Page 42

TREY

I can’t believe my luck right now. First, she arrives two hours early. Then, she stays two hours later than usual. Now we’re going to get pancakes together? Seriously? Is this real life, or have the last eight weeks just been a long hallucination?

When we step out of the woods and onto the gravel road, Arella unlocks her car and tosses her blanket onto the backseat.

“Do you want to drive separately?” I ask, because maybe she’ll want to head home after we eat.

“Actually,” she says, “could we take your bike?”

I can’t hide my shock. “Really?”

“Yeah. I’ve never ridden on a motorcycle before. It looks fun.”

I swallow because it’s moments like this that remind me she doesn’t remember me.

Sometimes when we’re together, I forget about what’s happened to her memories, because things feel like we’ve picked up right where we left off.

“I’ve only got one helmet, but there’s a diner not too far from here.

Are you cool with me riding without a helmet? ”

“If you’re okay with it, then I am.”

After we stash my backpack in her car and stick her purse and my wallet under my bike seat, I help her get my helmet on. It’s a little big on her, but it’ll keep her alive if we crash, which I don’t intend to. As extra protection, I take my leather jacket off and hold it out to her. “Put this on.”

She doesn’t ask why. She simply takes my jacket and slips into it like she’s been wanting to all night.

I mount my bike and pat the empty spot behind me. She throws her leg over the seat and wraps her arms around my torso the way she has before. A rush of warmth and tingles races down my legs and lingers there.

“Ready?” I ask. I almost call her babe but stop myself. I slipped up earlier, and even though her eyes lit up, I don’t want to overdo it.

“Ready.”

I start the engine, then we’re off.

Riding my motorcycle with Arella takes me back to the good ol’ days, when we used to do this all the time.

Arella rode with me to work plenty of times.

We’d take my bike to get dinner, or I’d take her back to her apartment on it.

I even bought her a helmet, which later became one of the many things that disappeared from my home after the Keepers scrubbed her.

A cute twenty-four-hour diner sits on a quiet main street in the town next to where our tree stands. I pull into a front parking spot and kill my engine. Then I wait for Arella to hop off before I do.

She yanks my helmet off and hands it to me with a grin. “That was so fun.”

I’m glad she enjoyed that. Probably not as much as I did though. She didn’t trace her fingertips in figure eights over my abs the way she used to, but that’s okay. I can’t expect her to do everything the same as before.

Inside the cozy diner, some ’70s music plays over the speakers in the ceiling. Two of the tables are occupied. One has a couple sitting on the same side of the booth, speaking in low voices to each other while they eat their waffles. The other table has a gray-haired man downing a burger.

Arella and I get seated in a corner booth.

“I’ll be back with some water,” our waitress says as she hands us our menus.

Once she’s gone, I glance at the menu, see something I want, then set it back down. Why look at a sticky laminated piece of paper when I can stare at the delicious snack sitting across from me?

It only takes another minute for Arella to set her menu down, which means I got a full minute of uninterrupted time to admire her.

Our waitress returns with two glasses of water. “Y’all ready?”

I order my pancakes with extra whipped cream, some sausages, and eggs over easy. Arella asks for pancakes with a side of bacon. Shit. I should have ordered bacon too, in case she wants mine, like she has in the past. I think about changing my order, but the waitress is already gone.

Arella takes a sip of her water with a far-off look in her eyes. She’s thinking about something heavy, and I wish I knew what.

I’m too curious not to ask. “What are you thinking about?”

She stares out the window at my bike. “I’ve been on a motorcycle with you before, haven’t I?”

“What?” I say, not because I didn’t hear her, but because I can’t believe she just said that. Our unspoken rule is that we pretend we don’t have a history and that she and Alterella are two separate people.

“Earlier, when I said I’ve never ridden on a motorcycle before, you got this look in your eyes.”

Damn my eyeballs for always giving me away. “What look?”

“The look you always get when I say something that contradicts what you know. You got that same look when I told you I’ve been in love twice and again when I mentioned my pregnancy loss.” She stares at me to gauge my reaction.

I keep my face impassive as I play with my hands in my lap. “I dunno what you want me to say.”

“Can you tell me if I’ve ever been on a motorcycle with you?”

A knot tightens in my chest. If we drive down this road, I have a bad feeling we’ll crash and it’ll break this magic between us.

