Found (Lost and Found #2, New Adult Romance) (Lost & Found) (6 page)

Maria

I
keep waiting for the tears to come the entire way home but they never do. I figured that Owen’s rejection would have settled in by now—that my brain would finally process what happened and get the crying over with— but what I’m feeling instead is even worse. There’s a hollow, dead spot in my chest and I can’t decide if it’s freezing cold or burning me. It feels like someone reached into my chest and ripped my heart out.

I stop on the bridge over the West Campus gorge and stare down into its depths, clutching at the wrought iron railing. The raging stream surges through the gorge, swollen from the melted snow and spring rain. If I fell in right now, there’s no way I’d ever get out again. Even if I were a strong enough swimmer to battle the current, the frigid water would send me into shock almost instantly.

Only a few weeks ago, I’d consider jumping. I still don’t know what had come over me, but I’d felt a brief feeling of
hope
, almost—a promise of freedom from my fears if I climbed the railing. All I had to do was let go and everything would be okay again.

I shake my head and continue toward my apartment. It wouldn’t have been okay; it would only have been over. Like so many of my fears, the whispered promise of freedom on the other side of the railing is just an illusion. Death isn’t a real escape; all it does is leave the pain behind for others. Owen and Tina would be alone if I’d jumped. I can’t imagine how they would feel if I did that to them.

“
I lost Owen anyway,
” I think, my heart aching painfully, “
but at least I had him for a little.
”

The thought of him isn’t helping much right now. I want to curl up in a corner and die.

I silently unlock the front door of my apartment, take my coat and shoes off, and head straight upstairs. Tina is studying on the couch with her legs propped up comfortably on a pile of pillows, and I can feel her eyes burrowing into me as I head up to my room.

“I made sandwiches for dinner if you want one,” she calls up to me, but I don’t answer her. I don’t have much of an appetite right now.

Instead, I close my door, climb into bed and curl up beneath the blanket. I feel horribly tired, but at the same time, I’m not sleepy at all. I just lie beneath my comforter and stare at its blue and white pattern as I try to sort out my thoughts. Why did Owen throw me away? Why did he want to get rid of me? I just don’t understand.

Maybe Tina’s right... maybe I’m just being obsessive and need to give him more room. I have no idea. I barely know how relationships work in the first place, let alone how to fix one when it breaks. All I know is that I want make Owen feel better and he doesn’t want me anywhere near him.

I don’t know what else to do now but stay under my blanket, press my face into my pillow and feel miserable. Just as I decide to spend the evening focusing on the great big hole in my chest where my heart ought to be, a sharp knock on the door interrupts my pity party.

“Maria?” calls Tina from the hallway, and she opens the door when I don’t answer. I know her well enough that I don’t even bother coming out from under the blanket. I can see exactly what she’s doing in my mind. She’s peeping around the corner, looking nervously into the room, trying to work out what horrible Maria-bomb she has to defuse this time. If she ever decides to cash in on the sleazy daytime talk show business, all she’d have to do is air few episodes about my messed-up life on Maury and she’d be set for life.

Tina doesn’t say anything else, but the floorboards creak as she sneaks toward me. If I know her as well as I think I do, I’m probably about to get swept up into a tiny, pink tornado.

Suddenly she’s on top of me, landing so hard that she nearly knocks the wind out of me.

“Om nom nom!” she babbles, pulling back the blanket and pretending to eat my hair as she tickles me.

I squirm and wriggle as I laugh uncontrollably, trying to get her off of me. I’m laughing so hard that I can’t breathe. She yanks the blanket off the bed and goes for my feet, and I squeal and yank my legs away from her. She launches herself at me for one last tickle attack, but this time I catch her and with one quick motion, shove her off the bed and onto the floor.

I plop down on the mattress with a huge grin on my face, still giggling as I try to catch my breath, and a chocolate kiss bounces off my forehead. Tina looks up at me from the carpet and smiles innocently.

“You doing better now, Miss Whiny-Butt?” she asks, and I hop down from the bed and hug her.

“Thanks.”

“Just doing my job.”

“It’s your job to cheer me up? Since when?”

“It’s in my contract. I’d show you, but my dog ate it.”

“You don’t have a dog.”

