Chapter 18

Havana took Aria to the tiny bus station in La Grange. In a rare feat, her sister drove Caleb’s SUV the entire way without saying a word, and of course it was the one time Aria would have preferred some chatter. How was she supposed to forget the devastation on Isaiah’s face during that last conversation if she didn’t have something to distract her?

It was only at the curb that Havana finally exhibited an ounce of mercy and broke her silence. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Aria nodded. That was the hope. Of course, the huge hole in her chest felt more like she’d lost everything. But that would fade in time. Time she fully planned to give herself. This wasn’t a lark or something designed to prove a point. The pain just made it all the more critical to figure out why she couldn’t accept that Isaiah meant it when he said he would stay in Superstition Springs.

Because that was the bottom line. She couldn’t stand around and wait for him to leave her. It didn’t matter how many pretty promises he made—everyone abandoned her eventually.

And it was on her to become someone that people didn’t leave. That could only be accomplished by taking action. By being brave. This journey was the scariest thing she’d ever done. Sure she’d have liked nothing more than to have someone right next to her, holding her hand. Isaiah specifically. But he’d refused to come with her, which honestly was for the best.

She just didn’t like it.

“Do you have enough money?” Havana asked as Aria stuck her hand out to open the door.

“I don’t know,” Aria mumbled and shifted her gaze out the window to watch the people milling about on the sidewalk in front of the gray building housing the bus station. “How much is enough?”

Shouldn’t the bus station be grander or have more buses waiting to whisk people away to a new life? The building was small and kind of depressing. Three long silver vehicles idled by numbered chutes that reminded her of cattle runs leading into a barn, but otherwise, there was little to indicate the purpose of this place.

“Depends on what you’re trying to do. Stay in a hotel for a few weeks? Rent an apartment? Go to Disneyland?”

Aria glanced over at her sister. All good questions that she didn’t have an answer to. “I have enough to buy a one-way bus ticket to Los Angeles and that’s the important part. I’ll figure out something when I get there.”

That’s what all the heroines did in her favorite books. They were smart, resourceful. They took on the world with no apologies and viewed each step as an opportunity. They did not abort the quest before taking step one.

Havana’s lips pursed and she could tell her sister wanted to say a whole bunch of things in response, but she didn’t. It must have taken an act of sheer will for her to keep her opinions to herself. They’d never picked up that discussion from the other day, the one that Isaiah had cut short. And Aria had no intention of hashing that out again anyway. What would be the use? To get an apology from Havana? That wouldn’t change anything.

“You can call me anytime if you need me to come get you,” Havana finally said. “No matter where you are.”

“Really? What if I’m in Alaska?” she couldn’t help but retort. That was nowhere in her plans, but still.

Havana just turned up her hands. “Even then. You think distance makes a difference when my baby sister needs me?”

Yeah. She did think that because it made a huge difference, but Aria was the only one who seemed to understand that. “Distance is the whole point of this excursion.”

“Because you’re trying to escape me.” Havana’s mouth flattened. “I’m bossy and difficult. You can say it.”

“This is not about you.”

Except it was. It was one hundred percent about how everyone else in her life had gotten to go places and do things and hadn’t had one thought for how Aria would feel about being abandoned. How hard it was to be the one left behind. How that would become the defining phenomena that drove her decisions. Even after spelling that out, still Havana had said nothing.

And now Aria was the one doing the leaving. Finally. Was it supposed to hurt her this much though?

“Well, I’m not going to tell you what to do this time,” Havana said firmly though Aria would swear there was a glint in her sister’s eyes that meant she was trying not to cry. “You’re an adult and you can make your own decisions.”

“That wasn’t ever in question. And for the record, I’ve never minded you telling me what to do. What I minded was when you left.”

“Would it help if I said I was sorry?”

One tear finally worked its way down her sister’s face and that was nearly Aria’s undoing. Havana wasn’t a crier. She was a get things done kind of woman, the likes of which Aria had always admired.

“It helps.” But it didn’t change anything.

