Dear Aaron(71)

Tears prickled my eyes, and I honestly felt like something sharp jabbed me in the stomach.

This is what you get for taking a chance, Rube, my brain egged my heart on.

He wasn’t here. He wasn’t coming. He’d left me.

He’d left me here. He wasn’t coming to get me.

I was so, so, so stupid. I knew better. I freaking knew better.

It wasn’t until something cool slid down my cheek that I realized my eyes hadn’t just started prickling, they’d gone for it all. The breath that came out of me was hiccupped and choked. Strangled.

It isn’t the end of the world, I tried to tell myself even as two more tears streaked down my cheek. Stop. I needed to stop and get it together. I wasn’t going to waste tears over being left. I wasn’t.

I had my credit card.

Plenty of people traveled by themselves.

I had a cell phone.

There had to be a hundred hotels I could stay at close by.

There were worst places to get stranded at. At least there was a beach. It was summer. I had a bathing suit and plenty of sunscreen.

I could do this.

I could— Two more tears slipped out of my eyeballs, and I heard more than felt myself suck in a choppy breath.

I had to get it together. I couldn’t cry. It was fine. I was fine. It wasn’t a big deal that Aaron hadn’t shown up. I should have known better than to let myself get disappointed. When had I ever had good luck with guys to begin with?

Never. That’s when.

Aaron not showing up… being stranded alone in a city I’d never been with limited money… none of it was the end of the world. I wasn’t going to cry over being ditched. We were friends—had been friends—and he didn’t owe me a thing. It was fine.

I wasn’t going to dwell.

Not me.

I had my credit card, my good health, and plenty of people back home who loved me. This didn’t reflect on me. Aaron letting me down had nothing to do with me. He was the one who had chickened out, not me for once, and that was supposed to be a victory I could celebrate when my organs didn’t feel like they were getting stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick.

He’d left me, but it was going to be okay. It was.

This small part of my brain tried to tell me that maybe something had happened to him. That he wouldn’t have left me here at the airport for no reason. Part of me vouched for the man I’d gotten to know over the last few months, telling me he wouldn’t do something like this…

But the biggest part of me said I was being naive.

Three more tears came out of my eyes, and I wiped at my cheeks with the back of my fingers, fighting the urge to cry more because my body sure wanted to do that. Get it together, Ruby. Figure it out and stop standing here crying in public. You’re better than this. It’s fine.

I was getting a headache.

I had to wipe at my face twice more, and when I looked at my fingers, I found black marks from my runny mascara smeared on them, and it just made me even more upset. It made my head hurt worse, instantly.

All right. I could do this. First thing, I needed a taxi, and I could ask him to drop me off somewhere close to everything. I could find a hotel.

I had just taken a deep breath as a group of six that had been on the same flight as me walked by, when I heard distantly, “Rubes?”

I stopped breathing.

I almost didn’t look up, my vision bleary, but I made myself do it.

Standing not even five feet away, with a torn-out piece of notebook paper in his hands that said RC SANTOS in thick, scribbly red letters, was a man. Not a boy. Not a man-boy. A man I could have looked at all day for the rest of my life. With neat, short, golden blond hair on his head that I noticed first thing, and a deep tan covering every inch of his exposed skin, I stopped breathing. Deep-set eyes, high cheekbones and a mouth that was pretty darn full for any gender, seemed to tie in together to shape a face that was too good-looking.

Way too good-looking.

He looked like a model. If this was him, it was no wonder he’d had so many girlfriends and they’d all been nuts. Nobody gave up this kind of guy without a fight. But it couldn’t be him.

There was no way….

No freaking way.

Was this a joke?

I turned my head to glance over my shoulder, and then turned to look over my other shoulder like there was some other Ruby or person in the world that could go by RC Santos that this man could be asking for. Because the name was common and all that.

But when I faced forward again, the tall, very six-foot-two-ish blond man with the paper that said RC SANTOS on it raised his light-colored eyebrows gradually. I saw his Adam’s apple bob. Gulp. And in the slowest motion possible, hesitant, hesitant, hesitant, one of his hands let go of one side of the sign and both his fists dropped, paper and all. The man blinked, and I took in what seemed like dark brown eyes staring at me beneath that heavily constructed bone structure. I took in the way his lips slightly parted, and the way his whole face went slack as he swallowed again.

Then that mouth, that mouth, seemed to curve up, his smooth shaved cheeks went pink… and I realized he was smiling. At me. Brown eyes lit up as they scanned me from my face down to my gold flats and back up again.

“Ruby?” the man asked in that voice I fully, totally recognized from the one and only conversation we had on the phone in the months we’d known each other.