Unplugged II: Unplugged, #2 Read online

  I give him a self-effacing smile, which he returns with an amicable one. With our steaming mugs in hand, talking about the progress we made today, we walk toward the group. I share a boulder with Pedro who brought us each a dish of daal roti. With a tummy full of warm, wholesome food and a content, easy smile, I watch the people around me, feeling utterly blessed to be a part of the group. Familiar tunes have me slice my stare to Kenny who’s holding the guitar now, crossed-legged on the floor beside us. Longings explode in my stomach when he sings one of Tyler’s songs. I hug myself, watching him, listening and counting the minutes till I make that phone call.

  When the logs turn into burning coals and people start to scatter for the night, I volunteer to do the dishes. A way to keep myself occupied till another hour passes and it won’t be as early in LA.

  At ten, with my phone in hand, I make it to one of the swings suspended from a sturdy ficus with aerial roots. To a moon lit corner, away from the house. Away from the few who remain outside to chat and smoke. With a shaky hand, I dial Tyler’s number. The ringing sound has my stomach coil with anticipation like a tight spring.

  In lieu of a greeting Tyler says, “I’ve dreamt about you nearly every night since you left.” His voice surges right to my heart. He sounds tired and weary. His voice distinctively hoarse, not his usual husky cadence, like it was overly used, strained. But the emotions it brings, the butterflies it releases inside me. The sweet press on my chest.

  Though all I want is to tell him that I missed him so much I could hardly breathe, I downplay it, going with a tease instead. “Is that a new sappy song?”

  Tyler chuckles. I can hear something clicking at his teeth, and then a deep swallow. “No, it’s literally how my nights have gone since you left me.” Another clink and a swallow. Probably the herb candy he chews on whenever he’s strained his vocal cords.

  “Are you after a concert?”

  He hums a confirmation, “Yep, last night.”

  “How did it go?”

  He chuckles briefly after a short pause. “There were a few thousand calling my name and the only one I wanted next to me is far away.”

  “Where’s that person? Can’t you, I don’t know, do the thing you do. Flick your fingers and have someone bring that person to you?”

  “Can’t do that, she’s too busy saving the world.” His voice brims with flirtation. His chuckle is an afterthought. “I don’t want to upset the universe. You know what they say, Karma’s a bitch and all that.” After another short pause, he adds in a low voice, clear of tease, “Ivi, I meant what I said before you left.”

  My chest feels heavier.

  “And now after not seeing you, or talking to you for over a week, I’m more than certain. Come back.”

  “Needy, are we?” I joke, too overwhelmed to tell him I’m moments away from throwing everything to hell and jumping on the next plane out to LA. My soft chuckle dies to the extended silence on the line. “Tyler . . . you’re quiet.” I break the silence in a soft chord.

  He takes a generous inhale. “Yeah.” Then, “I’m waiting for you to really hear me.” He exhales audibly. “Really listen to what I’m trying to say. I want to give us a chance, Ivi.”

  “I’m listening, Tyler.” It’s a choked whisper.

  “I feel like I haven’t been the same since the morning after . . . you. You’re everywhere. All over my mind. All the more since you left.”

  “Tyler—”

  He cuts me off before I’m able to say another word. “Ivi.” He brings my wayward thoughts to a screeching halt. “It’s simple, very simple, as I see it. What we had is too good to not at least give it a chance. It’s about two people liking each other. That’s it. I want you to come back and move back in.”

  Move back in? I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. But this is . . . “Are you serious right now?”

  “The boxes you asked Eli to send to Estonia. I asked him not to. They are here, waiting for you.”

  “You are serious,” I say on an incredulous breath.

  “Yeah, I am. Come back to me, Kiisu.”

  It seems like we talk for hours. My eyelids become heavy, and goosebumps cover my skin. Chill descends upon the night and I’m shivering, but I don’t want to hang up. Tyler’s voice soothes me like a warm bath and soft blankets.

  “Ivi?” Concern rims his question. “It sounds like you’re shivering.”

  “I might be a tiny bit cold,” I say and let out a choked sneeze. “As in completely frozen.”

  “Get inside. Go to bed. Call me tomorrow.”

