Chapter Four
I couldn’t get the thrashing organ in my chest to slow down.
I’d been trying in vain for at least fifteen minutes. Every time I thought I’d managed to regulate my erratic breathing, the electric memory that had felt closer to a glimpse of the future consumed me, restarting the cycle again.
A phantom sensation of his calluses tracing over my fingers, curious and reverent, confident yet eager, lingered and spread over my body. Unyielding, arresting hazel eyes, more bronzed-copper than sage, inked the back of my eyelids, the intense weight of their roaming discovery memorizing every inch of my body right down to the fly-aways of my hair. The cast-iron chair had served as a throne for the commanding, masculine frame of his broad body, slanted in my direction, while he stared at me, enthralled, holding onto every fidget, every word, and every inhale with an irrepressible need.
My fingers rasped against the velvet of my dress, curling. Enduring static from the fantasy his touch had thrust me into beckoned for my return. How had he done that?
How did I make it—whatever it was—go away?
I didn’t like the influence he’d had on me, the loss of my self-control from his touch, or the abandonment of my wits when he looked at me like he saw exactly what I had.
An impossible future.
Lust, that’s what this was. Lust was irrational, wasn’t it? Up until now, I wasn’t familiar with it or the magnitude of its presence. That’s why it had caught me off guard, momentarily blindsided me, and hijacked every thought, muscle, and nerve ending in my body until my common sense returned.
Yeah. Lust. That was all.
Removing myself from the situation had been the appropriate thing to do. I couldn’t handle being under his roving gaze any longer. I didn’t trust myself, or him, for that matter.
Any man who scrambled your head that way, who caused palpitations, was wrong for you the same way smoking increased your likelihood of cancer or butterflies in the pit of your stomach made you liable to do something reckless and unforgivably stupid.
“Everything is fine,” I chanted to myself under my breath, pacing the vacant hallway while running my perspiring palms along my hips. Fine. Perfectly fine, in fact. “You did nothing wrong.” And as long as Ma never found out I’d been outside with a boy, regardless of Maria’s chaperoning, everything would remain that way.
It had to.
Despite Ma’s micromanagement of my dating life, I’d had no shortage of secret crushes in two decades, Dougie included. But my experience with reciprocated, uhm, interest , was nonexistent. I was the stepping stone to losing your virginity before college or the good enough for now.
Which made Felix’s behavior unnerving. Unchartered waters I knew I’d never be allowed to explore. Besides, I was more comfortable with being overlooked, and I’d learned to tolerate being picked apart for the things I couldn’t change.
Martin had vocalized I wasn’t his type out of the gate, laughing the first time he’d removed my shirt, visibly underwhelmed by my body. “Too bad you never got tits like your cousin, huh?” I hadn’t needed the reminder, not when I was so vulnerable. He mocked me until tears surfaced, cooing his taunt with glee. “Quit your crying. I’m still gonna fuck you.”
But that wasn’t really what he’d wanted. I discovered early on that my tears turned him on. He vied for them the same way I did my autonomy because dating him meant that, for the first time, I was free in a way I’d never been before. Once I’d had a taste of it, I wasn’t going to risk giving that up. I did what I had to.
I maintained control by turning my brain off for him the way I had Ma for years. The nauseating, new car-scented air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror served as my grounding point while he discarded my underwear and forced my legs apart, settling between them. I stopped flinching when he crammed himself inside of me before I was ready, no matter how much the biting sting of his assault hurt—I never did get used to that. When he was done, so fucking proud of himself with a sheen of sweat on his high forehead, and a smirk so sinister I’d remember it forever, I presented him with the same unfocused expression I gave Ma after she enlightened me about my latest screwup with her hands. If this was the cost of keeping me out of the house, away from her, so be it.
I could handle it. This was the lesser of two evils.
