CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nico
It’s dark as we follow my family out into the cold night air and start down the street to the high-rise where Alba, K.C.’s mother, lives.
The dinner went well, I think. My sisters were a lot nicer than I thought they would be, being relatively careful only to talk about Layla when she was legitimately out of earshot. Gabe was his usual eager-ass self, working hard to entertain my guest while he threw around big words, trying to sound smart while Allie threw pieces of pasteles at his face. Ma was Ma, quiet and watchful as always. I can’t tell yet what she thinks of Layla. She’s never been the type to trust outsiders, and even if Layla has a last name like Barros, she’s still an outsider.
Jesus Christ, I’ll never forget the look on her face when she followed my mother out of the kitchen carrying the plate full of that smelly fuckin’ cheese. I had no idea what she’d brought for dinner. I could have told her that my family wasn’t going to eat food that smelled like it had been lost under the couch for two weeks. I’m more adventurous than the others, but even I didn’t want to eat that stuff. It smelled like feet.
But her face. Her poor, beautiful, embarrassed face. You could tell she knew the mistake she’d made as soon as she set the platter of that crap on the table. We all stared at it. No one wanted to touch it. And then she turned to me.
“I brought cheese,” she said and bit her lip.
Yeah. I was already a goner before she did that, but I can’t say no to that face. Not when she looks at me like that, dying for someone to like her. So I leaned over, loaded a piece of bread with the slimy blue shit, and took a giant bite while my sisters laughed behind their hands and my brother watched with eyes about the size of our dinner plates.
“Ewwww!” Allie cried from across the table. “He just ate the mold!”
“Hush!” snapped Maggie.
“It’s delicious,” I said with my mouth full.
Beside me, Layla looked like sun was beaming straight out of her face. I’m not going to lie; that shit tasted like feet too. But I’d eat a whole closet of shoes to make her happy. And after catching her watching us with a gleam in her eye, I think my mother knows it too.
Layla looks up at the high-rise with surprise when everyone starts through the revolving glass door. “K.C.’s mom lives here?”
She was expecting another apartment like my mom’s. Maybe something a little bigger that could accommodate all the family, but roughly the same. That used to be the case––Alba, my mother’s best friend, used to live just downstairs from us in a bigger two-bedroom place. But the first thing K.C. did when he started to make some money was upgrade his mom’s apartment.
It’s hard not to be jealous. I’d love to do something like this for my mom one day, but who knows if that will ever happen. Nice apartments usually require all the tenants’ names to be on the lease, and that’s not something my mom is willing to do.
“K.C.,” is all I say, and Layla nods. She’s been to his apartment in Hoboken. That place is crazy nice.
We take the elevator up to the fifteenth floor, and as soon as the doors open, salsa music floats down the hall. Layla looks at me nervously.
“I thought this was just a family thing,” she says.
I squeeze her hand. “It is, sweetie. But this family is...big. It’s a generous term. You’ll see.”
Inside is a familiar scene to me, but Layla holds my hand like she’s about to drown. Alba has a big space, even bigger with her furniture pushed to the walls for the party. Her big table is filled with a potluck of foods, mostly leftovers people brought from their own Thanksgivings. The place is full of people I grew up with. People I call family, but who are really just a part of the extended network that helped raise my mother and, by default, her kids. Countless tías and tíos, their kids, and their kids’ kids scurry around the apartment. Layla watches curiously as I greet most of them with a quick “bendición,” accepting kisses to my cheeks from the aunties and a few uncles too, letting the older ones murmur “Dios te bendiga.” It’s close to fifteen minutes before we’re able to make our way to the far side of the room, where I can toss our jackets on a pile by the balcony and get us some drinks.
Layla’s a champ––she clutches my hand with a death grip, but nods politely at everyone she meets and accepts kisses where they’re offered. They look curiously at her, but she’s not the only stranger at the party––a few other people have brought their girlfriends or boyfriends to meet the family too. It’s hard. I can’t come out and say that’s what she is, because she’s not. Every time I have to say she’s just my “friend,” there’s this stabbing in my chest, so eventually I just tell them she’s Layla and let them make whatever assumptions they want.
Most of the people here are Puerto Rican, which means the older ones mostly speak Spanish, but the younger ones, like me, speak English peppered with Spanish or a mix of both. There’s a playlist blasting a mix of Latin music from Alba’s stereo, and already the group is getting boisterous. Even the line of men standing against the picture windows like a line of pigeons are starting to move a little with the music.
Beside me, Layla polishes off her cup of coquito. “Wow,” she says. “That is really good.”
