She's not on the porch when he steps out one thick-air morning in early July. He tries to ignore the disappointment in his gut. He's not much of a coffee-in-the-morning kind of guy, but her little burst of energy, her reassuring smile and chatter had become the kinda-thing for him, that jolt that he was starting to yearn for. He feels the vacancy of it, and a small headache swells. He leans on the shifty banister of his porch and watches ashen skies grow darker, sees the first sets of spiraling waves that would later swallow up the whole shore. He smells electricity hanging in the air, and knows this is going to be a rough one.
Soul waits a few more moments to make sure she's not just waking late by accident, then makes his way, alone, to the restaurant.
Maybe it's for the best, he thinks. Maybe he needs to start burning that bridge.
He walks by the tourist paraphernalia store where the older owner is setting up shop, and sees a stand with sea glass shards on thick rope necklaces. He has a flash in his mind of her eyes, seemingly stained with the greenest paints of the sea.
She is just as much a part of this place as the water.
Liz greets him at the locked door. She gives him an inquisitive look when she doesn't see her boss at his side, and he returns the stare.
"She's," he starts hesitantly, "not here yet?" He stuffs his hands in his pockets. An early-storm wind curls through his unkempt hair.
She shakes her head, and bites her bottom lip. "I think I know why, and it's not good."
"I figure it can't be good, for her to not be here." He sighs.
"She's gotta still be in her apartment," she says. She breaks their gazes to unlock the door with her own, rarely-used key. "Patti and I can handle this place for the day, so I need you to do me a favor. She's going to probably be locked in her room. Weather like this gets her frazzled, and bad. I need you to help her."
"Liz, if this some kind of emotional turmoil thing, I can't handle that... I... We just can't get too attached, and this is the sorta thing that-" He startles and goes silent when she slaps a hand on his shoulder and meets his gaze again, her eyes like two swords straight into his heart.
"Listen to me, kid." She shakes him, a strength more vicious than the mounting swirls of wind. "I understand why you feel the way you do, and I'm sorry you two are connecting under these circumstances. But I'm going to tell you something... I met Maka when I was 18, and she was 15. This town is beautiful, but there's a lot of drug crime here. Things get boring in the off-season, and Patti and I were thoroughly involved." Her grip softens. "We had no one except each other. We had nothing. Maka found us in alley after we'd been robbed bad and wrong, and she took us to the restaurant, and she and her mom cleaned us up."
He does not say a word, like he's lost his lungs, his tongue.
"And Maka told her mom to give us jobs. And they did. And they took us in until we could be on our own. We sat at their damned dinner table, and we ate with them every night. We left the streets. That girl saved me, saved my sister. She means the world to me. You gotta know that I would never do anything I didn't think was good for her. And you know how much I loved your brother, Soul. And how much I care about you." She lets go of him. "I would never do anything I believed could break the two of you. So please, go. She'll appreciate your presence, and anything that evolves from it is natural." She shoves him back in the direction of their apartment complex.
He nods, still unsure of what to say. But he can imagine it - an even tinier version of Maka - seeing two young girls bruised to bits in an alley and instead of asking questions, instead of turning away in disgust, she takes them home without a word and melds them into her family. She's always had the light he knows now.
Soul makes his way up the stairs, and knocks on her door. The sound of rain pelting the glass of her windows is all that greets him.
"Maka?" he calls. A response never comes. He knocks again. Nothing.
He feels like a burglar as he pulls an old gift card out of his wallet and fiddles with the lock until it comes loose. He steps in as quietly as a robber, and shuts the door slowly behind him.
He first notices that all of her windows are shut and locked. He remembers, again, how she told him that when she's home she always has to hear the waves to be comfortable, to feel at home. Her bedroom door is shut tight and locked. He knows he should go to her, but he travels to her bookcase first, about to collapse from the pressure of all of the oversized books that weigh down her ancient shelves.
He smiles at the section overflowing with Nicolas Sparks books, organized alphabetically. There are cookbooks from a variety of places: Chile, Jamaica, Vietnam. Some aren't even in English, but the pages are curled at the edges - some yellowed - as if they've been used thousands of times since they appeared in her hands. He also notices three separate books on hummingbirds, and tons of books of poetry, most of which he's never heard of beyond the Robert Frost anthology. They all looked like they have been chosen carefully from yard sales, from library basements. He knows those are the sorts of places she ventures.
