30. Marisol
30
MARISOL
Dino is awfully quiet the rest of the way back.
He doesn’t let me out of his sight. Whether it’s his hand on mine, or his arm around my waist, or any possible way, he touches me the entire time as we head back to New York.
I like it.
But, I haven’t had any chance to actually talk to him. There’s so much more we need to talk about.
So much more that needs to be said.
Decided.
What did you mean when you said I was yours?
Nico, on the other hand, is an endless fountain of information.
He never stops talking. Literally. I’m entertained by it, and he’s definitely a good conversationalist, but the contrast with Dino’s stony silence is almost striking .
It’s hard to see them as related.
Until, of course, I look at them.
From Nico, I learn that Dino’s father and his father were twins. I can see it. Underneath all the scars and tattoos, they definitely look alike. They have the same broad shoulders, the same lean but honed physique. They even have the same hair, except Nico seems to be going grey a little faster than he should.
“My mother’s side,” he explains when I ask. “It’s said that they were cursed by the gods.”
“What’s the curse?”
He laughs. “Essentially, ‘here for a good time, not for a long time.’ Most of them have died young, so I’m happy with the grey. It means I have broken the curse.”
That, I think, might just be Nico in a nutshell.
We make it past customs, which Nico literally flirts to secure our way through, and into the private car that Marco sent for us.
Dino still hasn’t spoken.
Soon, the road looks familiar. I see the winding dirt that leads up to Elio’s mansion, and my heart starts to pound.
I’m so close.
So close to seeing my children again.
My girls.
My angels.
So close to being a family .
I turn. I need to ask Dino. “Dino, what…”
“We’re here,” he cuts me off.
Oh.
I try not to be disappointed.
I asked for this, didn’t I? I wanted to go back to the girls.
Dino never promised anything other than that.
Maybe I read too much into it. Maybe he doesn’t want… to be a family with me.
Maybe…
I shut my thoughts down.
All that matters right now is getting back to my girls.
The car door opens, and I run out. I don’t wait for Dino. I don’t wait for Nico. Elio and Gia and Sal are at the front door, but I don’t stop.
I briefly look at Caterina. “The girls?”
She smiles. “Playroom.”
It’s all the encouragement I need.
I fly down the hall, my feet barely touching the ground. Soon, I’m at the playroom door. I push it open, slowly.
“Mamá?”
I can’t see. My eyes are flooded with tears. Words catch in my throat, and I can’t get them out.
I don’t need to.
The girls are in my arms. I’m holding them.
I lose myself in the moment.
Time passes, but I have no idea how much. Eventually they wiggle out of my arms, chattering and tugging at my hands, begging me to come see their dolls and their artwork and a million other things.
I follow them.
“Oh good. You made it,” I hear a familiar voice.
I turn, sagging with relief. “M?e.”
My mother smiles, tugging me in close. “I told you I would find them, didn’t I?”
I don’t have a response. Because instead of using words, I let the tears that I’ve been holding back for weeks loose.
And I lose it.
Eventually, I stop crying, the girls and my mom all staring at me. My mother is gently patting my head, and I wipe my eyes, taking a tissue when she offers me one.
“So. He was that bad?” she asks.
I look at the girls.
My mother sighs. She asks the girls to go play, the Spanish rolling off her tongue, then turns back to me.
“Tell me.”
In Portuguese, I slowly start. “I don’t know. I don’t think he was as bad as he could be. As bad as he was. He assigned Moretti to follow me around like some kind of guard dog, and Moretti… he wanted to marry me, to be father’s heir.”
My mother snorts and cusses in Spanish .
“M?e,” I chide, looking at the girls.
She waves her hand. “I have been working on their Spanish, but they don’t know that word yet.”
“They’ll figure it out,” I whisper.
She shrugs. “Continue, please.”
“He… father… he made it seem like he loved me. Loved you,” I say quietly.
My mother’s eyebrows pinch together. “Loved?”
I take a deep breath.
Then, I tell her about the mud. About the mountain.
About him pushing me away.
And, what he told Dino.
As the story unfolds, my mother’s face goes pale. When I reach the part about Dino seeing father die, she winces.
“I was afraid of this.”
Curious, I tilt my head and look at her.
She shakes her head. “Benicio and I… We are like the moon and the sun. Destined to be apart, forever. If we were together too long, the world would stop spinning. A while back, I woke up in the night feeling… like I had lost the moon,” she whispers.
“M?e,” I say, my voice breaking on the word.
