11. Chapter Ten
Chapter Ten
K eep walking.
Don’t go back.
You can’t.
But, God, he wanted to.
He wanted to storm right back into that bedroom, grab Sky, and drag her to his bed.
I want my wife.
And that was a huge fucking problem.
“? Ay güey !” Beto exclaimed when Rafa burst out of the nearest door and onto a secluded patio space. His younger brother made an irritated sound as he flung droplets of whatever he was drinking from his hand. He had been reclining on one of the loungers with a drink and a cigar. “You scared the shit out of me, Rafa!”
“Sorry.” He caught the scent of aged tequila and asked, “Is that one of the new a?ejo bottles we released?”
“Yeah.” Beto offered him the bottle. “Here.”
“I shouldn’t.” Rafael made a point of not drinking when he was upset or agitated.
“It’s your wedding night, bro. If you’re out here with me instead of with your gorgeous new wife, you need a drink.” He shook the heavy glass bottle. “Take it.”
“I’m not with her because it’s not that kind of marriage.” The words rang hollow. Rafa took the bottle from Beto and sank down onto the lounger next to his brother.
“Uh-huh.” Beto sounded amused, and Rafa was sure if he could see his brother’s face through the darkness, there would be a smile on it.
Ignoring his brother, he popped the cork out of the bottle and drank straight from it. He could only imagine the horrified expression his grandfather or father would have worn seeing their progeny drinking like uncouth frat boys. He had broken all the rules of enjoying a quality aged tequila. He hadn’t let it breathe. Hadn’t used a proper glass. Hadn't paired it with a delicate dark chocolate to highlight the notes of vanilla or cinnamon.
“That bad?” Beto reached across and tapped his arm with something. “Here. You probably need this, too.”
Rafael placed the bottle on the short table between them. “What is it?”
“Vape pen. One of Lola’s special ones,” Beto clarified. “I’d share my cigar, but it’s my last one from Nicaragua.”
“Not tonight.” Rafa waved off the vape pen loaded with Lola’s exquisitely mellow THC. “I need to be able to take care of Jasper tonight.”
Beto made a horrified sound. “I don’t think fatherhood is for me.”
“I didn’t think it was for me either,” Rafa admitted.
“Really?” Beto seemed surprised. “I always figured you’d get married and have kids, if for no other reason than to carry on the family traditions.”
Rafa glared at his brother. “That’s a terrible reason to have kids. Besides, there are five of us to carry on the family name and traditions.”
“Four,” Beto corrected gently. “There’s only four of us now.”
An invisible hand clenched and squeezed his heart. “I forgot.”
“It’s strange, right? Like Jaime is gone, but it doesn’t feel real. Not even after the funeral.”
“It was the same after we lost Papa and Abuelo. I can’t tell you how many times I picked up the phone to call one of them or walked to their offices expecting to find them.” Even after all these years, he could feel that gut-wrenching pain.
“Jasper was laughing earlier, before the ceremony, and I took a video of it for Jaime. I started to send it to him—and then I remembered.” Beto’s voice deepened with grief. “Took everything I had in me not to cry right there.”
“It’s okay to cry, Beto.” Rafael didn’t want his siblings to suppress their grief. “You don’t have to hide your feelings.”
“Like you don’t hide your feelings for Sky?”
“That’s not the same thing, Beto.”
“There it is,” Beto said triumphantly. “There’s the hypocrisy.”
“I’m not—.” Rafael swallowed the words on the tip of his tongue. “It’s different.”
“How?”
“I’m telling you not to bottle up the feelings of grief and loss so you aren’t emotionally crippled. What I feel or don’t feel for Sky doesn’t only affect me. It affects her, too.”
“Which is why you should tell her that you love her,” Beto angrily snapped.
Stunned into silence, he stared at his brother’s shadowy outline.
“Don’t deny it, Rafael. I can see it. I saw it today when you were reciting your vows. A business arrangement? Bullshit. You love that woman—and I think she loves you. I think she always has, even after whatever happened at the wedding.”
“Why does everyone assume something happened at the wedding?” he asked, ignoring the crux of the matter. “You and Lola and Dina.”
“Are we wrong?” Beto shifted in his seat and reached for the bottle of tequila. “I was there, Rafa. I saw you disappear. I saw her disappear. I saw you come back. But she didn’t. She ran away.”
Rafael grimaced but didn’t try to deny it. “I made a mistake.”
“Then or tonight?”
Rafael grimaced again. “I seem to only make mistakes when it comes to her.”
