4. nova #2
I lean against the kitchen doorway with the dish towel over my shoulder and I watch them.
Tomás is explaining blue shells. Romeo is nodding like this is critical intelligence — brow furrowed, controller balanced on his knee, giving a ten-year-old's lecture on power-ups the same gravity he probably gives boardroom briefings.
He is terrible at this game. Genuinely, embarrassingly terrible.
And he keeps playing anyway, round after round, because my brother is smiling and Romeo Rivas does not know how to walk away from that.
I see the man behind the armor. Sitting on a carpet with a fraying edge, sleeves shoved past his elbows, ink from a pen stain on his right forearm that he probably does not know is there.
Awkward. Uncertain. Stripped of the grin and the charm and the money and the name and left with nothing but a man who does not know how to be in a room with a child without performing — and is trying anyway.
Failing beautifully. Losing every race and caring about the wrong ones.
He glances up.
Our eyes meet across the length of my apartment — twelve feet of worn carpet and second-hand furniture and a life I have held together with my bare hands for two years — and neither of us moves.
He sees it. I can tell by the way his face changes — the grin gone, the performance gone, everything gone except the raw thing underneath that I keep catching in glimpses.
His eyes move from me to the kitchen behind me — the pot on the stove, the permission slips held to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a sunflower, the chore chart I made with colored markers because Marisol responds to structure the way some kids respond to praise.
The lunch bag on the counter. The dish rack full of mismatched plates.
The thin scar on my wrist catching the overhead light as I hold the towel.
He sees the woman I became at eighteen when my mother walked out and left me holding every piece. The woman who gave up a scholarship and picked up a mop and then a pole and never once sat down on a hallway floor and cried about it where anyone could see.
And I see him. The boy who called the wrong number at seventeen trying to save his brother and opened a door that killed his father. The son who inherited a crown made of razor wire and wears it every day and smiles so hard his face must ache by midnight.
The look between us is not the look from the back office. No heat. No arrangement. No transaction.
It is the look of two people who have been carrying something too heavy for too long and just realized the other one knows exactly what that weight feels like.
Tomás hits him with a red shell. Romeo blinks. Looks at the screen. Looks at my brother's triumphant face.
"That," Romeo says, "was dishonorable."
Tomás grins. "That was strategy."
The moment breaks. The game resumes. I turn back to the kitchen.
But something has shifted under my ribs and I cannot push it back where it belongs.
The Rule She Reinforces
Romeo stands at the door with his jacket over his arm and I block the threshold with my shoulder against the frame.
Behind me, Tomás is in the bathroom brushing his teeth. I can hear the water running, the hum of whatever song he is inventing tonight. He has been humming since Romeo sat down on that carpet. An hour of Mario Kart and my brother sounds like a different kid.
I hate how much I notice that.
"Nova—"
"You broke my rule."
He stops. The charm does not come. The grin does not load.
He stands in my doorway holding his jacket and looking at me with an expression I have never seen from him before — open, quiet, almost chastened, like a man who walked into a place he was not invited and found something he was not ready to see and is still processing the damage.
"I told you," I say. Quiet. Firm. The voice I use when Marisol pushes back on curfew — the one that sounds calm on the surface and carries a blade underneath.
"My apartment is off-limits. My siblings are off-limits.
You do not get to show up where they live because you are bored or restless or whatever it was that made you climb four flights to a door I told you to stay away from. "
He nods. One nod. No argument. No deflection. No but I wanted to see you, no I was in the neighborhood, none of the lines a man like him keeps loaded for moments like this.
"It won't happen again," he says.
He means it. I can hear it — the absence of performance, the raw simplicity of a man saying something true because a woman told him to and he listened.
I step back. He moves past me into the hallway. His cologne trails behind him — cedar, warmth, something expensive that has no business mixing with the smell of chicken soup from my stove — and I watch him walk toward the stairs.
He takes them carefully. One hand on the railing, each step deliberate, like he is mapping the building on the way down. Memorizing the creak on the third step. The gap in the banister on the second landing. The water stain on the wall shaped like a hand.
He is learning my world. Step by step. Even as I tell him to leave it.
I close the door. Lean my back against it. The wood is cool through my shirt and I press my palms flat against it and breathe.