“I don’t? Oh good, I thought I’d lost him somewhere,” she replies, and now it’s my turn to throw chocolate at her head.

“So,” I ask, “shall I assume, from the chocolate, that you’ve scheduled me for psychiatric evaluation?”

Tina nods and flashes me a toothy grin.

“Yup! Dr. Tina will be seeing you on the couch in five minutes,” she answers, and then she leaps up from the floor and bolts down the hall.

I smile and shake my head before getting up to follow her. There is no point fighting her, and frankly, talking to her might do me some good right now.

––––––––

U
sually when Tina and I are having couch time, the chocolates go back and forth between us until we eat them all. She throws me one if she thinks she’s about to hurt me with a question, and I throw her one if my answer’s going to hurt her back. Today’s discussion is very lopsided, though, and almost all the chocolates are going in my direction. I can’t eat them all, so I eschew tradition and toss most of them right back into the glass sugar bowl. Each one lands in the bowl with a resonating, musical ‘clink’ and waits patiently until Tina scoops it up and tosses it back to me again. It’s like a two-person juggling act of chocolate and psychosis.

“So, I’m gonna go out on a limb and bet that you’re
not
upset about the interview,” says Tina.

“Why not?” I ask, aiming a chocolate for the bowl.
Clink.

“Because you weren’t upset like this after the last one,” she answers. “You were more... I guess resigned rather than upset, and you were doing
way
worse back then. I’m going to bet that this is something to do with Owen instead. Am I right?”

She’s right, of course. I wish I knew what happened, though. It’s hard to talk through the problem when I don’t understand how everything went so wrong.

“He’s... not doing well,” I finally tell her after as long a delay as my chocolate wrapper will allow. I don’t know if I should tell her about the police wanting to talk to him. I feel like that’d be betraying him, somehow. Owen said they wanted to talk about his father and I can’t imagine a more painful or personal topic for him than his dad.

When I look up again, Tina’s twirling a strand of her blond hair and staring at me as if trying to read my mind. It’s uncanny how her eyes can cut through me and root out my innermost secrets. She’s had a knack for that ever since I met her. Her eyes suddenly light up and I brace myself for whatever deep, dark secret she’s about to pull out of my brain.

“He got you pregnant, didn’t he?” she blurts out, and I gasp and cover my mouth to stop my giggling.

“Wow, no. Holy shit, Tina!” I answer in between bouts of laughter. Her magical powers of deduction aren’t infallible after all.

“So what is it, then? Tell me!” whines Tina, bouncing up and down on the couch cushions like a caffeinated toddler.

“Okay... let’s say something really bad happened to someone you care about...”

“So in other words, Owen,” she interrupts. She lounges cross-legged on the couch as if sitting by the campfire while I tell a spooky story.

“Yes, Owen,” I answer, rolling my eyes at her. “Something so bad that he won’t tell me about it.”

“Try bugging him until he gives up and tells you,” offers Tina as she pops a chocolate into her mouth. “Always works on you.”

“What if it was something so bad that, well...”

“Well? Finish it!” she nags as I trail off.

“...that he broke up with me rather than tell me,” I quietly finish, and Tina nearly chokes on her chocolate.

“He
broke up with you
?” she gasps, nearly leaping off the couch. I bite my lower lip and nod back to her. My chest is starting to hurt again thinking about him.

“I tried to get him to tell me what was wrong and then he told me to leave him alone,” I whisper. “He said he needed to be apart from me until he sorted things out.”

Tina closes her eyes, leans back on the couch and sighs deeply.

“If you really wanted to help him and he pushed you away, what would you do?” I ask, desperately hoping that she knows something I don’t. I don’t want Owen to hurt anymore and I don’t want to be apart from him. I need him and the idea of being without him hurts more than I can bear.

When Tina opens her eyes and shakes her head, my last little spark of hope dies out. If Tina can’t think of anything, I’m doomed.

“You do nothing,” she finally answers. “You need to give Owen some room, and I don’t even mean in the possessive-girlfriend sort of way.”

She scoots across the sofa and hugs me tightly.

“Can you at least tell me whether what’s hurting him is mental or physical?” she asks.

“Mental,” I answer. I know that much, at least, whether he tells me or not.

