What happened?
That question repeated itself over and over in Maika’s mind, but it didn’t help bring any answers. Like chasing a flea without a magnifying glass, the answer eluded her.
She brushed back her long, blonde hair, suddenly feeling like she was twelve years younger and back in high school again. When she was sixteen, everything seemed so much simpler, yet so much more complex at the same time. It had made sense to her back then. Emotionally and mentally, everything made a strange kind of sense.
Now, there was just confusion.
Maika rose from her bright red microfiber sofa and went to the window for what seemed like the hundredth time that night. She pulled back the curtains, letting the sights and sounds of the big city pour into her apartment from twenty stories high, like a plague upon healthy cells in the body. She could hear sirens in the distance, but couldn’t see the source in the billions of cars heading to and fro.
Warmth from the glass penetrated her skin, making her shudder. It was a lovely spring night.
Maika sighed and let her mind wander as she continued to absorb the city. Her thoughts returned again to her earlier life.
Devlin, her first boyfriend. She could remember him well. He was the popular kid everyone wanted to be, but at the same time wanted to hate. For some reason or another, though, she found him to be the most attractive man imaginable.
They had been in the same class since elementary school, but neither of them paid the other much attention. So it came as a surprise to everyone when they started dating early in their sophomore year.
Unfortunately, Devlin didn’t turn out nearly as well as she’d hoped. Just two months after they had started dating, he cheated on her with Marcie, who she thought was her best friend. This, of course, led Maika down a strange path of vengeance, a path she had told herself early on in life she would never go down.
So, when Devlin and Marcie announced their wedding two years later during the senior prom, Maika did everything she could to make sure the affair didn’t go well.
In her despair, she had tried everything from planting seeds of doubt in each of their minds by making them think the other might be cheating on them, even to the point of trying to put cockroaches in the wedding cake. She was, of course, caught during the cake incident by Marcie’s mother and brought to justice on the whole affair before Maika was able to get any more than a couple of the bugs planted. That was the day her friendship with Marcie officially ended.
It didn’t take her long to realize that her quest for vengeance had become an obsession. From that point on, she hated everything having anything to do with romance or togetherness. Valentine’s Day and the very idea of love was like acid on her tongue. She avoided getting herself into romantic situations whenever possible. The thought of giving someone her heart again disgusted her.
Love isn’t real, she had thought. Love is just a word used to describe an unhealthy obsession over someone, like her own obsession over Devlin.
It was all Marcie’s fault, she could remember thinking a few months after the wedding. Marcie had stolen Maika’s outlook on love years ago, and turned it into a dark, nightmarish, and twisted version like something out of a horror story. She herself had turned into something out of Elm Street. She didn’t think she could ever fall in love again.
But that was before she met Chris.
Chris was a man beyond his years, someone with a powerful ability to heal wounds that seemed impossible to heal. He was someone who could rip an hourglass nailed to a table that played a sad melody and reset it on its other side, to a play happier, wonderful melody.
With Chris, she was glad to feel like she was back in high school. Only now there was no Devlin. No Marcie. There was only the obsession. And as dangerous as she knew it to be, Maika couldn’t hide the feelings for Chris strengthening within her with each passing day.
Maika moved from the window to sit on the couch again. Maika had told Chris of her plight. He knew what she had been through. He knew better than anyone what that felt like, for he had been through something similar, though he hadn’t tried putting cockroaches in a wedding cake. They have that similar bond to stand on.
Or had.
As she sighed, Maika picked up a magazine from her table, but just skimmed the words as her mind became preoccupied with the same question she had asked herself many times that night.
What happened?
Despite how good things were going with Chris, Maika had still found a way to mess it up. That very night, he had come over to take her out to dinner as they had planned. But when he got there, things didn’t go exactly as either of them expected with Maika suddenly turning her high school emotions into a battleground. It wasn’t so much an argument. It was exactly what Maika did not want to admit it was: an emotional breakdown that had been bottled up for twelve horrible years. In the end, Chris had ended up leaving at her request.
