower’s keeping me away,” he says, as he sets her down.  He kisses her again and she raises to her toes.  I look away because, Jesus, it’s a little much.  “Two o’clock.  Then you’re all mine.”

“Two o’clock,” Mia repeats.

Ryan grins at me as he walks quietly past.  “Take care of my girl until then.”

“You got it,” I say and smile as she watches him disappear.

Sighing, I walk toward her.  “Cousin, how the tides have changed.  Here I am, getting up after spending the night alone, responsibly going over the itinerary I was given, making certain I have the schedule for the day burned into my brain so nothing could possibly go wrong. Then I find out you’ve not only been harboring a boy in your room, you’ve kept him here to the day of your wedding, a day he’s not supposed to see you on.”  I tisk at her as we walk inside and close her door.

Her room is the suite, an extravagant affair made up of white fabrics and what appears to be reclaimed beach wood — something more suited to the sand and surf than the desert — but it also feels like an oasis from the harsh landscape, an invitation to sink in and forget the dry and dead outside.  The bed sits dead center with its magnificent wood headboard, the plush covers all done in sparkling white and thrown everywhere, the adornment pillows in white and gray scattered on the floor. 

She’s smiling at me, her head shaking back and forth as she walks into the bathroom and begins to change into shorts and a running tank similar to mine.  “We don’t care about that.  And since we’re not going to get a ton of time together once baseball season starts, we’re taking what we can now.”

She pulls back her mane of hair in a ponytail and walks out to slip on running shoes.   “Three?” she says and I nod.  “Together or alone?” she asks and I know if I said alone, she’d point me one way and go another.  That’s the thing about Mia, she doesn’t push, she doesn’t smother, and she doesn’t criticize.  But she’s always there.

“Together,” I say with a smile, following her out and down until we’re outside in the mild December heat. 

“You doing okay with that? The fact that once he finishes with this season he’ll begin another right away, for a team that might not be anywhere near here?”

She nods and we begin out of the inn parking lot, hitting the running trail that goes through the small town.  Following it, we take it all along and through different housing complexes, switching between trail and sidewalk until we reach Lost Creek Road and head up into the stark brown hills of Arizona wilderness.  We don’t talk, not just because we’re both concentrated on breathing through the altitude and the almost consuming dryness, but because it’s part of who we are, who we’ve become as a unit.

This used to be Mia’s thing, running, getting away, getting out.  I always thought she did it to stay in shape—to look good.  I never took the time to go deeper, to understand that she needed this because it helped her release those things that she felt bound by, those things she couldn’t control and needed to. 

Now that I run with her, we rarely talk because I see the value in getting away from the noise and the people, the constant communication and attachment that I once craved like a junkie.  Even if it’s for only an hour a day, I detach myself, disengage, and I focus only on the next step I need to take to move forward.

When we get to the top of the hill, we’re both breathing hard, chests heaving, sweat glistening off our skin.  In San Diego, we run a five mile circuit on the beach that we usually try and end with a quick swim in the ocean.  Now, I mourn the loss of that beautiful piece of my morning as I squint and try to breathe.  Christ, it’s brutally dry here, and try as I might, I can’t work to find it beautiful in its sparseness. 

“God, are you sure you’re ready to be back here? It’s so ugly.”

Mia smiles and bends at the waist to stretch and catch her breath.  “If you’re asking am I hoping that one day Ryan gets drafted and it’s anywhere but here? Yes, but for now, he’s here. We won’t get a lot of time together once we get back to school, and after this season… well, he’ll be somewhere else playing and I’ll be working on my graduate degree.  So right now? It’s worth the time we’ll have, and moving from our place back to here.”

I nod because I get it.  She doesn’t see brown and deserted when she looks out anymore — she sees a future and some time with the man who
is
her future.  It’s almost second semester for both of them, but Mia won’t be going back to USD in January. She’s transferred to ASU so she and Ryan can live together and spend as much time as possible being a married couple before their futures take them in different directions.  But always back to each other at the end, that’s the way their love story works.

“Are you going to be okay by yourself?”

I don’t pretend to misunderstand her, though a part of me wishes I could brush off her question with a grin and a promise that being alone has always suited me.  We both know what suited me before is no longer what’s good for me now.  An image of Jake and his proposition from the night before slams into me and I knock it away.  The fact that I was tempted for even a second, and that I’ve thought of him all night and into the morning, tells me just how dangerous he is.

Pushing him out of my mind, I stop stretching and so does she, both of us standing and resting our hands on our hips as she waits for me to answer.  She’s small, petite, a girl who carries her strength without showing it.  Her hair is golden, darker than the platinum I used to rock, lighter than her sun-kissed skin, but not by much.  Her eyes are a clear blue, and her skin is flawless, stretched over high cheekbones, a pointed nose and a perfectly sculpted chin.

              I used to think that she was the one who needed to be protected, sheltered, saved, because she was the one who felt everything.  Every failure, every loss, every angry word shared by someone touched Mia until she was driven to fix it.  It wasn’t until she was saving me from myself, going down to Los Angeles a year ago and gathering me up, taking me to The House and visiting me every chance she got that I realized in
not
feeling, I had broken myself.

The person I had been three years ago was someone who refused to acknowledge anything that hurt — instead, I pretended to be a warrior, wearing armor that I had made out of careless looks, careless hook-ups, and chemical induced memories.

I thought I was so grown up when I moved to Los Angeles alone, that I was going to take the fashion world by storm, a naïve eighteen-year-old from Portland, Oregon, who graduated from high school online because she was too impatient to wait and graduate in June, and who thought that everyone else would be amazed by her grand vision when she met them.

Instead, my life went from confusing to awful as I struggled to find myself, began and ended a marriage and discovered that my mom, who I had never been close to, had become a victim of early onset Alzheimer’s.  Our already rocky relationship became volatile as she pushed hard against any weakness and I fell into it.  It was then that I decided the best way to mourn what she was losing was to give my life away to whoever wanted it.  Until Mia saved me, and then taught me how to save myself.