Chapter Eleven #3
“It should be fine as long as we stick to the plan. When I talked to Mr. Allen while you were washing up, he showed me a map of town. It’s a bit out of date, but hopefully, it’s at least to scale.
I’ll drop you and Gwen off by the doctor’s office while we go to the mill, but you can’t go to the cemetery until I’m back in town or the tether won’t reach.
If you finish before we do, you may need to kill time and walk around. ”
“Gwen and I can do that.”
“When we’re back in town, I’ll give the tether two tugs to signal you can go to the cemetery. It should reach no matter where we are in town, but if you have to go to the far end of the cemetery, maybe you can do that spindle thing with the tether again to thin it out.”
“That should work, though we’ll need to be careful with it. What if everything is farther apart than you anticipated?”
“Then, I’ll turn around and come back to get you and Gwen. I’m sure I can figure out an excuse.”
Oliver stuffed down a rising pang of anxiety at the mistake he had made and the trouble it might have caused as Felipe wrapped his arms around him.
Standing cheek to cheek, the tether pulled taut between them as he shut his eyes.
He had grown accustomed to living his life with Felipe always at his side, a steady weight under his heart, and he would never take it for granted again. Never.
***
NO ONE COULD SEE FELIPE where he hid wedged between the yarrow, white sage bush, and the wall of the house.
The heat of the day had long gone, and in its place stood the chill night broken only by the buzzing drone of cicadas and the hazy glow of lanterns.
The medicinal garden stood empty, and from his pocket of privacy, he could see his aunts, uncles, and cousins walking along the upper catwalk of the compound or silhouetted in the candlelit windows of the kitchen and their bedrooms. This time of night, he should have been settling in with the other children, but he didn’t want to deal with Carmen’s bossiness or his cousins’ taunts.
If he slipped out after dinner, no one would care enough to look for him, except his parents, and they were occupied.
All day he had felt his father’s disapproving gaze on his back as he struggled through training, so as soon as he heard his father whisper to his mother to meet him in the storeroom, Felipe knew it was about him.
Wrapping his arms around his legs and pulling them to his chest, he listened to the voices on the other side of the stucco wall.
“This can’t go on much longer. He can’t fight properly because he’s supposed to be learning healing. He’s not healing, so he isn’t fighting. He’s nearly fourteen, Marina! Do you know what I was doing when I was his age?”
“Oh, trust me, I know, which is why he must learn to heal.”
“But he isn’t!”
“But he will. Some powers take longer to come in than others, you know that. He can’t help it.”
“There are ways around it.”
“We have discussed this, Diego,” his mother hissed.
“And we’re discussing it again. You know, it isn’t your choice to make. He’s my son. I decide his fate, and if I don’t, my father will. Which would you prefer?”
The silence thickened. Felipe didn’t dare move or breathe for fear that his father would hear his heart pounding on the other side of the wall. His mother wouldn’t let them hurt him. She wouldn’t, not after he had tried so hard.
“If he doesn’t make himself useful, he will be turned out. Do you want that shame brought onto us? How will it look for the Patrón’s eldest son’s only boy to be a wastrel?”
“So what do you propose we do with him?”
A bead of blood ran down Felipe’s leg where he dug his nails into his flesh to keep the sob in his mouth.
“He’s going to learn to fight with the men.
It’s long past time. He can still go with you when you visit the Quinteros, but his days will be spent in the training grounds.
Mateo will take up his healing lessons when he has time.
Don’t look at me like that. Your way isn’t working, and it’s making him soft. My son cannot grow up to be a coward.”
Felipe flinched as if he had been struck, and a sharp breath caught between his ribs.
Blood pulsed down his leg anew. He hadn’t hidden it well enough.
Somehow, his father knew. That word had been spat in his cousin’s face and whispered behind his back for years no matter how well Santiago fought or how dutiful he was.
Felipe’s sister had told him it was because Santiago looked at men the way women did, and that was an unforgivable weakness to their grandfather.
Felipe hadn’t understood. He hadn’t understood the consequences of their shared weakness until Santiago was caught with a man from town and cast out of the family with nothing but the clothes on his back.
It had been a warning and a spectacle his grandfather and uncle took pleasure in even as Santiago pleaded for mercy.
Every word and tear he shed only proved his weakness, but what Felipe remembered most was his sister’s nails digging into his shoulder as if she could sense his sympathy.
Ever since that day, Felipe had tried so hard to keep his eyes low and his head down.
Felipe bit back a sob. He couldn’t be cast out.
Whatever his father required of him, he would do it.
“If I already see it, they’ll see it soon enough, and if they do, there’s nothing I can do to spare him. So no more coddling him, Marina. He’s a Galvan, and he needs to start acting like one.”
The door rattled in its frame, and his father charged into the moonlight.
As Diego crossed the garden, he stopped directly in front of his cowering son.
For a fleeting moment, Felipe thought his father might try to comfort him or offer something that amounted to remorse, but when he beheld his son’s wet gaze, his face twisted into a disgusted sneer.
With a shake of his head, his father stormed off towards the training grounds without looking back.
Felipe awoke with a shuddering gasp. For a wretched moment, he thought he was still that boy on his family’s estate.
A wave of long-forgotten hopelessness settled over him until he remembered where he was.
He wasn’t that boy anymore; he was a grown man standing in the dark, his body humming with adrenaline from a decades-old memory.
Scrubbing a shaking hand over the stubble lining his jaw, Felipe focused on the moon shining on the other side of the windowpane.
He had left that life years ago. He had a home, he had a job, he had Oliver.
Oliver. Turning back to the bed, relief washed away the remaining fear as Felipe watched Oliver sleep.
His pale pink lips were lax, and a boyish wave of black hair covered his eyes as he lay oblivious to Felipe’s nightmares.
Felipe swept a gentle hand across his lover’s cheek, and the tether slowly tightened as Oliver seemed to lean into his touch.
Oliver who loved him so fiercely no matter what.
Felipe swallowed hard. Would Oliver love him less or lose his love for him entirely if he knew where he came from or the man he would probably still be if it hadn’t been for that fateful January night?
“Felipe?” Oliver called, his grey eyes drifting open. “Is it morning?”
“No, love, I was just stretching my legs. Go back to sleep.”
“If it’s a cramp, the jerky’s in the dresser.”
A watery smile crossed Felipe’s lips as he climbed back into bed.
Oliver blindly reached for him and pulled him close, twining their legs together.
His face nuzzled against Felipe’s shoulder as he murmured “I love you” into his skin.
Holding Oliver’s hands over his heart like a talisman, Felipe tried to sleep, but every time he shut his eyes, he saw Santiago’s tearstained face as the gates to the Galvan compound closed to him forever.