  “Tyler?”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “Everything you said before.” My voice comes out softer. “I feel the same way.”

  “Night Kiisu.” It’s tender and quiet and full of everything I want to hear. “See you when I fall asleep.”

  See you when I fall asleep. Euphoric rush prevents me from falling asleep long after Tyler tells me those sweet, sweet words. I hug my pillow, filled to a brim by thrill.

  Tyler and I are happening . . .

  When my book, my thoughts, and even the one and only Sleep with Me podcast doesn’t do the job of transferring me into slumber realm, I give up. Instead, I grab one of the peanut butter pretzel bags in Tyler’s care package and dive into it like a ravenous raccoon.

  “Love. Many translations, one universal intention.”

  A framed quote in the sole coffee shop in the village.

  “Do you have a thing for Kenny?”

  There’s some energetic conversation buzz in the background, which to me is white noise. I’m floating in Tyler Land, snippets from our last few good calls boosting my happy. Due to his busy tour schedule and the time difference we don’t get to talk every day, but each time we do, it lifts my happy a little higher. I miss him even more with each call.

  “Do you?” I finally realize that Renata is talking to me.

  “What?” I ask, tearing my stare from where it wandered to while my mind took a tour down infatuation lane. My brows crinkle when the spot my eyes were honed in on becomes clearer. Kenny, who my stare got stuck on, gives me a toothy grin from a couple of tables away.

  “You do, don’t you!” Renata deflates.

  I spin to look at her. “What, no!”

  She raises an incredulous brow. “Re-al-ly?” She stretches the three syllable word, her accent softening the R. “Could have fooled me . . . you were, you know, ogling him for the last ten minutes with silly, googly eyes.”

  “I spaced out. Believe me, I’m not interested in Kenny.” Or anyone else on earth for that matter. Who could even stand a chance next to Tyler?

  She gives me another assessing scan before turning to her brother. “What do you say?”

  He nods, taking a sip of his coffee, then adds, “You kind of been walking around with this goofy smile and crazy, dreamy eyes since last week. Enamorada . . . seriously crushing.” As though that tidbit somehow corroborates Renata’s suspicion.

  “Well, there’s a good explanation for that. There’s this . . .” How do I even begin to describe Tyler? Boy? Definitely not. Man? More like it, but still, sort of rings too adulty in my head. Guy? I guess. Yet it seems way too simple for Tyler. “A guy, um — friend, I guess, that — we used to have a thing. Well, he reached out to me last week, and I think we’re, um . . . I guess, back together?” The tail end of my answer rings of uncertainty. Hearing “back together” leave my mouth immediately brings back the silly smile my friends accused me of just seconds ago.

  Renata grins, squinting at her brother conspiringly. “Oh, Mr. Ca-ching!”

  “Excuse me?” Shoots out of my lips.

  “He’s the one who sent you that phone, isn’t he?”

  I huff, slumping in my seat. Looking around the shabby coffee shop, I try to figure out how to explain Tyler. I’m not too inclined on discussing . . . him. Nor, do I know how to even begin explaining him. I want to laugh, thinking that they probably won’t even believe me if I went with the simpl
e truth.

  “Yeah. He’s the guy who sent me the care package.”

  Renata frowns, looking at her brother again. Her stare, somewhat tentatively, crawls back to me. “Who’s this guy, why would he send you a Tyler Lee Adams shirt?”

  “Pardon?” My brows nearly reach my hairline. “You went through my stuff?”

  “Hey, no need to get all offensive. It wasn’t exactly like that. Well, it was sort of open and I might have pushed it a little to open it wider.” She gives me a bashful smile and flings her pointer finger in a little push gesture.

  “Don’t make that cute face. It’s not helping,” I say. We have zero privacy in our little room as it is, please don’t go through my stuff, okay?”

  “Sorry, it won’t ever happen again.” She has the decency to look a little repentant while crossing her heart. For a second and a half that is. Her lips curve up. “It was truly tempting.” Before I’m able to scold her again, she quickly adds, “So what’s the story with the shirt.”

