Serious Moonlight(86)

“And this one,” he said, pointing to the other photo of my mother by herself. “She was a waitress? Wait. Is that the Moonlight?”

I nodded. “Worked there until I was five, I think? Then she started managing stores at Westlake Center. Then she worked at Macy’s . . . Then she was unemployed for a while. She sort of bounced around a lot.” I pointed to another photo of her, when she was a year younger than me—seventeen. She’d gotten her first job behind the counter at the cinnamon bun café near the harbor. In this photo, she smiled at the camera, showing off her apron, her name embroidered at the top. This was the last picture of her taken by my grandmother, and you could almost feel her sense of pride from behind the camera. Oh, how that changed.

“My mother was already pregnant with me when the photo was taken, but she didn’t tell them until much later, when she started showing,” I told Daniel. “The only person who knew was Mona.”

He squinted at the photo and then turned to me, a strange expression on his face. “Your mom’s name was Lily?” he said, eyes flicking to the stargazer in my hair.

I nodded once.

The lines on his forehead softened, and he looked at me with so much tenderness, my chest became hot and constricted. Without warning, tears brimmed, stinging the backs of my eyelids.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to say, talking around the knot in my throat. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s been eight years. I should be past all this.”

And I was, sort of? When I thought about my mom too much, my mind went into a horrible loop, because the thing was, I couldn’t remember a lot about her. She was pretty and had a dry sense of humor, and she smelled good. She was always working, never around enough, and I remember always wanting more of her. More of her attention and time. But the rest of my memories had been trampled under everyone else’s opinions of her. Grandma said she was rebellious and stubborn and never thought about consequences; Mona said she was loyal and determined and always tried her best. Maybe both of them were right.

“I can barely remember the real Lily anymore,” I said. “My strongest memories from back then are of Mona. How is that possible? How could I forget her?”

He didn’t say anything. He just wrapped his arms around me. I laid my head on his shoulder and clung to him. It felt like holding sunshine in my arms. As if I was starving and he was nourishment. It felt like forgiveness. Relief.

Warm hands cupped both sides of my head. I cleared my throat, sniffled, and then laughed, as if I were some sort of malfunctioning cyborg. “I seriously don’t know what’s wrong. Ugh, I’m so embarrassed. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” he said, eyes shining. He swiped beneath my eyes with his thumbs. “You’re a little bit of a disaster, Birdie,” he murmured, but not unkindly.

“You have no idea.”

“I don’t mind. It takes a disaster to know one. And I’m a grade-A disaster.”

“Daniel?”

“Yes?”

“What are you doing here? I mean, I’m happy you’re here. Really happy. It’s just . . . I thought everything was okay with Cherry.”

“It is. Did I not just lug a bucket of apricots on a ferry across Elliott Bay?”

I huffed out a soft laugh and then said, “We haven’t talked much the last couple of days. . . . I worried maybe you’d had second thoughts.”

“About us?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve had thoughts. Not second ones, though.” He swiped at my cheek again. “I just realized some things.”

“What things?”

He blew out a long breath. “All of this has happened so fast, and it’s not like any other relationship I’ve been in before. And I didn’t expect any of this at all. When we started, I just liked you, in the diner that first night. And then I just wanted to spend time with you. And then something changed.”

That didn’t sound good. I tried to pull away, but he gathered me more firmly against him. “Listen. I need you to listen to me, okay? Before I lose my nerve. Sometimes I feel a little sick to my stomach when I can’t see you, and then when I do, I get so nervous, I worry I might vomit.”

“You . . . never act nervous.”

“I guess I’m good at hiding it.”

“You are?”

“It’s a skill.” He rested his forehead against mine. “What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t expect this to happen. I didn’t sit around wishing for it. I didn’t even realize what was happening until it had. It’s like you walk into a convenience store to get bread and you hear a song playing over the speakers, and you’ve never heard it before, but it’s so good, it blows your mind. And all you wanted was bread, but now it feels like you’ve just seen the face of God, and how did this even happen?”

“You haven’t been eating more of those gummies, have you?”

He lifted his forehead from mine and shook his head. “Not a one, Birdie.”

“Sure?”

“So sure,” he said, sighing. “No one tells you about the yearning. I’ve never yearned in my entire life—not once, Birdie. But here I am, yearning. It’s awful.”

Longing-pining-aching.