“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you have a girlfriend?” she asks. “Oh my God, you do. This should not be happening. I shouldn’t have done that...Ellie. God, I don’t know what I’m thinking right now. This isn’t right. This definitely isn’t right. This, us, we are not supposed to be doing this.”
I agree with everything she just said. I shouldn’t be kissing her when I feel the way I do about Charlotte, but my lips against hers make Ellie’s heart beat faster. This attraction is a connection, one I am so desperate for that I can’t tell her I’m sorry for what I just did. “Charlotte broke things off with me so I could figure out what I want,” I tell her. “Meeting you has added a whole lot of confusion into my life.” Maybe that’s too honest.
“Oh,” she says. We’re staring into each other’s eyes and all I want to do is see Ellie’s soul within her beautiful gaze. But souls cannot be seen, they can only be felt and I feel it. I’m at a loss for words. I don’t know what to say to her. “Why did you kiss me if I’m adding confusion to your life?”
The answer shouldn’t be complicated. How do I tell her I fell for the words on every typewritten note she gave me? How do I tell her I want to be near her because it’s like being near Ellie? It makes some sort of screwed up sense in my head, but I’m not sure it would make much sense to anyone else. “I wanted to,” I say simply.
“I don’t think you want to get involved with me, Hunter.”
Not that I can decide whether it’s a good idea to get involved with her or not, but why would she just spit that out? Clearly the kiss didn’t bother her since she didn’t stop me. “Why?” I should be asking myself the same question.Because of Charlotte.
She smiles at me and touches her finger to her lips before slipping out of reach. Grabbing the broom from the corner of the showroom, she begins sweeping around me. I place my hand on the broomstick and stop her. “Why?” I ask again.
“I’d fall for you,” she says.
“You don’t have to,” I tell her as if it would be that easy.
“I know, but I would.”
“So what if you did?” What am I saying? Love? I can’t love anyone else...I don’t think. I should be telling her she doesn’t want to be with me. I might only want to be with her for what’s inside of her body.
“You’d end up hurt,” she finishes the back and forth with this stabbing statement.
“How could you be so sure?” I push for a deeper explanation, one I don’t quite need but curiosity is stabbing at my brain.
Ari stares coldly into my eyes and I swear I see her thoughts assembling within her gaze. “Hunter,” she begins, though it sounds more like a prolonged pause.
“What is it?” I ask, gripping my hands around her slim shoulders. The sensation of touching her is foreign, considering I jumped from every other stage of getting to know someone right to kissing her.
Her focus breaks from my face and she looks down between us. I want to press my finger under her chin so she looks back up at me but I give her the time she needs, hoping she decides to divulge.
“Ellie’s doctor told her she had an unruptured aneurysm. They discovered it when they did a CT scan after the car accident you were both in.” Her words are soft, almost hard to hear, but the meaning of what she is saying is louder than a piercing foghorn. “The doctors told her that operating on it would only result in a fifty percent chance of survival. They also told her that by not operating on it, she would only have a fifty percent chance of survival. Because of where the aneurysm was located, it could rupture with any intense activity or trauma. The doctors advised her not to pursue a pregnancy.”
My knees literally give out and I’m on the ground, leaning up against the counter, staring blankly out the glass door. Everything I thought I knew was not accurate. Elliewashiding the world from me behind her truth-filled eyes.
“She wanted a baby so badly,” I say out loud to myself. “We tried to conceive Olive for three years. If I had known—”
“You wouldn’t have Olive,” she interrupts me with sternness laced into her voice.
I could never respond to that with what first comes to mind because I would never give Olive up for anything in the world, but I should have known. “She kept this from me,” I say. Ari slides down against the counter, the clamminess of her hands scrape down the glass as she places herself close to my side. “I thought I knew everything about her, down to the order she put her make-up on in the morning. We didn’t keep things from one another, and now I know she kept everything from me.”
“This isn’t everything,” Ari says. “This is one secret that she kept from you.”
“This one secretiseverything.”
“I asked her once what you thought about her condition and I’ll never forget the look that swept across her face at that moment. I had never seen that look before, not that I’ve known Ellie my entire life or anything but she was my mentor and we spent a lot of time together.” Ari reaches up and sweeps the back of her hand under her eye. “She told me it was something she couldn’t figure out how to tell you and she hadn’t decided if she wanted to ruin your life by telling you. Even her parents didn’t know. She knew the chances of surviving were poor and the last thing she wanted was to be treated differently because of it. Especially by you.”
“I don’t understand why she would want a baby so badly if this is all true.” How could this all be true? I was with her at the hospital after the accident—she never said a word. The doctor we saw for the pregnancy, he would have had to know, too. This information had to be in her files somewhere. Why would no one tell me?
“She wanted to leave her mark in this world, and Olive was the way for her to do that,” Ari says, placing her hand on mine.
“She left me purposely, leaving me with a little girl who I’m raising alone.” She did this deliberately and I don’t know how to accept this fact. How could she ever assume I would want to be left without her, and as a single parent?
“You were left with a part of Ellie,” Ari says, as if she can hear my thoughts.
“Why the hell would she tell you all of this? You were a student to her—student teacher, whatever. Why the hell you instead of me?” I stand up, doing little to conceal my growing rage. Why Ari and not fucking me? I deserved to know. I was her life. I was the one pushing her closer to her death every month we tried to get pregnant, and nothing in her head made her think we weren’t meant to have a baby so she could live. Nothing made her think that. We could have lived a relaxing life and kept her safe against extraneous activity. It didn’t have to be this way. She could have lived.