  I generally don’t lie. At least try not to. A white lie once every blue moon, maybe. Especially for the benefit of the other person. I bite on my lip, looking at the sediments of tea in the bottom of my mug. A lie of omission is still a lie, but, oh well. “He knows I’m a huge admirer of Tyler Lee Adams’ music.” I slowly raise my eyes to a wide grin.

  “Dios Mio.” She fans herself theatrically. “That man is so hot!”

  I wince. Not the greatest fan of Renata swooning over Tyler. “He’s a great singer,” I say flatly, opting to move on to the next subject.

  “When this idiota was younger,” Pedro rolls his eyes his sister’s way, “She used to kiss his posters.”

  Cringing, I try to divert the narrative. “So, what’s the latest on Kenny?”

  Soon I learn that Kenny is great, but so is Aksel from Denmark. Pedro and I trade amused glances with the following subtext: Renata is back to her old antics.

  “Ta bom.” Okay, Pedro announces twenty minutes later. “It’s our turn to clean the house today, my ladies. Shall we?” He gestures toward the door of the café — the beads curtain leading to the street.

  Cleaning Big Mom’s house is one of my least favorite tasks around here. It comes tight with taking an outdoor shower and rubble clearing. No matter how much you scrub, wipe or swipe, it always looks the same. Shabby sans the chic part. Yet, taking it in stride, we all do it in turns.

  Absorbed in scrubbing the heck out of the kitchen counter, I jolt a little when the phone vibrates in my thigh pocket. Wiping my hands on my pants, I fetch the device out. Both my lips and heart smile when I read the message.

  Tyler: Call you in an hour?

  So. Much. Yes.

  I text back. At the end of our first phone call, I decided to let go of my hesitations. Encouraged by Tyler’s enlightening openness with how he feels about me, I decided to not hold back either.

  Two minutes later another text lands in my phone.

  Tyler: Serious issue, Kiisu . . .

  A beat later as I’m about to send a reply, a new text follows.

  Tyler: Can’t stop thinking about you.

  Butterflies go wild in my stomach.

  A duet of rain and wild winds keep pelting the windows, deviously gusting in an icy breeze. With one candle lit in the center of our room, Renata, Pedro and I, bury under all our blankets combined. We squeeze against each other in Pedro’s narrow bed, where we lodged right after the light had been cut off, curtsy of the storm wreaking havoc outside.

  “I will never survive this weather. We’re from Brazil, we don’t do real winter,” Renata says through chattering teeth. “This is it, this is how I’m going to die. Que triste.” How sad she adds in her mother tongue. Turning to her brother, she says, “Don’t ever let mamãe read my diary when I’m gone.” Which prompts a long and hilarious banter between the siblings.

  When their amicably poking at each other marathon subsides, they each tell me about what awaits them at home when they leave in less than two weeks. Pedro will return to his longtime girlfriend and third year in med school. Renata to her dancing/bartending “career” and to a wealth of debauchery as her brother puts it.

  “What about you?” Pedro asks me next.

  “I’ll be going back to the states, for . . .” For what? For how long? God, that even sounds crazy in my head. How can I explain it to someone else when I don’t even have a clear answer? “To visit with friends. For a while.”

  “And then?” Renata prompts.

  “Full honesty, guys—” I shrug, gaping at the droplets dancing wildly on the steamed window. “I have no idea.”

  They both look at me skeptically. “Um, well,” My phone, ringing from my bed stops me from trying to explain to my friends, and myself, what I’m doing. Jumping out of our little human cauldron, I answer the call. “Hi,” my voice mellows on cue to Tyler’s “Hey.”

  “Did you catch that?” Pedro asks Renata, his eyes trained on me.

  Mirroring her brother, Renata says, “Wow, she’s got it bad.”

  Turning my back halfway, opting for some sort of privacy, I resume trying to listen to Tyler on the other line. The phone signal is pretty poor indoors, but with the storm blazing outside . . . I have no other choice but to stay in and endure the bad reception and my friend’s prying eyes and attentive ears. I walk to stand by the window.

  “Tyler, I can’t hear you too well, you’re cutting out,” I tell Tyler, when something he tried to tell me about Jeremy reaches me in broken sentences.

