Hate Crush (Filthy Rich)

by Angelina M. Lopez

  Staring into the flames, she angrily wiped a tear from her cheek and cursed herself for ever comparing her beautiful boy to that cheating, vainglorious, self-involved man.

  Like an autumn leaf thrown into the flames, all her ache and worry disappeared the instant she heard the rise of happy voices around the bonfire. Only one person had the power to elevate the mood of an entire group like that.

  Sofia jumped to her feet. Looked through the roaring flames.

  And saw Aish, lit by the glow and the moonlight, carrying his guitar toward the fire, fist bumping and hand clapping the people who greeted him, John trailing behind and carrying his little video camera. Aish never took his eyes off her.

  She ran to him. And it was like no one else was there.

  She jumped and his strong arm grabbed her around the waist and then he was kissing her and she gripped him with her thighs and he tasted warm and rich, he tasted like he’d missed her too, and she tangled her fingers in his hair and John laughed and said, “Fuck, man, she attacked you like that bug in Alien. Make she sure she doesn’t implant something.”

  Without breaking her kiss, Sofia flashed John the OK sign behind Aish’s neck. In the Monte, she’d explained to him—because it was only useful if he understood—that symbol meant asshole.

  The other interns hooted and hollered as Aish kept kissing her—wholly and wetly, as if they were alone and he was inside her—while he walked them both toward the firelight. She gave a muffled yelp into his mouth when he grabbed her ass and swooped down to take a seat on a log.

  She stayed straddling him, nestled closer as his big hand stroked down her uncovered thigh. She’d worn her ripped-up jean shorts and a tank top. She’d never felt more confident in her body than when he was touching her.

  “Mi fuego,” she breathed against his lips.

  She opened her eyes to find his sparkling into hers. “Mi estrella. Estrellita.”

  She’d been trying to explain to him that he couldn’t make every word diminutive but he did make her feel small. His demanding hands, his long body, his thick penis, he made her feel tiny and necessary, like a far-off, life-giving sun.

  She put her hands on his face, on those glass-cutting cheekbones, and pushed back his hair. “Where were you? You took forever.” She pulled on his hair as punishment.

  His eyes fell lazy with heat as he smiled. “With John. We finished our rounds then he wanted to hang out. He’s the reason—” He shivered as Sofia stroked his plush bottom lip and she grinned. “He asked my uncle to put us on the same crew today.” Sofia stopped stroking. “He missed me. When we were done working, we played for a little bit. He feels better. And he won’t do that again.”

  Sofia looked up and saw John, a few feet away and in a circle of conversation, watching her. Sorry, he mouthed, then made a forlorn grimace with his big blue eyes. Sofia gave a nod. Apology accepted.

  She knew when she returned her gaze to Aish that John would still be watching.

  “Are you going to play?” she asked Aish, wanting to change the subject, wanting to shake off the weird certainty that, yes, John was going to do something like this again.

  He nodded. “For a little bit. Not too long.” The look he gave her made her toes curl in her boots. “I promise.” They still had a few hours before they all were to report to their trucks at 3 a.m., to start driving out to the vineyards and picking up the grape bins that the vineyard workers filled.

  They still had a few hours to find someplace dark.

  With a soft nuzzle of his lips, she slipped off his lap and settled on the ground near him. She leaned back on her palms and stretched her legs out. His eyes took a long, slow, meandering crawl up her body.

  “I’m going to play for a very little bit,” he muttered. Sofia grinned.

  When he pulled the pick from the neck of his guitar and started to strum, John stepped over the log to sit next to him, set the video camera on a tripod in the dirt and pressed record. The other workers moved closer.

  Aish settled into a melody and John tapped out a rhythm against his thighs. Aish started to sing. The song was an easy and bright one Sofia hadn’t heard before. She watched John as he joined in with Aish for a nice harmony at the chorus, his eyes closed, their voices blending smoothly because of the similarity of their registers.

