Alejandro

After leaving the gastropub where we’d eaten lunch, Kaya directed me to the closest CS Market, which was about a mile away. I grinned as I clicked the lock for the car doors and fell into step beside her. “Taking me to work, Miss Porter?”

“Ha ha,” she answered playfully. “Don’t worry, Mr. Oh-so-long-half-day, that’s not why we’re here. We’re going to utilize the bulk candy bar at the back of the store.”

One consistent thing in all American CS Markets was the wall of self-serve candy. My father and Uncle Quino had originally implemented it in a dozen stores at the suggestion of one of our American product-placement executives. Once they saw how popular it was, the feature had gone into the entire chain across the United States.

“Ah,” I laughed as we walked through the sliding doors into the store, “I didn’t realize when you said you wanted to stock up that you meant from the store. You know there’s candy at the movie theater, right?”

She’d been in the process of pulling out a cart, but she stopped dead in her tracks, clutching her chest as she turned to me in horror. “Alejandro! No. You never, ever buy the candy at the theater. It’s like a bazillion percent markup. The same small box of candy that would set me back a buck over at the Dollar Store costs me six at the theater. That just doesn’t sit well with me. There’s nothing I can do about the five-dollar soda or the ten-dollar tub of popcorn—can’t very well lug in a fountain soda of my own and warm theater popcorn with a load of butter is magical—but I haven’t bought candy from the concession stand since I was a little girl, and Dean taught me about bringing my own. It’s why I have a purse,” she said.

I bit back a laugh when she gestured to the white handbag with ice cream cone accents that she’d just set down in the front of the cart. “Besides,” she continued, “at the theater, I don’t get to create my own chocolate mix. Here, I do. Trust me—it’s the best thing ever. Follow me?”

I’d have followed her anywhere. “Of course. Let’s do this.”

She started walking the cart with great purpose toward the back of the store. “The cart’s overkill though, right?” I teased.

Kaya laughed as she continued walking. “Well, I’m certainly not going to fill it to the brim with candy if that’s what you’re asking.”

When she looked over at me, I raised an eyebrow.

“I just prefer carts,” she shrugged. “I figure if anyone gets in my way I can just run them down.”

There was something so unbelievably free and fun about Kaya Porter. She had no artifice—she came as she was, no attempts to change who she was according to the people she was with. I’d spent a lifetime weeding out people who treated me differently because of my family’s wealth. That she was genuine was so damn amazing I could hardly wrap my mind around it. Even the way she ate and enjoyed her food without care for what I’d think was refreshing. She’d been right in the restaurant—I was used to women who nibbled on a chicken salad and swore they were full. It had gone on for so long that I’d stopped seeing just how ridiculous and fake it was. Kaya had me feeling fully engaged with another person—one who wasn’t family or a very close friend—for the first time ever.

She looked back over her shoulder and caught the way my eyebrows rose as she picked up three of the empty candy bags and opened them. “Don’t worry,” she snickered, “I’m not trying to give us both diabetes.”

I pretended to wipe sweat from my brow. “You had me on the ropes there for a second.”

Kaya laughed as she turned back to the wall of candy. It was interesting to observe the way she worked through the automated candy wall, pressing buttons and holding the bag under individual dispensers. She didn’t go overboard, but she did get a good selection of chocolate, asking me for my preferences as she filled it up. When she was finished, she handed the bag over to me. “Can you close this off?”

I nodded and took the bag from her, folding it down and sealing it shut while she filled her second and third bags with watermelon and apple Jolly Ranchers, one flavor in each bag. Those bags she loaded to capacity before sealing them shut.

“Want to tell me again that you’re not trying to put us into a sugar coma?”

She snorted as she set the bags down in the cart. “Those aren’t all for the movie. I’m addicted to Jolly Ranchers, and I always have some with me. What about you—what are your favorite sweets?”

My mouth watered just thinking of them, so I made a mental note to tell my mother to bring some along with her. “The candies from La Colmena back home. You have not tasted heaven until one of their lavender or marshmallow flavored candies is dissolving in your mouth,” I laughed. “My mamá buys them in bulk because we all love them so much. They are handmade, and you can tell. When I want chocolate or pastries, I stop in at Chocofiro. You would love it there because it is like a wonderland. In my opinion, you have not known true food love until you’ve been to Spain. Our cuisine is the best in the world.”

