What the Heart Wants, page 2
It has to be. It has to last a lifetime.
I hold on to him like my life depends on it, wanting to never let go. Only I know that’s not how our story ends.
No, once Cam snuggles against my side, he pulls off of me and loops his arm around my waist. “I’m going to love you forever, Suda Kaye Ross,” he promises, then kisses the back of my neck, sighing contentedly. He removes the condom and stashes it in a paper towel nearby before coming back to cuddle next to my cooling flesh.
I wait a good twenty minutes, lying there, memorizing the feel of his arm around me, the ache between my thighs, the fullness of my heart, until I know he’s asleep. That’s when I remember what I have to do, and my heart cracks and breaks open, spilling all the love we have out into the air around us. I leave it all there, in the place where Camden Bryant made love to me inside the barn loft, the giant window all the way open so we could stargaze.
It was the best experience of my life.
Swallowing down the heartache and sadness, I quietly remove myself from his arms and slip back into my dress and panties, noting the tinge of blood smeared on my thighs. I grab my flip-flops and clench them in my hand, not wanting to make a sound. I grab my phone, lift it up, and take a single photo of my sleeping love because it’s the last I’ll ever get.
On my hand, the moonlight reflects off the small gold-and-diamond promise ring he gave me last month when I graduated high school, and he promised me a good, solid life where he’d take care of me. At the time, I wasn’t sure where my life would lead, so I accepted the ring. That was before I read my mother’s letter—the letter that changed everything.
I slip the ring off my finger and set it on top of his phone along with the small pink note I wrote him before I came over tonight. It’s only a few words, but he’ll understand their meaning.
Be happy. Love another.
Fly free,
Suda Kaye
* * *
With one last look back at the man I’ll love until the day I die, I step down the ladder, letting him go one rung at a time. By the time I’ve left the barn and made it to the car my mother’s inheritance bought me, I’ve already put the love for a life I wasn’t meant to live behind me. With every mile I drive, that life disappears, and new opportunities present themselves. My half of the money Mom left Evie and me will last a long time and I plan to use it to live my life to the fullest.
No settling. No laying down roots.
I’m living for the moment, not for the future.
I have to see for myself if Mom was right.
The grass may not be greener on the other side, but if you look hard enough, you can always find beauty.
1
Present day
Wanderlust. A word for some, a lifestyle for others. Wanderlust is not something that’s easy to ignore. It lives and breathes inside you. A yearning that’s hard to describe. Once you know it’s there, alive, calling out to you, enchanting your thoughts with grand adventures and discoveries, you are driven to make one of two choices: accept its siren call or banish it forever.
Like my mother, I felt the empty hole in my gut that urged me to move on. To go. To flee. To fly. It still lives inside me, sometimes satisfied but never full, always yearning for something more.
From place to place I went. For a decade, I lived the life of a true wanderer. Slept on the couches of people I met at a concert, caravanned with other nomads, performed with a belly dancing crew all over Europe, and enjoyed all types of pleasures.
Sumptuous foods around the world.
Sensual clothing that flirted and aroused.
Visited exotic locales most people could only imagine in their wildest dreams.
Though the men I met, tasted, bedded, and experienced incredible pleasures of the flesh with, never, not once, compared with the single night I had with my first love.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. In every place my wandering soul took me, I worked hard at starting anew, leaving behind my life in Colorado. And for brief moments, I succeeded. Until that gnawing, twisting feeling in my gut would start again, and I’d have to go. Off to the next adventure, always attempting to fill that emptiness.
I’ve driven the Autobahn in Germany. Spent a month in an ashram in India, learning the art of yoga and self-love. Kissed a Frenchman under the Eiffel Tower. Eaten pasta with a stunning Italian in a small seaside town at the tip of the boot in Italy. I’ve ridden a camel through the desert and touched the pyramids of Giza. Prayed for clarity at the foot of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil. Worn a fuzzy Cossack hat in Russia while twirling in circles in the snow. Ridden a bicycle in Copenhagen. Sailed the fjords in Norway. Watched the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve on my twenty-fifth birthday. Evie flew out for that one, and she was my first kiss that year.
Despite all of these wonders, this incredible life I’ve been blessed to live, the night I gave my heart and body to Camden Bryant is one I’ve never topped. It’s my most cherished memory. I hold it close, never speak of it, not to anyone. Even Evie. She knows that I lost my virginity to Cam and left town the same night, but she has never—not once—dug for more information. Somehow, maybe through our sisterly connection, she knew I couldn’t talk about it.
For years, I’ve given myself to the wind the same way my mother did, and I don’t regret it. The grass is definitely greener on the other side, only because it’s a new experience. All new things tend to come with that breath of whimsy, that moment of awe. But what I’ve come to learn is that nothing, not the Great Wall of China, not Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, the Hawaiian Islands, or any of the other extraordinary places I’ve visited, the incredible things I’ve done, come close to the feeling of being home.
