Chapter 21 #2
“He is.” She smiles. “And his mom was fluent, so I learned a lot from her growing up. Nonna Rosa. She refused to speak English to either of us, which helped.” She shrugs.
“Spanish is a Romance language too, so it wasn’t too hard to pick up once I had Italian as a foundation. And I’ve always liked languages.”
The woman behind the desk says something to us, and Brooke turns back to handle the rest of the transaction. I pull out my wallet.
“I’ve got the rooms,” I say, handing over my credit card before Brooke can argue.
She raises an eyebrow but doesn’t protest. A few minutes later the woman slides two key cards across the counter and says something in Spanish with a warm smile. Brooke thanks her and hands me one of the cards.
“Room 212,” she says. “I’m in 214, just down the hall.”
We head up the stairs, leaving twin trails of wet footprints on the worn carpet. At the top, the hallway splits in two directions, and we both stop.
“Well,” she says. “This isn’t exactly how I pictured tonight going.”
“No,” I agree. “It’s not.”
She looks at me, and neither of us seems to know what to do next.
Normally we would’ve already said something sharp to each other by now, found an excuse to fight.
But we’re both soaked through and exhausted and stranded in a town we’re not supposed to be in, and I guess that takes the edge off things.
“See you tomorrow, I guess,” she says. “Hopefully on a plane.”
“Hopefully.”
She turns right. I turn left, finding room 212, and push the door open.
The room is small but clean, with a queen bed with a floral bedspread, a TV bolted to the wall, and a window that’s rattling with the force of the wind outside.
I strip off my soaked clothes, towel off, and dig through my carry-on for something dry to change into.
Once I’m in joggers and a t-shirt, I try my phone, holding it up toward the window in case the signal is better near the glass.
One bar of service flickers briefly in the corner of the screen and then disappears, but I manage to type out a text to Roman.
Me: Stuck in Valle Quieto. Big storm, diverted flight but I will be there tomorrow. We’re going to try and catch the morning flight. Do your routine and get some sleep.
The message sits there with a little spinning wheel for thirty seconds, then forty-five, then a full minute. Then the wheel stops and a red exclamation point appears.
Message not delivered.
The single bar of service is gone. Fuck.
I try again, holding the phone in different positions, standing on the bed to get closer to the ceiling, opening the window and leaning out into the rain. Nothing. The message refuses to send.
I pull on my shoes and head back downstairs. The woman at the front desk looks up from her paperback as I approach.
“Disculpe,” I say, my Spanish rough and halting. “Teléfono? Para llamar?” I mime holding a phone to my ear, feeling like an idiot.
She nods, understanding despite my butchered attempt, and gestures toward the phone on the counter. She says something in Spanish that I don’t catch, but her tone is sympathetic.
“Gracias,” I say, and she slides it toward me.
It takes a couple tries to get an outside line, and even then the connection crackles like the storm is interfering with the signal.
Roman doesn’t pick up, so I leave a voicemail explaining the situation, that I’m stranded in some town called Valle Quieto, that I’ll find a way to get there, that he should focus on his prep and not worry about me.
“Gracias,” I say again to the woman, and she nods and goes back to her book.
Back in my room, I pace the small space, running through options.
There’s nothing else I can do from here.
No flights to rebook, no cars to rent, no way to will myself to Mexico City through sheer stubbornness.
Roman’s title shot is the day after tomorrow and I’m stuck in Valle Quieto, completely powerless to do anything but wait.
I hate being powerless. I’ve spent my entire adult life building systems and routines specifically designed to prevent this feeling. I control what I can control. I prepare for what I can prepare for. And then a storm rolls in and none of it matters.
A knock at the door pulls me out of my thoughts. I cross the room and open it to find Brooke standing in the hallway, changed into leggings and a sweater, her wet hair twisted up in some kind of knot on top of her head.
“There’s a bar downstairs.” She nods toward the stairs. “I saw it when we checked in. So, any chance you want to join me and drown our sorrows in whatever alcohol they have? Because I refuse to spiral alone.”
I should say no. I should stay in this room and keep trying the phone and figure out logistics and maintain the professional distance that’s kept me sane for the last few weeks.