I smirk, then take her cup for a refill. Alba really went all out this year––coquito, the coconut and rum drink, is usually something we have at Christmas. I wonder if my mom asked for it since I won’t be around this year. K.C. was moaning all last week about missing it since he was hired for a big party in Vancouver over the weekend.
Layla starts to loosen up. She still looks a little like a scared deer, but her hips are starting to undulate to the music, some random bachata song.
I nurse a beer, but my eyes stay on her. She catches me watching and immediately turns red. It’s fuckin’ adorable.
I snake a hand around her waist. “You want to dance, baby?”
“What?” Maggie’s loud fuckin’ voice blasts from at least three people over. “You want to dance? Since when do you dance?”
I roll my eyes. My sister had a few drinks already back at the apartment, and the people she’s standing with shake their heads and laugh. There is nothing Maggie likes more than giving me shit. I give her a rude hand gesture behind Layla’s back, which Maggie ignores. Behind her, Selena covers a laugh, and across the room, Ma watches us with interest.
“I can dance,” I insist. I look back at Layla. “I can dance.”
“I didn’t say you can’t,” Maggie says as she moves over to us. “I said you don’t. You hate bachata. You don’t even like salsa.”
Layla watches our exchange curiously, but stays silent. I feel myself turning a little red.
“Maybe I like it better now,” I say, starting to move my shoulders and hips a little with the music. I don’t know what it is, but something about being here with Layla makes me want to show off. “Maybe I just needed to stop hearing it every damn day like I did living with you. I can only take so much Marc Anthony, Mags.”
Maggie pouts, but she can’t totally hide her smile as I start moving a little more. I’m not a great dancer or anything, but I have a few moves. I’m not doing it for her, though; I’m doing it for Layla. I’m doing it because of the way her mouth falls open as she watches my hips. Just then, the music shifts. The bright guitar of the bachata fades away, and a sultrier beat replaces it, accompanied by the telltale horn section of salsa and the crooning voice of Marc Anthony, the man himself. I recognize the tune––it’s hard to live in New York and not hear this voice. Especially living with Maggie, the man’s superfan.
“Well?” Maggie asks Layla. “You gonna dance with my brother or what?”
Layla flushes, but I’m already halfway to the dance floor, hand at my stomach as I step backward with the beat. God, this girl turns me into such a fuckin’ cornball. But I don’t care. She’s laughing, and I’m feeling on top of the world tonight. If all I ever did for the rest of my life was make her laugh, I’d die a happy man. So I hold out a hand.
“Come on, baby. I’ll teach you how to move.”
Layla lets me lead her to the center of the party crowd, and she watches carefully as I take both of her hands and instruct her on the steps, just like Ma taught me when I was a kid.
“Move your right foot back, two, three, left foot forward, two, three. Yeah, like that, sweetie. On your toes, not your heels. Yeah, you got it.”
She follows my feet, and after a bit, she starts to move naturally. It’s a basic step, much more basic than some of the moves other people are doing. The real experts are the older ones who moved here from one of the islands or who grew up when salsa really got going. Layla’s doing pretty good, actually. She might look like a white girl, but she doesn’t move like one.
Back and forth we move, until I get bored. I pulled her close. Her flowery scent surrounds me and makes it hard to think. It’s been three days of this. Three days of hugs in public places, of holding hands across a dinner table or a coffee shop, of one quickie in her room on Tuesday before her roommates returned from their classes. I’m ready to do a lot more than that. I want to take my time with her, again and again. I want her to know how much she means to me, get as close as we can for as long as we can until I have to go. Tonight is ours, and I want to make the best of it.
“Get ready, baby,” I say.
Before she can ask for what, I slip a hand around her back and twist her around the combos my mom taught me long ago. Ma loves to dance, so she made Gabe and me both learn with her. I bitched about it a lot when I was a teenager, but I’m sure as fuck glad she taught me now.
I turn Layla through one, two, three separate maneuvers that include ducking her under one of my arms and pulling her backwards against my chest. With the last one, she yelps a laugh, catching the attention of a few other people on the floor. Plenty of people have been watching us––Layla really doesn’t know how beautiful she is––but now Ma stops her conversation with Alba and zeroes in on us as I continue to turn Layla around the floor. She’s not sure about Layla yet; my mother is a hard nut to crack. But when Layla laughs, I think I can see Ma soften.
“You’re doing pretty good, baby,” I say as I turn her around some more. “You got the hips down, that’s for sure.”