Soul knocks on her door, a whisper of a sound. He wonders if she heard the rasp of his knuckles over the sheets of rain sliding down her windows.
The door whips open and the barrel of a gun is pointed at his chest, wielded by a hand shaking more than the boats left at the dock. Her gaze is animalistic, like prey in the shadow of the lion. There's no life in them, just a sheer and chilling blankness behind wide eyes.
He holds his hands up and backs away. "Please don't shoot! It's me." He feels like he has to clarify; she's got the eyes of the ghost and a shining weapon. "Soul. Your neighbor. Your talented chef."
Maka's eyes flood with tears in an instant, and the gun clatters onto her floor. "Sorry."
"It's okay. I'm sorry I startled you. It's my fault. It's my fault I barged in on a crazy woman with a gun." The joke isn't featherlight enough for the boulders weighing her heart. She starts to cry. "Shit, Maka. Shit. Stop. I'm sorry."
"That's a pellet gun," she blubbers. "I stole it from Black Star when we were in middle school. He still doesn't know." She holds her face in her hands. "Don't tell him, please. It just makes me feel safer because it looks like a real gun and I can't kill anyone with it."
"Okay," he says, trying not to laugh at the words spilling from her mouth. He walks closer. "I won't tell anyone it's fake. I won't tell him you stole it. Nothing."
She nods, but goes quiet.
"Please stop," he groans. "I don't know how to handle crying girls."
"I'm a woman," she murmurs.
Soul takes one of her hands and pries it from where it seems glued to her face. He guides her to the couch, and when they sit, he places her head in his lap, where she continues to cry. He takes the blanket from the back of the couch and lays it across her despite the stifle of the apartment air.
He can't resist playing with the edges of her hair free from its usual pigtails. It's as soft as he imagined since the moment he met her, where it splayed across her collarbone.
"How'd you find me?" she whispers as she leans into his other hand.
"Liz told me you'd probably be here. And I figured something was up when I saw that your windows weren't open."
"Did she... tell you why?" He hates the way her voice cracks.
He shakes his head. "And I won't ask."
She grabs the hand playing with the fringes of her hair. "Let me tell you. But promise me something."
"Okay." He intertwines their fingers.
"For everything I tell you, I want you to tell me something."
He hesitates, but collapses at the sight of her red-rimmed eyes. "Fair enough."
"My mother passed away a while ago. Not long after I graduated university," she admits. "When she died, time froze for me. She passed away in a car accident." She trembles.
"Maka, you don't have to-"
"It was in this exact kind of weather. A summer storm. So much rain. Skies so dark you'd think it was night. Lightning strikes. So many it was like the sky had veins, coursing blood. A pickup truck on the other side of the road hit a puddle, and fishtailed. It slammed straight into her car, a real tiny car, and it flipped and rolled down a steep hill. Over and over. It was... not left in good condition." The tears flow again, and he wipes a few from her cheek, his expression breaking with her own. "She was going to get a picture of the three of us at my graduation framed for my birthday. My dad and I... fell apart. We fought all the time, and usually over who was more at fault. Neither of us was, but in that grief everything seems rational. Everyone's thinking about what they could have done to change the outcome. I don't... like this kind of rain."
"I can see why." He hears the writer in her in her descriptions, hears the Frost and Wilke that line her bookshelves that she undoubtedly read over and over in her childhood.
She's glad he at least doesn't melt, or cry with her. He doesn't apologize like so many others, or say the cookie-cutter things like, "At least she's in a better place now," or, "It's not your fault." He looks to her with eyes full of a complex understanding, and says something simple that puts her at ease.
"Here," he murmurs as he slides his iPod out of his pocket. He puts his headphones over her ears. "My turn to tell you something."
"How can you tell me something with music?"
He glares, and even pouts a little. She laughs. "This is my music, and every part of me is in it. You figure out these songs, and you'll know me."
"Has anyone else ever heard these?" she asks as he shifts through hundreds of albums and playlists.
"Just my brother," he says as he selects a song.
She closes her eyes, and is ensconced in the murky piano pieces. The smile fades, and some tears form again.
He runs a hand through his hair self-consciously when he knows the songs have ended, some half-finished, some overdone. "So?"
