“What?” I might have asked about our dates to tease her into a reaction, but I wasn’t expectingthiswould be it.
“Nothing. I’m gonna jump into the shower.”
“Do you want me to leave? I can go downstairs. There’s an Inter Milan match I want to watch. I can do it at the workshop.” I would do anything to take back whatever it was I’d said that had made her pale like that.
“Okay.” She regained her color.
“Is the card such a bad idea?”
“It’s not. We do need more texts and notes as proof, just in case. I’ll write a few, too.”
“June.” Until that moment, she was standing and I was sitting on the bed. I got up now and approached her. She wasn’t easy to read, so in the few times I could see something on her, I grasped at it.
As if to stop me, she quickly said, “I hate Valentine’s, that’s all.”
“Why, besides the obvious reasons?” I noted the use of “hate.” A strong emotion from a mild woman. A strong emotion against a holiday that celebrated love.
She sniffled. “In high school, I once … I left a Valentine’s card for this guy I was told liked me, too, but it turned out that he didn’t. That’s all. It’s just not a very nice memory.”
Same level of emotion as when she spoke of her father’s death. Her words were dry, her eyes, too, but I could have sworn that something in her bled internally behind the poker face at this specific memory.
I took a step forward.
“Shower.” She turned and disappeared resolutely before I could say or do anything.
Whatever she wanted or needed, or taught herself not to want or need, I knew she needed space tonight. The partition was a big enough clue.
I took a pen and blank greeting card she kept in the desk drawer, one of those that came in packs of tens with envelopes, wrote down the words, left it on her pillow, then grabbed my guitar, phone, and a few snacks I kept in her kitchen cabinet, locked the door behind me, and went downstairs.
How did I go from flirting with her to full-on wanting her to developing a weakness for her all in the course of one day?
I hoped I wouldn’t drown in the uncharted waters that was June Raine.
19
June
You’re my June on Valentine’s, and my Valentine in June.
Love you always,
Angelo
A handwritten Valentine’s Day card had been left on my pillow by the time I got out of the bathroom.
How stupid was I, at my age, and after all these years, for this to make my eyes sting with sudden tears?
How stupid was I to be moved by a fake Valentine’s Day card?
And how unbelievably stupid that I actually had to fight the urge to go downstairs, to the man who had faked it so skillfully?
I took the ring off, left it in my purse, shoved the card into my bedside drawer, got into bed, and did my breathing exercises to the distant sound of his guitar playing unfamiliar tunes.
But hateful memories of two terrible years of shame and fear now blended with a longing for something I had no name for. They weighed on my chest and spread in my insides like the ball of rubber bands my mom used to keep in our kitchen drawer “just in case.” It reached everywhere, expanding into my throat until I got up and rushed to the bathroom.
I had the sense to grab a towel from the rack and quickly wrap it around my shoulders and chest when a violent spasm sent me kneeling and bending over the toilet to throw my soul up for the first time in many years.
The noise was so loud that only when a voice came from behind me, I realized that someone had entered the apartment.
