12. Ariella
Chapter 12
Ariella
I ’m bored.
I’m also feeling embarrassed, shallow, and lonesome.
The ongoing list in my brain continues. I feel like an asshole for thinking these things while at such an important family event.
People from all over the world and every walk of life have shown up to celebrate another year of the Infamous Vicente Consuelo. The Elites of Houston mixed with Drug Lords disguised as businessmen spread across the rows of tables.
I should feel honored to be here. I love my Abuelo. Even now, I feel immense gratitude as I look at him at the front of the dance hall. He built this legacy for us.
I watch as he smiles at his four children surrounding him. My heart swells at the empty chair beside him, which holds a bouquet of roses he reserves for my Abuelita. Even in her absence, she owns every part of his heart.
I’ve been here for over three hours, and I already want to leave. I keep looking around to see if I can find what I’ve been restlessly searching for.
Who I am searching for.
I haven’t seen Nero since I made a fool of myself at the clubhouse. I should apologize, but I’m not sure what to say. “Hey, sorry I kissed a random guy, but I saw you talking to Shawny, and even though you are absolutely oblivious to it, I have a huge crush on you.”
In my defense, Shawny had provoked me. My insecurities were evident, and she found a way to pick at the surface of them. She brought out the Don Julio, and my temper tantrum did the rest. No wonder my family was still placing me at the kid’s table.
I look around at all the familiar faces. Lucia and Luca, seven years old, sit on each side of me. Lucia reserved a chair next to her just for Guapo and is attempting to feed him with a spoon. Luca is smiling and looking around at all the light setups. The visual stimulation in the room, the large floral centerpieces, the shiny vases, and the small tealight candles likely comforted him.
Luca was autistic, and while most people saw that as something that held him back, I was always jealous of the way he saw the world. He could see details we never could and appreciate the simplest of things. I look up at the ceiling, following Luca’s eyes, and stare up with him at the chandlers.
Luca would likely be the first of us at the table to tap out. He didn’t last long at these events. A few hours into the music, and he would cover his ears. He was done. It was too overwhelming.
The other kids at the table are Rosie and Maikel, Silas’s younger siblings, the three-year-old Zamora twins with their nanny, and Gordo and Kamila, Genesis’s younger siblings.
“Gordo, where’s your sister?” I ask the twelve-year-old, whose eyes are glued to his phone.
He answers with a shrug, so I look to the chismosa Kamila. Kamila has bit holes into her tortilla and is now wearing it as a mask. She turns to be robotically.
“Genny has a headache,” Kamila replies in a low voice through a very carefully constructed tortilla mask.
Kamila was eight, and like her big sister, she was an artist. The precision of the holes she bit in the tortilla mask is perfectly symmetric. If Gen were here, she’d give her a ten out of ten. She’d praise her for the level of creepy. I sigh internally. I miss my best friend.
In a perfect world, Genesis would be forced to sit with me at the kids’ table. We would be careless about it since we both loved kids and preferred their company over the adults.
They weren’t as superficial as adults could be. Even Lucia and the 5,000 questions she asked me never made me feel like repeatedly banging my head against the wall.
She never cared when I was getting married or how many kids I wanted. She just wanted to know why mosquitos didn’t just drink water instead of our blood. Or why McDonald’s didn’t serve pancakes all day? Which, by the way, were all valid questions to me.
Besides that, Gen, our gang of mini broke besties, and I had our own fun. Fun that lasted a good four hours before they went to bed, and we got the entire table to ourselves. I would spend most of the night dancing, and she would sit with her sketchbook, drawing funny cartoons of me and the men I danced with.
Now that I am alone, I realize how pathetic it is to be at the children’s table. I look across the room at the table where Thalia sits with her husband. Like our table, it’s round and has a large floral centerpiece in the middle surrounded by tealights. They had more tealights than we were allotted since my gang of broke besties was a fire hazard.
Next to Thalia sits her friend Alma, and next to her, my cousin Adrian’s fiancée, Mireya, and Adrian. Next to Adrian were three empty seats reserved for my brothers and Yelizaveta.
Efren is on the other side of the table next to Silas. The sous chef I had met the Sunday the Italians showed up. I check my surroundings to find Adan talking with my father and his friends at the bar. I don’t see Axel or Yelizaveta anywhere, so I decide the empty seats were the perfect opportunity to escape the children’s table.
Finding Guapo too content with the pampering, I double-check to make sure the kid’s bodyguards are on standby before I make my way across the dance floor to Efren. Or at least that was the plan. I’m not even a step past the table when a man stops me and asks to dance.
Then it begins. I am swept away song after song. I never reach my destination because the moment I dismiss one dance partner, another waits to grab me before I can sit down. I never have the heart to say no.
My mother always said the whole point of these parties was to dance, not judge someone by their age, looks, or even height. This is how I ended up dancing with Juan. The man lacked all of the above.
He was almost two feet shorter than me, so I opted to dance side by side with him to the cumbia rather than suffocate him with my breasts.
Halfway through the song, I lock eyes with my cousin Thalia. I send her a “please save me look.” She nods, and Silas turns her possessively on the dance floor to see who she’s talking to behind his back. I wave at him, and Thalia lets out a laugh before he spins her a few times.
As soon as the song ends, she’s by my side.
“Don Juan, thank you for coming. My family appreciates your generous support. Con permiso, I need to speak to my prima.” Juan nods in gratitude, and Thalia wraps her arms around me.
