Dear Aaron(72)

But I still blinked at him.

This was a joke.

It had to be.

This could’ve been straight out of a movie where I got kidnapped and taken, sold into human trafficking and my family would never see me again unless one of my brothers vowed vengeance and went to search for me. Like that would happen.

But it was the smile on the blond man’s face that seemed to just… click. To say maybe this wasn’t a prank. That I wasn’t imagining this.

“Aaron?” His name out of my mouth sounded as wary as it seemed in my head.

“Yeah,” the man my gut was 99 percent sure was the person I’d spent a year e-mailing, said.

I didn’t miss the way he looked me over one more time, or how his smile wavered. Hesitated. Flickered. Before coming back to life, lips together with only the corners arching upward.

Maybe it had been a bad idea to not send him a picture of myself after so many months.

Was he disappointed? If he’d genuinely thought I’d resemble my sister or my mom, it was his own fault for setting up those expectations. I’d told him I looked like a mix of both my parents. I wasn’t the pretty one in the family or the funny one or the talented one or the outgoing one or the smart one…

I was just Ruby.

Just Ruby. And that had to be enough. I’d come too far for it not to be.

I blinked at those brown eyes staring a hole into me. I swallowed just as hard as he’d swallowed a minute ago. Then I told him before even processing the whispered words coming out of my mouth, “Can I see your ID?”

He blinked, and just as quickly as he blinked, he smiled almost, almost tenderly and nodded. One of his hands went behind his back as his gaze bounced all over me. Something small and brown filled his hand, and he finally moved his gaze to the wallet he held. His hand was steady as he passed me two plastic cards, one was a Kentucky driver’s license and the other was a military ID with the name I knew well: Aaron Tanner Hall.

It was him. Crap on a stick, it was really him. My hands were shaking just a little as I looked at his driver’s license one more time before handing it over, thisishimthisishimthisishim going around and around my head, stealing the power from my lungs as I told him the one thing I hadn’t exactly been planning on admitting as my voice practically shook, “I thought you weren’t coming.”

Aaron—not some faker who had hacked into his account and decided to come kidnap me out of all the other people in the world that he could find—shook his blond head, still frozen in place even though his features seemed to be bouncing back and forth between a smile and an expression that might have been a surprised one or a confused one, but I didn’t know him well enough to be sure.

“I thought—” He cleared his throat, making me drag my eyes toward his bobbing, very tan Adam’s apple. “I was standing over by the lot, waiting. I didn’t know….”

He was disappointed. He was disappointed, wasn’t he?

“You don’t look like I thought you would,” were the words he used to break the silence. His pronunciation was slow, calm. He blinked in the middle of his sentence as his chest went wide with an inhale and just as quickly deflated with an exhale. I stopped breathing as those dark brown eyes of his roamed over my face and down my front all over again. His mouth did that wavering thing again, fluctuating, indecisive before settling into a weak smile as his eyes bounced all over me one last time. His voice was as wary as his smile as he said the five words we’d said to each other so many times over the last few months, a reminder of our friendship, a reminder that he’d invited me to come here. “You know what I mean.”

He was disappointed. That’s what he meant. What was new? I should have known. Should have expected….

I didn’t fight the urge to blink or suck in a breath through my nose that sounded choppy and broken into syllables that it wasn’t capable of. My heart started beating faster, nervous, more nervous than I thought I’d probably ever been before, and that had been really nervous. Tears prickled in my eyes like they had moments ago, but I didn’t let them fall. I wouldn’t. Somehow, someway I managed to clear my own throat and tell him more softly than I would have liked, “I told you I don’t look like my mom or my sister.”

The man I was sure was named Aaron made a sound that resembled a huff, almost like a laugh, but the next six words out of his mouth made me flinch. “No. You don’t look like them.” And then, while I was pinching my lips together again at the brutality of his honesty, telling myself not to cry because he’d done this to himself by thinking I was lying, he really did laugh as he took a step forward, his eyes suddenly so bright and focused, that face of his I’d just been shocked with, lit up. “You hungry?”

He asked it like it was nothing. Like he hadn’t just confirmed something I’d accepted a long time ago but never got that much easier to accept. Like I didn’t have one little tear I desperately wiped at in the corner of my eye.

“What’s wrong?” Aaron asked immediately as his eyebrows knit together, by some miracle making his gorgeous face look even more handsome, even after he’d basically admitted he’d thought I was something or someone else and was trying to process it.

I was such an idiot.

My vision went blurry, and I could sense the anxiety in my sternum and belly. “This feels weird,” I told him honestly, nervous, nervous, nervous. More nervous by the second. By the millisecond. I tried sucking in a breath that wasn’t there.