Ocarina Inn's usually taciturn atmosphere had been overtaken by boisterous eruptions of girlish laughter and futile intermittent low shushes. The ticklish scent of juicy tomato soup and aromatic salmon fried rice fanned through the breathing air, slinking into the undetectable spaces between each mahogany floorboard.
Tucked comfortably into a booth in the middle of the diner, Kathy, Luna, Selena and I let all our worldly worries flitter into the effervescent air; suspended in time, we momentarily forgot about any detonable clocks ticking over our heads, any writhing responsibilities caught in our throats. The fourteen-karat gold ornament Selena wore weaved elaborately through her artful updo – a family heirloom, she'd said – dangled erratically in her booming, body shaking laughter.
"I can't believe you finally agreed to go out with him," Selena partially chided Kathy through sultry giggles, referring to her newly established relationship with the beefy Owen. Said redhead had been pining after the undeniable blonde bombshell for almost a year now, and his lengthy efforts had ultimately paid off. She had finally accepted his perpetual lingering around the Brass Bar as more than just a particular fervour for alcohol.
"Hey, I take offense at that," the perky barmaid jabbed an oxymoronically daintily strong finger into Selena's bare side, the fleshiness of her bronzed olive waist temporarily dented; a head into a pillow.
"Siento," the tanned, magenta-haired foreign beauty apologized offhandedly with a wave of her fluid fingers, Latin roots bubbling up to her embellished surface.
"At least he had the guts to ask you out," Luna chimed in, lavender pink ponytails like whipped cream, perfectly coiffed as they descended downwards. Delicately pallid pink cherry blossom accessories dotted the ombré curls in her hair.
Luna was a poison ivy berry – sure, she looked saccharine to boot; ice cream and strawberry shortcake and raspberry merengue – but one wrong move and you would find yourself on the receiving end of her piercingly venomous nettle. The only antidote was to either get so close to her that your blood learned how to dilute her poison, or to steer clear of the prickly leaves altogether.
"A certain lilac haired man, who is way too effeminate for my tastes, by the way, has yet to so much as ask that same question of my poor sister," she continued. Her voice jingled; the silver bell of a kitten's collar.
"You're kidding," I moaned melodramatically, rose apple lips parting in disappointed despair. Apparently Julius and Candace's relationship – if you could call it that – had stagnated to a standstill ever since my last attempted intervention. "But two New Year's Eves ago they looked like they were so close," I mourned for the mousy seamstress.
"Exactly," Luna's belligerent fairy voice squeaked through the entire inn, the petals in her hair almost wilting in her rage, "It's only been downhill from there. It's like for every one step Julius takes in the right direction, Candace takes three back." Luna was never one to withhold what played on her mind, even if that made her seem a little rough around the edges – or downright brusque, to be honest. But even so, the trickling creaks that sometimes peered out from underneath her bristly façade, how she always had everyone's best interests at heart: that was her saving grace, the rose quartz encrusted crown that redeemed her. The sweet ripeness of those fatally poisonous berries.
"It's just such a shame," Selena's bejeweled tasseled earrings swayed alongside her shaking head, the tinkling of a wind chime, "They both so obviously like one another."
"Seriously," I concurred, caramel strands in my chestnut locks highlighted in the glittering inn light, "I saw the way he looked at her. That was the look of a man in love."
"And she's waited so long," Kathy lamented, her accompanying sigh almost visible in the cooled indoor air.
Back in the city, with all its putrid smog and nauseatingly boozy air, girls were oft given to stab sharpened blades into the others' backs, cackling maniacally as they watched the blood and trust drain out of their competitors' ashen veins. Maybe it was something in the water, like instead of injecting fluoride into the town's water supply, the government added a dollop of insecurity instead. But, here on Castanet, with all nine of its young adult bachelorettes, we ladies looked out for one another.
"You're one to talk," Luna chastised, baby blue eyes narrowing in her good humoured berating, "You only made Owen wait an entire year."
Haphazardly attempting to deflect the claws of judgment off of her, Kathy shot back, "Hey, don't pick on me. Pick on Molly instead. She made her sugar bunny wait twenty-one whole years before they finally got together." Shooting her a wide-eyed look of betrayal – what had I just said about girls having one another's backs here? – she mouthed, "Sorry, collateral damage."
