I sigh. She’s not talking about sex anymore, I had a feeling she was going to bring it up eventually. Layla and I have been living together long enough now that we’re starting to know some of each other’s patterns. I know when something triggers her back to Giancarlo, and a little clowning around with some well-placed kisses can usually nip a full-on panic-attack in the bud.
She, on the other hand, has an uncanny habit of knowing exactly when I feel like the world is trying to bury me, and that my instinct is to fight back. Hard. Sometimes I lash out, and that’s usually when I have to walk away from people before I hurt them.
But Layla never lets me walk alone. And sometimes she can steer me back to the bedroom to distract me from my worst thoughts. Two handfuls of my favorite body part usually solve that problem, and Layla is usually all too happy to let me lose myself in her until my mind is clear enough to think straight and listen to whatever she wanted to say to begin with. Like right now.
“It would be a simple trip,” she says as she leans into my neck. “Get there, go to the records office, go home. That’s it. Ileana can walk me through it.”
And then, of course, that’s usually when she lays down her predictably clear logic. I press a light kiss into her hair as my breathing returns to normal. But when it does, and the pounding of my heart lessens, that heaviness is still there. I’d risk a lot for my mom. I’ll put myself, my record, all of it on the line for her. But there’s no way I’m risking Layla.
“No,” I say quietly, hugging her a little tighter. “I love you for wanting to, baby, but the answer is no. We’ll find another way.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Layla
There’s something that happens when you step off the plane in a foreign country. It doesn’t even matter if it’s the same climate—something in the air shifts. A smell. A weight. Something changes, and you know you’re in a completely different place.
As we walk down the steps of the small plane and follow the line of passengers across the runway toward the Vitória terminal, Nico’s head is on a swivel. This is the first time he’s ever been out of the country, which I didn’t realize until we had gotten on the second leg of our flight in Miami.
It took a lot of trades, overtime, and basically giving up every holiday for the rest of the year, but Nico managed to get a week off to come with me to visit my dad. He basically worked nonstop for the past three weeks while I did extra credit in my classes so I’d be able to leave too. It’s not an easy trip to be making for either of us, but I’m definitely glad we’re here.
“It smells…” Nico wrinkles his nose adorably, looking around for something, then back at me, confused. “Sweet. What is that?”
I grin. “Chocolate. There’s a factory a few miles from here. Garoto is like the Brazilian version of Willy Wonka.”
Nico grins. “Oompa Loompa? Brazilian style?” He leers at me. “I would doompity-do you right now, baby. Jesus fuck it’s good not to be on an airplane anymore.” Even with his backpack, he jogs a second next to me. For someone as active as Nico, sitting for fifteen hours straight was tantamount to torture.
“Oh my God, you’re corny.” I nudge him in the shoulder. “Only you could make a song by tiny orange men sound dirty.”
Nico leans in to nip my ear. “I could make a lot of things dirty with you, baby. ’Specially after having to sit next to you for that long without so much as a kiss. Who knew joining the mile-high club would be so damn hard?”
Nico drapes his arm around me, tipping his head up to the sun so its light can shine under the brim of his Yankees cap. In New York, it’s freezing, with snow on the ground and another round predicted while we’re gone. Here, Brazil is in the middle of summer, and it’s hot here on the coast.
I’m laughing and blushing at the same time as we head into the airport terminal. That is, until I see the person standing with his arms crossed on the other side of the small barrier.
Tall, stolid, with thick black hair threaded with only a few strands of silver. Wearing an impeccably ironed blue button-down shirt and neat slacks in spite of the heat. He’s the kind of man who looks about six inches taller than he is only because of his stern presence. Who’s had frown lines since his twenties because of how little he smiles. Whose fingers tap impatiently even when he’s not waiting for someone.
My father.
Nico’s arm falls from my shoulder, and I take his hand as we follow the crowd through the glass doors and into the terminal. He squeezes, but whether it’s to comfort me or himself isn’t clear. Nico, my strong, unflappable New Yorker, has a sweaty palm.
