19. Ariella
NINETEEN
ARIELLA
GRACIELLA’S DADDY ISSUES ARE SHOWING…
My breath caught in my throat as I stood beneath a cascade of icy water. Droplets trickled down my body, tracing a path down to my feet, chilling my heated skin. It wasn’t the humidity alone that had me feeling so flushed.
A certain athlete with the body of a Greek god was also to thank for that.
I stood there, embracing the chill, surrendering myself to the relentless stream, hoping it would chase away the images of his thighs. I thought riding in the car with him this morning was torture?
It had nothing on seeing him in the gym.
Fuck, every time he was in the rack squatting, I had to pull my eyes away from the way his shorts tightened around his legs at the bottom of the movement.
I want to identify as those shorts.
My groan echoed off the white subway tiles of the tiny shower, remembering when that man had done the unthinkable. The image was seared into my brain for all eternity and was sure to be the material I used for self-care for years to come.
Him in his hoochie daddy shorts, reaching back and pulling his sweat-soaked shirt off with one hand . I’d seen plenty of male athletes’ bare chests, and never in my career had I wanted to lick the sweat droplets off of their abs and trace that cut V with my tongue.
And the abs weren’t even what had finally sent me into a mental tailspin. No, my downfall occurred when he took a drink of his water and then spit it onto the turf. Some sick part of my brain desperately wanted it to be my mouth he’d spat into.
My hand trailed down my body, and I imagined it was Dalton’s palm caressing my torso, making its way toward my pussy. If I didn’t release some of this tension, I was going to end up fucking my fake boyfriend, and that was the last thing I needed.
Or exactly what you need…
“Why do you have to be so goddamn hot?” I muttered to myself as the stream of water hit my face.
“Eh. It’s genetic,” a random masculine voice responded.
A scream ripped from my throat, my hands dropping to cover myself despite the shower curtain being closed. The bathroom door burst open, and a panicked Graciella yelled out, asking what was wrong, right as I opened the curtain enough to see who was in the bathroom with me.
“Who the hell are you?” I yelled, clutching the floral fabric to my chest.
A stranger wearing my cousin’s fluffy pink robe stood by the vanity, wagging his pierced brows at me. He looked like he was auditioning for the role of loser boyfriend in a band that practiced in his parents’ garage, with his mop of messy box-dyed hair that hung into coal-rimmed brown eyes.
It wasn’t that he was ugly, but he had bad idea written all over his tattooed-covered skin.
“Who the fuck are you?” I yelled at him again. He didn’t even bat an eye at my outburst. Like being yelled at by women cowering behind a shower curtain was an everyday occurrence for him.
Maybe it was.
“Viper, I told you my cousin was taking a shower, and you’d have to wait.”
My eyes shot to Gracie so quickly I thought they might literally fly out of my head. Viper? I mouthed to her, but all she gave me was a shrug. I cleared my throat. Maybe my next question would knock some sense into her. “You let a man named after a snake into our home?”
Her lips thinned, and I knew right away that it was the wrong thing to say. Gracie didn’t take criticism of her romantic interests in her life well. To a degree, I understood it. In our family, the women were always under heavy scrutiny from our fathers and brothers; hell, any male in our life seemed to get a say on what we should or shouldn’t do.
It was one of the few aspects of my culture I resented—the machismo .
I suspected her choice of men was a rebellion in the same way that my lack of a choice in men was. Both were a pushback on the cultural normative we’d been raised with, and normally I didn’t give a shit who she chose to be with.
But none of the others had barged in on me when I was naked.
“ My house, Ariella,” she bit back with enough venom that she should have had the name Viper.
I lowered my eyes in a show of apology. “You’re right, I’m sorry.” My gaze snagged on the guy still casually standing in the bathroom. “But I’m sure you can see how I’d be a little bit creeped out that there’s a grown-ass man in the bathroom with me while I’m naked.”
“He was supposed to wait until you were done,” she said, frowning.
“Hadda piss, baby.”
God, gag me.
There was no way this guy held doors open for Gracie. He probably made her pay for his meal.
I wanted to vomit at the thought of him peeing while I was less than two feet away. Ew. And he wore her robe while doing that, too.
“Okay, well, now that you’re done, do you mind? I need to get dressed,” I asked, desperately wanting to be wearing some clothes.