"Please, don't call me that ever again," said sugar bunny in question drawled as he and Owen walked through the Ocarina Inn doors, entrance bell sighing melodiously as they did so.
"What're you guys doing here?" Selena interrogated aggressively, all fire and snarling flames and volatile sparks.
"This one over here," Chase explained, amethyst eyes stony in his shooting of daggers in the muscular Owen's direction, "wanted to come and see his girlfriend, but didn't want to make it obvious, so he dragged me along."
"Dude," the besotted spiky redhead wailed in response, while simultaneously picking Kathy up and seating her in his lap. "Hey," he grinned at her foolishly, edges of his crescent smile almost reaching the tips of his earlobes, chocolate puppy eyes – a Labrador, as loyal as it was loving – glinting as he greeted the object of all his affections.
"Hi, sweetie," Kathy's energetic voice sung like musical notes, as she pressed a kiss to Owen's plush lips. His entire stratosphere lit up at her lips against his; the glowing light bulb in his enclosed globe.
"Disgusting," the twenty-one-year-old Luna groaned, sweet, feathered facial features contorting in contrastingly sickened revulsion.
"Por favor," Selena added on, wincingly retracting her naked arm as the conjoined couple slowly edged closer to her, "Please, cut it out."
"Sorry," the beaming couple mumbled, not apologetic in the slightest.
"We were just talking about how Molly made you wait forever before you guys finally became a couple," Kathy teased, endeavoring to lift the puckered, scowling faces glowering in her direction.
"Waiting around for this old hag?" Tones of mocking incredulousness melted over Chase's words; wax in a burning candle. Seated next to me, he softly knocked his lithe knuckles against my forehead, feline canines bared in his rose petal smirk.
"Hey," I retaliated, pinching his supple cheek in between my tough-skinned thumb and index finger, "Who're you calling an old hag?"
The inn erupted into laughter, a volcano spewing liquidized merriment.
"You see what I'm talking about?" Chase theatrically bemoaned, secretly lacing his svelte fingers through mine underneath the table.
Flimsy clouds peppered the azure sky's canvas, granting Castanet with diminutive absolution from the relentless sun that beat down against our burning skin. Butter sizzling on a stove.
"It's so hot," I cried to Chase jadedly, as we took our leave from the spirited lunch at Ocarina Inn, "Am I being cooked in an oven? It feels like I'm being cooked in an oven."
"Please," he responded indolently, peach strands matting to the back of his neck, "You city dwellers are so vulnerable to heat. Back in our hometown, it was summer three hundred and sixty days a year. The other seasons took up all five of the remaining days."
"I guess you're right," I pondered aloud, watching Celesta Church Grounds' resident beagle take a dreamy snooze in the gratifying shade of a giant ash tree, "Even though I haven't been back there in pretty much nine years now, I still think of it as home. I don't know why, but the city never really felt that way."
"You miss it?"
"A part of me does, yeah."
Chase's amethyst eyes swerved away from me as a bright cherry blush settled decidedly on his cheeks. "Well, maybe you and I could go visit this year," he mumbled, so bashfully that I almost didn't hear him.
"You mean it?" I asked redundantly, hazel eyes lighting up at the edges, bleached teeth making an appearance in my elated grin – a child on Christmas morning.
"My folks have been on my back about bringing you home," he clarified, blush growing even more vivid in the blinding sunlight, "They haven't been able to say, 'I told you so,' enough ever since I told them we were dating." In all his trademark tradition, his words wrapped themselves in a cloying coat of acerbity.
"You and I both," I sympathized, flashbacking to the multitudes of, 'I always knew it would happen,' I had suffered at the hands of my jubilant parents. "And I'd really like that," I chirped delightedly in response to his previous diffident offer. "What've you been telling your parents about me?"
"All bad things," Chase reassured me cheekily, one corner of his scything mouth tugging higher than the other.
"I'll bet," I scowled playfully, poking him in the toned shoulder for good measure, "I can hear you insulting me from miles away."