I numbed myself to his relentless ridicule and his prodding fingers, the bruising punch of his cock hammering the back of my throat while he held my head still and hurled gritted insults at me— “worst fucking blow job of my life”— followed by the sour zing of his cum when he finished seconds later on a barrage of screeching whimpers and I swallowed it quickly. I concealed my disgust to both the taste and sound of his pleasure and ignored the urge to heave because my body had rejected him long before my mind allowed me to. I hobbled and studied blood on squares of toilet paper for two weeks after he’d taken me to a lookout point in Rhode Island, wrenched my jeans and panties down, and forced me to bend over a fence. Dread circled my veins, and the anxiety mounted when he dashed his thumb back and forth over the frilled ring nestled between my ass cheeks, his moist breath damp against my ear, while he whispered, “Bet no one’s fucked you here before.”
I took it all in stride, absorbed the brutality of it, and turned my mind off until I couldn’t. Until it became clear to me that this wasn’t freedom. It was another cage, and marrying Martin would have signed my death sentence.
Punching me in the face had been a reality check. This wasn’t worth it. It never had been. So, with ice wrapped in a cloth and held to my face, I ended it on the rotary phone in the kitchen while Ma listened on from the parlor room.
I ignored his protests. “C’mon, Bel. Don’t make a big deal of this. We can work it out.”
His accusations. “You think you can do better than me? Give me a fuckin’ break. I was so out of your league, my dad wrote you off as a charitable donation last year. Don’t be stupid.”
His history rewrite and justifications. “It was one little slap, and I wouldn’t have hit you if you’d just keep your mouth shut.”
The phone was halfway to the base when he snarled. “Can’t wait to let everyone know what a fucking slut you are. That you take it up the ass.”
Terror struck me, and for a fleeting second, I’d almost considered walking back the decision—I was as good as dead if Ma found out—but in a whisper too low for Ma to perceive, I said, “Then I guess I’ll let them know you forced me.”
He paused. “You weren’t a virgin when I met you. No one’s gonna believe you.”
Maybe they wouldn’t believe me, but… I scanned over my shoulder, listening for evidence of Ma’s approach. “Go ahead, Martin,” I murmured as a laugh track from the television rolled in. “Tell them. Tell everyone because Cristina”—he drew in a sharp breath, the implication clear— “knows what you did. I showed her.” Martin had clout, but Tina had a gift for gab. People liked her. They trusted her. She’d talk circles around him and anyone who believed him any day.
He hung up with the striking slam of the phone. The adrenaline gave out on me, my legs weakening. I clamped a hand over my mouth to suppress the sobs. Ma would kill me if he made good on his word.
By some miracle, Martin had taken my threat to heart. Still hadn’t stopped him from trying to get me back, if for no other reason than to even the score later once he succeeded, because getting dumped by the likes of me had bruised his ego. After all, he’d done me a favor by lowering his standards. I owed him. Me. The weak, flat-chested bitch he only got involved with because his avozinha —grandma—liked Ma and told him to.
I wasn’t moved when he signed off hand-written notes with “I love you.” It was bullshit. Every time Ma blamed me for provoking him, insisted I take him back now that the gossip she’d stirred up had died down, and the weight of her financial predicament had caught up with her, the memory of the melancholic melody of the roaring wind, and the foamy, white caps slamming against the sandy shoreline the day at the overlook drowned her demands out.
What I wanted had always been insignificant to her and everyone else. I was a thing. An asset. Expendable.
Even the loss of my virginity on a crusty seat in the back row of a movie theater at Harbour Mall with my first boyfriend—the one I’d managed to keep a secret for several months—was marred by my discard shortly after and a bad memory.
It hadn’t mattered the lengths I’d gone to just to be there. I’d lied and told Ma I was at Tina’s. Ma had unexpectedly turned up, looking for me. Tina had escaped out her bedroom window, hopped her neighbor’s fence, and ran six blocks to the theater, hissing out my name just as Corey Miller finished in the condom, and I discovered after all that fuss, sex was wildly anticlimactic.
But he liked me, right?