“Dad,” I say as we approach the barrier between people waiting for passengers and the tiny baggage claim area. “Hi.”
My father leans over the barrier and gives me kisses on each cheek, Brazilian style, barely even grazing my skin. It’s like he’s greeting a stranger for the first time. There’s no hug, no smile. He’s not a particularly affectionate man, but I had at least hoped for some thawing of his normally stern personality, considering we haven’t seen each other in over a year and a half. But it looks like any chance of that happening vanished when he caught sight of the tattooed, backward-cap-wearing bad boy walking beside me.
“Alô, Senhor Barros,” Nico pronounces, working extra hard on the Brazilian pronunciation of the name that I taught him on the way over. “Tudo bem?”
“Who is this?” Dad asks me abruptly, reverting back to his terse English, more heavily accented now than I remember.
I frown. “Dad. I told you weeks ago that Nico was coming. This is Nico Soltero, my boyfriend.” I know I shouldn’t like the way that sounds so much, but I do. I really do.
Nico’s face has suddenly turned blank. Shit, I know that expression. It’s the same one he wears when he sees cops on the street or when security guards follow him around a store. It’s the face he wears when he feels trapped. Stereotyped. Pigeonholed.
“Nico,” I say, reaching for his hand to tug him over next to me. “Babe, this is my father, Sergio Barros.”
“Doctor Barros,” Dad corrects me, though his gray eyes don’t stray from their stern perusal of Nico.
I’m basically witnessing one of those nature videos when two male lions are facing off. My dad puffs out his chest, but keeps his arms firmly crossed while he stares, unblinking. His sooty eyes, with their dark circles that I get, which almost make him look like he’s been rubbing his eyes with ashes, are unwavering. Nico, to his credit, also refuses to look away, and if it weren’t for the way his hand squeezes mine almost hard enough to hurt, I wouldn’t even know he was bothered. The thick silence between them actually stunts some of the other chatter around us as people look up from greeting each other to watch the standoff.
Slowly, Nico extends a hand again. Dad looks at it as if Nico’s offering him a dead fish. Then, slowly, he takes it, and they commence a white-knuckled handshake that seems to last about an hour. When they finally let go, both of them flex their fingers, relieving the pressure.
“Soltero,” Dad says. “And what kind of name is that?”
“Dad!”
The last thing I need is my dad fishing around for Nico’s pedigree. I’m already mortified by his frosty reception, although I don’t know why I expected this to be better. There was a reason I never had a real boyfriend through high school. Still, Nico’s going to be on the next plane out of here if things don’t perk up.
“My mother’s from Cuba, sir,” Nico answers gamely. “My dad was Puerto Rican and Italian.”
“Was?” Dad asks. “What do you mean, ‘was’?”
A muscle in Nico’s jaw ticks, but otherwise he maintains his plain, open expression. “I guess is. I don’t really know, sir. Honestly, I’ve only met him a few times, and not since I was a kid.”
An awkward silence falls. Nico really, really doesn’t like to focus on the fact that his dad was one of the first who dropped his mother and her kids like a hot potato as soon as he got the chance. I will him to know t
he truth—that I couldn’t care less. None of that changes who he’s become. In fact, it might have contributed to it.
“Well,” Dad says finally, dragging his harsh gaze back to me. “Where are your bags?”
I look down at my small carry-on and the beat-up duffle Nico has over his shoulder. “This is it. We’re only here for a week, so we didn’t want to check anything.”
Dad frowns as he starts walking toward the end of the barrier, where the gate opens. “That’s it? Did you forget the banquet?”
Nico and I follow him, shuffling by other passengers in the crowded airport.
I frown. “Of course I didn’t forget it, Dad. Don’t worry, we brought some dress clothes. We’ll just need an iron, that’s all.”
Dad darts a narrow-eyed look at Nico’s duffel bag. “What kind of man packs his tuxedo in a sack?”
