“There,” he said, turning off the noisy trimmer, “how does that look?” He had removed the guide and trimmed closer in some places, but that gave it a finished look.
“Can I feel it?” I asked. I’d felt a buzz cut years ago and remembered how interesting it was.
He leaned his head toward me.
“Oh, that feels so cool,” I said, laughing as my hands slid over the soft, yet stiff ends of hair.
His hand went up immediately to feel the stubs, touching mine as he did. He looked at me and smiled. I removed my hand and went back to sweeping.
“Are you ready to dye?” he asked.
I didn’t intend to show my reaction when he uttered those words, but he caught my momentary expression of panic. “Yea-yeah, sure,” I said, trying to leave the room.
He gripped my arm, “I think you and I need to talk.” All his teasing vanished.
“About what?” I replied, trying to let the color return to my cheeks.
“You just freaked when I asked that question. I saw the same reaction when I asked you at the wedding if your life was ending. Has Micah ever threatened to-to kill you?” His eyes narrowed at me and I knew he was going to want an answer.
“There is a lot about Micah and I that no one knows,” I said, holding back the tears forcing their way to the surface.
Ryan gripped my shoulders, “You know there are no reasons for you and I to have secrets from each other-not now anyway.”
It was a long, long evening, as I told him everything about Micah and me. How he had been hired to kill me and then almost did. How he agreed to let me buy a few weeks of life to stop whoever was hurting my family, and his agreement to be a gentleman. I told him what exactly was going through my head when I collapsed just before Micah took me away the day at the diner. I replayed my frightening first encounter with David, shooting lessons, his family, being drugged, and our time spent at the small motel becoming too close. I told him about the final call that shortened my life to mere hours, Jack and Ricky’s executions, and ending with being in the hospital.
“So this is the same D’Angelo guy from the hotel today? He was the one pulling Micah’s strings about killing you?”
“Yeah, he is like the banker, I guess. Someone comes to him with a hit, and he holds the money and assigns the hit man. When the job is done, he makes the pay-off.”
“If you hadn’t gone to the hospital that day to try to help your mom, you would have waited for him to come back, wouldn’t you, even though he said he was going to kill you?”
“I didn’t have a choice, Ryan. If I’d run, then Micah would have been killed. I don’t know if he could have actually done it, but I’ll never forget the way he looked at me when he told me my time was up.”
“Why,” he asked with his eyes large and round, “did you get back together with him?”
“I told you, I am so honestly in love with him. He’s not really that way. It’s just how he was raised. He’s changed everything to-to…” I had done well up until this point in only allowing a few tears to fall, but as soon as I considered everything Micah had done to change his life, to make a new life with me, I collapsed inside. It was like an implosion of the worst kind. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe and what was worse was I didn’t want to breathe.
He had changed his world for me and now I had pushed him away-I had no choice, but at the moment all I wanted was to be selfish and run back to him. To keep him for myself and the consequences be damned, but I knew if I did then one day very soon he would hate me for what I’d done to his family. “Oh, God, Ryan, what is he going through right now? He knows by now that I’m gone. He thinks I’m some trashy whore who couldn’t make up her mind about which guy to sleep with. He must hate me so badly. Oh, Ryan… Oh, God,” I sobbed, my shoulders convulsing from the depth of emotion coming to the surface.
He pulled me into his arms as I disappeared into my pain. In all the points in my recent life when I had felt broken, nothing ever, ever hurt so badly as what I was feeling now. All I could see was Micah’s face and the hurt, pain, anger and betrayal. All I wanted at that moment was to disappear from the planet earth, but I didn’t know if even Heaven could heal the gaping wound inside my heart. The full effect of what was irreversibly put into motion this morning was like the impact of hitting cement after jumping from a high rise, obliterating everything inside me.
I must have literally cried into unconsciousness because when I woke up it was dark and I was tucked into a bed-alone. I got up and found Ryan asleep in the adjacent bedroom. It was two in the morning and I couldn’t sleep. I imagined Micah was awake wherever he was at the moment.
I pulled the cell phone from my purse and sat there for another hour trying to decide if I should turn it on. I wanted nothing more than to call him, to hear him answer his phone as he breathed out my name. I would at least tell him how very sorry I was for what happened. I wanted to tell him I loved him with all my heart, but that wouldn’t make much sense when I needed him to believe I left him for Ryan.
I finally turned it on and noticed I had twenty-seven new messages. I didn’t want to play them, but I knew his voice was waiting for me at just the push of a button. The first message began the slow tearing of my heart from my chest.
“Hey baby, call me as soon as you get this message-I just need to know where you are right now. Call me back.”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I know you love me, Annalisa. Don’t do this to us, please baby. I can forgive you for anything, just don’t leave me.”
“Why won’t you at least answer the damn phone? Tell me what I did wrong-and then tell me what I can do right to fix this. You’ve got to at least talk to me, Leese, please. I know you’re listening to this message-if you ever loved me, call me, baby.”
There was a message from my mother begging me to think about what I was doing to everyone, Micah’s family, her and Kimmy, and even to Ryan, “I never thought of you as selfish, honey, but this was the most… God, Leese, what’s gotten in to you?”
There were twenty three more messages, two more of them from Mom as she balled her eyes out and asked me to come home, and twenty-one more messages were from Micah’s cell number, but they were all silent. The silence hurt worse than the pleas.
I was still awake when dawn broke. There was no need to go back to bed as I groggily walked to the kitchen. Even though I wanted food, coffee would do for now. I think the sound of me in the kitchen must have disturbed Ryan’s sleep because I could hear him moaning and tossing around, but he didn’t wake.
The coffee finished perking and I poured myself a cup and unlocked the sliding doors that led to the back porch. A mist was lying down the intensely green mountain side as I sat in a rocker and watched a hummingbird by a large flowered bush at the end of the porch. It was so peaceful to look out upon when my inner self was in total shambles. I heard the sliding door as Ryan appeared carrying a cup of coffee; he didn’t appear to be fully awake.
“Not a morning person?” I asked. Micah and I had both been early risers.
“Absolutely not,” he said, rubbing his sleepy face, “but you? I figured you were a morning person; morning people always seem to be so bubbly.”
“Jewels is bubbly, I just like to get up early no matter what mood I’m in.”
He laughed, “Yeah, you’re right. She was off the charts bubbly most of the time-it drove me crazy.”
“So was there ever any chance for the two of you to get together?”
“No. She wanted to try her wings out at-at sex, but I wasn’t-”
“Jewels?” I said, clearly surprised. “She wanted-”
“Yeah, like majorly bad. I think I was the complete opposite of what her parents would approve of and that was a big turn on for her.” He shook his head at the memory and breathed in the vapors rising from his coffee cup.