  The other girls thought John was hot. Sofia imagined he was, in a blond and square-jawed kind of way. But next to Aish, with Aish’s one-of-a-kind beauty—black hair and lightning-struck eyes, long nose and a dimple—it was like comparing American vanilla cake to her village’s torrijas, bread soaked in milk or sweet red wine, fried and then covered in honey.

  John’s voice compared the same way. Talking, he sounded a lot like Aish, a symptom of growing up in each other’s pockets. Sometimes when she heard them out of her sight, she didn’t know whose low voice was whose. But when they were singing, she could differentiate them in a second. While John had a perfectly fine singing voice, he didn’t have Aish’s range or depth. Or emotion, if Sofia was going to be bluntly honest.

  Whatever drove John weren’t the same things driving Aish.

  When the song ended, one of the multiyear workers called out for a song that Sofia hadn’t heard before.

  “How about this one instead?” Aish said and began strumming.

  But John smirked and said, “We don’t play that one anymore.”

  “Why?” the woman asked.

  John looked straight at Sofia. “’Cause.”

  His message was clear. It had been a song about another girl.

  Sofia pulled her long braid over her shoulder, aware of everyone looking at her, and smiled. “I don’t care.”

  “See, I told you she wouldn’t care,” John said, motioning at her. “We can’t get rid of half our playlist every time you get a new girl.”

  Aish had called her his muse. His North Star. Of course he’d written songs about other women. And when this summer was over, he would shelve her songs for new ones.

  Sofia believed that for about three seconds before Aish thumped the side of his guitar and turned to glare at John. “Fuck, man. I told you. The fact that I’m in love with Sofia has nothing to do with dropping that song. It’s just a shitty song.” He glanced at the person who’d requested it. “No offense, Lan.”

  Lan shrugged, enjoying the drama with the rest of the group. “I’m good.”

  Sofia could feel her heart expanding in her chest. It was going to burst if she didn’t...touch him, talk to him. Kiss the shape of those words on his lips. After a lifetime of having her private pain displayed for the world, she refused to share this happiest moment with anyone else.

  She stood up and caught Aish’s attention when she took the pick from him, slid it in her pocket, then wrapped her hand around the neck of his guitar. She handed it to John without looking away from Aish’s firelit eyes. She tugged him to his feet and pulled him away.

  Aish walked docilely behind her through the moonlit grass as they headed toward the bunkhouse. “Sofia?” he said.

  “Not yet.”

  Once they’d turned the corner, once they were out of sight of the goggling workers, she shoved him against the side of the barn.

  “Otra vez, señor,” she said, holding him against the wood by his shoulders.

  His warm hands slid down her forearms, over her tattoo, making goose bumps break out in the warm night. “Sofia, what is it?”

  “Say it again,” she demanded.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about John. I know I said he wouldn’t pull this shit again. I don’t know what’s gotten into...”

  “No, not about him.” He was driving her crazy; she wanted to tear open his shirt and listen to his heart pound out the words. “I don’t care about that. Say what you said.”

  “What?”

  The crinkle of his black eyebrows, the confusion on his gorgeous f
ace, would have been adorable if Sofia wasn’t suddenly horrified. What if she’d heard wrong? What if she’d had a ministroke? What if—Dios mio—what if she wanted him to say it so bad that she’d hallucinated it? What if...

  Stop.

  She might be young. She might be inexperienced in matters of the heart. But she’d been lied to her entire life, so in this—sensing what was real and what was pretend—she was a divining rod. Aish loved her and needed her and she could point the way for him.

  She stared up at him and dug her fingers into his shoulders. “I love you, Aish. Te amo.”

  Those shoulders slumped. “Shit,” he said, and he looked so disappointed. “I know you do, baby. I love you too.”

  Sofia blinked. Breathed. And relaxed her grip on his shoulders. She straightened and dropped her hands to her sides.

  “Sofia?”

  She leaned back on one heel. “You love me?”

