A Heart of Time (19 page)

I kick through the foot of snow and make a narrow path up to the glass door of the flower shop. I’m guessing this might be why she isn’t going anywhere tonight. Besides the fact that her car is pretty much stuck, thanks to the drifts, the door is also snowed in.

I walk back to my truck and grab a shovel out of the bed. Clearing a path, I remove the snow so the door can move freely, but as I pull on the handle, the door doesn’t budge. I knock a few times, rubbing away a coat of frost on the window so I can see inside.

Through the blur, it only takes a few seconds before Ari appears in the door with a smile. She unlocks the deadbolt and pushes on the door. “You were stuck in here and felt the need to lock the door?” I ask with amusement.

“You never know who is crazy enough to have a shovel and dig me out so they can break in and abduct me,” she says with a cunning grin. Her soft laughter fills the air as she brushes a few strands of hair away from her cheek. At the same moment I’m watching her, the mixed scent of different flowers hits me all at once, nearly making my knees weak. So many of the scents remind me of Ellie. She always had a new flower obsession and each flower had its moment in the spotlight under the skylight in our family room. The aroma from the flowers always filled the house.

“Have you always been into flowers?” I ask Ari.

She bobs her head from side to side as if her answer is neither here nor there. She lifts a planter from one of the stands and places it down on the glass counter. “Actually, no, but because my parents are gardeners, I was always around plants and flowers. You know, too much of anything can sometimes be more than enough.”

“Yeah, I can understand that.” Kind of.

“Anyway, once I recovered from the transplant, I sort of needed a fresh start. I considered going back to teaching but they made me take a year off for liability reasons and I wasn’t about to waste precious days of my life sitting in front of the TV. My parents were friends with the guy that owned this place and he was getting ready to retire. A month later, I was running the shop. Crazy, right?”

“I guess everything happens for a reason,” I tell her. “Ellie would have loved this shop. She lived and breathed for flowers. It was just a hobby but it was her greatest passion.”

“I know,” she says. “She told me many times.” Ari moves the planter to the back counter and I follow. “Knowing that definitely helped with my decision to manage this shop. I think it’s a nice tribute to her.” She turns around, finding me probably a little too close. “I know it’s silly but I sometimes wonder if she can sense me being in the shop here—you know if she really is connected to me and stuff.”

“I’d like to think that,” I tell her. Her words are enticing, soul-filling, wonderful and similar to the thoughts I don’t share with anyone. Why does that make me want to tell this woman I love her? Why do I want to kiss her and press my hand up against her heart and never separate from her existence again?
I do not know her. This is wrong.

If I’m wrong, though, why is she looking at me like I’m right?
My
heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my head and in my arms and legs. I just need to... I shouldn't.
There’s Charlotte
. And Ellie, but part of Ellie is inside of her. I have to...I think...

The struggle is short lived and I act on an un-thought-out whim, cupping my hands firmly around her face as I press my lips against hers. I startle her, as well as me, and she falls heavily against the back counter, her hands moving back and forth from my waist to the counter behind her, as if she can’t make up her mind on the right or wrong of this situation. I’m kissing a complete stranger who I might soulfully know the most in this world. My chest is against hers and holy shit, I can feel her heart pounding. My cheeks are burning and I squeeze my eyes shut tightly, avoiding tears that would destroy this moment before it had a chance to unravel.
I can feel her heart
. Ellie’s heart. It’s beating against mine again. It’s beating against me. I can feel it. I can feel her.
Ellie
. Ellie. It’s pounding so hard, just like mine. It feels everything mine feels, just like it always had before. She’s in there.

As our lips part, I realize I didn’t even consider the sensation of her mouth against mine; my only thoughts were focused on her heart. That’s all I can feel. Still. I can feel it against my chest even though there is space between us now.

“Hunter,” she says between heavy breaths. “Is this wrong?” Yes. Completely wrong. My mind is spinning between Charlotte and Ellie and now Ari, and why would I throw myself into a mess like this?

“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. Ellie
was
hiding 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 secret
is
everything.”

“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.

Pacing from the door to the middle of the shop and back, I notice Ari out of the corner of my eye, hugging herself in the back of the shop, looking a bit frightened. I shouldn’t be blaming her. I should be blaming Ellie. All of these years I have refused to feel any resentment or anger toward Ellie, even if I felt it sometimes on the nights when Olive wouldn’t sleep and the days she was sick and I had no idea what to do to help her. I wanted to scream so loudly in hopes of Ellie hearing me so she knew how angry I was about having to raise our little girl alone. What did I know about raising a kid? Nothing. I was supposed to have a partner in this life. Olive was supposed to have a mother.

Olive was supposed to have a mother.

Olive was never meant to have a mother. She was only meant to have me.

“A car accident, even a fender-bender could have killed her,” Ari says through a whisper. “Then you would have been left with nothing.” I don’t want to listen to Ari and her thought-out words. I don’t want to hear the truth or any more lies. Now I know why Ari didn’t want to tell me and I can pretty much assume why Ellie didn’t tell me. I would have talked her out of it. I would have put her in a bubble and cared for her. She didn’t give me that option, though. “Instead, she left parts of her behind.” Ari places her hand on her heart, clutching at the material over her chest. “Olive has so many parts of Ellie.”

“You don’t even know her,” I remind Ari. I know it’s an asshole comment but it’s true. Unless she knows Olive, too, and just decided not to share
that
with me either.

“You’re right, but it takes two people to create another human being; therefore she is, in fact, half Ellie.”

“Okay,” she says. With nothing left to argue about, Ari wraps her hand around mine and pulls it toward her body. Placing the palm of my hand flat against her chest, she holds it there firmly. I close my eyes and focus on the thumping rhythm. “It’s her.” Ari’s gentle voice vibrates through her chest.

I focus solely on the beat of Ellie’s heart, trying to remember a time where I listened to her heartbeat. There’s only one time that I can remember, though. The first heart doppler check we got at the beginning of her pregnancy. We thought the heartbeat was Olive’s but it was really Ellie’s. It had taken a minute before we heard a similar sound, just softer and more delicate. I didn’t consider how badly I would want to remember that sound. Does it sound the same in Ari’s chest? Does it work that way?