In recent years, I’ve come to understand why Mother always came back. It wasn’t just Evie and me or our grandfather Tahsuda, the reservation back in Oklahoma, or even Colorado where we ended up. It was all of it. The entire kit and caboodle. It was the green grass of familiarity. A beauty Mom already knew existed, not one she had to search for.
I clutch Mom’s letter while the plane makes its final descent into Denver International Airport.
With shaking fingers, I open the letter and take a full breath, remembering where I was just eighteen hours ago.
Australia. My twenty-eighth birthday.
I celebrated my birthday yesterday in Sydney, but once I read Mom’s words, I packed up my things, kissed my current fling, Brody—an Australian surfer with golden skin and a bright white smile—a quick goodbye and wished him well. I had to go home for the first time in ten years. Had to. It was my destiny.
Brody, being the total hippie, Mother-Nature-loving, pleasure-giving sweetheart that he is, understood. He didn’t even question me. He knew the score. Every man I spent any time with over the past decade knew the score.
Suda Kaye Ross went where the wind took her.
It was in writing. Written on pink parchment paper in words left to me by one of the two most important women in the world.
Since I left Pueblo, Colorado, a decade ago, I experienced everything my mother suggested with a flourish and desire for life that couldn’t be quenched. This last letter, though, threw all of her other teachings into the fire. It was a complete one-eighty from the letters that came before.
The letter on my twentieth birthday had told me to go to Europe and see a man named Marco in Calabria, Italy. She gave me an address and a phone number. When I showed up, Marco knew immediately who I was and welcomed me with open arms. His son, on the other hand, was even more welcoming, warming my bed and getting me over my Camden slump. We spent months in bed and working in his family’s Italian restaurant by the sea, until my feet started to itch and the pit in my gut twisted in warning. After six months, I left and headed to France, meeting up with another of my mother’s contacts.
Along with the letter Mom wrote for my twenty-first birthday, she’d given me a thin book, filled with names, numbers, and addresses alongside the following note:
Suda Kaye, my huutsuu,
Open this book, point to a page, and go where the wind takes you. Do it every time the urge to spread your wings comes upon you. Fly free, my little bird. Live life to the fullest. Always be honest with your intentions toward others. Never let them expect your feet to stay on the ground.
Have no regrets, my darling.
All my love,
Mom
I’ve been pointing and flying for years. Sending Evie postcards and presents from my travels but never going back home. Even the thought of being in the same place where I’d lost my mother and left the love of my life was too painful. Until now. Until my mother’s two words spirited me into immediate action.
I sigh and unfold the letter, looking at her beautiful handwriting for the hundredth time since boarding this flight.
Suda Kaye, my huutsuu,
You’ve had your adventures. Hopefully you have heeded my words and spread your wings across the globe using the money I’ve left you.
If there is one thing I could take back in the life I lived, it would be that I never had the time to share in the adventures I wanted to have with my girls. You will understand one day. Wanderlust may be inside of us, but we decide when to set it free.
Today, and for the foreseeable future, I want you to be brave, to be strong, to be everything I was never able to be.
Settled.
Fully at peace with your lot in life.
You have the ability to make that happen for you, my darling. Now is the time to set me free alongside that need inside of you to fly. Don’t clip your wings, for you’ll need them one day.
A solid friend.
A true wife.
A responsible mother.
A committed sister.
Be there for Evie. For our family. Plant the seed. Make roots. Ground yourself to somewhere and something that fills your soul with a different desire. The desire to be needed. Wanted. Loved. Present.
Go home.
Wherever home is to you, go there now.
With all the love the world has to give,
Mom
Go home.
After years of celebrating life, all the beauty that the world has to offer, my mother’s words spill into my mind like a warm ball of light. The thought of Evie, making a life near her feels...right. She’s the closest thing to home I’ve ever had.
It’s time I make peace with all that I left behind. Time that I ground myself, turn my life into something solid. Stable.
A joy I haven’t felt in ten years seeps into my bones, warming me from the inside out as the plane’s wheels touch down. I look out the window and smile at the Colorado sky.
I’m home.
* * *
The second I step foot outside of the Denver airport, I see a sleek, black Porsche Cayenne idling at the curb. Only that’s not what takes my breath away. It’s the stunning goddess leaning nonchalantly against it, arms crossed over her chest, long blond locks hanging over her shoulder like bushels of wavy spun gold. She’s rocking black aviators with a sweet chrome trim, a pair of tapered midnight-colored dress slacks, a silky, flowy white blouse, a sexy-as-fuck pair of black stilettos, and a black leather blazer to top it all off. My sister looks hot and expensive. It’s like she just stepped off the cover of Business Badass, the smokin’ female edition.
Her pink-tinted lips curve into a simple smirk.
“Took you long enough.” She tips her chin up before her smirk turns into a full-fledged beaming white smile as she opens her arms and pushes off the car.
“Sissy!” I squeal and take off in my cork wedge sandals, my maxi dress flying all around me, one arm holding my floppy wide-brimmed sun hat in place as I run.
We collide, giggling like schoolgirls instead of a woman in her late twenties and one having just knocked on the door of thirty.
