Against my better judgment, I picked up the phone and answered.
“Hey, Dad.” He sounded happy like he was having the time of his life.
“Not your dad.”
His side of the line was quiet for a long moment before he finally said, “That voice is too sexy to belong to my dad. So, who do I have the honor of speaking with?”
I almost laughed. He was smooth, that’s for sure. “Annie. Your dad’s in the shower.”
When he spoke, I could just picture him smirking. “And you’re not in there with him?”
Heat spread from my chest to the top of my ears and I was glad no one was around to see it. “I am afraid not.”
He chuckled. “Well, will you just let him know I called? I’ll catch him some other ti—”
“No,” I interrupted before he could hang up. “He won’t like that he missed your call.”
“Ahh, you got him all figured out, huh?”
I grunted. “Not really,” I said, getting up from the table and trudging up the stairs.
He kept talking. “Please enlighten me on how you and my father met. As far as I’ve known, he hasn’t been in a female’s company since I was a toddler.”
My eyebrows raised on their own at that tidbit of information. “It’s kind of a weird story,” I admitted to him. When I walked into the room, the bathroom door was still closed but I could no longer hear water running. I opened the door at the same time Hector pulled it open and I would have fallen if he didn’t catch me. His hands grabbed at my arms as mine clutched his chest. His naked chest.
I squeezed my eyes shut and stood still. After a moment, Hector’s hands loosened their grip on me and rubbed my arms softly. I made the mistake of opening my eyes and all of my resolve crumbled. The bad decision of flicking my eyes below instead of looking up at the naked man who still stood too close to me.
His dick was out and proud, curving up and almost resting against his stomach. It was a lighter shade of brown than the rest of his body. If I thought his wink from earlier stopped my heart, the sight of him, the sight of all of him, was enough to give me a premature heart attack.
“Annie.” His voice cut through my thoughts and I snapped my eyes up to his face, knowing my face was flushed. “What are you doing in here?”
“Oh,” I said, looking around for his phone. I found it a few feet from the door. “Hey, are you still there?”
“Yes, I am. And I’m not ‘Hey,’ I’m Samuel. What just happened?”
I ignored him and tried my best to mentally bully the blush from my face. I glanced at Hector. “It’s Samuel.” He took the phone from me wordlessly, walking past me and into the bedroom. My body didn’t follow him but my eyes did. I watched him throw on a pair of boxers and a pair of shorts. I didn’t hear a word he said to his son and soon, he was out of the room, heading downstairs and I didn’t dare follow him.
I laid my palm over my chest, willing my heart to calm the fuck down. I walked into the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes once more.
So, I’d seen Hector in all of his naked glory. That wasn’t a big deal.
Except that his eyes made me nervous enough. And now he knew that I knew what the most delicate part of him looked like.
Not delicate at all.
I threw my body against the mattress, groaning. If only I could burn the image of him from my head.
I crawled up the bed, turning on the TV and climbing underneath the sheets. I couldn’t focus on the episode of Criminal Minds playing, my traitorous eyes flicking toward the doorway too many times to count, wondering what he was doing.
For the remainder of the night, I stayed put. I didn’t go downstairs to clean up the mess from dinner. I didn’t go and retrieve my luggage from where it still sat by the couch in the living room. I was too much of a coward to face Hector.
Long after the episodes of Criminal Minds ended and the infomercials started, I laid on the bed, with the TV on mute, staring at the doorway, convinced he would walk through at any moment. I strained my ears to listen for him, but I couldn’t detect a thing. Was he working out his frustrations in the gym? Was he cleaning up from our dinner? Did he leave? Or worse, had he decided to sleep down there?
Ever since that night he woke me up from my nightmare and I asked him to stay, he slept beside me. Always at the edge of the bed, making sure no part of him touched me. He always slept on top of the blanket I covered myself with, always getting the flannel one from the closet. I watched him every night until I fell asleep. I watched the steady rise and fall of his chest until it lulled me into sleep.
