To You, Iyla, page 21
Finally, I met his gaze—looking into the eyes that I had gotten to know so well this week.
I thought I’d fallen in love with this man, when in reality, maybe I’d fallen in love with an idea. An idea that he would save me.
Zeke was a false sense of promise. A trick. There was no fate between us, just an inherently wrongful disposition—one that had haunted me my whole life. I was foolish to think this would be anything different…and I was smart enough to know better. Nothing good has ever happened to me naturally.
Celeste Kinney makes her own luck. She writes her own story.
“I need to go,” I muttered, looking away from his eyes and onto the ground. I couldn’t say anything else. “This is over, Zeke.”
“No,” he protested, the desperation evident in his voice as he tightened his hold on me, unwilling to let me go. “Please, let’s try and talk this through.”
“There’s nothing left to say.” My voice turned weak as I pulled away once more, Zeke giving up as he let me go. I was tired…so tired. “This was a mistake. You were a mistake,” I whispered.
When he didn’t respond, I finally looked up at him. I had to because the second I turned away, I knew I could never look back.
Copyright Kate Lauren 2023 thewriterkate1@gmail.com
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I Y L A
There comes a time in your life when everything changes. In a moment, everything you once knew falls to your feet, leaving you to pick up all the pieces. And there I was, trying to piece back together a part of myself I hadn’t known was broken until now.
As soon as I arrived back at the campus, I fell onto my bed and closed my eyes.
“People come into your life for a reason, whether we know those reasons or not. And Iyla Larson. You’re meant to be in my life.”
Ambert’s words plagued my mind as they repeated on a loop.
Was the universe trying to play some sick joke on me? Was my mockery towards the idea of fate coming back to bite me once and for all?
How could this have happened? And why did it feel so wrong?
Hadn’t I wanted this all along? A chance to re-trace my mother’s footsteps—an opportunity to learn who she was. Yet, the moment I could taste it…I fled.
Tears streamed down my cheeks at the thought of Ambert’s hurt and confused expression in my mind. I felt terrible leaving him the way I did. I hadn’t meant what I’d said. I was just overwhelmed, desperate, and looking for an easy way out.
Ambert didn’t deserve that, though. It had only been a short period of time, but Ambert had become someone who I could envision a life with.
Had he been more to my story than that all along?
Had Ambert been a vessel? A calculated attempt to get me closer to connecting with my mom…with Claire…with my dad?
Dad.
The answer I’d always been curious to uncover was now crystal clear.
Zeke was my dad.
My brain pounded in my head as I attempted to recall everything I knew about him.
“He’s been close friends with my parents for a long time. So, growing up, he was always in my life...except for the first few years.”
“What happened the first few years?”
“Some stuff happened back in the day. It’s something my family avoids discussing, so I don’t know much. And if I’m being honest, I try not to ask.”
What had my parents told me about my father?
“He wasn’t around.”
“You wouldn’t want to know him anyway. He was a deadbeat.”
A rush of adrenaline made its way through me as I shot up from my bed, pacing the room. “Think, Iyla,” I whispered, wringing my hands together anxiously before raising them to my temples and massaging either side of my head. “What else do you remember?”
But there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I hung my head in defeat, doing everything possible to calm my breathing when the most important words somehow managed to rush through my mind.
“We’ll always be a phone call away. If you need us, we’ll get on the first flight out.”
I stumbled over myself as I reached for my phone to dial my mom’s number. Each pained and prolonged ring stung worse than the last as I anxiously awaited her voice.
“Hey, Iyla bear, how is everything?” She picked up on the third ring.
“Mom…” I paused, my mouth open for a moment before I closed it. I didn’t know where to start. I thought hearing her voice would have calmed me, but instead, it filled me with an unexpected anger and sense of betrayal that left me physically shaking.
“Iyla.” I could hear the sudden concern in her voice as she picked up on my perplexed state. “Honey, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“What haven’t you told me?” I cried, wiping away a few tears that pricked at my eyes. “How could you and Dad let me come here being so naïve? How could you?”
“Iyla,” she paused, seemingly assessing my words before I heard sounds of her shuffling through the house. The infliction in her tone was evident. “Your dad and I are getting on the next plane there.”
“No, tell me now!” I demanded. “You’ve already made me wait my entire life. Tell me about my real mom…my real dad…everyone.”
“Iyla…” I could hear her voice start to break. I’m sorry…I’m so sorry. Your dad and I will be there as soon as we can. In the meantime, don’t do anything irrational. Please wait for us,” she begged. “We’ll tell you everything. I will bring you the package…the letter. I promise. Just wait for us.”
I was reluctant to agree, attempting to understand how it all came down to this. The answers to my questions had been with them all along, yet there I’d been, struggling my whole life to fight for the truth.
I wanted to hang up. I wanted to pretend that I’d never even picked up the phone and called them to begin with.