Aria was fixing herself once and for all. She opened the SUV door and forced herself to step onto the curb, then collect her bags. Because she was a masochist apparently, she turned for one final tremulous smile for her sister. “Tell Ember I said bye and that I’m grateful to her for taking over my job at Ruby’s.”

Havana nodded and the moment Aria shut the SUV’s door, her sister drove off, leaving her there with two pieces of luggage and the sinking sensation that she’d somehow messed up an opportunity to leave all of her old baggage full of the past behind.

But her sister wasn’t getting it, insisting on missing the point by laying blame for Aria’s troubles on something so meaningless as Havana’s tendency to be dictatorial. Who didn’t know that about the eldest Nixon sister? Havana had even said that Caleb loved her in spite of that flaw.

All at once, that conversation she’d had with Havana and Ember filtered into her mind, the one where Havana had said that Caleb let her be herself. And called it heaven on earth. Exactly how Aria had felt every moment she’d ever been with Isaiah—except for the ones where they argued about the future of their relationship with no compromise in sight.

But even then, he’d never once made her feel unloved. Or like he had no interest in working it out. He’d just asked for time to sort through the stuff in his head.

Well, guess what? She was giving him that time while she got out before being hurt again.

She bought a ticket for Los Angeles at the window and stoically climbed on board the bus at the appointed time. It was easily the lushest vehicle she’d ever been in with soft, posh seats, a rest for her feet and a cushion for her head that would come in handy since she’d have to sleep on the bus after transferring in Austin.

The trip to Austin took over an hour but it passed pretty quickly, probably because Aria had gone numb by the time the bus hit the freeway. For a grand adventure, it wasn’t turning out to be anything other than a lesson in misery. Mostly because she couldn’t stop thinking about Isaiah and how she’d put lines on his face that hadn’t been there before she’d told him she was leaving anyway.

She’d hurt him. And still he’d asked her to stay. Had told her in no uncertain terms that he wanted to be with her. Why couldn’t she just take that at face value? Wouldn’t staying be a better test of whether she’d become someone people didn’t leave? With each rotation of the tires, she grew less and less convinced that she’d made the right decision.

But this was the way it had to be. Wasn’t it?

In Austin, she deboarded the bus and found the queue for the one that would take her to Dallas, where she’d have to transfer yet again to make the long trek to California. Somehow she’d envisioned this journey would be fun, but it was June in Texas, which equaled hot. And sticky. After a long fifteen minutes, the new bus rumbled into place.

And then she couldn’t make herself get on it. Once the bus rolled away from Austin, she’d officially be the farthest from home she’d ever been. Why that was tripping her up, she had no idea. Maybe because she’d come this far and nothing had changed. She was still really mad at Havana and Ember for leaving and really mad at herself for being so adamant with Isaiah that this was the only answer. But how did she go back home when she’d been so convinced that the only way things could ever work with Isaiah would be if he left with her?

Staying would have never gotten her to the point where she could relax in the knowledge that she’d never be abandoned again. He obviously didn’t get that.

She sighed. Maybe he didn’t get that because she’d never quite come out and said it, not that plainly. But then again, he hadn’t divulged all of his junk either, just dropped a lot of cryptic comments on her about how messed up he was.

The bus heading for Dallas left without her. She found a bench near the ticket window and heaved herself onto it, tucking both pieces of luggage underneath. The way this day was going thus far, she’d be using one suitcase for a pillow. Odds were good she’d be sleeping in the bus station unless she could figure out what she was supposed to do when she couldn’t stop being stuck between the past and the future.

That’s where Isaiah found her some hours later.

“Is this seat taken?”

She glanced up into Isaiah’s beautiful, precious face, both of his irises luminous in different ways, and everything inside melted. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you. Duh.”

He smiled, then yelped as she launched herself at him. He caught her, easily shifting to compensate for her weight while simultaneously avoiding an unnecessary trip to the bus station floor. Of course, because he was brilliant and solid and amazing and when his arms wrapped around her, her world rebalanced.