The ache between my legs and the strained muscles in my thighs still lingered when he broke up with me a few days later. “You’re real sweet, Bel, and this has been great, but I’m going to school out of state, and you’re…” Yeah, I got it. I was never leaving Fall River.
Weird how the impending move hadn’t stopped him from going official with Melinda Lawrence all of two weeks later.
I’d liked Corey more than he liked me—the first of many mistakes, or so said Tina. While I’d been an adequate choice to lose our V-cards together in a very awkward setting, my inexperience, coupled with the difficulty of seeing me outside of school—not like he could just call me or come to my door—had meant a long-term relationship with me left little to be desired. I wasn’t worth the trouble.
Or so said the story of my life. I was good enough to fuck, to drill a lifetime of frustrations into, but unworthy of love. Hell, Dad hadn’t loved me enough to stay. It was no wonder I conditioned myself to weigh out the pros and cons of each situation and assessed how much I could withstand before I crumbled. I anticipated pain, had come to rely on its presence, and panicked in its absence.
Knowing all that… was it really any surprise Felix had turned me into a flight risk when everything about him was so contrarian to all my lived experiences? His responsiveness to me had flipped the rusty switches in my brain I’d turned off a long time ago. But I knew better. No matter how good it had felt to exist in his orbit, Felix Ferreira wasn’t a safe bet.
He was an inevitable heartbreak. That was what had served as the antidote to the paralyzing effects of the future he’d injected into my thoughts with the swiftness of a cobra’s strike. The devastation he promised to leave behind when he was done guaranteed my damnation and ruin.
He’d haunt me forever.
So why did I want to go back?
My pacing came to an abrupt standstill, my legs growing impossibly heavy as the next kaleidoscope of anxious butterflies unleashed in my chest.
Why did I want to seek him out when everything in my gut told me not to?
When I knew exactly how it would end before it had even begun?
Ma would never approve of him. Everything about him screamed the opposite of what she sought for me.
But tonight… I rubbed my lips together, mulling it over.
Tonight could be for me, couldn’t it? I’d earned that after years of scorn, of ceaseless reminders that I wasn’t good enough for anyone. If I remained sight unseen? If I was vigilant and put all those unintended effects of my upbringing to good use?
I could pull this off, just like I had the movie theater.
Ma had been at the bar again when I’d come back inside, her raucous laughter grating in my ears. She was officially too drunk to care, which was to my benefit.
I stared at the end of the hallway, traveling voices from nearby kids playing in the lobby. Was I really going to do this?
Glancing at my reflection in the glass case housing the fire extinguisher, I gave myself a quick once-over. I’d wiped off the lipstick, needing the freedom to chew at the inside of my lip without staining my teeth.
Ma’s instruction had been not to embarrass her, but wanting someone wasn’t a crime. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Yet.
What would it be like to have sex with someone who liked you back?
My blood cooled. What was I saying?
A sharp smarting battered under my armpit, the invisible pinched reminder she would haul me out of there faster than I could form the words I’m sorry .
Safe bets. Safe bets only.
Resolved or defeated—depending on how you looked at it—and firm on my game plan to avoid him, I smoothed my hands over the imperceptible wrinkles in my dress, gearing up to get back out there. I’d go sit at the table and wait until the clock struck ten and Ma made her rounds, reminding everyone for the third time she had to be up early. Then we’d go home. I’d try to fall asleep until the persistent throbbing between my legs won the war, and I tried to figure out how that masturbating thing worked.
Good girls who had been bred and raised to be just like their mothers didn’t act out on their urges, but what Ma didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. If I could learn how my body worked, how to coax some kind of euphoric response out of myself the way Tina described, then maybe I could settle for whoever Ma eventually decided for me.
It wouldn’t be that bad.
I was fine. This was fine . If I said it enough times, I might believe it, too.
The ornate gold carpet underfoot absorbed my steps before transitioning into hardwood as I headed back to the banquet room, trying to clear the mess of thoughts while slipping through the doors as a few people clambered out, flush-faced from the dizzying combination of alcohol and dancing. In my absence, the lights had lowered, and a strobe light had descended from the ceiling, streams of colorful beams dancing along in rhythm with the horde of animated, moving bodies swaying beneath it.