  “Yeah. I do,” he said with a sad half smile and a shrug.

  She took a step back away from him. “Is this an illness you catch with every girl you’re with?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head and reaching for her as she took another step back. “No, I just—”

  Sofia gave a resigned laugh. “Or the illness every girl catches when she’s with you?” She was such an idiot. “They touch you and then they give you some cute nickname and then they fall in love with you...” She thought that she was special. “And then they become too needy because—”

  “No, Sofia, that’s not—”

  “I mean, who wouldn’t need all that, look at you, and then you have to break up with them because—”

  Her back was against the wood so quickly that her head spun.

  “No,” Aish said, fierce above her, dark hair framing his eyes. “Don’t do that. I’ve never said it to a girl before. Because I’ve never felt it. Ever. I’ve never felt anything like this. And I just wanted to... I wanted to make saying it special. John said I should wait and do something special.”

  Staring up at him, head still spinning, Sofia realized she might not be the idiot here.

  She put her hands on his hard chest. “Why would you wait?” she asked.

  “John said I shouldn’t just blurt it out. John said you probably have guys telling you they love you all the time. So I asked my uncle for next weekend off and John and I had figured out...”

  As he described an overcomplicated plan involving parasailing and a lighthouse, Sofia thought of the large pool hidden in the tunnels of her kingdom. One lounging night, she’d told Aish and John about the tunnels, about the pool, about the belief that the body of water was the principal gathering point of mountain runoff and the initial source of the Río Christo, the river that sustained her valley. Legend had it, she’d told them, that something dropped into the pool was a sacrifice to the river, would not touch air again until it bobbed up kilometers away.

  Right now, she could imagine dropping John into that deep, dark pool.

  Aish cupped her face in one big hand, squeezed her waist with the other. “I loved you the moment I saw you.” His eyes were bright in the shadow of his hair, in the little cave for them he created with his height and width and dizzying warm scent against the barn wall. “I’ve needed you since the first second you opened your arms to me.”

  His hand slipped under her shirt, and its rub and grip against her body felt like ownership.

  Sofia slipped her hands into his hair and anchored his eyes on her. “Don’t wait to tell me words like that. I...” She closed her mouth, then opened it again. He was being honest with her. She had to be honest with him. “I need them, Aish. I don’t hear them very often.”

  His heavy brow furrowed. “Fuck. I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t think. With my parents... I hear them all the time.”

  And Sofia knew that, had heard “Love you, too” at the end of every phone call.

  He pulled her up on tiptoe, against him. “I love you, Sofia.” He cradled her face. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I—”

  She stole his final love you when she invaded his gorgeous mouth. But she gave it back to him, covered his body in cooed I love yous when she fell to her knees and pulled down his jeans, gave him love in a way that had him crying out the words against the barn wall. She had him moaning I love you after he grabbed a sleeping bag and rushed her into the small woods on the edge of the property, riding him with te amo, te quiero, mi amor, mi gigante, making him writhe beneath her. He fingered the I love yous on her lips when he covered her mouth to restrain her screams, when he got comfortable between her thighs and showed her that her body could do that magical thing more than once a night.

  He swore, “I love you,” into her ear as she cried against him, as she felt—for the first time in her life—the impact of being deeply valued by someone she loved. He held her against him and continued to say it, in front of everyone, in front of John, with his arm slung over his best friend’s shoulders as they walked to the waiting trucks in the deep of the night.

  September 15

  Aish followed Sofia’s brother down the low-lit hallway to her suite, the ex-army ranger moving in that quiet but resolute way that made him look like he could bust cleanly through a wall. Aish imagined Roman Sheppard would bust through him if he tried to follow this path again. He was surprised he hadn’t been blindfolded.

  But the fact that Devonte emailed and Namrita approved and Roman led him to this midnight meeting meant that everyone was in agreement. It was time for Sofia and Aish to clear the air.