Maka knocks on his heart gently, the way he had on her door just moments before. "It's dark in there, huh?"
His smile is forlorn.
"Is blueberry picking okay?" she asks as he slides into her passenger seat. "You asked to do at least one touristy thing, but besides kayaking, that's about it."
"Sounds good to me, but... if we're blueberry picking, why are dressed for kayaking?" He cannot look in her direction without a burn to his cheeks. She wears a hot pink bikini top and jean shorts, and they ride up every time she leans forward in the seat.
"I told her to wear that," Tsubaki murmurs from the backseat. "It's hot."
"You're not wearing one, and it's also 6 PM," Soul retorts, "it'll start to cool off in a hour."
"Then you'll have to warm her up," Black Star chimes in, and Soul and Maka blush and shout for him to shut up.
"Why'd you bring them?" Soul groans as he sinks so far into the seat he might meld into it.
"Don't worry," Black Star says with an uproarious laugh, "we'll give you guys time alone."
Maka turns up the radio as they pull away.
"Seriously," Soul whispers into her ear - too close, she thinks - as they walk far behind Tsubaki and her clowning boyfriend, "why did you bring them? And why are you wearing that?"
"They're our friends, and why does it matter? You call me tiny-tits on a near-daily basis. I thought men were only into watermelon breasts, anyway." She crosses her arms over her chest as they meander down an abandoned dirt path lined with sun-dried bushes and spiraling trees.
"Not all men are into big boobs. That's sexist," he blurts. "Some men like them small. Easier to handle." He trips after his ridiculous statement and stays on the ground with his face covered, as if he worries she'll read the terrible thoughts bouncing off the center of his mind through his eyes alone. When he turns, she's kneeling by him, and he accidentally stares directly at her chest for a moment before meeting her heated, inquisitive gaze.
"Are you... some men?" she pries, and he rolls back over to face away from her, into dirt and pebbles and anything other than her face.
"When you guys are done fucking each other with your eyes, we'll be over here," Black Star shouts.
"They're our friends," she repeats, more to herself than him. She helps Soul up, and they meet in a small clearing.
"Why didn't we go to a normal place?" Black Star whines as Maka disperses some ancient tupperware between them, old Nestle dough tins and recycled takeout boxes.
"Because we'd have to pay and pick a certain amount, and these blueberries taste just as good and we can take just what we need home with us."
"Yeah, if we can find any."
"Let's split up then. You and Tsubaki head toward the tree-line, and we'll go in the opposite direction."
Black Star slaps a hand on her slight-pinkened shoulder. "Be careful when you guys start stripping, because some of these bushes might have thorns."
Tsubaki just grins when Maka kicks him in the groin and stomps into the bushes without another word. Soul follows her, lead alone by the sound of her angry gait.
She stops a good distance away and inspects a smaller bush, picking through some already-shriveled blueberries. He's amazed by how she always seems so focused, from cooking to crosswords and now to blueberry picking. She takes almost everything seriously. He thinks about his earlier boob-size statement and nearly throws up in his mouth.
"So," he says as he catches up to her, "how did you know this place was here?"
"My mother," she answers. "Though back when I used to come with her, this was an actual farm." Her smile is small, but sweet, like the wild berries, he observes. "I just still come here every year even though the farm is gone, since the blueberries never stopped growing. Since they've been growing on her own," she continues, "they've got a different taste."
"Good or bad?" he asks as he stoops with her at the same bush.
"Good. Natural. Almost like they were always meant to be here."
They pluck at the same few bushes for a while before they both sit side by side on the moss-and-dirt-coated ground, long untouched by other people. The sun has sucked away their energy and disappeared, as if it needs to borrow some of their light for the next morning.
He goes to say something, but she stops him with a finger to his lips and grins.
"Wait," she whispers, and after a few heartbeats, tiny green lanterns flicker around them.
He thought he'd seen every shade of green in her eyes, but that of the fireflies is different. He smiles with her and holds out a slightly-sticky hand, and one alights on his palm. The light is on, then off. On, then off. One lands on her shoulder and she laughs, but not loud enough to scare it.
"You know," she says so quiet he thinks he might be imagining it, "there's another reason I come here."
Soul shifts closer to her in the warm dirt.
