As Lucia saunters off, humming a lovely tune to herself, I peer up at Damian, feeling the fatigue of today setting in. Before I can ask him where I’ll be sleeping, Lucia coyly calls over her shoulder, “Oh, by the way. He might try to sleep with you.”
“What?” Damian and I both seem to choke on the word, and I stumble back a step, putting some distance between us, my face horror-stricken.
Lucia nods toward her dog, who I didn’t notice had meandered into the kitchen and is now bumping his naked head into Damian’s shin for attention. “Xolo,” she says as if the answer was obvious. “He loves when we have company.” WhenDamian and I both gape at her, speechless, she bats innocent eyes at us. “Why? What did you two think I meant?”
But she doesn’t wait for either of us to respond, and as she turns to leave the room, I glimpse the devilish smile hooking up the corners of her lips…along with the twinkle in her eye that tells me she knew exactly what she was implying.
The air shifts the moment we’re alone, charged and crackling, like static electricity. Though Damian tries to laugh it off—to ignore this weighted attraction between us that even his abuela can see—I know he’s well aware of it, too.
And all it will take now is one little spark to set us both alight.
Logro resistirlo todo, salvo la tentación - I manage to resist everything, except temptation
Translation: We all eventually give in to our desires…and I am no exception.
The silence is oppressive as I lead Blondie down the long, empty corridor, Xolo striding alongside us, and a rush of heat burning under my skin that sets my entire body aflame. I can’t explain how or what, but it feels like something has shifted between us since this morning, since that awkward plane ride with my parents. We were both acting—putting on the necessary show—I know that, but there was also truth behind each of our words, I’m sure of it. There was certainly truth to mine.
Or maybe I’m wrong and nothing has changed at all, and it’s just my own deepening feelings I notice, now that I’m actually aware of them. Since Halloween, those feelings—andher—are allI seem able to focus on, her presence a constant weight around me, heavier than the thickest humidity, depriving me of oxygen.
Of sense.
This feeling…this wasexactlywhy I came up with the No Repeat rule, why I distanced myself from romantic attachment. From any attachment at all. Because this—whateverthisis—it threatens everything I pretend to be. It threatens to dislodge the mask that serves as a shield to protect the shredded remains of my heart.
I thought I could keep up the ruse. I thought I could keep that needed distance between us, and maybe, with anyone else, I could have.
But Blondie isn’t just anyone, and I realize now I was just fooling myself thinking I wouldn’t end up liking her. It was stupid of me to think for one second that I would make it out of this arrangement without getting attached.
This is exactly why I didn’t want to get to know her. Part of me was smart enough to understand if I did—if Iallowedmyself to get close to her—it would be impossible not to feel something. And I do.
I feel everything.
I can’t help wondering…when did this actually stop feeling fake for me and start feeling like something real? Something I would actually want? The Breakers, maybe—when we kissed for my Instagram post? Or was it even sooner—maybe even that kiss in my car? I wrack my brain, but I can’t pinpoint the exact moment it happened, and the more I try, the more I think I was down bad for her before I even knew I liked her at all. And when she kissed me the other day in the library…I think that was when it really began to sink in—not consciously, but enough to get the wheels turning until Halloween sent that train full steam ahead.
And now? Well, now, I’m fucked. I thought I could put a boundary in place, keep things non-physical and emotion-freebetween us, but seeing her here? With my family, my abuela embracing her without question or reservation? It’s shaping a future I never dared to imagine because I could never bring myself to picture a future without Jamie in it. I struggle to still, but…for the first time since he died, a bright golden light is starting to break into the unforgiving gloom of my world, and I find that Iwantto envision it—what that future might actually look like.
And in every version of it, I see Blondie.
“Earlier,” she begins, breaking the silence that separates us as we walk down the hallway. My fingers curl instinctively at the soothing cadence of her voice, and it takes all my self-restraint to keep from pulling her to me, from running those fingers through her wild curls. It would be a bad idea. I told her as much. But that doesn’t mean the temptation isn’t there.
The flames broiling in my chest burn hotter as I force myself to look at her.
She analyzes my face, like my guarded expression is a math equation waiting to be solved, and her teeth roll over her bottom lip, her gaze considering. Contemplative. As if she’s not sure if she should ask the unspoken question pressing at the seam of her lips.
“Just before we left the house,” she continues with a decisive breath, “I noticed a little boy in some of the pictures on your abuelo’s ofrenda.”
An icy shiver douses that fire in my veins, like a bucket of water has been tipped over my head. My skin pimples, the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck going rigid, standing on end, rising in protest of this topic.
Only forty-eight hours ago, it felt too soon. To tell her about this. For me to be emotionally ready to voice it. But I can’t avoid it forever—not anymore. And knowing what I know about her now, about her mom…it wouldn’t be fair to.
It’s time. Not to get over it—I don’t think that will ever be possible—but to accept that what happened…happened. To no longer treat it as something taboo, never to be spoken about or thought of outside of one day a year, like my parents seem so intent on doing. But to talk about it.
To acknowledge my pain with someone who will actually listen.
“I considered that he could maybe be a cousin,” Blondie murmurs in a gentle voice before I can find the courage to speak. She casts a wary look at me out of the corner of her eye as we continue our sluggish advance through the hallway. “But…judging from how we’re the only ones here, and there weren’t any other family members in those photographs, I’m guessing not.”
“Jamie,” I croak, his name foreign and strange in my mouth, as if my tongue can’t comprehend or comfortably form the syllables anymore. When was the last time I actually allowed myself to say it out loud? “My younger brother.”
The fire that occupies my chest vacates the premises to move up into my eyes, which burn now without mercy. Four years of pain stored up, ready to unleash in one blistering moment. I dip my gaze so Blondie won’t see the tears.