The worst part was, Maika didn’t know why she broke down like that. She was over what Devlin had done to her. She was over Marcie’s betrayal. She had even started having second thoughts on love, reverting back to a better and happier time.
So why did she do it? Why did she feel the need to push Chris away despite how he had made her feel?
She shook her head. It didn’t matter. She had made a mistake. Plain and simple. Chris was the perfect guy for her. Everything from the business style cut of his black curly hair to the twinkling of life and love in his brown eyes made him perfect. His personality was a little rough around the edges, but it was only a few minor things that most guys possessed anyway. So why did she let him go?
Maika wiped away a tear. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she told herself aloud. “Call him, Maika. Just call him.”
She forced herself to rise from the couch to grab her cell phone a few arms’ lengths away. She busied herself with scrolling through her contact list to find his number. When she finally did so, she set her phone’s cursor on the call option, but did not initiate it. Instead, she hesitated.
What am I going to tell him? What will I say?
“Tell him you’re sorry,” Maika told herself, feeling a bit odd that she was still carrying on a conversation with herself. “Tell him to come back. What are you waiting for?”
She felt fear stabbing at her chest like a thousand nails being hammered through her skin and into her heart. Her mind immediately swelled up with questions that she could not push away.
What if he had gone out with someone else? Some guys have been known to keep a contingency plan in case things didn’t work out with one girl so they could move on to the next. What if he was upset with her and told her he didn’t want to see her again? She had, after all, told him she didn’t want to see him. Would he be able to forgive her? What if he didn’t? What would she do?
Maika almost canceled the phone call in spite of herself, but forced herself to press the call key. There was only one way to answer all of those questions, and she knew it was best to do it quickly rather than wait for his love to turn cold. If it hadn’t already.
She heard the dial tone. She heard it again and then a third time. She got more anxious as each tone muttered its eery hum.
And then she heard something else. A familiar tune from out in the hallway. A tune she knew so well.
Her emotions boiled up inside her just thinking about it. Her favorite song. A song that she had shared with Chris.
She promptly ended the call and ran for the door. She pulled it open slowly and saw Chris, phone in hand, smiling at her from out in the hallway.
“So, I’m guessing you’re having second thoughts about that dinner?” he asked, his smile widening.
She was stunned for a moment, not knowing what to say or how to say it. “You were standing out here for two hours?”
He shrugged. “Not exactly. An hour and a half really. I did have to make a quick trip downtown to get these.”
From behind his back, he presented a bouquet of roses and another of a type she did not recognize.
“Begonia,” he said when he noticed her questioning gaze. “They aren’t that rare, but they are versatile. They can be grown inside and outside. So they reminded me of you.” He rubbed the back of his head. “Just try and make what I just said into something deep, meaningful and romantic, will you?”
She accepted the bouquets and returned his smile. “I’ll try.”
Chris put his arm around Maika and beckoned to the elevator. “So, should we go see if that reservation is still valid? If not, I know a good fast food restaurant we can go to.”
She laughed. “Now that you mention it, fast food does sound good.”
She closed the door to her apartment after putting the flowers in water and let him lead her down the hall. She stopped near the elevator and turned to him.
“An hour and a half? Really? How long were you planning on waiting for me before giving up?”
He shrugged. “Hey, I came prepared. I have a sleeping bag in the car, so I could sleep out in the hallway. At least until the bellhop, or porter, kicked me out. And I’m pretty sure at some point I could learn to beg food off of people. You know, like a professional. A shower would have been a problem, but I like to think that eventually, you would have come out of your apartment on your own.”
She shook her head and laughed as they boarded the elevator. His humor never ceased to make her happy. She felt her sense of love restored. All the fears and doubts she felt earlier had abated. The pain was fading away. Chris’s power seemed to be working on her once again. This time, she let it without trying to stop it, and it seemed to grow stronger with each passing moment. It was as if his very touch could heal even the most fractured heart.
“A sleeping bag,” she muttered with a smile. She squeezed his hand as the elevator doors closed. “And here I thought I was obsessed!”