I didn’t want tonight to be any different. I wanted to fall asleep to the sound of his steadying breaths, to the sight of his warm skin and his nervous cheek twitch because I had my eyes on him. The entire time I curled up on the bed, his flinch from earlier in the night replayed in my head like a bad dream.
The clock on the wall struck two o’clock when I noticed a shadow of his figure enter the room. I sucked in a breath when he moved closer to the bed. His hair was astray, sticking up in every possible way as if he spent the last few hours with his hands tugging at it. He dug out his blanket and resumed his normal spot.
Once he was settled in, I whispered, “Thought you were going to stay down there all night.”
He grunted, offering me nothing more. I guess I deserved that. I turned to my side, as I always did and looked at him. “I don’t think I can handle your eyes on me tonight, Annie.”
His words were a hit to the heart but I didn’t listen to him. My eyes were glued to his face. To his closed eyes, his clenched jaw, and his slightly flared nostrils. “The scariest things happen in the dark, Hector.”
I had to swallow past the massive lump in my throat to get the next couple of words out. “I met you two weeks ago and you’re the person who knows me best.” Better than I fucking knew myself. “I’ve been alone for a long time, so long I forget how to act around other people. Case in point, snapping at the one person who is only trying to help.” Albeit, I didn’t ask for that help, but I kept that tidbit to myself.
His head fell to the side and his eyes opened and I didn’t back down by looking away. This man knew me from only what I’ve dared to show him. Which other than him catching me trying to kill a man hadn’t been much.
His eyes softened and his head snapped back into place. His jaw loosened and he lay there like it was a normal night between the two of us. In that moment, I wanted to tell him my truth. I wanted to tell him just what kind of man Cameron Wade was. I wanted to tell him about my mom. I wanted to tell him everything.
I opened my mouth, unsure of what would spill from it when his voice flooded my ears wrapping me up in a warm blanket.
“Samuel was born in the dark.” My breath caught in my throat at the sound of his soft admission. “He wasn’t planned, obviously. I was only sixteen and his mother was fifteen at the time. We had been dating for a little over a year. The summer before high school. She was a good girl and I was the bad guy she thought she wanted.”
I couldn’t help but notice how his voice turned hollow, but more than that, I couldn’t imagine Hector being a bad guy. I knew he killed, he told me as much. He wanted to kill my father and I suspected he had a good reason for it. “Define bad guy.”
He tilted his head to the side, thinking. “I had a dangerous last name. Every girl, Summer included, wanted to show up to parties on my arm. Kids and grown-ass men were afraid of me. Sure, I did some stupid things like arena fights on weekends. But really, my family was dangerous and that extended to me.
“My dad, for all of his faults, was a romantic. He married my mom as soon as they turned eighteen. He worshipped the ground she walked on until the dangerousness of our life caught up to them. My mom was caught in the crosshairs of a drive-by shooting when I was thirteen. After he buried her, he never so much as looked at another woman again. He warned me about Summer. He pulled me aside one night after I had come home late from some kind of
high school dance and he asked me, ‘Is she a queen?’ My fifteen-year-old self snorted at that which earned me a slap in the back of my head.”
The fond smile that curved on his lips made my heart ache. He lost his mom, too. “And then he went on and told me, ‘Your mama was a queen. There are a lot of women, son, a lot of women who will be interested in your reputation, in your lifestyle, in the money you make. But a woman who is a queen will only be interested in three things: your heart, your health, and your happiness. Once you find that woman, that’s when you become a king.’”
I thought about his dad’s outlook on love and though it riled my feminist feathers a little bit, I realized his theory was gender-neutral. A woman was just as capable of power and wealth as a man was. But it wasn’t about the material things when it came to love. You had to peel off the layers of a person to know them, to love them.