“Pinche Lord Fauquier was not gonna let you go!” she teases.
Silas follows behind her, watching her every move back to the table. I greet Adrian and Mireya and say hi to the others. I move to the empty chair next to Efren, and a big smile washes over his face. Only the smile isn’t directed towards me. I follow his gaze to Alma and then back to him.
“Oh. Am I? Are you two?” I say, confused, looking between the two.
Alma rolls her eyes across the table, and Efren laughs. Suddenly, I feel gross. I never want to be that girl.
“We’re nothing.” He replies, his eyes pinned on Alma.
“I don’t even know the guy,” Alma says coldly.
Efren glares at her, and I take it they are definitely not anything past enemies. When Efren is done glaring at Alma, he looks up at me, and his eyes soften.
“Ari, come, sit down!” he exclaims.
I look again between him and Alma, but she’s turned to talk to Mireya. Since I have no intention of hooking up with Efren, I ignore the whole thing and take the seat next to him. I just needed the chipotle hollandaise recipe. I wasn’t a homewrecker, but I was a foodie.
“Those egg benedicts you made. They were sooo good.” I begin.
“You liked those, huh?” He asks, his tone flirtatious.
“I loved them! I can’t stop thinking about them. You have to share your recipe.” I plead.
Efren is still looking at Alma, who is very much avoiding his gaze. When she gets up, he lets out a small chuckle. He thinks no one notices, but I do. Suddenly, I feel very uncomfortable.
“First, let’s have a drink, then I’ll get you the recipe.” He uses two fingers to summon a server over and orders two drinks.
One drink leads to three, and after the third, I realize that Efren is a natural-born scam artist. He shoos away anyone who comes and asks me to dance, which is likely to cause rumors among the guests.
I can already hear the whispers around me and the curious eyes. So many bored adults, unhappy with their own lives, held on to see what I was doing. Various YouTube gossip channels worked overtime to expose me or create a scandal. Noticing my anxiety, Efren stands to his feet and pulls me up with him.
“To the dance floor, Princess!” he exclaims, taking my hand in his and walking me to the dance floor.
It’s a cumbia, and he doesn’t pull me in but instead dances next to me like Juan did. Efren is not short, and he’s far from ugly. If I weren’t obsessed with my bodyguard, I would say Efren was the ideal guy I saw myself with. He is handsome and extremely fashionable. The vintage tan suit pants sit high on his hips with a black belt and an all-white dress shirt tucked in. His hair is combed back, and his facial hair is neatly trimmed. It was giving 1970s Pachuco coming out of Vogue magazine.
His personality is playful, and I could use a good laugh right now. We start walking back to the table when the song finishes but stop when we hear the beat—a zapateado.
My eyes widened, and I gave Efren a big smile. No one loves a Zapateado more than me. Efren flashes me a smile back before driving his heel into the floor. I follow his lead and let the music take over. There’s space between us at first, but then he extends his hand and pulls me to him.
He spins me over and over across the floor. His dancing skills were on the higher end of what I was used to. When he’s done spinning me, we dance separately in our respectful places. I am having too much fun to notice Axel striding toward me. I’m thrown off when he grabs me by the arm and pushes me to the exit.
“Axel, what the fuck!” I protest.
I don’t even look back. Who knows what scene Axel made pulling me off the dance floor? I didn’t want Efren to get into a confrontation with my violent-fueled brother. Alma passes by us back into the dance hall with a cruel smile on her face.
“You’re drunk. Let’s go.” Axel commands.
“Axel, stop! I’m not drunk.”
“Axel, let her fucking go,” Thalia’s voice sounds from behind us.
She’s hot on our heels. Axel turns on his feet to face her.
“Stay out of it, Thalia.” He keeps pushing me to the lobby.
“Axel! Fucking stop!” I squeal.
“You know as well as I do, Thalia, if the Cuevas Family gets wind of her acting like a fucking slut the deal is off!” he growls.
Everything happens so quickly. From the time the insult flies out of his mouth to the moment, Thalia punches him in the face. I’ve gone through a million different emotions. The Cuevas Family? I replay the part where he calls me a slut, and my eyes begin to water. Axel stands down when he sees Silas coming for his wife.
“We’re not done, Ariella,” Axel says before buttoning his suit and entering the elevator. I move to a nearby bench and take a seat.
“Fuck him. Come on, Ari. Let’s go back inside,” Thalia says, moving to comfort me. I shake my head.
“Who is the Cuevas family? What was Axel talking about?” I ask her despite knowing deep down what this was about. I knew better than to expect anything less from Axel.
“Preston Cuevas’s family signed a deal with us this morning, Ariella. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I didn’t think Abuelo’s birthday party was the right place.”
She keeps talking, but the sound fades. All I can hear is the loudness of my heart. The racing beat and the sound of my sealing fate. Darkness falls on me. The familiar room in the corner of my mind. It’s a mix of the liquor and the harsh reality that shoved me back in there.
I was getting married.
Axel had come through with his threats to marry me off.
I can hear Thalia calling my name, and I block it out. I can feel her shaking me, but I don’t budge. Where do I even go from here? There is no safe path for me, and my freedom has been short-lived.
I wouldn’t have a chance to prove to Axel that I could wait. He already made the decision for me. Voices all around me call out my name, but I crawl further into the dark room. I register nothing until large, familiar hands pick me up. I wrap my arms around him, and everything fades away as I look into the comfort of his pitch-black eyes.