“Naw.” He leaned back against the little blue cabinet, spreading his legs apart wide enough for me to see that he wasn’t wearing pants—or shorts.
I hoped to god he wore boxers at least.
“I meant leaving, pendejo . Do you mind leaving? ” I hoped the look I gave my cousin sufficiently communicated how much of a piece of shit her current hook-up was. The pink coloring on the tops of her cheeks left me hopeful that it had.
“Come on, Viper.” She pulled him out of the bathroom by the upper arm, not looking back.
When I walked out into the main portion of the apartment, Graciella was lounging on her bed—alone.
“Where’s bargain store Andy Biersack?” I asked, opening up the fridge to grab a water. She flipped me off, not bothering to look up from her phone.
“He had to get to rehearsal.”
I snorted at how right I’d been with my original assessment of him, which earned me her full attention.
“I’m sorry we can’t all be dating a hot star hockey player. A hot, loaded hockey player at that.” She smirked at me, and any worries I had about her still being pissed went out the window.
I plopped onto her apple-green striped duvet, laying on my side, head propped up on my hand. “Fake dating,” I corrected.
“For now, but watch, you two are going to fall madly in love.”
“ Ay .” I sucked my teeth at her ridiculous claim, but she didn’t take the hint.
“No, you mark my words. In fact, I’m putting it in my diary.” From under her pale pink silk pillow, she pulled out a well-worn notebook. She wrote everything down in that damn thing. “What’s today’s date? Never mind. Ariella and Dalton will fall in love for real, and this will be their meet cute,” she said, writing furiously while I rolled my eyes.
“Oh, right, because that will go over well with my family.” I flopped onto my back, staring at the ceiling with its exposed ductwork and pipes.
“Sure, my uncle and primo will be a little bit pissed at first, but they’ll come around.”
I looked over at her, narrowing my eyes. “Did he pay you to be supportive or something? You don’t even know Dalton.”
“No,” she drew out the word. “But I know you , and the fact that you even gave this guy the time tells me all I need to know. Think about it, Ari. You never go on dates with anyone, yet you took him when he was a complete stranger.” I pursed my lips. She had a point, but I wasn’t ready to relent. “And you trusted him with this whole charade, too.”
“Yeah, but that’s because I had no choice,” I argued, but there wasn’t a lot of conviction to my statement.
Gracie scoffed. “Please, no one can tell you what to do. That’s why Ricky had such a hard time keeping you in line when we were in college. You don’t fall in line. You stand up for yourself.”
Her words simultaneously were like a warm hug and a kick to the gut.
On one hand, I was proud of paving my own path, but it was also a reminder that some of my choices went directly against what my family expected of me.
“Have you talked to them?” she asked, her voice soft.
I took a deep breath. I had, but every time they called, I came up with an excuse to cut the conversation short. It wouldn’t be long before they caught on, and then I’d have to explain why I was dodging them.
“Yeah, I’ve talked to them, but not since—” I shot up, pointing at Gracie, who was watching me with wide eyes. “ No digas nada . Okay? Not a damn thing about me dating Dalton.”
She pursed her lips and flipped me off. “Right, because that was my first instinct to tell them about your love life.”
“I’m not in love.”
“Not yet,” she threw back, face sobering. “But seriously, what are you planning on telling them about you dating him?”
I flopped back on the bed, staring at the exposed ceiling pipes. “Nothing. I’m going to find a solution, break up with Dalton, and then resume life here as originally planned…they never have to know.”
Gracie laughed so hard I thought she’d need an inhaler to breathe again.
“Ari, as the queen of ignoring my problems and living in delusion, even I know that’s a dumb as shit plan. He’s literally the NHL’s golden boy. His dad owns a team. Like, you two are about to be all over the news.”
She wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t already thought of. And she was right, I’d been pretending these realities didn’t exist. “My dad re-watches the same soccer matches from years ago,” I argued—with her or with myself, I wasn’t really sure. “The man is not going to be watching the hockey game.”
“And Ricky?” She gave me a pointed look. “You really think your twenty-seven-year-old brother, who watches you like a hawk, isn’t going to watch the team he knows you are coaching? Or look up your name to see if there’s anything new about you online?”
I groaned, throwing my arm over my face.
She’d said the quiet part out loud—the only hiccup in this arrangement I’d been dreading besides meeting Dalton’s father. Then, because the universe apparently hated me, my brother’s name popped up on my phone screen.