“Then you basically have to do something completely impossible, Maria,” she says. “You have to stay close to him without letting him know you’re doing it.”

She gets up from the couch and heads to the fridge, and I hop up and follow behind her.

“Explain, please?”

“There is no way on earth that he broke up with you because of anything you did,” explains Tina as she dives into the fridge and grabs two beers. “You two are
perfect
for each other, and I’m not just saying that because I love you.”

Before I can decline Tina’s alcoholic offering, she’s popped both caps and shoved one of the bottles into my hand. It’s a class night, but just one won’t hurt, I guess.

“If we’re perfect for each other, then why...”

“Because whatever’s wrong with him is fucking with his head,” she answers, interrupting my question, and she takes a deep swig of her beer.

“Are you going anywhere else with that answer?” I ask as she keeps drinking, and she holds up one finger in reply.

“Ahh, I needed that,” she sighs contentedly as she heads back to the couch. “So, where were we again?”

“Owen’s head being messed up.”

“Right. So, the thing is that personal problems sometimes need personal ways of getting through them,” she says, picking up where she left off. “Owen needs to figure out how to cope with whatever the hell happened to him, but you need to stay close so that you can take care of him if he does anything self-destructive.”

“Like what?”

“Like randomly break up with someone he loves? I don’t know... you tell me,” she answers with a shrug. “You just have to stay out of his hair until he figures it out, but make sure you’re close enough to save him if he needs you.”

She downs the rest of her beer, wipes her mouth on her sleeve and then adds, “I betcha anything that it’s got something to do with that fucking dad of his.”

I ignore her bet since it’s almost definitely true, take a sip of my beer and wrinkle my nose as I put it down on the table. I’m not big on beer in the first place and light beer is even more disgusting. I’m feeling a little better after talking with Tina, but most of all, I’m happy that she thinks the break-up is just a phase. It gives me a little hope to think that maybe it’s really all just a big mistake, but what if she’s wrong and he doesn’t change his mind? Losing that little spark of hope for a second time may crush me.

“Be honest, please... do you really think we’re perfect for each other?” I quietly ask her. Twenty-two years old or not, I still never had a boyfriend before Owen. Tina might not be Dr. Phil, but she has way more experience than I do.

“You seriously have no idea,” she answers with the faintest hint of a smile.

Just as I’m about to ask Tina to elaborate, my phone starts ringing. It buzzes loudly as the vibration bounces it up and down along the table, and before I can get to it, Tina picks it up.

“Oh hey, it’s your mom,” she says excitedly, and she hits the speakerphone and tosses it back down on the table. She really loves my mother for some reason. The two of them get along wonderfully on the rare occasion that they talk to each other, which typically only happens when she beats me to the phone.

“Hi Mrs. Ayala! This is Tina. How are you?”

The line is silent for a second, and then all the blood drains from my face as I hear his voice.

“Um... hello? This is Micah. Is Maria there?”

Tina spins to face me and her jaw drops in shock. My throat suddenly dries up and all my words flee to the darkest corners of my mind. I don’t want to talk to him. God no, I don’t want to talk to my brother.

“Umm... yes, here she is,” answers Tina cautiously. “One second.”

“Micah?” she whispers to me. “Is he your...”

“Yes. My brother,” I whisper back. My hands are starting to shake. I wish I could just hang up the phone right now, but there’s no way I’m getting out of this. Not now that Tina told him I’m here.

“Hi Micah,” I call out as strongly and confidently as I can. “It’s been a while.”

“Hey sis! No kidding, it feels like it’s been years!” says my brother. He sounds so excited and happy to be talking to me and his happiness only makes me feel even worse. I don’t talk to him because doing so forces me to remember. I don’t want to remember his apartment. I want to move on and be free of the nightmares, to be with the man I love and help him through his own problems now, like he helped me through mine.

I can’t move on if I still talk to Micah.

“Yeah, it’s been a long time... how’ve you been?”

Micah rambles on and on about his job out in Rhode Island, some girl from Providence he’s dating named Jackie and the latest gossip from Mom, but I’m barely listening. Instead, I’m grinding my teeth together and trying to get Darren out of my head. He sitting down next to me on the couch again, and any moment now, he’s going to touch me.