She waves her hand at me. “Benicio was not an easy man. But I am not an easy woman. What we have… I will hold. I will keep. I do not expect anyone to know about it, I do not expect an yone to understand. But as happy as I am to see him dead, I will miss him with every piece of my soul.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
Other than to just hold her hand.
We stay like that, together, watching the girls play. My mother mourning the loss of her moon.
And me, wondering if I ever had mine to begin with.
I leave the playroom.
Eventually.
Seeing my mom mourn my father, while also hating him, has created an energy that galvanizes me to move forward.
I have to know if Dino wants to have a life with me.
I have to know if he will be with me, or the girls.
Or, if I need to start mourning the loss of him, in addition to the father I wonder if I could have had.
After making small talk with Elio, Caterina, Gia, and Sal, who are all more or less completely charmed by Nico, I look at Caterina. “Where is he?” I ask.
She sighs, and points to the patio.
I walk outside.
The air isn’t cold, but it also isn’t warm, exactly. My skin prickles at the chill, but it could also be goosebumps from the conversation I’m about to have.
The conversation that needs to happen .
Which could either be the beginning of everything…
Or the end.
I head out onto the porch, then walk into the yard. Dino is sitting on a swing that’s attached to one of the huge trees out back. There are so many toys in the backyard, it’s like a minefield.
I sit next to Dino, looking at the giant playhouse that’s sitting in front of us. “That’s new.”
“I’m not shocked. Elio probably jumped at the chance to get a new toy for the kids.”
“He definitely seems to be a family man,” I say.
Good. At least we know what we’re here to talk about.
Dino looks at me, and I sit on the swing next to him.
“We need to talk,” I say quietly.
His silence is the confirmation that I need to keep going.
“I need to know if there’s a future with us. With the girls. If you don’t have a future with us Dino, then…”
“I want you, Marisol. I do,” he says, cutting me off.
I look at him.
“My whole life I didn’t think I belonged in my family. I spent my childhood fighting everyone. My dad. Marco. Sal. Every fucking body that I could. I was angry, all the time. I don’t know what it means to be part of a family like you are. That you want to make. I don’t know how to be a dad,” he rasps.
My heart sinks .
“I don’t… Nico, he said that he wants me to take over. To be the head of the Drakos family.”
My jaw drops. “Dino. Do you want that?”
“I don’t know. I know that if I build that empire, then I’ll have something to give you and the girls.”
“Dino, you don’t?—”
“I need to know that I can give you something, Marisol. Something more than how I feel about you. If I think about myself as a father, as a partner, then I need to be able to provide. Protect. I need to…”
“I don’t need you to do that!” I yell.
Dino stares at me.
I take a deep breath. “Dino, if you want to take over that role, you should do it. For yourself. But not for me. The girls and I just need you, ” my voice breaks.
I feel like I’m begging him.
Just to be with me.
That thought makes my jaw snap shut.
I will not beg anyone to be with me.
I won’t.
Dino looks at me. “Come with me.”
“What?”
“Come with me. To Greece.”
“Dino. No,” I blurt out. “The girls, they just got settled here, we can’t… ”
“Okay,” Dino says quietly.
There’s nothing left to say.
I stand up, the swing creaking as I step away. I take two steps, then look back.
Dino is staring at me so intensely, it makes my heart ache.
But I won’t beg him to be with me. To choose me.
Choose us.
I tuck my shoulders, keeping my head high.
And I go back into the house.
When I wake up, Dino is gone.
The house is quiet. The girls are asleep in their beds, where I spent the night as well. They had questions about Dino, but I dodged the answers.
I didn’t sleep.
Not even a little.
I’m making coffee when my mother comes into the kitchen. “Morning, M?e,” I murmur.
“Do you mean to tell me you let the girls’ father walk away?”
I turn.
She’s in her pajamas, her hair in rollers. She has on an eye mask, and she’s glaring at me through it.
“I’m not going to beg him to be with me.”
“I didn’t tell you to do that,” she snaps. “I asked, did you just let him walk away?”
“Yes.”
She lets out a long string of curses in Spanish.
“Mother. Please,” I say in English. “There are babies in this house.”
“And they’d say the same thing if they knew the words. What the hell are you thinking!”
“That I’m not going to beg him to be with me! If he wants to choose me, he can!”
“And you think that him choosing a future that you can live in isn’t choosing you?”
I raise an eyebrow.