Beto sighed. “Listen, brother, I’m the last man in the world to give anyone relationship advice. I haven’t managed to get a woman to stay with me longer than three weeks.”
“That’s because three weeks is the limit to how long you can ignore your obsession with your boat and the sea.”
“Probably,” Beto agreed. A long silence stretched between them as both men became lost in their thoughts. Eventually, Beto asked, “What’s going on with the judge?”
Rafael exhaled with disgust. “He was letting me know that one of his colleagues in a different department had a run-in with Beverly’s legal team. She tried to file kidnapping charges against Sky and roped in the US Embassy.”
Beto swore nastily. “What is wrong with her?”
“She’s crazy. Jaime always said she was nuts, but I never thought he actually meant she was mentally unwell.”
“Maddie told me about her childhood,” Beto confessed. “She and Jaime were out with me on the boat after their engagement. Jaime was knocked out below deck because he’d covered himself in seasickness patches.” Beto laughed at the memory. “So, Maddie and I just drank beer and fished and talked. The things she told me....”
“That bad?”
“Terrible,” Beto confirmed. “Her mother was always a little unhinged, but I guess after her father had that affair and left Beverly for Sky’s mother? Well—she went over the edge. It’s why Maddie ended up in a private boarding school. Her dad didn’t trust Beverly to keep her safe, and he traveled all the time. It’s the same reason Sky ended up there after her mother killed herself.”
“It was an accident, I thought. Sky’s mother? She drowned during a party?”
“According to Maddie, she was high and fell asleep in the pool after the party.” Beto hesitated. “It was Sky’s birthday party.”
“What?” Rafael bolted upright. “Are you sure?”
“That’s what Maddie said. Sky found her the next morning.”
Shocked, he sat there trying to digest what he’d just heard. “I didn’t know. She never said.”
“I get the feeling she plays things close to the chest. I doubt Maddie would have told me the truth if she hadn’t been four Tecates deep.”
His stomach churned at the realization that there was so much about Sky he didn’t know. “Does Lola know?”
“No idea. If she does, she’s never said.”
If Lola did know, she wouldn’t reveal that secret to anyone. She had always been good about staying quiet.
“I think she wants to belong, Rafael. Your wife,” Beto clarified as if he didn’t know. “I think she’s afraid of being alone or having people dislike her, so she runs to save herself from that pain.”
Rafael stared at his brother’s shadowy profile. He suddenly better understood why Beto had run off to find himself. “Why did you run?”
“I didn’t run.” Beto finished his cigar and left it smoldering on an ashtray he’d brought to the patio table. “I sailed.”
“Alberto!” He used his brother’s full name in exasperation.
“You want to know why I left?”
“Yes!”
“I had to find my own place in this world, Rafa. I’d always been Joaquin’s youngest son. Don Pedro’s youngest grandson. I wasn’t the heir. I wasn’t the spare. You were raised to take over the business. Jaime was raised as your backup. Me? I’m not as brilliant as Dina. I’m not gifted with plants like Lola. I couldn’t even cut it in the fields as a jimador .”
“To be fair, you cut plenty in those fields,” Rafael reminded him. “I don’t think I ever saw Abuelo speechless until he found you surrounded by massacred agave.”
“That’s his own fault. Sent me out there with a coa and no explanation. What did he think would happen?”
“He probably hoped you’d do what Jaime and I did at that age,” Rafael suggested. “We found someone to teach us. We showed initiative.”
Beto scoffed. “I was never meant for the fields.”
“No, you weren’t,” Rafael agreed. “You showed initiative when you sailed away. You showed initiative when you came home and asked me to help you with the resorts. You found yourself and your place. You found success, and I’ll always be proud of you for taking chances the rest of us didn’t.”
“Thank you,” Beto said sincerely. “I know I didn’t make things easy for you.”
“You didn’t, but I believed in you.”
“What about you?” Beto asked.
“What about me?”
“You didn’t disagree that you were groomed to be the heir. Did you ever want something else?”
“Not really,” Rafael answered honestly. “I enjoy the work. I like talking business and financing and logistics. I like solving problems. I like knowing that I’m maintaining a company that’s been operating through generations of our family.”
“So, you wouldn’t walk away if you had the chance?”
“Walk away? Completely?” Rafael shook his head and then remembered Beto probably couldn’t see him in the dark. “No, but I might take a long sabbatical or even step back into a less demanding role.”
“For her?”
“For them,” Rafael corrected. As he and Beto lapsed into silence, letting the crickets and slow breeze lull them into a relaxed state, he started thinking of all the ways he could be the man that Sky and Jasper needed.
My nephew. My wife.
My family.