Sixty Days (16 page)

“Shut up! You d
o not, DO NOT, ever talk about us having sex in front of my grandmother, my mother, and your mother. Never. Ever. Ever. Get it in your head, Vega!” He laughs at my outburst.

“You are so cute when you ge
t all flustered and embarrassed,” he says moving our joined hands towards his mouth and kissing mine.

“
Whatever,” I gripe.

“I love you, my heaven.”

“Right back at ya, Dimps. With all my being, never forget.”

To say this hotel is ahmahzing is putting it mildly.
Yes, I just said ‘ahmahzing’, and I’ll keep saying it because I’m pretty sure I just landed in heaven. And this is just the freaking lobby. I’m just in awe.

“Pretty amazing, huh?” Mickey whispers in my ear after he sees me eying everything
with my mouth almost open.

“You can say that again,
” I tell him, almost breathless. He chuckles at my reaction.

The hotel looks more like a villa, which is pretty kick ass. The lobby is pretty
amazing, but what has me enthralled is the floor to ceiling windows with a breathtaking view of one of the biggest lakes in Florida. With a view like that, I may never want to leave this place.

We get our keys
from the front desk and head up to our room. My amazing boyfriend even managed to get us the honeymoon suite. When we get to our room we are pleased to find a cart full of strawberries and chocolate, compliments of the hotel. As Mickey sets the bag, on the floor, I’m reminded of the conversation I had with my mom yesterday. No better time than the present.

“This is amazing,
Mickey, thank you so much for this,” I say, starting the conversation off lightly.

“You’re more than welcome, my heaven.  But
, it’s not fair for me to take all the credit. Our two crazy ladies had a lot to do with this,” he says. I add a mental note to thank them later.

“Figures…” I practically mutter.

“Something’s up with you. What is it? You don’t really like this, do you?” He furrows his brows, looking concerned and worried.

“No, it’s no
t that. I love this, I love you,” I say taking a seat on the sofa across from us.

“And
, I love you, too. Which is how I know that look on your beautiful face says you’ve got something that’s bothering you. We promised once to never censor our feelings, so tell me, baby,” he says joining me in the sofa.

I move so I’m facing him and he does the same. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation I had wit
h my mom yesterday.” He nods, encouraging me to continue. “I told her that I would choose you over them without even blinking,” I say, which he already knew. “No matter— no matter what people have been saying about you throughout the years,” I blurt.

He nods, but
remains silent. After what feels like forever, he finally speaks up. “Would it—” he clears his throat, “would it change things with us if it were true?” I can see pain and worry written in his eyes.

“No, of course not,” I quickly
assure him. “I love you, Mickey. You know that better than anyone. And, by loving you, it means that I also know every inch of your heart and body. I know you’re not that person. Even if you were at one point…no, it would never change things with us,” I say, he nods. “But, I need to know if it’s true. Did you really deal drugs in high school? Were you high on LSD the night…the night of the accident?” I finally ask the question that has been weighing heavily on my chest for a while now.

“You know, I’ve been wondering
how long it would take you to finally ask me these things. Do you really think I would do those things, Laylah?” he asks with a painful look.

“The man
I love would never do those things. The man that Lola raised, wouldn’t do them either. So, no, I don’t think you did,” I tell him, seeing some of the pain lifting from his beautiful eyes. But, I can still see the ghosts that haunt him lying right under the surface.

“I’ve never been a drug dealer, Lai. I’ve never even touched the stuff. I had my mind set on my baseball career
and I wasn’t just going to let that shit ruin it for me. But, in the end, I guess it still did, no matter how much I avoided it. I wasn’t driving that night, Lai” he confesses.

A
couple of days after high school graduation, Mickey and a few of his friends went to a graduation party at some football player’s house. Mickey used to play baseball. He was so good, in fact, a college scout approached him after a playoff game and offered him full scholarship with the promise of a professional career in the future. It had always been his dream. Sure he loves working with cars and fixing them, but baseball had always been his focus.

Anyway,
on the way home from the party, they were involved in an awful car accident. Two of his friends were pronounced dead at the scene. Mickey and some other guy got out safe. Well, not really safe, but alive.

Mickey broke a few bones in his le
g and hit his head pretty badly, while the other survivor had some internal damage and bleeding due to his seatbelt. The police report had said that the guys were high on LSD and that Mickey was the one driving. At least, that’s the story I’ve always been told. He was branded a killer, blamed for the deaths of two passengers. Some have even gone as far as to protest the fact that he wasn’t charged with manslaughter. I’ve always wondered about that, why he wouldn’t be charged with their death. I guess, I finally got my answer.

“What do you mean, you weren’t driving?” I ask after his words settle in.

He lets out a breath and starts with his story, “My buddy, Jake, was driving that night. The EMT’s pronounced him dead at the wheel. I knew they had taken the drugs, but it had been a few hours, so I just assumed he was okay. I was drinking that night and I wasn’t in any shape to drive, so when he told me he was fine, I believed him. But, I should have known, I shouldn’t have let any of us drive that night,” he says full of remorse.

“It’s not y
our fault, baby,” I say rubbing my hand up and down his back, soothing him.

“You should
have seen how wrecked that car looked. If it were truly me who was driving, I wouldn’t be here right now. I wouldn’t have survived it,” he admits. “I didn’t want his parents to find out that their perfect son was the one who caused the accident. So, when the police arrived, I told them to blame me; to say I was the one driving. I already had a bad reputation, so it wouldn’t be hard to believe. At first, Jake’s parents hated me, even went as far as to try to press charges against me. But, the police denied their request. When they asked why, the police told them the truth.