Pretending that I came from an alternate universe is what’s keeping our weekly slivers of heaven from feeling tense and awkward.

Is she going to keep coming if things get complicated?

If I start confusing her with stories of the past?

Or mentioning things I know about her she doesn’t recall ever telling me?

“You know what?” she says. “I don’t need to hear you say it for me to know the answer. The second I sat on your bike and put my arms around you, I knew it wasn’t my first time. It felt too familiar.”

We never should have left the solace of our secret tree.

The second we did, it changed things. She and I exist in peace there.

It’s a place no one else knows about, where we can be together without acknowledging the rest of the world.

How am I supposed to find peace with her out here when there are thousands of things threatening to tear us apart?

“Can you at least tell me why you got that look when I told you about my miscarriage? What do you know that I don’t?”

That knot in my chest pulls tighter, threatening to suffocate me from the inside out. “I, um, I don’t think we should talk about this.”

“Like right now in this diner or at all?”

“At all.”

“Don’t you think I should know?”

Yes, she deserves to know. Should she know?

is a different question. This knowledge won’t change anything.

She’ll still be married to someone else, and I’ll still be forbidden from being with her.

It’s better if she lives in ignorance. That way, she won’t have to carry all the pain and burden that comes with knowing the truth. One person doing it is enough.

“Arella, I think we should keep pretending like?—”

“It was our baby, wasn’t it?”

My bubble of bliss cracks straight down the middle. I’m about to lose my perfect little world of paradise that exists on Sunday evenings with sunsets under a tree. I can’t allow this to happen. I won’t.

“Arella, I?—”

She slides out of her booth, climbs into mine, then throws herself into my chest. I hold her close as she quietly cries into my shirt.

Her shoulders shudder, and I tear up as I let out a deep breath into the top of her hair.

I can’t break down right now. If I do, I might not be able to crawl out of that hole for a while.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers into my pec.

I caress little circles into her back. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

“Yes, I do. I left you to grieve the loss of our baby all on your own. That must have been so hard.”

It was. I lost my baby, my dad, and then Arella, all in a matter of days. But none of that was her fault. The entire situation was something neither of us had control over.

Arella wipes her wet cheeks off with the bottom of her shirt, then tilts her head back to look up at me. “Did you want to have a baby?”

“With you, yes.”

“Was it something we tried for?”

“It was an accident.” An accident I wish I would have known the truth about sooner. If the zovernment didn’t lie to the Zordi world, saying it’s impossible for us to reproduce with Ordinaries when we actually can, I never would have questioned Arella’s faithfulness.

“Did you know it was a girl?”

My body goes rigid. “What?”

“After my surgery, the doctors sent the embryo to pathology. When the test results came back, it included a note that stated the embryo had XX chromosomes. That means it was a girl.”

An invisible hand grips my lungs and squeezes all the air from them. I chomp down on my bottom lip as a debilitating wave of agony takes over my body.

I could have had a baby girl. She would have been two by now. I could have known what it’s like to hold my own child in my lap and kiss her forehead. I could have known what it’s like to hear a little girl call me her daddy. I could have had a family.

Hearing that our baby was a girl makes the loss more real.

It makes the pain more real too. I was so close to being a father, and then it was torn away from me in the worst way possible.

This miscarriage didn’t happen naturally like Mia Wang said probably would have happened.

Someone drugged and dropped lightning balls onto Arella until our unborn baby couldn’t take it anymore.

I will never forgive Jodi for that or anything else she took away from me in her diabolical scheme to get revenge on my dad for having an affair.

My mom and dad were soul mates. I used to think the soul-mate thing was just a ploy to justify adultery, but now I think it’s valid.

My mom and dad were meant to be together.

Why get in the way of that? Why take it out on their son?

Jodi could have gone off to find her own soul mate.

Instead, she swapped minds with my dad and locked him up with intentions to torture him.

Then she pretended to be him for over twenty years.

That decision destroyed many lives and ended countless others.

The waitress returns to our table to find Arella sniffling into my shirt. She flashes me an understanding look, then without a word, she places our plates onto the table and leaves.

It takes Arella a few minutes to gather herself. Once she does, she sits up but doesn’t leave my side, giving me a tender smile. “I’m ready to go back to pretending now, if that’s what you want.”

I return her smile. “Yes, please.”