“Tuxedo?” Nico asks. He glances at me. “I was supposed to bring a tux?” He holds up the garment bag that was slung over his other shoulder. “I brought a suit. I hope that’s okay. I guess I could rent something…”
“The banquet is black tie,” Dad responds, not even bothering to look up as he checks his watch. “Layla, I tell you these things so you will listen. Does that expensive school teach you anything? How to read a basic email?”
Nico just glances at me, alarmed, but I shake my head, willing him to trust that I’ll figure it all out. My father said absolutely no such thing. And even if he did, it doesn’t really matter. I doubt that Nico will be the only one to show up in a suit instead of a tux.
We walk around to the other side of the barrier, and I set down my bag, ready, finally to embrace my father the way everyone else in the terminal seems to be doing. But even though it’s been more than a year and a half since I last saw him, Dad just keeps walking toward the exit, his step as brisk as ever. It’s only when he notices we’ve fallen behind that he stops and turns around.
“Layla,” Dad barks, loud enough to startle a few clusters of passengers. “Are you coming?”
Without waiting for an answer, he walks out of the airport. I take a deep breath. A hand slides around my waist, and Nico pulls me protectively into his side.
“Your dad could host a comedy show,” he mutters. “He’s like a real bundle of laughs.”
I chuckle, but lay my head on Nico’s broad shoulder and inhale. “I’m so sorry. We’ve been here two minutes, and he’s already being an asshole.”
“He just loves you. I’d probably freak out if my daughter walked up with a guy who looks like me too.”
“Stop. If our daughter ended up with someone like you, I’d be over the moon.”
Nico freezes, and it takes me a second to realize what I just said.
“Shit,” I say. “Don’t freak out. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
But instead, I’m rewarded with a sweet smile that sets my insides alight.
“Relax. You’re good. I got you,” Nico murmurs into my ear.
His scent and the warmth of his breath on my neck immediately cause my shoulders to fall back to their normal position. I sink into him slightly and recharge for a moment before standing up straight and turning my face toward his.
“Thanks,” I whisper, giving him a quick kiss. “I got you too.”
“Anytime, baby.” Nico smiles into my lips. “Now let’s catch up with your dad before he drop-kicks my ass onto the next flight home.”
We drive through Vitória in silence while my dad listens to the news, which, in its rapid Portuguese, is mostly incomprehensible. Nico and I just gaze out our windows, taking in the sights. The airport sits on the north side of Vitória, and we’ll have to drive all the way through the island in the center of the C-shaped bay to get to Vila Velha, the twin city on the other side of the bay. Nico and I sit together in the back of my dad’s Mercedes, since his front seat is full of paperwork he couldn’t be bothered to move. I don’t mind. I actually preferred to be close to Nico, even after spending a whole day straight on three different planes together.
There isn’t much to see for the first part of the drive. The green foliage that surrounds the narrow highway hides a lot of the houses lurking beyond. Nico smiles when we pass the Garoto factory and starts humming the Oompa Loompa song until Dad clears his throat loudly enough to make him stop.
Eventually the highway curves into the city, and we start zooming through the hills of crumbling housing that encircle the low-lying island on which Vitória is built, where the beaches and high-rise buildings are. Occasionally Nico points to things and asks me what they are, but honestly, I don’t know much more about the city than him, having only been here once in my life. I know that my dad’s sister, whose son is the one graduating this week, lives in Vitória proper, in an apartment looking over a beach called Praia da Camburi. My dad lives on the other side of the massive arched bridge that crosses the bay into Vila Velha. I know from pictures that his apartment is also beachfront, on the sixteenth floor of a building in the shopping district of Praia da Costa.
“How do I say that?” Nico points to a road sign for Vila Velha, as we start crossing the bridge. “Vee-la Vel-ha?”
I shake my head. “The ‘h’ is pronounced kind of like a ‘y’ when it’s paired with a vowel like that. That’s why when you see it after the n, it’s pronounced like ñ in Spanish. Claro, Senhor Soltero?”