I spin her out and do a little shimmy of my own. Watching me, Layla trips over her own feet. It’s hard not to feel smug as I catch her and pull her flush against my body. I know that look in my girl’s eyes. It’s that look she gets when I’ve done something that gets under her skin. She’s thinking about one thing, and now it’s all I can think about too.
I hold her waist in the middle of the crowd. We’re both breathing hard now; there’s a thin sheen of sweat on Layla’s brow, and her rose-petal lips are open slightly. Our eyes meet. In the middle of this loud, crazy room, we’re both silent.
If this were a club, with dimmed lights and people we didn’t know, we’d already be all over each other. I probably would have dragged her to a dark corner somewhere to cop a feel, drive her crazy with my fingers, watch her lose herself in the dark. Or maybe we’d have already left, gotten lost on some street corner or in the back of a cab, racing against time to reach the moment when we have to come together, public place or not. Central Park. The bathroom at AJ’s. An alley by her dorm. How many times did we forget where we were, who we were, out of the blind need for each other’s bodies?
I’m wearing the same black shirt and pants I told her about last week, the ones that made her growl and kept me up half the night fantasizing. I’ve unbuttoned my shirt a few buttons and rolled up my sleeves to combat the heat, and by the way her gaze drifts down every so often, it’s clear she likes the way my tattoos poke out on my chest and over my elbow.
She’s wearing a little black dress, one that’s a far cry from her club wear, but which does fuckin’ nothing to hide her curves. Caught slightly with sweat, the dress clings. Fuck me. If we were even close to alone, I’d have already torn it off.
But we’re in a room full of my relatives, many of them watching the show we’ve put on, watching how the new girl, the blanquita (a term I’ve heard a couple of times when they thought I wasn’t listening), is going to fare at the family party. As Layla catches her breath, she looks around, blue eyes wide. The joy disappears from her face.
“You okay?” I step closer.
Layla presses her lips together and waves a hand at her face. “Yeah. I’m just going to get some air, okay? It’s hot. There’s a balcony, right?”
I nod and point toward an open door that’s covered by retractable shades. “Over there. I’ll get you another drink.”
Layla escapes to the balcony while I go to the kitchen for another beer and a bottle of water for Layla. When I come back out, Gabe is waiting for me in the hallway.
“Hey, papi,” I greet him, tossing him the water. I reach back into the kitchen and grab another.
“You were tearing it up out there with NYU,” Gabe remarks as I shotgun my beer. Shit, that’s good.
I nod. “Yeah, she was doing pretty good for a first-timer.”
We stand there for a second, gulping down our drinks. Then it gets awkward.
“So?” he asks.
It’s the first time we’ve had a second without the fuckin’ sonar ears of the women in our family. Allie skids by on the floor, having lost her shoes a while ago so she can slip and slide around the hardwood floors in her tights.
I polish off the rest of my drink “So what?”
“The test, dickhead. How did it go yesterday?”
I glance around, making sure no one is listening, and most of all that Layla can’t hear us.
“I don’t know,” I say with a shrug. “It didn’t seem that hard to me. But it’s still a pretty fuckin’ long shot.”
Gabe nods, but to my surprise, he claps me on the shoulder.
“If anyone can do it, it’s you, bro,” he says. “For real.”
I study him like he’s joking. Gabe’s softer than the rest of us, being the youngest and all, but no one in my family gives out compliments too often. We love each other, but Carmen Soltero’s kids are realists.
“Thanks, man,” I say. “That means a lot.”
Gabe shrugs like it means nothing, but doesn’t meet my eye. Besides my mother, he’s the one I worry about most. He’s never said it, but I know he didn’t want me to move away. It’s hard enough being a dude in this family without being the only one.
I toss my can into a trash bin and carry the water out to the party. A glance around the room tells me Layla is still on the balcony. I cross the room and push open the blinds, ready to pull my girl back into another round of dancing/foreplay. But what I see stops me in my tracks.
Layla stands at the balcony, looking out at the city, her arms wrapped around her waist. She’s not doing it because it’s cold outside, even though it is hovering just above forty. It’s a posture I know and hate––she only does it when she’s upset. Scared, maybe.
“Hey,” I say, immediately dropping the water on a lounge chair and crossing to her.
She turns, clearly trying desperately not to cry.
“Whoa.” I pull her close, sweaty shirt be damned. “Hey, what is it, sweetie? What’s wrong?”
My words don’t help for shit. She just starts crying into my shirt, her hands curling tightly at my collar. I keep one hand at her waist and slide the other up her back to the nape of her neck, cradling her against me. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong, but I can guess. She hides it well, but my girl’s been carrying a lot.