  “Haven’t felt your glares for a while,” Aish murmured. He needed banter, anything to distract him from the teeter-totter of anger, guilt, and aching erection he felt for the woman he was about to talk to for the first time in four days.

  “Been busy” was all Roman gave.

  Yeah, Aish imagined he was. Bad news kept streaming out of the Monte. The blow by blow of their fight appeared in the press, the public blow by blow, and recent stories positioned the queen and the Consejo as the kingdom’s saviors. Some tabloids had started a countdown clock to the end of #Aishia.

  But fake countdown clocks were the least of Roman’s worries. Someone had shifted from pain-in-the-ass words to pain-in-the-ass actions.

  Random acts of vandalism had started in the village, with taverns reporting break-ins and shattered bottles, restaurants dealing with spoiled food from fridges left open overnight, and inns managing middle-of-the-night fire alarms. They were stupid kid moves and no one had been hurt, but they’d happened enough over the last few days that tourists and press were grumbling. Devonte told him that Sofia had been refilling fridges and paying people’s hotel bills as fast as she could write the checks. But the business owners had started wondering if an expanded tourism industry was worth it. Right now, travel bloggers were calling them incompetent and unprepared.

  A heart-eyed #Aishia would be a great distraction for everyone right now. But Sofia and Aish had stopped talking.

  “So you’re gonna catch the motherfuckers?”

  Roman shot him a sniper’s grin over his shoulder. “Never doubt it.” The guy was good looking with his dark hair cut short and bottle-green eyes. And scary. He was missing half of his right ring finger and his left hand was scarred with burn. Aish’s calluses from guitar playing couldn’t compare to what this soldier-prince’s hands had gone through.

  He thought of another burly security type who’d been absent recently. “Henry’s been busy with you guys too?” he asked, going for casual. He hoped the bodyguard who protected Roxanne Medina and her family had been, maybe, patrolling the mountains. Or even looking for bad guys in other countries. Anything was better than the thought of him holing up in Sofia’s room. Especially after he and Sofia had...

  “Yep,” Roman said.

  “Good guy?”

  Grunt.

  “He seein
g anybody?”

  Roman glanced at Aish. “Why? You wanna date him?”

  Fuck it. “Is he with your sister?”

  That stopped Roman’s ground-eating walk. He turned slowly on Aish and stared at him. Then he made a circle in the air with his finger. “What do you think’s gonna happen here?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Aish said. “I’m pissed at her and I want her like my next breath. It’s exhausting.”

  Roman looked at him incredulously. “You just gave me more reason to keep an eye on you.”

  “I know,” Aish said. “But I’m done pushing her.” It was a declaration he’d already made to himself after that debacle in the cellar. “And I won’t hurt her. I just to want to help.”

  He’d said it since he first arrived, “I just want to help,” but now he wasn’t sure how much he’d meant it. The first couple of weeks in the Monte, half of the time he had with her, he’d been certain that it was Sofia who had to change. And what had that given them? Two weeks of bad press and angry emotion. The only good news story had been the one Sofia orchestrated.

  She’d told him repeatedly what she’d needed—space, calm, and respect of her wishes—and maybe if he’d given it to her instead of pushing for what he wanted, things wouldn’t be such a mess now.

  Maybe if he’d actually listened to her, instead of insisting that he was helping, he wouldn’t have been hate-fucked in the dark by the woman of his dreams.

  Roman gave him an x-raying once-over. Then he turned and kept walking. “I’m waiting out here to kick your ass if she tells me to,” he murmured as they neared a door at the end of the hall.

  “I won’t—”

  Roman knuckle-knocked the door and then stepped to the side of it. “There’s nothing going on with Henry.”

  Aish glanced at the steely eyed soldier before he heard the click of the door. Then he turned and forgot him entirely as Sofia filled the doorway with her glow: just showered, her hair swept back and still damp, her eyes huge, her cheeks steam flushed, braless and barefoot in baggy pants and an oversized sweater.