My Heart Insists the Truth is Messy
The new beat of my heart is disconcerting. It’s leaning so hard toward Hannah I’m afraid I might topple into her and knock us off course. Except I think she’s revolving around me too. How we crash together is still to be determined. As I watch her press the button for the giant sphere floating in the center of the Oregon Science Museum, changing it to a projection of Earth, I can’t help but feel that gravity tug on my heart toward her. What makes the sensation more terrifying is that I haven’t felt this way before, and I’m not sure how to navigate it.
“Look at this one!” Hannah says with a gigantic smile on her face. She presses the button for the floating planet, changing it to Mars. “Could you imagine all the things we could do here with elementary students?”
“I can imagine.” I reach out and touch her, needing to ground myself by pressing my hand against her lower back, testing if she’s real. If this is real. She straightens and leans into me, proving I haven’t made this up.
“Did you still want to watch the Hubble Telescope film?” I ask. I glance at our tickets. “It starts in ten minutes.”
She takes one of my hands in hers. “Lead the way.”
I pull her away from the rotating projection of the planet, and we move through the dark exhibition hall, out into the bright lobby toward the escalator. A wall of windows framed with metal supports rises several stories, offering us views of the Portland skyline beyond. The museum sits on the east side of the Willamette River, the city on the other side. I can imagine settling in this city and picture what that might be like, only Hannah is in every version of my vision.
She steps onto the escalator first. I follow her onto the next step, and she leans back against me as we travel down to the main floor. I wrap my arms around her, drawing her closer, and press a kiss to her temple. It hits me then. I can’t picture life without Hannah because she’s it. I’m done. There isn’t anyone else I want besides her. My heart has always known it, and my mind is catching up.
The fact that she knows about all the messy stuff in my life and still wants to hold my hand, still wants to kiss me, still leans against me as if I’m a support system, is reinforcement of how right this is. And that is what’s so terrifying about the prospect. I could mess this up somehow. She could meet my family and decide we’re too much. There could be all kinds of reasons this could go wrong. My heart skitters in my chest as if looking for a shelter from all those fears, but I’m completely exposed.
Once we’re seated in the IMAX theater, Hannah leans against my shoulder, and I wrap my arm around her, kissing her temple again. The theater gets dark, and a Technicolor image of space fills the screened wall ahead of us, a dizzying array of the cosmos. It makes me feel as if I’m floating through space. A floating heart.
Hannah squeezes my hand and tilts her head to look up at me. My tether.
I lean and kiss her, the Orion nebula moving around us in a gorgeous rainbow of color, though I’ve close my eyes to focus on the woman who’s become my universe. I want to tell her how I feel, but fear holds the words hostage.
By the time we return to Linden Falls, it’s dark, and it has been a perfect day. I drive us through town toward Hannah’s apartment, her hand in mine, listening to her chatter about the museum. After I park, I look over at her and smile. “Date four. Check.”
She’s staring at me.
“What?”
“I had so much fun with you,” she says, echoing my sentiments, but her face is so serious I’m afraid there’s a but in the rest of her statement.
“Why don’t you look like you had fun right now?”
She gives me a self-conscious smile, and unbuckles her seatbelt. “Make room for me,” she says, then slides over the center console and situates herself in my lap.
I like the feel of her there, her rounded ass pressed against my thighs. I lay a hand just above her knee and give her a squeeze. “I’m thinking all kinds of thoughts, Hannah.”
“Me too,” she says and slides a hand up my arm over my shoulders, burning a trail up my neck, a touch without purpose, really, just physical connection, but I love it and squeeze her again, pulling her a touch closer.
“What is it?” I ask. I might have felt afraid had she remained in her seat, but she wanted to be closer, so my heart jumps in my chest with excited anticipation.
She swallows but doesn’t say anything. Instead, she leans forward and presses her lips to mine, her hands framing my face. It’s not a kiss filled with physical need, but I can feel the emotional longing. When she leans back, disconnecting the kiss, she says, “I don’t want to be without you.”
Her words hit me like a punch, a calibration of my feelings with hers. It makes me groan, and with my hand wrapped around the back of her neck, I pull her back to me to communicate all my feelings with physical connection.
But she presses a hand against my chest, and with an understanding smile, says, “Wait. Let me finish.”
