The Hateful Heavy Heart | 18+

38 - Up in the Clouds

Ruggiero

Jace slept soundly against my shoulder. She looked so snug in her blue cable knitted sweater. If I'd eaten as much as she did, I'd be tired, too. She was lucky to have no one behind her — a real miracle — so she leaned her seat back and comforted her neck with a pillow.

At this height, it as we were floating in the sky, the plane cradled in the soft cotton of the cumulous clouds. For a moment, I lost myself in the peace of being suspended in the air.

I watched the clouds until they were no longer white balls of puff and instead stretched threads blotted with gray. And then the sky grew dark, the water below us seeming small yet infinitely menacing. I dared not to look down, to take in the immenseness of the ocean.

Despite how hard I tried to resist peering down at the water, at the waves crashing, and the knowledge that it would both carry us and drown us, my eyes were drawn to the way the moon illuminated the ocean blue and reflected off its surface, the same way they were drawn to Jace's eyes.

So blue, so lovely, so dangerous.

I always felt like we were swimming, both toward and away from the other. Our relationship was fluid—we operated as we had before, when our lives were separate. She questioned me little and I returned the same respect to her. Never had we sat down and had a conversation about how we should operate or "run" our household, not even now that she was with child. But I wasn't sure we needed to.

Somehow, we seemed to fit one another. I'd always felt that way—things just clicked with her. Even then, I dreaded telling her how I really felt about being in Italy. It had been almost seven years.

I knew my father would greet me with open arms, but my mother wouldn't share his reaction. I expected her to scowl, mutter or say an insult aloud—it just depended on how bold she might be feeling—and demand my father to leave with her. If she did none of those things, I knew she wouldn't take kindly to seeing me again after almost a decade of being away.

I hoped that Jace would change her mind about meeting my parents, or that I could convince her to change her mind.

Fuck. Why hadn't I listened to Jackson? He told me to choose a neutral place, somewhere like ... I don't know, Canada? But I knew Jace would want to go overseas. I knew that I could give her an experience she'd surely remember if I was feeling my most authentic. I loved Jace and I was at home with Jace, but nothing was like being at home, in Italy.

Now, if only I could pretend like my mother didn't live there, too.

If I couldn't change her mind, I hoped meeting my parents wouldn't break us. Despite the tender night we shared last week and the fluid move of emotions between us, our relationship sometimes felt fragile as tissue paper, its edges thin and brittle and flammable.

We had experienced so much and so little together—Thanksgiving with Cleo, the budding life we created, Christmas Eve with Cleo, Christmas with her family, Cleo's death. Throughout all of this, somehow the two of stayed afloat, hands and legs and hearts entwined. Then there was the beginning, how first she ran, and then, when fate led me to her again, she pushed me out.

And then ... she came back.

Would she run again when we were in Udine, sitting across the dinner table with my parents? Would she think me too complicated and want out? Want better for her and our baby?

Jace shifted in her seat and snaked her arm around mine. I drew my eyes away from window and set them on her. I was prepared to see her face, soft and peaceful, as she snoozed the time away. But instead her eyes were open, blue as the ocean waves, and they seemed to be searching for what I didn't know.