She collapses into a chair, her eyes trained on me. “I have been talking to the women. Listening. Hearing about this Dino, the father of my grandchildren. He reminds me so much of your father?—”
“Oh, no. Then I definitely need to run,” I snap.
She holds up a hand. “Let me speak, because I am your mother and I will not be talked to like this.”
My mother rarely scolds me, and it shocks me into silence.
“He has a fire in him that reminds me of your father. But unlike your father, that fire has not burned him alive. When I fell in love with Benicio, there was merely an ember. He lived in the blackened shell of himself, and he had done things that were… that were beyond repair. I loved the man Benicio was. I did not love the things Benicio did to fill the da rkness in his heart.”
My heart aches. “Dino has darkness, M?e.”
“Not like your father did. He is choosing to build you a life, Marisol. He’s going to make you a queen.”
“I don’t want to be a queen,” I whisper. “I just want to be loved.”
My mother’s face falls, and she stands. Slowly, she tugs me into a hug.
“Why can’t you have both?”
I look up at her.
“Those things are not exclusive, my love. Your father did not know how to do both. Like I said, the fire in him had burned away much of the person Benicio could be. I loved him, even if I didn’t always like him, even when I knew that loving him would burn me too. But Dino… he loves you. It is clear. He loves you, and what he does, he does for you and the girls.”
“Then why did he leave?”
She rolls her eyes. “Have you been in this house? There are too many men. They make the air thick with their machismo. A man like Dino who is full of so much dynamite will explode. But if he channels that into a place where he can make his own action, he will carve an empire out of the very bones of the earth. He means to change the shape of the world. For you,” she whispers.
I frown.
“He has always loved you, Marisol. He has just waited to see if you would love him too.”
I blink.
Could that be true ?
If it is, then I have made a terrible, terrible mistake.
I look up at my mother. “M?e…”
She smiles.
“Go. I will watch the girls. And when we come to Greece? I want a villa all of my own,” she smiles.
I take a Range Rover. I don’t know whose it is. But I peel out of Elio’s garage, hoping that I can beat Dino to the private airfield that Gia told me he was headed toward.
Please don’t let it be too late.
I’m barreling down the road, barely around the corner of the turn, when I slam my foot on the brakes.
There’s another car.
Heading up the road.
Just as fast.
And I recognize the driver.
Slowly, I get out.
Dino mirrors my movements. We walk to the front of our respective vehicles, eyes locked, drawn to each other.
Like the moon and the sun .
Except Dino and I are like the sun and the earth. The moon and the stars.
We belong together.
Always .
He has just waited to see if you love him too.
Dino opens his mouth. “Marisol…”
“I love you,” I blurt.
Dino reels like I slapped him.
“I love you. I love you so much that I’m afraid you’ll take this and just walk away from me. That you’ll abandon me and the girls. I love you and I don’t know how to handle it because my mom loved my dad and he turned out to be… him,” I gasp. “And I want you and I to have so much more than they did, and I love you so much and I don’t…”
I stop talking when his lips cover mine.
Dino and I have kissed many times. So many times that I remember all of them. Each one feels unique to me, special in a way that I’m sure I’m never going to forget.
Before this, each kiss felt like a treasure. Something to hold onto when I felt lonely.
Not now.
We’ve never kissed like this.
This kiss is life. It’s all the promise of a future. All the passion that we’ve kept for each other, everything that we haven’t been able to say.
It’s here.
When it finally ends, I pull back, gasping.
Dino smiles. “I love you, Marisol. I’ve loved you since the second I met you on that fuckin’ beach.”
“So why did you wait?” I laugh .
“Because I didn’t think I deserved you. You deserved to be happy, and I’m…” he stops at my look.
“I’m the man who loves you, and I’m going to make you happy,” he finishes.
My smile feels like it stretches across my entire body. “That sounds about right.”
Dino presses a kiss to the top of my head. “I love you, Marisol. Will you please come to Greece with me?”
I hum. “My mother wants a villa.”
“Done.”
“The girls are going to need to go to school.”
“On it,” Dino grins. “I’ll build you a fucking palace, Marisol, I?—”
“You are my palace, Dino,” I whisper. “You’re the home I need. Where you are, I am home. Just be there, and I’ll be happy.”
Dino doesn’t say anything.
He presses a kiss on my head.
“My heart is yours. My home is yours. And I’m yours,” he murmurs.
I tug him close.
Dino is mine. I’m his.
And together, we’re going to build the future we’ve always dreamed of.