I tilt my head, pressing my forehead to hers. “Hurry up, Hannah.”
She giggles. “I need time to think, and your kisses steal my thoughts.”
I hum and press my mouth to her collarbone. “Patience isn’t my virtue. But okay.” I press more small kisses against her skin, loving that she tilts her head so I can access more, letting my fingers drift across the skin of her thigh.
“I was a little worried we were moving too fast,” she says. “Not physically or anything, but emotionally. It was a little like that with Sebastian.”
I stop kissing her and sit up, trying to meet her gaze in the dark. “I don’t want what we have to resemble what it was like with him at all. That’s–”
She shakes her head and presses fingertips to my mouth. “No. Let me finish. With him it was like this explosion of feeling all at once, like an emotion overload. He was always saying we were soulmates, and I remember doubting it, but never forcing myself to look too closely at the doubt.”
“Where are you going with this, Han?” Her words have my heart pulsing with heavy beats of concern.
Her fingertips smooth pieces of hair from my skin, and her eyes following the movement. “At first, when we reconnected, my feelings felt so big—like that. It worried me. I thought maybe I was making more of what I feel for you than it was.”
“Please let there be a ‘but’ in there.”
She makes a soft, mirthful noise. “But I realized something today.”
“What was that?”
“You were never a stranger.” She leans forward and kisses my cheek. “You’ve been in my life since kindergarten. And maybe we lost contact for a little while–”
“Like the telescope in space?” I kiss her again and linger there.
She smiles against my mouth. “Yes. But we’ve traveled back into range.”
I wrap my arms around her and rest my face in the space of her neck. “Hannah–”
She pulls my face away so she can look at me. I wonder what she sees in the dark of my car. I’m seeing her bright eyes, shiny and dark in the light beyond the car. “I love your dimples,” she says, then kisses one side of my mouth.
“And?”
She kisses the other side. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she says and smiles. I know she’s blushing. “It’s just that, I need you to know how happy I am. Right now. How these last weeks feel like rediscovering myself and who I once was, only now also who I’m meant to be.”
I grasp her face. “I know exactly what you mean. Exactly,” I whisper and press a kiss to her mouth. Then another. And another, until we’re both struggling to get closer in my car. I slide my hand up her thigh, under the hem of her short dress to her hip, the lace of her panties imprinting my palm. I want them gone.
She squirms against me, a gasp of breath when my fingers trail the skin over her stomach at the edge of her panties.
“I want you, Hannah.” I slip my fingers under the lace waistband, sliding over her hot skin until I’m touching the core of her, the soft spot that makes her grab hold of my shoulders and moan, “yes.”
“You feel so good,” I tell her. She’s hot and wet. “So good,” I murmur and use my hand to make her gasp my name. She wiggles against me, and I use my mouth to swallow the sounds, taking them into my soul.
“Seth,” she says against my lips, gasping, mewling, her fingertips digging into the skin under my shirt. “That feels–”
But I know how it feels. Good. She draws in a breath, tilts her hips against my hand, and tells me she’s coming, which I can feel as her body tightens around my fingers. I kiss her harder, needing her, needing this. Then she wilts, curling in against me, depleted but smiling. “Oh my god,” she says, her forehead against my shoulder. After she catches her breath, she kisses my neck, and between each kiss says, “Come up. Stay with me.”
“I’m not sure I can walk yet,” I smile. “I’m fucking hard as a rock.
She giggles as lights from a car outside illuminate the darkness around us. A loud rumble, indicative of a muscle car, accompanies the light. Hannah’s smile freezes as she breaks apart from me and tracks the slow-moving vehicle moving through the lot.
She sinks against me like she’s hiding. “Sebastian,” she whispers.
I look out my rearview, expecting to see Sebastian standing there, but I can’t see anything but the illuminated landscape in the mirror. “What? Are you serious?”
She nods. “That’s his car.” Then, as if we’re sixteen and caught by our parents, she adjusts her clothing and slides back into the passenger side of the car. It stabs my heart and fills me with annoyance.
The car stops right behind my car. Then it sits, rumbling.
My annoyance blooms into anger.
I’m not sure if Sebastian knows Hannah and I are sitting in the car, or if he’s just waiting there, looking up at Hannah’s apartment.
But I’m angry. Angry at the whole situation. Angry that this guy is stalking her. Angry at Hannah acting like what we have is something to feel guilty about. Angry about Sebastian fucking up what’s happening between us.