"The year after my mother passed away, they started appearing. I almost felt like she knew I'd still always come here and she sent them somehow." She leans back and closes her eyes, almost as if she were absorbing some of their light the way the sun had stolen theirs earlier. "I hope they never go away."
"Yeah." He gulps, and without thinking he's moving toward her, and she opens her eyes when she feels his breath ghosting her lips.
"Is this why you wanted us to come alone?" she murmurs as they lock gazes.
He swallows another lump rising in his throat. "What if I say yes?"
"Then you... might have to do what you're thinking of doing right now," she says.
He watches her chest rise and fall faster and faster the closer he moves.
They both roll apart from each other when they hear the rustle and breaking of branches and Black Star yell, "Are you guys almost done yet? We're ready to go!"
The fireflies scatter, as if only brought to life by their quiet, undisturbed affection.
"Yes, we're done," Maka replies, running in the direction of the harbormaster's booming voice.
The ride home is as silent as the clouds that slide by the moon. She leaves the radio off, as she wouldn't be able to hear it over the sound of her own thoughts.
"Then you... might have to do what you're thinking of doing right now..."
She avoids him as best she can. She slips into her office and locks the door behind her. She wakes up just five minutes earlier and slips away from their morning walks and chats - though she misses them. When he tries to get a hold of her at the restaurant in the down time, she speeds out front to wipe down tables, refill bottles of ketchup. She scrabbles for any excuse to not have to face him after their night among the blueberries and fireflies, the night their breaths mingled and her urge to kiss him was at its peak.
She's not sure when it happened, but she knows it's there. It is like her vision is blurred in one corner of her mind - the fragment that holds the matters of the heart. It's an image not yet fully formed or clear, but there. She knew their physical attraction was strong straight from their first meeting, but she's had that with others before. This is different, she knows, because of the way her heart hammers relentlessly when he's near her, the way she calculates what she says for fear she'll something wrong, or embarrassing. The way she rolls their conversations over and over again in her head, the way she studies every text he sends her like an ancient relic.
She's got a humongous schoolgirl crush on her chef, and she's not sure what to do with it. It has no instruction manual, no guidebook or distinct list of steps. She's never felt such a yearning for another human before. Maka has never in her life wondered what another person would taste like, feel like, be like in her presence. She has never imagined what it would be like to hold someone's hand, or to have him hold her in a cautious embrace beneath thin sheets.
She figures the best way to go about these uncontrollable feelings and thoughts is simply to step around them like a muddied puddle in the center of a sidewalk. It's glaringly obvious, but there are still ways to move past the obstacle without retaining too much damage.
But Marie's words pound at the edges of her heart: "I'm not saying you should force yourself to date if you don't want to – absolutely not - but if love finds you, you should give it a chance."
She falls to her floor and lets out a disgruntled, slight-silent screech. She only stops when she sees what date is circled on her puppy calendar.
She picks up a container stacked with some fine-China dishes and attempts to leave the apartment building without emitting a single sound.
She wanders down a familiar side street lined with candy-shuttered houses. She smiles when she sees two kids running rampant in their yard with tiny sparklers. She tries to shake off the images of fireflies.
Maka stops when she walks long past the seaside neighborhoods and enters a small cluster of trees. She takes a deep breath, and flips the lid from the container. Inside is a stack of four bone-pearl dishes, covered in art of women working rice paddy fields, men guiding ox off in the distance.
She runs her hand over the dip in the plate for a brief moment before she flicks it like a frisbee toward the center tree, and watches it shatter to bits in seconds.
She jumps when she hears a sharp intake of breath behind her. She picks her fake gun off the ground and points it in the stranger's direction, and nearly pushes the trigger when she catches a glimpse of sharp teeth and crimson eyes.
"Soul!" she shouts. "What are you doing?"
"I'll answer the question when you put that stupid thing down," he yells back. "How many times do you think you'll have that aimed at me before the summer is over?"
"As many times as you sneak up on me in the worst ways! You should know by now that I'm always prepared for the worst."
"And you got the best."
Even in the thick shade and with only dim sunset light, she sees his eyebrows wiggle and drops her gun. "What do you want? I'm busy."
"Breaking dishes?"
"It's a complicated thing," she says as she turns her back to him and tosses another plate into fractured oblivion beneath the pines. Her heart beats erratically, and she wishes there were some way she could tether it to normality. But it's a bird without bars and it cannot be contained. She bites her bottom lip when she hears him close in on her.