Abruptly falling silent, Chase seemed to be embedded in deep contemplation. Sparrows flittered lethargically through the sweltering summer air; sweat droplets dripping through their maladroit feather coats.
Softly arched eyebrows furrowing in concern, I nudged him lightly; my physical verbalization of asking him what was wrong.
"Back in there, what they said," he began reticently, defensive pride almost preventing him from spitting his confession out altogether, "about me having waited for you. They weren't wrong."
"So you called me an old hag to hide the fact?" I teased jokily, subtly letting my clammy shoulder bump against his.
He knocked his knuckles against my forehead in gentle rebuke; a fist against a door. "Even though that promise I made to myself to never fall for someone else was pretty much once upon a time, and as just a little boy, I didn't end up keeping it because I was stubborn, or even loyal," Chase murmured faintly, hesitantly, blood filling his entire face, "It was because I couldn't help it."
At this, he instantaneously quickened his usual languorous pace, sandaled feet kicking embarrassed sand grains up into the air, leaving me to wallow in his stunningly saccharine confession. Sugar crystals dissolving on my tongue.
Small mouth gaping as a snowstorm of sand landed in my chestnut hair, my feet remained firmly entwined into the ground, roots branching into the earth beneath me.
This was the truth: in all my twenty-three years, I had never been in love with anyone but Chase. Even with Calvin, it had been nothing but stupid infatuation. A meaningless crush with a meaningless guy. But, with Chase; whether it was him at six years old, Chasey, tangling with me in my muddy backyard and forcing grassy soil into my mouth, or him at fourteen years old, when I first learned about heartbreak when I'd had to part with my lifelong best friend, or him at twenty-one, when I met him again on Castanet and I knew that there was a God and he was kind. And now.
Now, most of all.
Stopping in his tracks – fifteen feet ahead of me – Chase sharply whipped his head around, his mussed peach hair lashing tersely against his tomato cheeks as he did so; the red hue travelling past his chiseled cheekbones, blending all the way up to his temples. His lithe hand was raised, suspended in the air.
"You coming?" he questioned brusquely, his crème brulee shell rising to all its full glory. "You already made me wait seven years," he complained, syrupy voice bristling to protect his pounding heart, "I can't wait anymore."
His amethyst eyes crinkled ever so slightly at the sides. If you were a mere passerby, you wouldn't have even noticed it. But I knew what they were doing. They were betraying his instinctive graveled exterior, the defensive thorns to his perfumed rose petals. His inner custardy softness shone through.
Ignoring his invitingly outstretched fingers, I sprinted straight into his unprepared arms, wrapping myself around him as he was forced to lift my feet off the binding ground.
I felt like all the sunshine in the world; the entirety of summer flooding into my heart. My head. My eyes. Love pulsing through my ignited veins.
If Chase was crème brulee, I was the spoon.
"Can people change?" I voice out ponderously to my beautiful children, gazing up at me in their six and five-year-old ingenuousness. Sometimes, I'm overcome with an all-consuming urge to scoop them up into my arms and swing them around for the rest of eternity. I know that they won't stay this young and precious forever; that there will come a day when they won't want me to walk them to school anymore; they won't wait expectantly for my goodbye kisses on their silky foreheads.
"Definitely," I answer my own question, pushing that glum thought to the back of my mind, where it could rot. Looking at their perfectly spellbound eyes, I could never fathom them morphing into that. My babies, all of three-feet-and-a-bit tall, their angelic giggles the harmonies that make my heart smile.
I continue with my tale. "But occasionally, we do get stuck in our old ways."
Daisy listens intently; the plumose locks of hair that frame her face lying seamlessly still. Nigel's excitable eyes flicker in restless anticipation, the usual interweaving flames in his pupils growing higher and higher in a brilliant battle of blazes.
"When that happens," I go on, wondering if they will one day come to remember these lines as my words of wisdom, "sometimes, all we need is a little push."
"Calvin?" I yelled apprehensively, spotting the earth-toned explorer standing, lonesome, on the boat dock, suspiciously packed haversack lying by his feet; khaki, of course, evidence of heavy use showing in its ripping seams.