Isaiah was here. In Austin. Holding her. It was so lovely that she floated away in a haze of bliss, not at all concerned about how surreal this whole thing was. Though after a good five minutes of being consumed by all the things he’d broken open inside her, she had to know.

“Why were you looking for me?”

“To tell you how stupid I am,” he murmured into her hair. “I let you leave. The best thing that ever happened to me and I let you go for all the wrong reasons.”

“You let me go for all the right reasons,” she corrected gruffly, scared to reiterate the point, scared to talk, scared to keep silent. Scared this wasn’t the second chance she so suddenly craved. “I told you to let me go. And you did, without question. What’s that, but a demonstration of how much you love me?”

That cracked what little of her had remained whole. It was exactly that. And she’d walked away from him. She was the stupid one here.

“A better demonstration would have been to tell you why I made you dizzy all of those times.” He laughed as she narrowed her gaze, too befuddled to follow his train of thought. “With the back and forth. Never putting my stake in the ground when it came to us. I’d like to blame it on my heterochromia iridium, but that’s just a convenient excuse.”

“Your um…what?”

“Different colored eyes. I veer between extremes so often that I forget it’s not how I used to be. Syria changed me in ways I have yet to compensate for. Let me tell you about it.”

She nodded. Yes. Talking was exactly what needed to happen here, but she needed to be doing it, not him. “In a minute. I have to tell you about why I was so bent on leaving.”

“I’m sensing a very long conversation in our future, then.” He glanced around at the crowded bus station, looking none too pleased with the lack of privacy. “Maybe this isn’t the place to do it.”

“It is. Location isn’t magic,” she advised him because she didn’t care who heard. It was all so clear, especially what Havana had been trying to tell her in the car about distance. “Only you matter, not where we are. I was afraid of you leaving me, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to beat you at your own game.”

“But I was trying to stay.” His confusion was entirely warranted. He wasn’t the only one who’d been veering from extreme to extreme without fully understanding how dizzying it was.

“I know. I didn’t believe you would, though.”

He winced. “I deserved that. I deserve a lot of things, but you’re not one of them. Not yet.”

“But you’re here, darling. You came after me.” He’d followed her. It meant the world to her, even though she didn’t quite understand it yet. But that’s where conversation came in. Real conversation that pulled no punches, the kind they’d always excelled at. “Why did you if you didn’t think it was the right thing to do? You were so sure you had to stay, even if I left.”

“Oh, it was absolutely the right thing to do.” He hesitated for only a moment and then asked, “Do you know why the guys call me Elmer?”

She shook her head, sensing there was more to the story than what Tristan had mentioned about the relation to Elmer Fudd.

“My job was to pick up everyone’s pieces and glue them back together. That’s how we did the hard work in Syria. It wasn’t pretty. People died at our hands. Sometimes it’s hard to wake up the next morning and do it again, but that’s what I helped them do. Over and over.”

He paused for a moment, but she couldn’t be sure if it was to give her time to absorb or him. She feathered a thumb across his cheek to show she was listening, which had the odd effect of making him smile. She’d take it, though it didn’t do much to ease the tremors in her stomach.

This was difficult for him to articulate. But he was doing it—because it mattered to him. And she’d listen as long as he needed her to. “Elmer like the glue, then.”

He nodded. “I was good at it. I liked being the guy the team needed because nobody ever had before. The rest of my team all had specialties that made them good at warfare but what I did was one hundred percent mental and one hundred percent necessary. And then I couldn’t do it anymore. I lost my stickiness. How do you fix that? It’s not like I suddenly couldn’t shoot straight anymore so maybe I practice and get better.”

A lot of things suddenly made sense. “You were trying to fix your stick-factor. That’s why you couldn’t leave.”

And she’d blatantly told him she hadn’t believed him when he’d said he would stay. The tremors turned into more of a sick wave. Why hadn’t he shared any of this with her? Because she’d been too busy trying to punish her sisters for abandoning her that she hadn’t paid attention to him?