Nico gives me an almost wicked look in response to my sudden Portuguese, one that has me wishing very badly we’d just gotten a hotel for at least one night instead of spending the whole week in my dad’s apartment. There is absolutely no way we’ll be allowed to share a bed. When Nico catches my hand, scratching his finger on the inside of my palm. It sends a shiver down my back.
“You’re so damn smart,” he whispers as he squeezes my hand, then turns and keeps looking out the window at the city fading away behind us and the other one approaching as we descend the tall arch. He nods at the hills that are piled with ramshackle housing that resembles multicolored cinder blocks stacked on top of one another. “Projects, right?” he asks with a half smile. “What did you call them?”
My lips quirk in response as I remember one of our early conversations together on the subway, passing some of the public housing projects on the way up to Nico’s apartment at the time. It was during the first weekend we spent together, just after our first date. The first time Nico began showing me sides of New York, of himself, that I’d never been exposed to.
“Those neighborhoods are called favelas. But ‘projects is just a word,’ you know,” I repeat his own words from one of our first dates.
That earns me a full-on grin, and Nico lifts my hand to kiss my knuckles.
“No doubt,” he murmurs.
We both lapse into silence as we continue the ride—me lost in my thoughts as I watch my dad through the rearview mirror, and Nico murmuring to himself from time to time. It’s only after I listen for a bit that I realize he’s reading signs to himself, followed by the translations in Spanish.
“Praia. La playa,” he says before he catches me watching him. “Beach, right?”
I nod. “Yep, you got it.”
He looks back out the window, taking in the even mix of palm trees and tall buildings that make up one of Brazil’s smaller cities. “Spanish and Portuguese aren’t really so different, once you figure out the little things.”
“They are completely different.” My father’s voice cuts in from the front, and he narrows his eyes at Nico through the rearview mirror. “If they were the same, they would be one language, not two.”
“Actually, they are pretty close structurally, Dad,” I say. “I’ve been taking both for my program, remember? It doesn’t really feel like I’m learning two completely different languages. They share almost all of the same roots and cognates.”
“Still,” Dad says. He continues to stare bullets at Nico, who shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “Different enough.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Nico
Dr. Barr
os pulls the car into the underground parking garage of a giant high-rise that’s basically beachfront. It’s right across the 4-lane thoroughfare that runs alongside one of the major beaches in Vila Velha right on the main Praia da Costa, according to all of the street signs. The two cities, like Layla told me earlier, separated by only a small bay, are basically one big one. Each side is probably about the size of one of the boroughs in New York.
Praia da Costa is on the other side of a giant—and I mean giant—arched bridge that towers over the bay and drops down into Vila Velha, next to a big white building that looks like some kind of church, perched on one of the egg-shaped hills that seem to rise everywhere up and down the coast.
“We should walk up there tomorrow,” Layla says as she points to it. “It’s this old convent. Nico, it’s so pretty.”
I nod. I wouldn’t mind jogging up that hill right about now. I just spent way too many hours crammed into three square feet on three different airplanes. My body needs movement. But first things first: I gotta get this guy to stop looking at me like he wants to toss me off that bridge we just drove over.
I’ve known him for less than an hour, but I don’t like Dr. Barros. I don’t like the way he’s barely said hello to his daughter even though he hasn’t seen her for eighteen months. I don’t like the fact that he keeps correcting and chiding her like she’s seven years old. I don’t like the fact that he keeps glaring at the tattoos on my arm like I have 666 printed on my bicep.
And I really don’t like the sad way Layla keeps looking at him—like a beautiful, blue-eyed puppy begging to be pet. Yeah, it’s taken me all of twenty fuckin’ minutes to understand how a girl like Layla got wrapped up with that asshole last fall, and it has everything to do with this asshole in front of me.
You could say I’m having a hard time giving the guy a fair chance.
“So, you must be really proud of Layla, Dr. Barros,” I venture as we take our bags up the elevator from the garage.
Bad Idea- The Complete Collection Page 92
