Chapter 14
Kairo~
While I hadn’t expected Triana to be at the tree this evening, that hadn’t stopped me from showing up anyway.
She was beginning to feel like a drug that I was slowly becoming hooked on, and I was the first to admit that it sounded too crazy to be real.
Yet, I found myself spending my days thinking about her and kicking myself in the ass for not getting her number or hitting her up on social media.
Yeah, I was very aware that my attraction to her couldn’t go anywhere, but I still wasn’t ready to give her up just yet.
At any rate, when I reached the oak tree that stood across the creek from Triana’s cherry blossom tree, I saw her sitting underneath the branches, her arms wrapped around her knees, her dark hair draped like a curtain all around her, and need gripped my heart like never before.
“Baby, is everything okay?”
Triana’s head snapped up, and her eyes were a bit red around the rims, and though she didn’t look a mess, it was obvious that she’d been crying at some point, and that bothered me way more than it should when you considered that I barely knew the woman.
“What...what are you doing here?”
“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said, ignoring her question.
She let out a shaky breath, and it took everything in me not to swim across the damn creek to wrap her up in my arms. She looked like she had the entire world resting on her shoulders, and it made her look fragile and tired, and I hated it.
“I packed up my office today after work because my parents fired me,” she finally answered, flooring me.
“Why on earth did they do that?”
She let out a hollow laugh. “Because I refuse to marry the man of their choosing.”
What in the fresh hell?
I almost choked on my shock. “What?”
Triana let out a tired sigh as she stood up, saying, “We have these family friends, the Fuentezes, and somewhere along the way, my father promised one of their sons my hand in marriage like...like we’re in some goddamn period piece, and when I refused to follow through on his promise, he accused me of dishonoring the family name, and so they disowned me earlier today. ”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“I...I just don’t know what to do,” she said brokenly. “Like you said, family is the most important thing, and I’ve just lost mine because I don’t want to marry a man that I don’t love.”
While inappropriate, jealousy crawled up my spine, and even though I had no rights to this woman, I didn’t like to think of her marrying someone else.
I mean, logically, I knew that I could never have her, and I knew that what we were doing was ill-advised and dangerous, but I still couldn’t help how I felt.
“I’ve never felt so torn,” she went on. “I never imagined that my parents would do this to me, and I certainly never imagined that they’d ever disown me for something so...so archaic and wrong.”
“What were your parents’ reasoning behind all this?” I asked, trying to understand.
“They never gave me one,” she answered. “They just said that they’d given their word, and that I would learn to love Romelio because he was a good man.”
The man’s name rolled off her tongue with such fluidness that it spiked my jealousy up a notch, and the way that she rolled her Rs, her heritage shining through was a bigger turn on than it should have been.
In fact, everything about her was beginning to feel like it was too much, and I really was in deep shit when it came to whatever this was.
“Did you guys used to date or something?” I asked, trying to stow away my jealousy and just listen.
She shook her head. “Never. I had no idea that he was even interested in me that way, and honestly, I haven’t even spoken to him about it. I just...I mean, I know that I should, but what kind of man does something like this without giving the woman a heads up?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, still trying to wrap my mind around her situation.
“I just...the idea of growing to love my husband sounds so...so cold,” she went on.
“It sounds like a...a business arrangement or something as equally boring. I don’t want to learn to love my husband, Kairo.
I want to not be able to get enough of the man that I married.
I want to look at him and not be able to ever imagine being with another man. ”
“As it should be,” I told her, wanting to be that man more than anything right now.
“I just...” She let out a deep sigh as she looked up at the sky, and fuck me running, she was just so damn beautiful. “I just...I want my marriage to be more than just a duty.”
I couldn’t help it anymore.
I just fucking couldn’t.
Going against everything that I’d ever been taught and had believed in, instead of just diving into the creek, I took off towards the northern edge of the trees, then crossed over into Rancher Hills, breaking every fucking law that there was.
When I finally reached Triana, her russet-colored gaze was wide with a hint of fear in it. “What...what are you doing?” she choked out. “Are you crazy?”
Instead of addressing my mental state at the moment, I asked, “Do you want my hands on you, Triana?” Her eyes started darting around like we were about to be shot, and I could hardly blame her. “Answer me, baby.”
When she looked back up at me, everything that I was feeling was mirrored in her eyes. “Yes,” she mouthed silently.
“I need to hear it, Triana,” I told her, refusing to risk everything for a misunderstanding.
“Yes,” she said, clearly this time.
Not caring about anything else, I grabbed her face in my hands, then kissed her with everything that I’d been feeling since the day that we’d first met.
I kissed her with her concerned words for me ringing in my ear, and I kissed her for how she kept coming back here, even knowing that I might not be waiting for her.
I kissed her to show her the reason that I kept showing up when I shouldn’t.
When I felt her hands slide up my chest to wrap around my neck, my own hands found her hips, and then I pulled her close enough that she could feel what she did to me. Now, while I didn’t want to scare her away, I also couldn’t help what was happening between us.
I also would have kept on kissing her if a squawking bird hadn’t flown overhead, bursting our little bubble, reminding us of where we were and what we were doing.
“Oh, God...” she gasped, stepping back, her fingers touching her lips. “What are we doing?”
Throwing caution to the wind, I said, “I haven’t been coming here every day to just be your friend, Triana.”
She immediately began shaking her head. “You...we can’t do this, Kairo. You have to get back to the other side of the creek.”
I understood why she was panicking, and since she already had too much on her mind, I said, “Give me your phone number first.”
“Kairo-”
“Give me your phone number,” I repeated. “If you give me your number, then this will be easier to navigate.” I took her face in my hands again. “We can talk on the phone safely.”
That was the thing about the times that we were living in. While we were forbidden to cross borders, phones and the internet still existed, so we weren’t completely cut off from everyone else, but most of us still just stuck to our own kind because it was easier and temptation was a bitch.
Triana’s voice shook as she fired off her phone number, and I quickly grabbed my phone out of my pocket to save it. Once I did, I sent her a text, so that she’d have my number programmed into her phone as well, and as much as I didn’t want to leave, she looked like she was going to lose it.
Racing back over to Sterling Acres, once I was safely back on the other side, I said, “Call me when you get home, and then we can talk about this some more.”
“About what?” she asked, sounding a bit frantic. “My parents or what just happened?”
“About whatever you want,” I told her. “We can talk about whatever you want.”
“Kairo-”
“Don’t tell me that this is wrong, Triana,” I said, interrupting her. “I already know that, but I don’t care. I don’t care, and I’d do it again.”
I watched her shoulders sag in defeat, and I knew that she needed a break from life right now. She was already going through a lot, and I hadn’t helped matters by what I’d just done, but I hadn’t been lying when I’d said that I’d do it again.
“Just...call me when you get home, okay?” I told her. “We...it’ll be okay, baby.”
She didn’t look like she believed me, but she also didn’t argue with me. Instead, she just started walking, and I followed her until I legally couldn’t anymore.