“Among other things,” he admitted. “Leaving was what I always had to do as a kid when things changed and I figured I didn’t deserve a place in Superstition Springs if I couldn’t do what I’d always done for the team. So I had to go. But then I realized staying was the key. Because it meant owning up to my healing process and trying to forgive myself for leading my team back into the battlefield where ugly stuff happened.”

Tears pricked at her eyelids as she processed the pain laced through his voice and she could do nothing else but lay her lips on his in a tender kiss that hopefully communicated the swirl in her chest that had his name written all over it.

“But you came after me,” she choked out in a whisper. “Why?”

His lips curved up against hers. “Funny thing. I thought I had to stay to fix the stuff that had me screwed up after Syria, but you’d already started healing me. One rooftop encounter at a time. I was looking for a bigger splash, a sign. Something. I got that the moment Havana came home without you in the SUV.”

“Really?” When he nodded against her forehead, she murmured, “What was it?”

“Tristan smacked me across the back of the head and told me to get on a bus,” he admitted sheepishly. “See, he’s kind of mouthy, but that comes in handy when I need to hear something, like how staying wasn’t going to fix anything if I lost you.”

Dazed, she pulled back and stared at him as her heart squeezed. “What would you have done if I wasn’t sitting here in the bus station?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’d like to think that it doesn’t matter. We were destined to be together, so I found you.” His arms tightened around her and she hoped he never let go. “Why were you sitting here in the bus station?”

“Funny thing…” She smiled through sudden tears. “I didn’t want to go to Dulac after all. I’d rather live in a swamp with you.”

He laughed at her Shrek reference, as she’d intended. “You know this is how the whole thing was always going to end, right? Except for the part where the dragon eats the bad guy at the wedding scene. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen in our story.”

Wedding scene? Surely he didn’t mean that literally. But what if he did? The thought winged through her heart and she could think of nothing she’d like more than to put on a white dress and pledge to love Isaiah West for the rest of her days.

A grin split her face. “I’d be okay with the happily ever after part.”

“That’s reserved for after a whole lot more conversation about what’s going on in our hearts until we know we can overcome all of the things pulling us apart. But the deal is that we’re going to be in the same place at the same time from now on. No more running away from the problems. You leave, I go with you. I leave, same deal.”

One of his arms slipped from her waist and he held out his hand for her to shake. Solemnly, she took it and pumped once. “I like those terms.”

Everything wasn’t magically fixed just because he’d come after her. She got that. Neither was he saying it was going to be easy to navigate whatever came out of the impending conversation and she had no illusions about the fact that she had some issues to iron out too. But he was saying he was committed to working it out as long as they were together, and she could totally get on board with that.

“Where to?” he asked and glanced around the bus station, then pointed to the backpack slung over his shoulder. “I’m traveling light, so you tell me where we’re going.”

“Home,” she said decisively. “Helps that I realized that’s wherever you are.”

“Well, sweetheart, I told myself I’d try to be really understanding of whatever was driving you to leave Superstition Springs and that I’d be accommodating if you ended up in Timbuktu, but I draw the line at living in a bus station.”

She laughed even as her heart squished over the term sweetheart, pretty sure that would happen a lot from now on. “Let’s find the bus back to La Grange and then spend the night on the roof. Together.”

His eyes went wide and then softened into melty pools of blue and brown. “Now you’re talking.”

“We’re talking,” she corrected him. “That’s what the roof is all about after all. Though we might get to some other stuff too. If you talk fast.”

The thought nearly made her swoon. Yes to talking, yes to touching, yes to Isaiah. She didn’t need her sisters to admire her or for either of them to stay in Superstition Springs. She’d needed the fulfillment of charting her own destiny, of seizing happiness, and he’d given her the courage to do so.

“I’m liking the sound of this more and more.” But before she could pull away to go stand in line at the ticket window, he cupped her jaw and brought her lips up to his in a sweet kiss that busted every wall around her heart, then knit everything all back together again.

Isaiah West was the most beautiful human Aria had ever laid eyes on and somehow the stars had aligned to give them as many shots at getting this right as needed. No makeover required—except for the one in her heart, which had allowed her story to finally start.

Page one: Isaiah.