“They were broken at first
, but ended up thanking me for keeping their sons good image. Unfortunately, things got even worse for me. The doctor told me that I would never be able to play professionally.  I could still play, but it wouldn’t be the same. I lost my scholarship due to the accident anyway, so it really didn’t matter whether I played or not. People started hating me for not paying for what they thought I did; I was getting harassed whenever I would leave the house, receiving hate filled letters saying that I should have been the one to die. It all became too much, so I turned to the bottle. I started drinking a lot and somewhere along the way, I lost myself. My mom and Mama finally got tired of seeing what I was doing to myself and they gave me an ultimatum; get myself straight or get out. At one point, I even got slapped by both of them.” He chuckles at the memory. “So, to make them happy, I did as they asked. I went to therapy and enrolled at the first nearby college that was willing to accept me.

“
Once I realized it wasn’t doing me any good, I stopped drinking and found my calling working on cars. But, there was still some emptiness inside me. That is, until you came along. You saved me, Laylah. That’s the reason I call you my heaven. You’re not just an angel, you’re my savior, my peace, my eternity. My heaven,” he says, looking directly at me. “You saved me,” he finishes.

If he was
going to say anything else, I sure as hell didn’t wait to find out. I kissed him with everything and anything that I had. He saved me, too. I was lost and he found me. We found each other.

“You saved me
, too,” I say breathlessly, pulling out of our embrace.

“I love you, Laylah.”

“I love you too, Miguel,” I say with a smile, kissing him on his forehead.

Before I
ever moved here, my anxiety had turned into depression. No matter how much I denied it, this was my reality. Then, the depression got so bad, I had started to having thoughts of suicide. I told no one. I really didn’t have any friends, aside from my uncle, and he had moved. That’s when I came home.

I was getting really good
at pretending to be happy, but Mickey saw right through it. After our time in Puerto Rico, I had started feeling better. Having him show me that he could really love me and that he cared about me, gave me hope, a reason to live. A year ago, I started to head down the same path again. It wasn’t something I could control, but he pulled me back again. Even when he was hurting, too. He showed me that’s it’s better to hurt with someone else than to hurt all by yourself. It makes the pain feel bearable, gives you the fight to push through.

“I’ve been thinking about the day of the
sing-a-long. You sang our song,” he says after a couple of minutes of silence.

“I did.”

“Why did you?”

“I don’t know.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that moment of our lives lately,” I tell him, moving closer to him. He wraps his arm around my shoulder and pulls me onto his lap.

“
Do you ever wonder how our lives would be if things happened differently? Where we would be now?”

“Always. But
, I guess it wasn’t meant to be. We weren’t ready at the time,” I admit.

And
, we truly weren’t. Mickey and I hadn’t even been dating for a year when we found out I was pregnant. I was nineteen, he was twenty four. We were both scared, but happy at the same time. Together, our love, had created another person. We hadn’t told anyone about the pregnancy, so you can imagine Mama’s surprise and horror when she found me sobbing on the floor of my bathroom with blood all over my hands and pants.

“It was supposed to be a girl. She was supposed to have your eyes and Mickey’s smile,” I say between sobs still staring at my bloody hands.

“Mi niña, come on
, let’s clean you up. We have to take you to the hospital,” she said coming towards me.

I shake my head
‘no’. “Is this my punishment? Is this what I get for lying, for wanting to end my own life?” I ask. “Why don’t I deserve to have one good thing in my life, why?” I keep asking, wrecking myself further. I had just lost a huge part of me. I could feel it. Worse yet, I couldn’t feel my baby girl inside me anymore. I knew she was already gone. I felt like I had nothing else left of me.

“Laylah, baby, come on. Y
ou’ve got to get up. We have to take you to the hospital. Get up!” Mickey kept saying. I figured Mama had called him, but I was too wrapped up in my own pain to notice. I could hear the pain and desperation in his voice, but I couldn’t function.

“She’s gone. Our baby is gone,
” I tell him as soon as he picks me up. I start crying uncontrollably on his shoulder, repeating my mantra. I can feel his tears coming down, too. I know he’s hurting, too, but the selfish part of me didn’t think he deserved to suffer as much as I was.

When we got to the hospital
, I was rushed to the emergency room. After some tests, the doctor confirmed what I already knew. I miscarried our baby girl. He started talking about what was going to happened next and explained that soon things will get back to normal. I really don’t know what he’s saying. I just tune him out. I tune everything out. It was as if I had died and my body was on autopilot. I became a zombie. I wouldn’t eat, I barely slept, and I don’t remember saying more than two words to anyone at any given time.

Weeks turn into months
and I continue to get worse. I’ve lost weight, considerably. All of my clothes are baggy and hanging off of my even smaller frame. This is when Mickey had decided he had had enough.

“Baby, you
’ve got to eat,” he says. I just stare at him with my lifeless eyes. “Eat, Laylah! Damn it!” he yells. “You can’t keep doing this! You have to eat, you have to—” he stops and takes a deep breath. “For the love of God, Laylah! We have to move on. You can’t keep punishing yourself like this, it’s not healthy. So, please, eat. Please, come back to me, to life,” he pleads.

“Move on? How the hell do you expect me to
move on when I lost a part of myself?” I ask, feeling the tears start to blur my vision. “I lost my baby! I don’t see a reason to move on, as you so nicely put it,” I finish, glaring at him.

“
It was my baby, too
!” he yells at me. “It was my baby, too,” he repeats, softer. Tears begin sliding down his cheeks and I can see his pain, a pain that equals mine. “You’re not the only one that’s hurting. I’m hurting, too. And, the fact that you look so lifeless and are willing to just give up without a fight, is killing me. It’s killing me seeing you like this. Come back to me, baby. Please, come back to me. You are not alone, my heaven. We are in this together. I need you,” he admits.