“Do you know,” she says once her tears finally stop. “Neither of my parents called me today? I know they’re out of the country, but it’s not like they can’t afford a phone call.” She sniffs against my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I–––”
“It’s okay, baby,” I tell her as I stroke up and down her back. “You got nothing to be sorry about. I know it’s hard not being with your family around the holidays.”
“No,” Layla says. “No, that’s not it.” She lifts her head and looks at me even while she wipes her tears from under her eyes with her fingers. “It’s...I never had this, you know? In my family, Thanksgiving is a formality. Mom usually hired a caterer, or maybe we’d go eat with one of my dad’s partners. At Christmas, we’d exchange gifts in the morning, and then spend the rest of the day at church. I...” She breaks away for a second to wipe her eyes. “And I miss it. Isn’t that crazy? I actually miss those weird, cold holidays. Because it’s what I knew.”
I rub her shoulders. “Of course you do, baby. It was home.”
She sniffs and looks back toward the party. “But then I’m here. There’s so much love in there, Nico. It’s amazing. And it...well...it just made me feel really alone for a second. Like, I’m missing what I never had at all.” She rubs her forehead. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to ruin your night. Really, I’m so grateful you brought me here tonight.”
She looks out to the city twinkling below. Alba’s apartment looks east toward Times Square, and from here the lights of the Broadway theaters and billboards glow between the buildings. Layla’s face is lit by the glow too, a sort of blue hue that fits her mood. My girl is incredibly beautiful, but she’s also so sad. I hate it.
“They’re a pain in the ass.” I jerk my head toward the party. “Always bitching at each other, getting into trouble. One wrong thing, and you get a house slipper thrown at you––I’m not kidding. They’re like fuckin’ heat-seeking missiles.”
Layla chuckles.
“No family’s perfect, Layla,” I tell her as I press my forehead to hers.
“True,” she agrees. She closes her eyes and sighs. “I do miss mine.”
Fuck. There’s not much I can say to that, and I’m not going to blow it off like it’s not important. Her parents aren’t together anymore, and she has no siblings. No matter how distant or cold they might have been, the family she had is gone. I have the same one as ever, full of drama, judgment, insecurity, and, yeah, love. I never thought I’d be the luckier of the two of us, but here we are.
So, I hold her tight and let her feel what she feels. We look out to the city. Layla shivers.
“Come on, sweetie,” I say. “Let’s go back inside.”
We walk back to where the party is in full swing––even more “relatives” have arrived, and the music has been turned up some more. Even Ma is on the dance floor, swishing her skirt around her knees with the first smile I’ve seen in a while. I have to grin. My mother doesn’t smile that much, so when she does, I know it’s because she’s truly happy.
“You want to dance some more?” I ask Layla, still holding her hand.
She shakes her head. “Not yet. I just want to watch for a bit. You should if you want, though.”
I don’t. I don’t want to be anywhere but with this work of art next to me. That’s what she is to me, and I wish I could tell her without making us both miserable tomorrow morning. Instead, I lean against one of the walls and move her so she’s sandwiched between my legs and leaned against my torso while we watch the party. I wrap an arm across her sternum, and the other around her waist, like two solid locks around her broken heart, and if I’m being honest, mine. It’s already getting late, and my flight leaves early so I can be back in time for work. Tomorrow I’ll feel like shit, having to leave this girl who makes me feel like I can do anything, who trusts me with her soul, and who I want to trust with mine.
But I don’t want to think about that right now. I nuzzle into Layla’s neck, a low hum escaping from my chest after I inhale her floral scent. We are both full of words we can’t say, promises we can’t keep. But what we feel––neither of us can hide that.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I say as I set my chin on her shoulder.
Layla sighs. “Thank you for bringing me,” she whispers, turning her face to mine.
I know I shouldn’t. I’ll catch a torrent of shit about this for a month, from my mother, my sisters, every Puerto Rican in a twenty-block radius wanting to know who this is, this first girl I’ve ever brought home. The first girl I’ve danced with. The first girl I’ve ever kissed in front of all these people.
But I don’t care.
Tenderly, I press my lips to Layla’s. It’s a church kiss, the kind you’d do in a chapel full of people. Totally chaste, especially by our standards. It’s not our most passionate kiss, the kind that makes me want to rip both our clothes off. Instead, it’s a kiss full of those words that neither of us will say out loud. It’s a kiss I’ll never forget.
~