Relief flanked me when I spotted my empty table. At least I wouldn’t have to make polite conversation or keep up the charade of one of Ma’s embellished stories. Sometimes, I lost track of the details even though I’d been there, too, because I couldn’t separate the truth from her version of it.
Someone cut my reprieve short, a firm grip registering on my elbow, closing around the bend. Startled, I glanced over my shoulder, worry cresting over me.
The sigh of relief slid out, my limbs relaxing.
Thank God.
Uncle John was a grizzled man with a wide smile and kind russet-brown eyes, just like my dad’s. He still had an enviable headful of hair streaked with silver against the thick black strands. He was a little shorter than Sean but taller than Maria, with an authoritative energy that had always commanded respect.
It conflicted with his general ease, though. My father’s younger brother had a sort of calm to him my dad had never had. Where Dad had grappled with the duality of his edginess and nervousness, and as I realized later in life—restlessness like he’d been biding his time—Uncle John was just content with his life and the repetition of it. He was as dependable as he was predictable. Routine kept him happy. He ran his own business. He was involved in the community. He spent his Saturdays working on the general upkeep of his house, went to church on Sundays, and had lunch with his family in the afternoon before he fell asleep on the couch. His children didn’t fear him the way I did Ma, and I couldn’t have dreamed of their being any kind of scenario where he controlled them the way Ma controlled me.
As it was, I couldn’t recall a single time he’d disciplined my cousins in front of anyone.
Ma had always found an opportunity to publicly humiliate me—a tear in my pantyhose, a lock of hair that had come undone from my braid as a child, my unassuming body as a teenager, and my lack of accolades as an adult.
I couldn’t imagine what it was like. Being allowed to make your own choices. Being allowed to fail. Living without permission.
Living at all.
“ Sobrinha .” Niece.
“ Tio .” Uncle.
Maria’s concern flashed in my memory. He was concerningly thinner, and his naturally golden complexion seemed a little dull.
My stomach churned, but before I could press him on it or express my concern, he spoke first. “You’re not dancing,” he observed in Portuguese, giving my arm a gentle squeeze, assessing me.
I swallowed, lowering my eyes. I didn’t dance at these things. Not because I didn’t want to. Truth be told, I hadn’t always hated these functions. I used to enjoy going to them. It was an opportunity for me to hang out with my cousins or for my dad to plant my feet on his and whisk me around despite my ma’s harping.
But after he’d left… these events were a reminder of everything I’d lost.
“I don’t feel like it.” The lie accompanied the need to look anywhere but at my uncle because sometimes meeting his stare hurt.
Not just because he was everything my dad wasn’t but because of how many physical similarities they bore. It was the constant reminder that in some alternate universe, my dad might have been a little like him.
Considerate. Involved. He might have loved me enough to stay, to protect me from Ma.
Or shit, taken me with him.
Uncle John clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, his exhaled sigh soft. “Your aunt asked me for a break, so I need a new dance partner.” He gave me a crooked grin. “I’ve danced with my daughters already.”
Even Maria had cut loose, unable to resist her dad’s magnetic ability to draw even the most reserved and standoffish out of their shell. I had caught them as he navigated her to a quick four-step number, her feet and legs falling into an instinctual rhythm mirroring his own. There weren’t many occasions I could recall where Maria was genuinely smiling, but for her dad, the ice in her personality melted away, and the child she kept tightly under wraps inside of her came out.
I’d never envied Maria. Coveted her freedom? Sure. But I’d never resented her, no matter how often Ma or anyone else had compared me to her, measured my shortcomings, and shamed me for all the things I couldn’t control.
Her relationship with her dad, though? I hated to admit I did.