I was inordinately proud of my home country. Always had been and always would be. I adored America, but Spain was home. The sights, scents, and tastes were all the things I loved most.

She smiled as she began rolling the cart toward the front of the store so that we could check out. “Believe it or not, Spain is the number one place Emery and I have always wanted to visit. There and Paris. Some day when she isn’t filming, we’ll make it happen.”

“Why Spain?” I asked, curious. Whatever the reason was it worked for me. If I had my way, she’d be seeing a lot of Spain in the very near future.

She blushed as she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “It’s dumb.”

“I’m learning that when you try to divert, you claim something is dumb, and I know it’s because something has embarrassed you. That just makes me want to know more.”

I watched as she struggled not to laugh. “Fine,” she conceded after a few more seconds. “We wanted to go because Enrique Iglesias was born in Madrid.”

I waited for her to expand on that statement but no further explanation came. “So you planned to hunt him down?” I hate to admit that for half a second I was a tad worried that maybe she was obsessed with a celebrity. I’d deal with it—I wasn’t letting her go for anything—but I was a little freaked out because I’d been so sure that she was normal.

“Don’t worry, Jerry,” she snorted, “you haven’t stumbled into a stalker-type situation. We were teenagers with big dreams of doing choreography for his tour dancers. I’ll admit that maybe there was a pipe dream or two that one of us would wind up marrying him, but we were realistic enough to know that the fact that he’s been with Anna Kournikova for a hundred years made it highly unlikely. It isn’t like either of us planned to track him down and kidnap him Annie Wilkes style.”

“Thank God,” I laughed. “I was really worried about being tied to a bed and hobbled to get me to agree to take you to meet him after you found out that the CS Markets are sponsoring his current tour.”

She rolled her eyes at me before turning as the person in front of her moved forward in the line, allowing Kaya to set the three bags of candy on the conveyor belt. When she looked back at me, her smile was a little smug. “I’ve already met him. He survived the encounter and left safe and sound. I didn’t even try to tag him,” she joked.

“You met him?”

“Emery got us backstage for the opening night in Miami a few months ago. We didn’t tell him about our choreography dreams, but we did get a few pictures. It was nice—and totally sane.”

There was no bite to her voice, but I still felt like shit. “I’m sorry, Kaya. I didn’t mean—”

She waved me off. “It’s not a big deal,” she assured me. “Don’t worry about it.”

The thing was that I did worry about it. I didn’t want to insult or alienate her in any way, and I wasn’t happy that my past experiences had made me question her for even a moment. That wasn’t fair to her. I vowed then and there to leave my issues where they belonged—in the past. I knew Kaya was different—had known it since the moment I met her. She wasn’t my past—she was my future. I had to remember that.

The subject was dropped when she stepped forward to the cashier because it was her turn. I watched as she reached into her purse and pulled something out at the same time the cashier asked her if she had a store loyalty card. Kaya nodded her head and fidgeted with whatever was in front of her until she found what she wanted. I chuckled when she handed a fat keyring of loyalty cards to the checker, the CS Markets card singled out to be scanned. It was clear that if a loyalty card was available, Kaya had it.

I reached into my jeans and extracted my wallet only to tuck it back in again when Kaya gave me the stink-eye. Without a doubt, I knew she would be annoyed if I tried to pay and I didn’t want that. She’d allowed me to pay for lunch only after I insisted that I had to since I’d invited her.

Later she grudgingly conceded and let me pay for her movie ticket, but she insisted on covering the ridiculous bill at the concession stand for our two sodas and the bucket of popcorn we got. She wasn’t kidding when she said she liked butter, either. Watching her maneuver the pump up and down on the butter at the self-serve kiosk was damn near my undoing.

Until Kaya, going to the movies with a girl had never been a turn-on. All that changed when we were side-by-side watching The Breakfast Club. After she’d untied the long-sleeved shirt at her waist and put it on over her dress, she sat down and got comfortable. I wanted nothing more than to touch her in some way, so I settled for slinging my arm over the back of her seat. I spent most of the movie surreptitiously leaning in closer to enjoy her cotton-candy perfume. I wanted to bury my face against her neck and breathe it in for hours because it was that damn good. Instead of giving in to that desire I held myself in check and enjoyed the moment. With Kaya things were unfolding slowly—but I was damn sure that she was worth the wait.