"Tell me," he murmurs. He does not step much further.
"You're not really keeping your part of the bargain, partner," she replies. "You promised me for everything I tell you, you tell me one thing. All I've really gotten from you is your favorite cereal."
He smirks. "Booberry."
Maka faces back toward him with her tongue out. "Count Chocula is way better."
"They're basically cocoa puffs. Booberry is its own unique flavor."
She huffs and thrusts one of the last of the dishes. They both flinch at the force of the break, as if it bends something within them when it scatters.
"All right," he says after a moment of silence, "I'll tell you two of my biggest secrets after you finish with your explanation of this... insanity. I promise."
She thinks of their almost-kiss at the raspy tone to his voice and tries to hide the shiver that follows. "Okay," she says.
She holds the last dish in her hands. "Every year on my mother's birthday, I break, burn, or toss something of hers out to sea. It's generally stuff like this, you know. Plates. Silverware. Jewelry." She runs a finger along a blue-painted pathway on the dish. "This is pretty much the last of it."
"Won't that... kinda make you forget? Aren't you supposed to keep that kind of stuff?"
"My mother's best friend, Marie, had just gone through the loss of her husband a few years prior to my mom's passing," she starts, "and she told me to do this. And it makes sense. I keep the important stuff: the pictures, mostly. I get rid of the little things that we tended to use on a daily basis. And it helped me feel better. It's because it's the little things we miss the most. The dinners we ate on these plates, the sight of her jewelry without her neck beneath it. The smell of her perfumes. Those things would send me back into full depths of grief." She grips the plate tighter. "But the pictures, those were the good times. And the memories that I conjure on my own are always the good times. Moments we would never be able to relive even if she was still here. When I can control the memories, I feel less sadness. They're not triggered by dishes like this. They're triggered just on my own, so they... generally are happier times." She turns back to him. "Does that... make sense?"
His smile aches with familiarity. "It does, actually." He stuffs a hand deep into one of his pockets and pulls out some sort of mini-violin, and shows it to her on his palm. She fingers it lightly for a moment before meeting his gaze. "My brother used to say that I sucked at violin, but no one could mess up one this tiny. He had the stupidest jokes." He laughs, quiet and filtered through hazy memories. "I bought him a tiny piano the year after. So, secret one," he continues before he launches the violin into shambles with the remainders of the plates. "The reason I showed up in this town was not to get away from my brother, but from the memories of him. He passed away in a car accident in April. It was still cold."
Maka takes his hand. "Let's do secret two at my house over coffee." She squeezes it, and they walk back to their apartment building in thoughtful quiet.
She wonders what that tiny violin sounded like, when it could still be played.
"I thought you hated coffee," he says as they enter her apartment.
"I... strongly prefer tea," she replies as she wanders behind her marbled kitchen island. He listens to the clang of shifting pots and pans as she searches for something in her cabinets, and plucks out a French press. "But there is good coffee out there." She places it on the island. "It's just that you have to make it yourself." She turns back around and opens a top cabinet, and struggles to reach an organic tin of coffee on the upper shelf.
She goes stock still when she feels him right behind her, reaching for the same can. Her mouth goes dry in just one breath and it feels like her chest might cave in if she were to turn around.
He puts the tin on the counter in front of her, but does not move from his place behind her, the two of them just barely touching.
"Soul?" she asks, staring intently at the coffee.
"Secret two," he says, and she swears she hears his voice shatter. "Don't turn around for this, because... if you do, I'll fuck it up."
She waits.
"I'm... really drawn to you, in a way I can't... explain well. I'm... maybe it's... I'm really, really drawn to you. I... really want to be with you. A lot." He loses his breath after the confession, and he leans on the back of her neck and she's stuck, she's become a statue in his stumbling proximity. "And I've... never wanted to be with someone this way before, so I'm sorry if... I do fuck it up somehow. But I mean what I say."
The open windows throw in almost-August drafts, ensconced in drizzling humidity and sweltering ocean. She tries to suck in that air and not his, so close and full of a really musky cologne that she wants to drown in and the faintness of the smoky scent of the grill.
After she steadies herself, she does a slow turn, almost as if they're starting a dance. When she meets his gaze, he leans forward, one hand on either side of her on the counter.