So maybe I was more like Ma than I preferred to acknowledge. Even if some part of me longed to take Uncle John up on his offer, to pretend for a little while, I knew it would come at a cost that exceeded the fleeting relief from the grief of mourning someone who was still very much alive. Someone who had decided when he didn’t want your mother anymore, he didn’t want you, either.
“I don’t know…” I trailed off, considering the consequences of doing something because I wanted to. Apparently, that was the theme of the night.
The sympathy lining his face told me he understood my reluctance.
My uncle and aunt weren’t oblivious to my ma’s antics. Portuguese bakeries were hubs for gossip, especially post-Mass on Sundays, with Ma often at the helm. People had cleared their conscience with God for the week, buying themselves more room to sin so they didn’t feel bad engaging with Matilda Tavares while picking out their loaf of bread. They’d clear their slate with a donation in a basket the following week and confession at the end of the year.
My aunt and uncle weren’t like that. Their pride meant the world to them, but they never sank to Ma’s level, even when they had enough dirt on her to ruin her reputation permanently. They’d comforted her when Uncle John tracked Dad down, and they’d been the ones to tell her he wasn’t coming back.
Uncle John came to take care of the yard, and Aunt Connie brought food every day for a month. She forced Ma into the bath, and while Ma was out of earshot, she assured me that things would be okay. I’d believed her. Eventually, Ma had gotten better, but the betrayal had closed her off, and the care our family had extended to us angered her. She didn’t want to be indebted to anyone, especially them. Not after everything. She met their continued presence in our lives with animosity, but they never wavered, even when we clearly didn’t deserve it.
That was why our invite never got lost in the mail.
“One dance,” Uncle John negotiated, holding up his pointer finger. The youthful playfulness glinting in his stare reminded me of Sean’s.
I could already hear Ma’s cranky accusation. You spent time with the enemy, blah, blah, blah…
But the little girl in me? The one who had tried and failed dozens of times over the years to dial the international phone number or cried herself to sleep when the crushing pressure of Ma’s expectations became too much, and the panic taking flight in my body felt like I was going to die…
She wanted to pretend.
One, tiny, short dance.
The opening of the slow song formed a brick in my gut.
My dad’s favorite song. What a sick move from the disc jockey. Or the universe.
It was a song fathers danced to with their daughters or husbands swayed to with their wives. It was another reminder that my father had left me with Ma.
It hurt. Six years later and the sting never seemed to lessen. I wasn’t sure it ever would, no matter how old I got.
A tender knowingness replaced the hope on my uncle’s face and had tears pricking at the back of my eyes.
Shit, I didn’t want to cry. Not here.
“I can’t replace him,” he started, holding his big open palm out to me. “But as long as I’m alive, I’ll treat you like one of my daughters, Belmira . ” His fingers flitted, beckoning me to accept. “It would be my honor.”
His outstretched, big palm blurred. Ugh. I sniffled, the burning tingle in my nose itching while I frantically blinked back the emotion and got a hold of myself.
I waffled for a moment more, coming to a decision. “One dance .” I slipped my arm from his hand, placing my palm inside his.
He escorted me into the crowd, finding an opening at the edge of the dance floor brimming with people. I didn’t have a second to assess where Ma was, but I got the uncanny sense Uncle John had deliberately positioned himself as a solid wall, masking her viewpoint wherever she stood, no doubt stewing. She’d get over it. Eventually, I hoped. For her sake, before Y2K happened, since some people claimed that was Doomsday or something. If the world did end, I’d hate for her to still be mad at me in the afterlife. Although, I had no doubts she’d track me down there, too, riding in on her wave of self-righteousness to ensure I knew how offended she was by my actions.
Just your typical Saturday night.
Stepping into position, I relaxed my cheek beneath Uncle John’s shoulder. He set his opposite hand high on the middle of my back, and I lowered my eyes, following the slow sway he guided us into, our rhythm matching the tempo of the song. Like this, I could trick myself into believing it wasn’t my uncle I was dancing with but my father.
No matter how old you got, you never stopped yearning for the things you lost.