As I stared down at the ground, the picture from Dr. Sanders had fallen out of my bag, and there she was, smiling up at me and reminding me why.
Why all of this had to happen. Why I was even in California, to begin with.
It was for her.
Everything had been for her.
“Iyla?” my mom spoke once more. “Are you there? Please, Iyla, are you listening?”
“Okay,” I muttered out the agreement. That one syllable broke me as much as I knew it would fix me. I had just hung up the phone when Hallie rushed through the door.
“Iyla.” She embraced me in a hug, her voice full of relief once she’d wrapped her arms around me.
I hugged her back, feeling the guilt from my actions wash over my body. I’d abandoned her at Ambert’s with no warning or explanation whatsoever.
“I’m so sorry,” I said shakily. “I shouldn’t have taken your car. I just couldn’t be…there…I needed to leave...I’ve made a mistake, Hal—”
“Take a breath,” she instructed me, rubbing my back. “I’m not upset with you, Iyla. I was just worried about you, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, burying my head into her shoulder as I sobbed out loud, no longer fighting to hold the pain back. “I’m sorry.”
“Shh…” She soothed me. “Everything is going to be okay.”
I pulled back from her embrace, assessing her face through my blurred vision. “What happened after I left? What did they tell you?”
“Korey came back out into the garden,” she explained calmly. “He said that you’d left and taken my car and that I should probably make sure you were okay. Vic dropped me off. I didn’t even see Claire or Ambert on my way out.”
I wiped the tears from my face, nodding in understanding.
“Iyla, what happened to you?” she asked gently. “Did you and Ambert have a fight?”
“No,” I choked out. “Hallie, it was him. It was my dad.”
“What?” She furrowed her brows. “Lance?”
“No.” I rapidly shook my head. “Not Lance, my real dad…Zeke.”
“Zeke?” The name left her even more dumbfounded.
“Zeke…he was in the picture with her…we have the same eyes…hair…then Claire said something about a package, and now my parents are coming here, and I don’t…” My words trailed off as I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes, shaking my head. Nothing made sense anymore.
“Slow down,” she instructed me. “Iyla, you need to start from the beginning. You need to tell me exactly what happened.”
I let out a slow and controlled breath, brushing back some tears. “Oh, Hallie…where do I even begin?”
Copyright Kate Lauren 2023 thewriterkate1@gmail.com
The
Fifteenth Entry
C E L E S T E
August 28
I stumbled over my shaky feet, finally reaching my dorm room after fleeing Long Beach and slamming the door shut behind me.
“Twelve.”
“One.”
“Thirty.”
“Fifteen.”
My erratic counting wasn’t working. Nothing was. My mind, the room, my whole world, it was spinning. Spinning faster than I could physically keep up with.
“Forty.”
“Eight.”
“Two.”
“Six.”
Work. Please work.
I raised my arm towards my forehead, my skin making contact with a cool unfamiliar material.
Zeke’s jacket.
I was still wearing his jacket. The jacket that confirmed his loyalty to Chaz—the jacket that was only a piece of the many lies he’d kept from me.
“Get off…get off…get off!” I whipped it off my body and flung it across the room, expecting to feel some sort of sick satisfaction from it.
But it wasn’t enough.
With my anger boiling over, I snatched it from the ground and marched to the tiny trash bin in the corner of the room.
“I hate you!” I screamed through my uncontrollable tears, shoving the jacket inside the bin as far as possible. “I hate you…I hate you…I hate you!”
I needed to get rid of him, and if the task proved to be impossible in my mind, then that meant that no physical trace of him could stay.
Rushing towards my purse, I reached for the photo of the two of us from the photo booth. In shame, I caught myself as I momentarily paused to stare down at it.
“No!” I tore my eyes away. “No, no, no, no, no!” I ripped the photos apart with each syllable and threw them into the trash alongside the jacket.
I needed to start over. I knew how to do that. I’d done it before, so who was to say I couldn’t do it again?
The only solution was to go back to the life that existed before there was him.
A simple life.
A predictable life.
A life that made sense.
As the hours achingly passed, I fell onto my bed, the tears faded, and my body exhausted itself second by second.
This dream had become a nightmare.
“Celeste, wake up!” A familiar voice shook my body awake. “CeCe!” The voice repeated, rocking me back and forth.
I squinted as the air made contact with my tired eyes. “Claire?” I looked up to face her worried expression.
“Celeste.” She pulled me into her tight embrace.
Still dazed, I took a moment to assess my surroundings. Where was I? And most importantly, why was I there?
As I lifted my head from my pillow, it all came flooding back to me.
I’m at the campus.
Claire called me after I raced into a taxi, pleading for me to tell her where I was.
Then, it all went dark.
Claire sighed in relief, running her hand over the back of my head. “Thank goodness you’re okay. You scared me.” Her expression went from one of joy to concern. “What were you thinking?!”