A muffled grumble slipped out from between crooked teeth. His cerulean eyes darted around shiftily, as if searching for a sullen spot to land on. Failing, he directed his creased eyes to the racing air beside my head, decidedly avoiding making eye contact with me.
"Call me crazy," I began warily, afraid that one brash word might send him scuttling off, "but it looks to me like you're leaving."
"Crazy," he retorted morosely. His throbbing heartbeats reverberated through his entire body, shaking it tremulously with each pulse.
The severity of the situation quickly dawning on me, an icy bucket of water dumped over my head, I raced up to him, slapping a tight palm across his temples. My farm-worn callouses scraped roughly against his perspiring skin, extra retribution for his unbelievable cowardice.
"I can't believe you," I hissed under my breath, whipping my head over my shoulder to check for any stray villagers that might have been innocently passing by, minding their own business – like I had been – while Calvin attempted to leave the pregnant Phoebe forever. "You're really going to leave your pregnant girlfriend in the lurch? What's gotten into you?"
"Kiddo," he started wearily, rubbing a pockmarked finger against the sloping bridge of his nose, the slant of a tree trunk, "Don't make this harder for me than it already is."
"Does she even know?" I probed hastily, widened eyes darting behind his drooping Stetson hat to scout for Pascal's ship. No sign yet.
Calvin was, uncharacteristically, a man of few words today. He shook his gruff face, barley wavy hair swinging in tandem. The cerulean that used to fill his pupils transitioned into a stormy sky, threatening clouds just before a hurricane.
"Two years ago, you told me that you were looking to settle down and start a family. Then, voila, you found it with Phoebe, who's perfect for you." Heart clenching at the thought of her fallen face as she heard the news, I continued, "So, what's the problem?"
Calvin, true to nature, never wanted to give me the answers I so pleadingly begged him for. A homeless man on the grimy sidewalk beseeching for change.
Or maybe not. People were always full of surprises. People were continually changing with every passing second.
"I love her, Molly," he murmured wistfully, glassy eyes casted out to sea, "God, I love her." His untamed, full eyebrows sagged in self-inflicted pain. "But travelling has always been my dream. And I'm scared that once this baby comes, I'm going to be stuck here forever. Tied down to one place."
My inflamed temper mottled down at Calvin's terrified confession. This was the first time I had ever seen him so vulnerable; a crab without its shell. Phoebe made him feel that way.
"Which is more important to you?" I questioned soothingly, searching his eyes for signs of cracks, "Seeing the world alone, or having an amazing baby and a wonderful life with the woman you've been dreaming about since day one?"
"It's no use," he replied, faltering, "I'll always wonder about what could've been if I stay here."
The sky above us heaved with bone gray clouds, foreboding summer storm speedily approaching. Packed tightly together, sardines in a can, the sight of nothing but grayness drained all sense of hope out of you.
"Won't you wonder about what could have been if you leave as well?"
A ray of dazzling sun shone through the lifeless clouds; a child peeking during a game of hide and seek. It reflected in Calvin's eyes.
"I'm a coward," the wanderer admitted reservedly, his resolve finally breaking, "She's so perfect for me, that it scares me. Maybe I'm not good enough for her." He paused; blunt, sanded down canines biting into the waxy skin of his lower lip. "Hell, I'm definitely not good enough for her. Every moment with her is exciting. I can hardly believe my luck, that a catch like her wants somebody like me."
"I'm starting to lose sight of the problem here," I redirected, furrowing my eyebrows in mystified confusion.
"Something this good can't last forever," he elucidated, husky voice growing hoarse from his one-man monologue, "What if one day I wake up and I realize my life isn't everything I imagined it would be?"
Chase's seven-year-old face skipped through my head. We stood on top of a potholed hill, wild growing grass whispering gleefully against our ankles. The setting sun shone in my squinting eyes. There, we promised that when we were older, we would rule together as king and queen – our pencils would be scepters, our grass hoops: crowns, our loyal followers our own children.