“ Sobrinha ,” he summoned my attention, and I peered up at him. “Do you understand the meaning of this song?”
I hesitated. Trick question? Of course, I did. Like a lot of first-generation Luso-American kids, I’d learned Portuguese first and English through television, and gotten a handle on syntax and my accent at school. I could interpret the song’s meaning just fine—love without boundaries. The foundation of family. A promise to protect their children and, in a fit of irony, never betray their spouses—but I hadn’t wanted to give much thought to the lyrics. Not when I’d finally managed to quit my blubbering.
I gestured my acknowledgment with a curt head nod. I understood the song better than I should. We both knew that.
“Promise me something?” he asked. Uncle John took my silence as permission to continue. “Don’t be afraid to do things you want to do, even if you’re scared. Regrets are like cancer.” I tensed at the dark word choice. I didn’t like it. His stare turned distracted for two blinks, and he cleared his throat with a loud harrumph, forging on, “ In life, the only thing irreversible is death.” My stomach dropped, chills stretching up along my spine. Was that sage advice from an uncle who’d had too many tonight, and the celebrations were getting to him, or something else? “Don’t let her ruin yours before it’s begun because she needs someone to take her anger toward your father out on. That’s not duty, and that’s not love.” He gave my hand a firm, comforting squeeze. “Their choices are not yours to be responsible for. You have your own life to lead.” Under the glow of the strobe lights, his eyes looked misty. “You’re still young, Belmira. So young.” Uncle John studied me for a long time before concluding with, “But life comes at you fast when you’re living it for someone else.”
If it wasn’t for his urgency to keep dancing, my legs would have rooted. I’d never felt like I had a choice about the trajectory of my life.
I succumbed to Ma’s every whim because she had beaten, ridiculed and taunted me until I understood I was nothing more than an extension of her.
I killed off the parts she didn’t like and deprived myself of the very human urge of wanting something—anything—because denial was second-nature. She was the hand that fed me, and she’d starve me into submission if she had to.
A prickling traversed across my body, my pulse raising hell. The breadth of a shadow materialized behind my uncle, the strobe lights above catching on the intruder’s chocolate brown hair. Thick, masculine fingers closed around his shoulder, our dancing coming to an abrupt finale. Uncle John’s bushy brows crumpled together, his head craning.
The staccato of my heart stuttered in surrender. Hazel eyes held me captive, and I found myself pathologically hooked on a boy—a man—when I shouldn’t be.
Which probably wasn’t a good thing.
No, I knew it wasn’t a good thing.
You weren’t supposed to be this cognizant of each blood vessel opening and closing in your veins, the oxygen gliding to your lungs, the incessant, needy beat forming between your thighs accompanying the slickness ruining your panties. Never mind the flurry of irrational messages reaching my brain, arguing, “He’s different, Ma.”
The potent effects of another stupid crush. Something I might think fondly about when I was married to someone else.
“Sorry, sir.” The gravelly bass of that voice left me clenching around nothing.
God, I really hated myself sometimes.
Tingling spread across my scalp, and my heart sped up as cedarwood, marked by the layered notes of citrus and frosty spearmint, collided with the earthy traces of tobacco burrowed deeper into my brain.
Martin had smoked, and I’d hated the acrid smell, never mind the taste every time he tunneled his intrusive tongue into my mouth. But Felix… he smelled like a memory I couldn’t place because I hadn’t made it yet.
Oh, look. Warning sign number one thousand this guy and my attraction to him was bad fucking news.
My knees quaked as blood flooded my nervous system, a war waging in my thoughts demanding I retreat from enemy territory, but I remained frozen in my emotional armistice.
Uncle John noisily cleared his throat. I startled, my head popping up, pink flushing my cheeks. The glint of discernment hit his eyes, lips kinking into a tight line.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
If he’d picked up on that… my neck swiveled, searching the room. Where was Ma? If I couldn’t hide my thoughts from my uncle, Ma would be able to smell my crush from twenty feet away.