“He asked me if Summer was a queen that night. I told him I was going to bed. A couple of months later, she came to me crying and pregnant. She was scared of how her parents would react, but I wasn’t. There were no secrets in my family. I took her back to my house, held her until she fell asleep and then I told my dad. He gripped me by the shoulders and asked me that same question. It was the first time I told him yes. Because I was a sixteen-year-old kid who thought he knew everything and would rather die than to admit that I was unsure. Unsure about her and unsure about becoming a teenage father, unsure about everything. We got married before Samuel was born, with my dad’s signature and fifty thousand dollars sent to Summer’s parents and their signature, too.
“Summer moved into my dad’s house and a few months later Samuel happened. He wasn’t just born, he happened. It was an event. It was the night before Valentine’s Day and with Philadelphia’s sick humor, they were calling for a blizzard. Summer woke me up at two-thirty in the morning with her water broken and my son coming. I loaded her into the car, woke up my dad who drove us to the hospital. Except Samuel was impatient and he couldn’t wait until we got to the hospital.” He chuckled, a soft smile spreading over his face as, I assumed, he thought of his son. “I read a lot of baby books. I knew I had my dad to help me but he wasn’t going to raise Samuel; the responsibility fell to me. But nothing prepared me for having to deliver my own child in the back of a Lexus in the midst of a blizzard.”
I couldn’t help it, I let out a soft laugh. Hector dropped his head to the side to look at me. His eyes, for the first time, weren’t studying me, weren’t intense. His eyes were alive, living in this moment between the two of us recounting a moment in his life that shaped him.
“He turned out all right,” I mused. I wasn’t sure how long Summer had been out of their lives but if I had to guess it would have been a long time. He didn’t say her name like it hurt him. Her name was just another word on his lips. I wasn’t positive that he had raised Samuel on his own, but the way he talked about him just now, and the way he never missed one of his calls, told me all I needed to know about their relationship. They were close, as close as I had been with my mom when she was alive.
“He did,” Hector conceded, a faint smile lingering on his face.
I fell into a peaceful sleep to that smile.
* * *
The sound of my alarm blared next to my ear. I cursed, grabbing it from the nightstand and silencing it. I blinked my eyes as the time came into view. Seven. I looked over to see Annie still knocked out, curled into a ball facing me, one of her hands outstretched, her fingertips barely missing the skin of my forearm.
I always woke before her. Even before Annie, I never needed an alarm clock. I guess waking up with Samuel for over a decade gifted me with a diurnal clock. Since the night she asked me to lay with her, I set this alarm just in case my body didn’t rise before I needed to.
And I needed to. All trace of me had to be gone by the time those blues opened. For the both of us.
Each morning, I would lay here and look at her. Her face so beautiful, so delicate. Her lips parted, just barely, that small pink tongue of hers sneaking through. Her eyes fluttered close, the skin between her eyebrows smooth, unaware that she’d been frowning all day. Each day, from across the table, I wanted so badly to reach over and smooth the creases when she got lost in her head.
This was Annie, unfiltered. This was Annie before she woke up to a world that had been cruel to her and she’d never forgiven. I craved her thoughts. I starved for any knowledge of her that she would willingly give up. But this right here, watching her at peace, sated me enough to get through the day.
And the thought of that scared the fuck out of me. She was quickly becoming an obsession for me, a drug that I knew would go out of stock and never return. I ripped my gaze away from her, heading downstairs for my morning workout.
I stretched my limbs before jumping into cardio. I started with a slow walk before building myself up to a light run. My phone rang in my pocket, flashing Samuel’s name. I slid my thumb across the screen, accepting the call before placing it against the treadmill and putting it on speaker.
“Why is Uncle Nolan ignoring my phone calls?” he asked bluntly before I had the chance to greet him.
I pressed the button to quicken my pace. I pushed my legs harder and harder against the belt. “Because I told him to.”
He scoffed and I shook my head. “What if I have to call him to confide in him?”
“About what?” I asked dumbly, knowing exactly where my son was headed.
