GABRIELLA #2
Though hearing him use the title made her laugh, the sound carried by the breeze that floated between them. “It feels like it. You remember me telling you how I grew up on a farm, right? There was always one animal or another that needed tending.”
“That sounds exhausting.” He crossed his arms over his chest, the shirt stretching against firm muscle that made her mouth arid.
Yemaya grant me strength, she thought, referencing the Caribbean Goddess of the sea.
She had recently learned of the Goddess, also considered a protector of women and children, from one of her colleagues here.
“It was exhausting, though I’d imagine not as exhausting as being a turtle trying to crawl up a beach to lay eggs. ”
“True. Couldn’t your family decide on which animals to save? Surely you could have eaten a few,” he jested, the wind brushing his shirt open to reveal a hint of the sea turtle tattoo underneath.
She scoffed. “To me, the farm animals were my friends. You think I’m indecisive as an adult?
You should have seen me as a kid. I was never comfortable eating my friends.
” She rolled her eyes at him. “Though my cousins had zero issues. The Italian side of my family was more accustomed to killing than I was,” she joked.
She remembered her cousins, Beatrice and Sienna, chasing her around their Tuscan farmhouse, each holding a headless chicken while wearing matching mischievous grins.
She missed them dearly. Headstrong and passionate, they felt like the complete opposite of her.
They were one of reasons she had found her strength to move forward, first after her parents died and then later after her divorce.
Mateo’s chuckle broke her train of thought. “True, it is hard to eat your friends.”
“Not if it’s consensual," she shot back, feeling brave in her flirting as heat rose to her cheeks.
His brow furrowed as his eyes locked onto her, as if he was recalling an unpleasant memory on her behalf. “I hope that for you,” he said gently, “it’s always consensual from now on.”
The way he so delicately alluded to all she’d suffered at the hands of her ex-husband and the trauma of her marriage emphasized how much he’d learned about her during their time together.
It was scary how close they had gotten recently, and how much of herself she had shared with him.
A part of her thought she should feel ashamed of how shattered she’d been before she’d learned to stand on her feet again.
But she wasn’t. Not with Mateo.
“With someone like you? Always,” she murmured. She saw something briefly pass his features before he managed to catch himself.
His chuckle died off until the silence between them stretched, broken only by the rush of waves and the distant calls of howler monkeys deep in the jungle—those mournful, guttural cries that rolled out of the dark tree line like a warning cry.
Gabriella had always loved that sound. Tonight, however, it raised the hair on the back of her neck.
Mateo turned towards her, and his dark eyes lingered a moment longer than necessary, her breath catching, before he looked to the water behind her.
Odd. She’d caught him doing that more than once this evening, the subtle drift of his attention away from her and towards the horizon or the tree line.
She’d chalked it up to vigilance. He knew this coastline better than she or any of her colleagues.
“Where is your phone Gabriella?” he asked, though his words carried an edge to it.
“My phone? I always leave it in the room when I know I might be submerged,” she responded reasonably. He would know that, because previously they had discussed how he would do the same.
Then Mateo’s stance changed, his shoulders tightening beneath the fabric of his button-up, the easy looseness of him drawing inward like a tide pulling back before a wave.
The amiable warmth that had always radiated off him—his steady, unhurried ease that had made her trust him—flickered for a brief moment.
She would have missed it if she hadn’t been used to studying him in silence.
“Mateo?” she asked, turning towards him. “Is everything—?”
The crack of automatic gunfire shattered the night.
The sound was nothing like the movies. It was sharper, harsher.
She felt it as much as heard it. A brutal, mechanical tearing of the air that drove itself straight through her chest and knocked the breath clean out of her.
For one horrible, suspended second, Gabriella didn’t move.
Couldn’t move. Her pencil slipped from her fingers and disappeared into the wet sand.
Screams followed, scattering across the beach like startled birds.
The serenity of Tortuguero dissolved into chaos as figures moved towards the trees, and her colleagues—her friends—became nothing more than shapes swallowed by darkness and panic.
Gabriella’s heart lurched as fear squeezed the air from her lungs.
A motor roared across the water. A boat covered in green camouflage cut through the waves and slid up the shoreline, its hull grinding against the wet sand in a sound that scraped along her nerves.
Men in masks leapt from it, rifles slung across their backs, voices barking commands she didn’t understand.
The moonlight caught the metal of their rifles, and her mind went perfectly, horribly blank.
This isn’t happening. This cannot be happening.
“Gabriella!” Mateo’s hand closed around her arm, firm and unyielding, his grip nothing like the casual, guiding touch she’d grown used to over these past months. This grip meant business. “We need to move. Get your shoes on.”
Gabriella complied, her fingers fumbling with her laces, her mind a static roar of white noise.
Her brain screamed, Move. Just move. Yet her body froze, just like it used to during the years of her marriage.
Unsure of what else to do, she let Mateo lead. He dragged her backwards, heading away from the beach and the faint, receding glow of the village lights and towards the endless trees, that dark and breathing wall of jungle that swallowed sound and light and people whole.
Mateo pulled while shouting in Spanish, the words too fast and clipped for her basic understanding of the language—yet, despite her panic, she noticed how his accent had changed.
It sounded different from any of the locals she’d spoken with; the consonants were too sharp, and he rolled his r’s too hard.
The cadence had been different, too, now that she was examining it.
Clinical, almost. Like a man performing a dialect rather than speaking his mother tongue.
How had I never noticed?
Gabriella knew some Spanish thanks to her father’s side of the family, but she’d never fully learned it.
Her father had always insisted on speaking only English at home and had feared teaching Gabriella Spanish would alienate her.
However, at this moment? She fervently wished her father had felt differently.
“Mateo?” she asked, afraid for both of their safety.
“I need you to be quiet and follow me,” he snapped. Her palm was sweaty against his, and she was sure he felt the staccato beat of her heart against her palm.
This was not the easygoing Mateo she knew.
An ominous feeling gripped her and squeezed.
She was filled with a familiar dread of helplessness, and she felt terribly small and frail.
Fear constricted her lungs as Mateo led her away from the beach.
The question snagged in her mind and wouldn’t let go, even as the jungle loomed before them.
She was a scientist. She was trained to observe, to catalogue, to notice.
She noticed the number of barnacles on a sea turtle’s shell from twenty feet away.
She noticed the degree of curvature in a flipper.
And yet she had spent months beside this man—months of shared dinners eaten from tin plates, of evenings crouched together in the sand counting hatchlings, of easy laughter traded over lukewarm coffee—and she had never once questioned who he said he was. Now she wasn’t sure.
Because you wanted to trust him. The thought was icy as it slithered down her spine. Because you always want to trust people, and it always costs you. Just like with Justin.
Tears pricked her eyes. She had been a fool.
Again. Of course, the man she had befriended so quickly was too good to be true.
Her mother, in her thick Italian accent Gabriella had loved, always told her she was a terrible judge of character and that it was in her blood to be welcoming to all those she met.
She’d acted the way she always did—open-handed and open-hearted, because that was simply the way she was built.
She trusted Mateo. His knowledge of the coastline was something she’d leaned on without a second thought.
She’d trusted the conservation committee to have done a thorough background check.
Of course she had. Why wouldn’t she? She trusted processes, trusted institutions, trusted the careful machinery of due diligence because she had to believe that the people protecting this work cared as much as she did.