  “Ivi?” Tyler’s voice sounds metallic just before the line cuts us off.

  “So, lover boy’s name is Tyler? Eh.” Pedro teases.

  “Just like Tyler Lee Adams, what a coincidence. Did you hook up with him because of his name?” Renata giggles amused with her little jab.

  “You guys are really bored, ah?” I say, not letting them go any further. “Now, scoot over, I’m freezing.”

  The room lights up with sporadic lightning and the walls eco with angry thunder, carrying us through the next hour with light conversation and silly sibling banter. Around midnight when our yawns become frequent and our voices heavy with fatigue, we each scatter to our own bed. About to set my phone on the floor next to my bed, an incoming text prompts it to flicker.

  Tyler: The press found out about Jeremy. My people are handling it. Kid’s taking it in stride.

  I try to text him back, but the bad connection prevents my reply from ever leaving my phone.

  I look around me. Pedro and Renata are busy contemplating what to order in this charming, little Internet café we’re at. It’s located in a neighboring town to which we had to drive over an hour this morning. A well-deserved hiatus from our hard work. Finally, a place where my laptop can come in use and most importantly a genuine way to connect to the cyber world. It’s the first time in nearly three weeks that we have left the village. A stolen morning to replenish on basic necessities among other much needed “services.” Renata and I splurged on some beauty treatments. The situation under our shabby appearance wasn’t much better than the exterior. Plucked, waxed and pampered, I lean back in the chair and scroll through my phone for the fifth time in less than ten minutes.

  Time difference sucks! Big time.

  I’m practically itching to dial Tyler’s number after getting a bunch of text messages that didn’t come through last night. And the photos he sent me. The photos!

  With my friends still busy ordering nearly every available dish on the menu, I can immerse myself in my screen with a silly smile on my face. I send the pictures to my email to look at them on my laptop. For the bigger screen of course. And oh Lord, the warm tremor cruising through me, twirling in my stomach. I’m mesmerized, studying Tyler’s face as he smiles at me with a quaint smile, his brown eyes flirting with me from under his lashes. My eyes trail to the message on my phone.

  Tyler: Hope you weren’t too emotionally attached to my hair.

  With a soft smile controlled by my swooning heart, my
eyes draw back to the photo on my screen where Tyler rubs his shortly cropped hair, looking at me with a boyish smile. I turn back to the second photo he sent me and my smile widens while I let out a tender sigh. Tyler and Jeremy both smiling widely at me with a matching buzz cut. Tyler’s arm is swung around Jeremy’s neck, their temples touching.

  A photo that Tyler captioned with: It’s for a good cause . . .

  I can’t take my eyes off his face. He looks younger, his masculine features enhanced now, lacking the frame of his hair which somehow gave them a softer edge. He’s stunning. Seeing him like that, with Jeremy, both smiling at me, longing overflows me. I’m giddy, wishing I could call him now, but it’s too early. Way too early on his side of the pond, and with him still touring, I know his nights are exhausting and how much he needs his rest. Pedro, pulling a chair next to me, has me minimizing the photos on my screen to give him my attention.

  Renata joins us a moment later, setting a few breakfast dishes in the center of our table. After small talk and a whole lot of munching, they both set their own electronic devices on the table and we continue talking while catching up on everything we missed, being isolated from the real world for over three weeks now.

  After answering a few emails and catching up on my friends’ lives via social media, I do something that I haven’t done since that one time I looked up info about Tyler having a kid. I stalk him online. A baffling experience, if I may. I might be more than a bit overwhelmed by the number of hashtags associated with Tyler. With Tyler’s hair, Tyler’s smile, Tyler’s eyes, Tyler’s voice, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a hashtag for Tyler’s flossing routine. The last two, the most trending ones, #TylerLeeAdamsSocks and #TylerLeeAdamsSon, direct me to the world of Twitter. Worrying my lips out of pure curiosity, I skim through the flood of speculations about Jeremy. I hope he handles it well. We haven’t spoken about it yet, but I’m more than positive Tyler will do everything he can to make sure Jeremy remains unscathed. As much as one can while being thrown into public attention, en masse.