I should avoid Brooke and whatever confusing thing keeps happening between us every time we’re in the same room.
There are a million reasons to close this door and spend the night alone with my thoughts.
“Yeah,” I hear myself say. “That’s actually the best idea I’ve heard all day.”
The bar is tucked into the back corner of the hotel, a small room with wood-paneled walls and mismatched furniture that looks like it’s been here since the seventies.
A few locals sit at the bar watching a soccer match on a mounted TV, and the bartender, a guy who looks to be in his sixties with a weathered face, nods at us as we walk in.
The storm is still pounding outside, rain hammering the roof, but in here the warm lighting and hum of Spanish commentary make the rest of the world feel far away. Like we’ve stepped into some pocket dimension where Mexico City and title fights and years of grudges don’t exist.
Brooke tilts her head toward the bar and we make our way over. I scan the bottles lined up on the shelf behind the bartender, the usual suspects plus some labels I don’t recognize, and a familiar one catches my eye. Mezcal Enmascarado. The black and gold label with the luchador mask.
“Tiene el Enmascarado?” I ask, pointing.
The bartender’s eyebrows lift and he says something in rapid Spanish, nodding approvingly like I’ve passed some kind of test.
“Lo siento, no hablo mucho espanol.” I gesture toward Brooke. “She’s the translator.”
She’s looking at me with a surprised expression. “He wants to know where you learned about Enmascarado. Apparently it’s the good stuff.”
“My sister-in-law Lark is half Mexican and she was a bartender for years, so she always brings the good stuff to family dinners. This one’s a favorite of hers.”
Brooke translates and the bartender smiles broadly, saying something that makes her laugh before pouring two glasses and sliding them across the bar.
“He says your sister-in-law has good taste,” she says. “And that this is from a family in Oaxaca who’ve been making mezcal for four generations.”
I raise my glass to the bartender in thanks and we take our drinks to a table in the back corner, away from the TV and the old guys and the bartender’s watchful gaze. The chairs are mismatched and the table is scarred and wobbles slightly on uneven legs.
For a moment we just sit there, the soccer match providing background noise, the announcer’s rapid Spanish punctuated by occasional cheers from the guys at the bar when someone does something worth celebrating.
The rain drums against the roof and streams down the windows in sheets, and every few seconds lightning flashes bright enough to cast shadows across the room.
What Margo told me at the Halloween party keeps circling through my head, the same loop I’ve been running for weeks now.
I have no idea how to bring it up. How do you tell someone that the foundation of everything between you was rotten from the start?
That the thing you did to them, the thing that started all of it, was based on complete bullshit?
She taps her fingers against the scarred wood of the table.
“This is unbelievable, you know. The biggest fight of your career, and potentially one of the biggest stories I’ve ever covered, and instead of being in the action, we’re stuck in some random town in the Sierra Madre, drinking mezcal and waiting out a storm. ”
She lets out a sharp breath, frustration radiating off her.
I nod, my own stress surging back at the thought of Roman in Mexico City without me, of everything that could go wrong tomorrow if we don’t get out of here.
“Tell me about it.” I glance up at the water-stained ceiling like some god up there might take pity on me and clear the skies. “Maybe it’s karma for all the shitty things we’ve done to each other.”
She snorts, a sound that’s more bitter than amused. “Hah. Wouldn’t that just be it. The universe finally deciding to collect on twenty-five years of mutual destruction.”
Sitting here now, with the storm raging outside and nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait, it feels like now or never. Either I tell her the truth or I carry it around forever.
“Speaking of shitty things we’ve done to each other,” I say, and the words feel heavy leaving my mouth. “I have to apologize to you about something.”
She looks up at me, confusion flickering across her face, and for a moment I’m struck by her.
Those lips I’ve kissed, that have also screamed at me in hallways and parking lots and across gym floors.
That face I’ve hated in equal measure to wanting her, sometimes in the same breath.
All these years, all this fucking history between us.
How differently it might have gone if Danny Miller had never opened his damn mouth, and if I hadn’t been stupid enough to believe him.
She tilts her head, studying me like she’s trying to figure out the angle. “Apologize for what, specifically? We have a pretty long list to choose from. You might need to narrow it down.”