“Happy birthday!” I lean back and kiss her cheeks, then her forehead, and then her lips in a quick touch.
“Right back atcha, sis!” Evie grins before turning and looping her arm around my waist and leading me to her fancy SUV.
“Nice ride.” I chuckle.
“Better than the rickety old baby blue Beetle I was driving last time you were here, eh?”
I laugh and lug my gigantic suitcase into the back of her car with a resounding thud. My entire life is in that case, and for a moment, I send up a thank-you to my wandering mom’s juju that she must’ve passed down in her genetics since I’ve never lost the case in all my travels.
“Absolutely!” I slam the hatch down and we both jump in the car.
Once we’re on the road, I take off my hat and unceremoniously toss it in the back before digging through my giant hobo bag-slash-purse, looking for some lip balm. That plane ride dried me out.
“So, you still in Colorado Springs? Last we spoke, you mentioned the possibility of moving back to Pueblo.” I cross my fingers at my thigh in the hope that we’re not going back to Pueblo where Mom had her long battle with cancer. At the time, she wanted us to have a “regular” high school experience instead of the years of study we had on the reservation when we lived with our grandfather.
Evie pushes her long hair back behind her ear while focusing on the road for our almost two-hour drive.
“Yeah, but I visit my Pueblo office often since it’s only forty minutes away. Once or twice a week I drive into Denver to do meetings with headquarters.” She crinkles her nose.
“Bet you love that.” I smile and lay my hand over hers where it rests on the console.
She squeezes my hand and the sensation of sister solidarity shoots like lightning through my palm, up my arm, and fills my heart with a warmth I have only been able to experience with my older sister. “You know me well,” she says.
“I know that you’ve never liked to drive. I’d offer, but honestly, I love you too much, and I’m too tired. I’d crash into a girder or go down in a ditch. That flight was brutal.”
Evie laughs. “Remind me, how long were you in Australia? Sometimes your adventures bleed into one another for me.”
I shrug. “Hmm, I think three months. I was in New Zealand before that. Rode around with the rugby team there.”
Evie’s eyebrow rises over her glasses, and she turns her head, dipping her chin to give me a peek at her icy-blue eyes. “A rugby team? Kaye, don’t tell me you banged an entire rugby team.”
I open my mouth half in shock and playfully smack her arm. “No way. I only bedded two...but it was at the same time, so it didn’t really count as more than one fling.”
“Seriously?” She raps on the steering wheel, sounding half scandalized and half jealous. She shakes her head. “Some life you live. Who’d’ve thought my baby sis would travel the world and fly by the seat of her pants?”
“Mom did,” I say softly, thinking about the reason I’m back.
Evie’s shoulders slump, and she sighs heavily. “Yeah, you’re right.” She clears her throat as a thick fog of sadness fills the interior of the car, both of us likely thinking about Mom.
“Well,” she says, breaking the silence, “tell me a little bit about Brady, the Australian surfer?”
I smile, recalling Brody’s messy long hair down to his shoulders, his big blue eyes and svelte body. “Brody. And he was great. A true gentleman.”
“Really? A gentleman?” Evie counters in disbelief.
I snort. “No, not really. He’s a peace-love dove, pot-smoking hippie who fucks like a god and surfs as though his legs were made for the sea.”
Evie smiles and chuckles. “And he was totally fine with you leaving?”
“It’s part of the deal. They want a piece of me, they take what they can get. No more, no less.” I run my fingers through my long brown hair, trying to work out the knots from sleeping on the plane.
“Isn’t that hard? Spending intimate moments, sharing a bed, months at a time with all of these different people, and then just walking away when the mood strikes? I don’t know how you do it, Kaye. I’ve never known. I especially didn’t understand it when Mom left us, month after month, returning for a brief couple of weeks, until she’d be off again. Stars in her eyes and the wind beneath her wings.”
Her words hammer into my chest, and that pit in my stomach twists.
Evie pulls off her glasses and looks at me, her wounded gaze piercing straight through to my soul. “We were never enough for her. And then she got sick...”
I swallow down the bile that scratches at my throat. “Evie...she just couldn’t stop. It wasn’t inside her at the time, and when she finally did—”
“It was too late.”
“At least we had those years with her. We should be thankful for that.”
Evie huffs, not seeming at all thankful. More like she’d rather scream her frustration at the top of her lungs, but she’s too cool a cucumber to explode. Too reserved. Proper. Put together.
As I watch the simmering anger cool in the silence between us, I vow to help my sister bring those emotions she’s suppressing to the surface. No one should live their life holding any piece of themselves back. Putting on a mask to hide the sorrow underneath. It’s not healthy.
I’m smart enough to know this is not the time for that. Not when I’ve just made it back home after a decade.
Evie sucks in a full breath and offers a pitiful, fake smile that I see right through. “So, how long are you staying? When’s the next big adventure and where is it taking you?”
I grab my sister’s hand, bring it to my lips, and kiss the top. “I don’t know. My heart and soul brought me home.”
“Oh yeah? Does that mean I may get you for two weeks? A month? Three? Like sexy surfer Brady?”