Gracie and I stared at the vibrating device before locking eyes, both of us wide-eyed with panic. It felt like the time we both said we were spending the night at each other’s house, only to sneak out to a party. Ricky called ten minutes to us being there, demanding to know where the fuck we were.
“Not. A. Word,” I whispered to my cousin as I answered, pasting on my best innocent tone. “Ricky, so nice of you to call. I was just talking about you.” Oh, god, he’s going to know something is up.
“ ?Qué chingados estás haciendo? ”
I froze. “What…what do you mean? I’m not doing anything. Gracie and I are sitting in our apartment, doing nothing…not a thing.”
She mouthed at me, “What the hell?” before cutting in to save me from my ramble. “Hey, primo . How’s California?” she asked, pulling the phone away and putting it on speaker.
Ricky made me more nervous than my dad. It was like he could sense when I was about to do something he would disapprove of .
“Don’t try to change the subject, Gracie,” he replied, his tone softer with her but still firm. “I know my sister. Her voice gets high-pitched when she’s hiding something.”
“It does not,” I protested, hearing the higher octave I was denying. “You’re imagining things.”
“Sure I am,” he replied dryly.
“Whatever. What do you want, Ricky? I have things to do.”
“I thought you said you two weren’t doing anything…” Pendejo. “Listen, Ari, I didn’t call to argue, just checking in. I know you’ve got your own plans out there, but I just want to be sure you’re…you’re thinking this through.”
My shoulders tensed as I met Gracie’s sympathetic gaze. Ricky loved me, no doubt, but he also felt like he had to step into the role of both older brother and father whenever he thought I was straying off course—his course. It was suffocating.
“Ricky, a little late to ask about that,” I said, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice so it wouldn’t cause a fight. “I’m already thousands of miles away.”
Gracie snorted before chiming in with her own two cents. “Ari’s doing great. She’s settling right in.”
“Right. And settling in involves what? Partying? Hooking up? Would Dad approve?”
That hit too close to home. I stiffened, feeling the surge of defensiveness rise. So much for trying to avoid a fight. “Ricky, I’m not a teenager anymore. You don’t need to check up on every decision I make.”
“Well, when you don’t call for weeks and then pick up sounding like you’re hiding a body…” His tone softened. “I worry about you. ”
My stomach twisted, torn between frustration and a flicker of guilt. He didn’t understand why I’d moved out here or why I was chasing something that didn’t line up with the life our family expected. Mainly because his decisions were never questioned, and he didn’t have the same restrictions I had.
“Look,” I finally said, forcing calm into my voice. “I love you, but I’m tired of being treated like a child. Maybe it’s not what you’d pick for me, or what Dad would, but it’s my life. And I’m figuring it out.”
There was a pause, one that stretched long enough for me to feel the tension in the silence.
Gracie, sensing the strain, chimed in. “ Primo , you gotta trust her. She’s doing great out here.”
Ricky’s sigh came through, softer this time. “Okay, okay. Just…be smart. That’s all I’m asking. Can you check in more often too? And if you need anything…”
“I know, I can call you,” I replied, a small smile tugging at my lips despite the tension. “Thanks, Ricky.”
The call ended, but a strange weight settled over me. I sighed, tilting my head back to stare at the ceiling, wondering if there would always be this tug-of-war between the life I wanted and the one my family imagined for me.
“It’s your life, Ari,” Gracie said gently, as if sensing my guilt. “You have a right to live it the way you want.”
“Maybe. But sometimes it feels like I’ll always be under the weight of their expectations,” I replied softly. “Like being happy and making them happy can’t exist at the same time.”
“Ow,” I yelped as Gracie whacked my arm—hard .
“Stop it.” Her voice was firm, her eyes blazing. “Your family loves you—they may not understand you, but they love you. You keep pursuing your life, Ariella, and they will fall in line. This is all new to them; you’re breaking cultural norms, and that means dealing with some fallout,” her eyes turned sad as she stood and walked toward our bathroom. I knew she was thinking about my tío .
I also knew she was right.
“Oh, and Ari?” She paused, looking at me from over her shoulder. “Letting someone in while you pursue your dreams isn’t a form of failure.” Before I could respond, she disappeared into the bathroom, and the sound of the shower filled the silence.
What the hell was I supposed to do with that?