The scene played behind my eyes, still as clear as the day it happened. Glancing at the fretful Calvin, Chase's lazy smirk conjured itself in my heart. The shadow of his eyelashes lightly dusted his mesmeric amethyst eyes; the first thing my consciousness had ever clung onto.
I smiled back.
"What if it is?"
"When I was younger, I used to dream of going on adventures, and not get stuck in one place," softening emotion mellowed the explorer's usually granular voice. The words he had once said to me, when he was twenty-three and overflowing with wanderlust, echoed from his chapped lips, seeping into Celesta Church's embracing walls.
"But, when I met you, I started realizing that those two things aren't necessarily synonymous with one another."
The radiant Phoebe emitted sparks of excitement and adoration. Her round tortoiseshell frames matched Calvin's tuxedo buttons, right down to the unique swirls in their cedar richness. Satiny white gloves graced her rough hands. She had kept her wedding dress simple: angel robe white, with just a clean scalloped edge and a flouncy hem that skirted slightly below her knees. True to her tomboy, people-can-say-what-they-want-about-me attitude, powder blue high tops adorned her feet. They were her something blue.
"Even if it's two in the afternoon, and all we're doing is getting a bite to eat – I'm never bored with you. Every moment I spend with you is exciting." Calvin's crooked smile painted itself across his freckle-splattered face.
"That's why I've realized that you're my new dream. And I can't wait for the three of us to embark on this adventure of a lifetime together."
Both their eyes landed tenderly on the dazed baby in Barbara's arms. His eyes were the colour of the sky after a storm; after it had cried out all the tears it had to shed. The little tuft of hair that graced his powdery head was an unmistakable deep turquoise – his mother's locks. Heath: open, uncultivated land, growing wild and free. Adventure wasn't only in his veins; it was in his perfectly chosen name as well. His proud parents had raced down the aisle with him at only a week old.
"I never imagined that I would be this lucky, to fall in love with someone like you," Phoebe's blunt voice rang through the chapel, genuine elation dancing on her words, "I'm clumsy, and forgetful, and I'm always getting lost in my own world."
The smile of a woman in love – yes, I take this crush to be my lawfully wedded infatuation – brushed across her face. "But whenever I come back to the real world, you're still always here, waiting patiently for me. Nobody's ever bothered to stick around like that before."
Calvin reached his hand over to hers, giving it a snug squeeze – almost as if he couldn't help it. Maybe he couldn't.
"I've always preferred being alone. But I finally found someone whose company is sweeter than my solitude." She paused, as if trying to drink in the peony-scented atmosphere, camellias and jasmines and orchids, burning this moment into her memory. Her eyelashes were the first to stir as she opened her eyes, the afternoon's perfection already permanently ingrained into her cerebral photo album.
She exhaled.
"If life's a journey, I want mine to be with you, every step of the way."
Chase's shirt-clad arm wrapped around my shoulders in a rare public display of affection – in front of the entire island's collection of villagers, no less. I nestled my head in the homely crook between his collarbone and chin, a space carved out just for me. Painstakingly etched from the finest wood by an Italian craftsman, so that the contour of my round cheeks lay restfully against his limber neck, the slight dip below my cheekbones fitting, like jigsaw pieces, with the smooth arch of his Adam's apple.
That breathtaking autumn day, the browning caramel leaves floated for all the love that emanated from that church. Love, in all its purest and most divine forms: the sweet paste of emotion that bound us to the earth, and to one another. If I closed my eyes, bursting kaleidoscopes twirled behind my eyelids; knee-length skirts spinning in exultant dancing. I truly believed that happiness could be so simply handed to you on a silver platter, the lustrous crystal ball: yours for the taking.
But, Calvin had been right.
Something this wonderful couldn't last forever.
Disclaimer: I do not own 'The History of Love' by Nicole Krauss or 'Three of Cups' by Marty McConnell.
Author's Note: Writing about Molly and Chase makes me so happy (can you say OTP?). Also, I don't know a word of Spanish, so please forgive me if some of Selena's dialogue was a bit off. I hope it's okay that I'm not always writing about Molly's own love life, but that I include snapshots of the lives of other characters as well. Thank you so much for all the support so far, please review/like/follow and let me know what you think!