“Sorry…” I shook my head, unsure what else to say.
She looked at me with a frown. “What happened, CeCe? Zeke came rushing back to the bar. He said you were gone, that you’d disappeared. We didn’t know where you were.”
“He’s not here, is he?” my breathing intensified, and suddenly it felt like I couldn’t breathe in enough. “Please tell me he’s not here.”
“No.” She shook her head. “He’s with Korey. He doesn’t know where I am. I promise.”
I reluctantly took her words for truth, despite the lingering panic I felt at the thought that he could appear at any moment.
“What happened?” Claire ran her fingertips along my freshly bruised neck, eyes widening in shock. “Did Zeke do this to you?”
“No,” I told her. “It was Chaz. Chaz did this.”
“Chaz?” she repeated, her face full of questions. “Who’s Chaz?”
“Claire…” I started to sob into my hands. “There is so much I need to tell you.”
“Oh, CeCe.” She pulled me back in as I continued to cry. “You can tell me.” She soothed me. “You can tell me everything.” She prompted me to lie back down, and slowly but surely, I explained everything to her.
That first night on the boardwalk.
Dancing with Chaz at the club.
Uncovering the money that haunted Zeke’s drawers.
The truth surrounding Zeke and every finite detail that led up to the moment before I ran away.
I’d never seen Claire this way. So hurt…so afraid…so desperate to take my suffering away. I wished it could have vanished so easily.
For hours, she cried with me, became angry with me, and consoled me. And most importantly, she listened to me when I told her that I wanted everything that happened on spring break to be a distant memory.
Copyright Kate Lauren 2023 thewriterkate1@gmail.com
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I Y L A
A faint knock came from the door almost exactly 24 hours later.
They were here.
My parents.
They’d finally arrived.
“Iyla.” They engulfed me in a hug as soon as I opened the door—one that I made little attempt to reciprocate.
Pulling back from our one-sided embrace, they looked at me as if waiting to hear me talk, yet I remained silent. I had nothing to say. They were the ones who needed to do the explaining.
My dad cleared his throat as he pulled in their luggage, followed by an envelope and a box he firmly tucked beneath his arm.
I sought refuge back in my bed. It’s where I’d been glued from the moment I got off the phone with them. It was the only place I felt safe. I’d learned that the world beyond the four walls of my dorm room contained too many truths, and they were ones that I no longer had the strength to chase.
“Iyla, I think the best thing is to jump right into it,” my mom spoke softly as she and my dad planted themselves onto Hallie’s bed.
“I think so, too,” I murmured, pulling a pillow into my chest.
My dad let out a breath. “Let’s start from the beginning. Earlier this year, we received this package along with a letter.” He gestured toward the items he’d now placed in his lap. “Although these were intended for you, they came into our possession first. Both the letter and the package were signed by a name that your mother and I recognized. It’s a name that I’m guessing you now know, too—Claire Wells, who at the time was Claire O’Donnell.”
“Claire was best friends with your birth mother, Celeste.” Mom picked up where he’d left off. “We had the opportunity to get to know Claire for the final few weeks you were in the hospital. She visited you almost every single day for the months you were admitted. Claire made sure that you were loved and well taken care of.” Her voice trailed off as I could see the guilt kick in.
I swallowed hard at that revelation. Claire did that…for me? But why?
“There were pieces surrounding Celeste’s death and the circumstances of your father that we wanted to keep shied away from you, Iyla,” she continued, cutting my thoughts short. “Not because we were jealous…but because we wanted to keep you safe. When we adopted you, we decided it would be best to close off all contact with Claire. She was a vessel into that world. We never realized the hurt and suffering we would’ve caused by doing that, not only to her and her family but to you.”
As my dad spoke, I shook my head, trying to wrap my mind around their words.
“You can imagine our worries when you told us that you wanted to come to UCLA and back to California. This is where the answers to all your questions lay, and we knew without a doubt that you’d search for them.”
Had I gone searching, or had everything managed to find its way to me?
My mom placed a hand on my dad’s leg. “Iyla, here’s what we’re trying to say. We were wrong to keep things from you all this time. You deserve to know what happened. You deserve to know the truth, and you deserve to have a chance to learn about your real mom and dad.”
The latter part of her statement sent chills down my spine as my dad handed me a visibly opened letter, yet a perfectly sealed box.
“We read the letter Iyla, and for that…we’re so sorry. It was never meant for us, and after we read it, we couldn’t hardly look at ourselves in the mirror, let alone at it. We pushed everything into the back of our closet. We knew we were wrong, and we couldn’t face it,” my dad admitted, the shame and regret written all over his face.
“But with that said, we want you to take the time to read the letter and process everything that could be inside that box,” my mom added, a hint of hope in her eyes as she locked them on mine. “And if there are still questions by the end of it, we can promise you, Iyla, that we’ll tell you everything we know.”