The apartment is quiet. The Mario Kart menu music loops softly from the television.
The pot on the stove is still warm. And his cologne is everywhere — on the air, in the carpet where he sat, on the kitchen chair where he draped his jacket.
Mixed with soup and dish soap and the fabric softener I use on Tomás's pajamas.
My world and his, layered on top of each other like paint on a wall.
The bathroom door opens. Tomás pads down the hallway in his socks.
"Nova?"
"Yeah, baby."
"When is Romeo coming back?"
The question lands in the center of my chest and sits there like a coal.
"He's not," I say.
Tomás is quiet for a moment. Then: "Okay." He walks to his bedroom. Closes the door. The rocket nightlight clicks on — I can see the blue glow through the gap at the bottom.
I stay against the door. The cologne fades. The soup cools. The building settles around me with its familiar creaks and groans.
He's not coming back, I told my brother.
I am already not sure I believe it.
The Thought She Cannot Afford
I clean the kitchen like I am scrubbing evidence from a crime scene.
Dishes. Counters. The stove top where soup dried in a crescent along the burner rim.
I wipe the chair where his jacket sat until the wood squeaks under the rag.
I open the window above the sink and let the night air eat whatever is left of his cologne because I cannot function in a room that smells like him.
The cold pours in and I stand in it with wet hands and let it strip the warmth off my skin.
Marisol's homework is on the kitchen table. Algebra. I check every problem because that is what I do — I check, I correct, I initial the top corner so her teacher knows an adult reviewed it. My handwriting is steady. My pulse is not.
Tomás is in bed. I sit on the edge of his mattress and pull the blanket to his chin and he is already half gone — eyelids heavy, mouth soft, the rocketship nightlight throwing blue across his cheeks.
He smiles in his sleep. A real smile. The kind I have not seen at bedtime in months because bedtime is when the panic finds him, when the dark turns into a weight on his chest and he cannot breathe.
Tonight he fell asleep in four minutes. Still smiling about Mario Kart.
About Romeo.
I close his door and sit on the hallway floor between their rooms. Back against the wall. Knees drawn up. The apartment is dark except for the blue glow under Tomás's door and the orange streetlight leaking through the living room curtains.
The routine is the same. Every night. Dishes, homework, bedtime, hallway. The ritual I built from wreckage when my mother vanished — the scaffolding that holds three lives vertical.
But the math is different tonight. For the first time in two years, the numbers in my bank account do not mock me.
Rent is covered. The electric bill is paid.
Tomorrow I will buy Tomás new shoes and Marisol a graphing calculator of her own and neither purchase will require me to choose which one of them gets to have the thing they need.
That should be the thing keeping me awake.
It is not.
What keeps me awake is Romeo on my carpet. Cross-legged, sleeves pushed up, pen stain on his forearm. Losing his third race and looking at Tomás - like my brother was a language he had never heard before and desperately wanted to learn.
The image is lodged in my ribs like a fish hook. Every time I try to pull it loose it digs deeper.
I catch myself thinking about him. About him — not the money sitting in my account, not the arrangement that put it there, not the body that pinned me against an office door while my hands clawed at his collar.
About the man who sat on my floor and let a child beat him at a video game and looked up at me across twelve feet of poverty and saw me.
The real me. The exhausted, terrified, stubborn-as-concrete me who has been holding the ceiling up with her bare hands since she was eighteen.
I hate myself for it.
Because I know what want does. I watched it dismantle my mother one piece at a time — wanting a man, wanting a life, wanting anything beyond the apartment and the kids and the grind.
Want is the thing that made her put on lipstick on a Tuesday and kiss her children goodbye and walk out a door she never came back through.
Want is a luxury. Want is a virus. Want is the crack in the foundation that brings the whole building down.
And I am sitting in a dark hallway at midnight wanting Romeo Rivas with a ferocity that scares me more than any overdue electric bill ever could.
I press my skull against the wall. Close my eyes. My hands are shaking again.
I cannot afford this. I cannot afford him — not the money, the man. The cost of wanting someone is the risk of losing them, and I have already lost everyone who was supposed to stay.
But Tomás smiled in his sleep tonight.
And I am already ruined.