“About the fact that my father, who I’ve never seen with a woman once in my life, has suddenly got one answering his phone, talking about, ‘he’s in the shower.’”
I couldn’t help it, a laugh rumbled through me. “You sound like a forlorn teenager, not a man.”
“Dios mío,” he grumbled, switching languages. “El momento en que me vaya, se consigue una mujer. Yo quería tener asiento en, primera fila, papá. Te he estado presionando para que salgas por años.” Translation: The moment I leave, he gets himself a woman. I wanted the front row seat, Dad. I’ve been pushing you to date for years.
I changed speeds again. “It’s not like that, mijo.”
“Ya te gustaría.” Translation: You wish it were. I reached forward, pressing the button to the highest speed and adjusting my legs to the change in velocity.
“La esperanza es lo más peligroso que puedes tener, especialmente cuando eres de la familia Rivera.” Translation: Hope is the most dangerous thing you can have, especially when you’re a Rivera.
He sighed from the other side of the world at a lesson I drilled into his head since before he could speak. You couldn’t hope for the best, you had to fight for it. I didn’t put it past him to fly all of the way home from his trip abroad to scope out the situation. To ease his burning curiosity, I offered up some semblance of the truth. “Le impidió cometer un error. Le ofrecí una salida de la ruta en que ella estaba. Sólo el tiempo lo dirá si la toma.” Translation: I stopped her from making a mistake. I offered her a way off of the path she was heading. Only time will tell if she takes it.
Samuel was quiet and I prayed he would drop it. I didn’t need him asking about her every time we talked. I had a hard time enough trying to get her out of my head, I didn’t need my son nudging me in a direction I knew I shouldn’t even consider a possibility.
“Is she hot?” Samuel asked suddenly and I knew a smirk glossed over his face.
“Don’t you have a class to attend?”
Samuel’s laugh filled the room. “Sure, Dad. I’ll let you get back to your woman.”
“She’s not my wom—” The line clicked; he hung up.
I slowed to a walk, knowing I’d have to spend an extra hour with weights if I did any more cardio. Fifteen minutes and I hit the stop button on the treadmill, grabbing a towel and wiping the sweat off of my face and neck before heading into the kitchen. I stalled at the bottom of the stairs, straining my ears to any movement upstairs.
Nothing. I looked at my watch to see it was only eight-thirty. She’d sti
ll be asleep for another half hour. I walked into the kitchen, grabbing a glass of milk before taking out a pair of skillets. The plantains I bought earlier this week should be ripe by now.
I was known to many people as many things. A father. A man of power. A protector. If it was up to me, I’d be known for my food. Samuel and Nolan had been well accustomed to my cooking. They were the ones who taste-tested everything until I was happy with a new dish.
I was born here in the United States, Philadelphia born and raised, but that didn’t take away from my Mexican heritage. My mom made sure of it, teaching me how to cook her favorite dishes as soon as I grew tall enough to peek over the countertops without a stepladder.
She always made sure I knew where I came from. We vacationed to Mexico, where her mom grew up, a few times a year. Since she died, I still made it a mission of mine to escape the city in exchange for the calmness of the home my father owned at my mother’s request in Oaxaca a few times a year. She forbid my dad from speaking English around me until I turned four, determined it would remain my mother tongue no matter where we lived. She was proud of her heritage, proud of where she came from and she wanted the same for me.
I thought of her each time I stepped into a kitchen. Each time I opened the fridge or turned on the stove. She left me long ago but I could feel her in every step I took. I grabbed a pair of plantains, setting them down on the brown marble countertop. I smiled as I looked down, seeing my mama’s face underneath the countertop. No one ever noticed it but in every kitchen I owned, I snuck a picture of her into the room. Here at the house, I hired an artist who excelled in blending their art into everyday objects. The marbles, a different variety of brown, scattered to the shape of her face. From her jet black hair to the holes in her cheeks where her dimples always shown, to the brown eyes I inherited from her. She was a beautiful woman who loved me like no one else ever did.
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