I snap. “This is fucking stupid and needs to stop.” I reach for the handle to my door, but Hannah lurches over the center console and grabs my arm.
“No. Please, don’t.”
I’m not sure why this adds to my anger, but it does. I can’t decide if it’s Hannah afraid for me or afraid for Sebastian. Maybe the fragile part of me thinks she doesn’t believe in me. Or maybe it’s the Cro-Magnon man feeling territorial. Or maybe it’s a seed of doubt that whatever Hannah has with Sebastian isn’t over, and I’m caught in a triangle again. Before I can respond, the car backs away, leaving the lot in darkness once again.
What do you know?
I try to grab ahold of the lessons, only my heart has been squeezed and isn’t pumping properly. Rational thoughts aren’t reaching my brain, and that makes me afraid.
You aren’t your father.
“Are you upset?”
I look at her, but I don’t answer her question, retreating. “I’ll walk you up,” I say instead.
Hannah grabs my arm. “Talk to me.”
I’ve slipped into my normal way of being, throwing up a wall. Here I’d thought I was so much further along than resorting to my usual way of dealing. But I’m hurt, and I slide back into silence. “Not now,” I say and extricate my arm from her touch. “I need–” I need her, but I feel wrong, and I need to figure that out before I pull her into my darkness.
Hannah gets out of the car, following me. “Don’t shut me out.”
“Come on. I want to make sure you’re safe.”
“Seth.”
I whirl and snap, “I’m pissed!” my voice raised just to the underside of a yell.
She leans away from me, and I hate it.
The movement, the feelings on her face just add to my anger, but at myself. I turn away from her, shove a hand into my hair then turn back to her. With a lower voice, I say, “I don’t want to fuck this up when I feel like this. Just give me–”
But she doesn’t let me finish, moving past me up the stairs.
I follow her up, every step I take feeling heavier. I don’t understand the feelings, but I know I don’t want to do or say anything more to mess up what was good just a moment ago. I don’t want to be my father.
When we get to her door, she uses the key to open it and walks inside. She leaves it open for me to follow her in, but my anger is burning away to regret, shame, and embarrassment. I don’t cross the threshold. Dr. B’s words drift through me: it’s how you respond in the face of your emotion. I don’t know if I’ve failed the test or passed it.
Hannah puts her stuff on the counter and turns. “Well?”
I don’t want what was otherwise a great night to end this way, but I don’t know how to get back to it with all these other feelings swirling through me. I take a step away from her. “I’m going to go,” I say. I see her swallow, and I’m afraid she’s holding back tears, which makes me feel terrible. I want to say something to fix it, but what comes out of my mouth is, “Why did you stop me?”
“I don’t want anything to happen to you–”
“You don’t believe in me?”
“Of course I do!” she says, her arms coming out to her sides. “That’s ridiculous.” Her arms drop back to her sides. She sighs. “When he showed up the other night, after seeing us together at the library, he threatened you.”
“So you don’t think I can’t take care of myself?”
“That’s what you get from this? I don’t want him between us. I just want him gone.”
“But don’t you see, Hannah, he is!”
“And? What are you trying to say? You don’t want this?”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all.” But I don’t know what I’m trying to say because my feelings are making it difficult to sift through my thoughts. I’m just mad that assholes like Sebastian get to act the way they do without consequences. And I suppose that goes back to my father, to my mother taking him back. All that bitterness and anger stored up. “I’m just angry. I don’t like that he’s doing shit like this, and I want it to stop. And maybe that’s what an asshole like Sebastian needs—someone he sees as a threat.”
“But at what cost?”
“Exactly. At what cost? You? I’m not willing to put you on the line with someone like him, Hannah.”
She crosses her arms over her chest, but it doesn’t look like she’s blocking me out, rather it looks like she’s trying to hold herself together.
“I’m going to go,” I say and take a step away from the door. “I need space to think.”
She just nods.
I pull the door shut between us, press my forehead against it, and wait to hear the lock. It takes a while for the tell-tale click of the lock, but when it does happen, I take a step back and look at the door.
With a heavy sigh I return to my car. I sit afraid to drive away. Afraid that I may have just ruined the best thing that’s ever happened to me and wondering how I’m ever going to be able to fix it?