"You know what I'm thinking of doing," he says. "Is it okay?"
Her tongue is tied. She nods, and closes her eyes.
She nearly smiles when he hesitantly kisses her. It's almost like her lips are on fire and he's afraid of the burn at first. He's slow and deliberate and nervous, and she joins him in the trembling movements at the same pace. He pulls back a few times to stare into his eyes, asking for permission silently over and over. She finally gains her normal bravery and shifts all her weight to her toes and tries for a more fervent kiss. He feeds off of her audacity and his tongue is running against hers, and she gasps when he gets a step ahead of her and runs a hand alongside one of her breasts.
He smirks against their kiss, but loses his arrogance when she shifts her lips to his neck.
"Bedroom," she whispers against his skin.
And suddenly, she's in control and he's okay with it.
When she returns from the bathroom, she slides under the sheets with him, and he pulls her close, her head on his chest, his arm wound tight around her, as if afraid she'll fall away without his strength. Her finger wanders again to the scar that runs from his shoulder to his hip.
"I was following behind my brother on my motorcycle on a dark road on a Saturday night. We were returning from some classical concert I still can't remember. I try not to remember." He plays with the fringes of her hair. "A car on the other side of the road veered right into his lane, hit him head on. I turned sharply to the right and drove straight down a cliff. I fell off my motorcycle and rolled and rolled for what felt like forever. Branches got me, and maybe more. I don't remember much. I blacked out." He leans his head back, and closes his eyes. "Maybe sometimes it's good not to remember. I woke up in a hospital, all slashed to bits, it felt like. After spending some time there and after my brother's funeral, I escaped. And I... came here."
"I'm sorry," she says.
"I know. You understand."
She grabs his other hand with hers, and intertwines their fingers.
The wordless touching she's always wanted comes so easy with him, she thinks.
"We definitely disagree on cereal," she whispers, "but our souls are on the same level, huh?"
"Yeah. Maybe that's why I ended up here of all places."
She smiles, faint. "I hope so. I really like the idea of soulmates existing."
She sleeps so soundly in his arms that night. He smells her cinnamon-vanilla mix like a smoke she breathes out as it surrounds them. The cinnamon, he thinks as he takes it in, has an singeing spice to it that reminds him of her father's cologne the night Spirit pulled him aside. It was only the seventh day of his new job, back in May. His heart even then may have already been bent to Maka's whims and nature.
Her father was her opposite in a lot of ways. His hair was near-cherry red and long and reminded him of red tide; his eyes were blue and bloodshot and laden with many sleepless days and nights. He looked like every man who had lost too much too fast: haggard, quiet, pensive. Soul figured that much of what Maka was came from her mother.
Spirit dragged him to a 24-hour diner far from town. He introduced himself very briefly over a steaming mug of black coffee. He was Mr. Albarn, co-founder of the restaurant. He was a retired construction worker of some kind. Spirit didn't inquire further, only said he needed a favor.
"Have you ever wondered," Spirit asked, "if it was possible to count every grain of sand?"
"That'd be like counting to infinity," Soul said.
"I know part of the reason Liz suggested this town to you... was because she had talked a lot about Maka, and thought you two would... connect." The weary man grits his teeth, and Soul spots some of his old spark, like a dusted-pane lantern. "If you do me this favor, I'll give you my blessing."
"Um... I just barely met her. I'm not going to ask her to marry me just yet." He clears his throat.
"You will."
Soul leans back into the booth. "How do you know?"
"She's a one-of-a-kind girl. She's got a soul like a riptide that'll just pull you right in. I can tell you're already drowning a bit."
He smiles, though small. "Fine. What do you need?"
"I need you to take her away from this town. She needs to live her own dreams, as she's been trapped in my ghost dreams too long. Her mother's. This is for her own good. Do what you have to do to get her out." He clasps his hands around the mug, and Soul notices the wedding ring still wrapped around his finger. "She wanted to be a New York City journalist, you know."
"What if she finds out about this plan of yours? What happens if I have to lose one of the best things I've ever come across?"
"You won't."
Soul watches her breathe a little while longer before he starts to drift asleep. He wonders how long it would take to count every eyelash, hair, shade of green in her stare. He wonders if he'll be around long enough to do it.