I take a sip of the mezcal, letting the smoke and heat settle in my chest, buying myself another few seconds. “I was at a party back home in Dark River a few weeks ago and ran into Margo Miller. Danny Miller’s little sister. Do you remember him?”
She squints, thinking, clearly not expecting this particular trip down memory lane. “Oh yeah, he was on your boxing team or whatever. Thought he was god’s gift to Dark River athletics.” She shakes her head. “Damn, I haven’t thought about him in years”
“Me neither,” I say, though I sure as hell have been thinking about him lately.
“Margo told me that Danny lied to me back in high school. When he said you were planning to sabotage my scholarship application, I believed him because I thought he was being a friend, but he made the whole thing up because he had a thing for you and wanted me out of the picture.”
She watches me with an unreadable expression, not moving an inch, and the silence stretches between us until I can hear my own heartbeat over the rain.
“I’m sorry, Brooke.” The words feel inadequate, too small for years of damage, but they’re all I have.
“About the scholarship and you losing out on all that money and opportunity because of me, instead of a fair fight between us like it should have been. You tried to tell me that you hadn’t done anything, but I was so filled with righteous fucking anger that I couldn’t hear it.
I thought you’d betrayed me, and I was too stubborn and too proud to ever consider that I might be wrong. ”
She stares at me for a long moment. I brace myself for the explosion, for nearly two decades of fury to come pouring out like a dam breaking, for her to tell me exactly where I can shove my apology in vivid, detailed terms.
Instead, she starts laughing.
Softly at first, just a huff of air that could almost be disbelief. Then harder, her shoulders shaking, until actual tears are streaming down her face and she’s gripping the edge of the table like she might fall off her chair. The guys at the bar glance over with curious expressions.
“Uh.” I shift in my seat, completely at a loss. “Are you alright?”
She waves me off, gasping for air, completely unable to speak.
I expected anger. I expected vindication. I expected maybe a drink thrown in my face and a detailed list of all the ways I’ve ruined her life, delivered at top volume with footnotes and citations. I did not expect... this. I have no fucking idea what to do with this.
“I’m sorry,” she finally manages, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, it’s not funny. It’s really not funny. It’s actually deeply fucked up when you think about it.” She takes a shaky breath. “But also it’s genuinely the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”
“It is pretty absurd,” I admit.
“Danny Miller.” She’s still laughing, softer now, shaking her head like she can’t quite believe what she’s hearing.
“Danny Miller with the terrible frosted tips and the Limp Bizkit t-shirts and the chain wallet. That Danny Miller is the reason we’ve spent twenty-five years trying to destroy each other? ”
“The very same.”
“Oh my god.” She presses her hands to her face, then drops them and looks at me with something caught between wonder and horror.
“He used to do that thing where he’d flex in the hallway mirrors when he thought no one was looking.
I caught him kissing his own bicep once. I thought I was hallucinating.”
“He told me his spirit animal was a wolf,” I say, and now I’m laughing too, the absurdity of it finally hitting me. “Unironically.”
“Stop.” She’s doubled over again, wheezing. “Stop, I can’t breathe.”
“He also had a bumper sticker on his car that said ‘No Fear’ and another one that said ‘Bad Boy.’”
“Dominic, I swear, if you don’t stop.” She wipes her eyes again, her mascara smudged now, but she doesn’t seem to care.
“We really went at each other, didn’t we?
All those years and energy. All that hatred.
And it was all based on a lie some teenage boy told because he thought it would give him a shot with me. ”
“A lie I believed without question,” I say, and the laughter fades a little. “Because I wanted to believe it. Because it was easier to be angry at you than to deal with... whatever else I was feeling.”
The words hang in the air between us.
The laughter fades slowly, leaving us both staring at each other across the scarred table. The rain is still hammering against the windows, the soccer match still droning on the TV, but the air between us feels different now. Lighter, maybe. Or just unfamiliar.
Brooke takes a sip of her mezcal and sets the glass down carefully. “Well, while we’re confessing things.” She traces the rim of her glass with one finger, not quite meeting my eyes. “I talked to Miles Webb last week.”