It Was You
Ortiz
I tell Torque where we’re going. He looks at me over the top of his coffee for a while, then says, “Truck. Back before dark. Text Rook when you’re parked.” That’s a yes.
She’s waiting by the truck in Beth’s jeans with her hair down. I’ve got a silent rule for today, and the rule is that I don’t look at her longer than it takes to answer a question. I’ve had that rule since the morning after the storm. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever kept.
I roll her window down before she asks. She puts her face into the wind the whole way over the river, and when the signs start coming up in Spanish she sits forward with her hand on the dash.
“Slower.”
“I’m going the limit.”
“Go under it.”
I go under it. Music comes out of a bakery door. Old men are at the tables in the little park with the dominoes going, slapping them down and yelling at each other about nothing, and she laughs at that before we’ve even parked.
She orders for both of us at a window. She doesn’t ask what I want.
She tells the woman in Spanish, fast and bossy.
The woman says, “Sí, mami” and hands over a paper boat of croquetas and two little cups.
Maribel pays out of the envelope Beth gave her for incidentals and doesn’t look at me while she does it.
“I said I would pay.”
“I know what you said,” she says. “Let me take care of this. Only because I want to feel normal for once.”
We eat standing at the counter. She burns her mouth and blames me.
She wipes grease off her thumb and I look at the dominoes.
A song she knows comes out of the bakery.
She does two steps of it right there on the sidewalk with a cup in her hand, the way her grandmother used to in the kitchen doorway. Then she looks at me.
“You still can’t.”
“I never could.”
“You could. You wouldn’t.” She takes my wrist and pulls. I go one step and stop. She laughs at me so hard she has to put the cup down. Everybody at the window is watching. I don’t care. I’d stand here and get laughed at by her until they closed.
I’ve been looking at her too long. I look at the dominoes.
She sees me do it. She doesn’t say anything.
We walk. She wants every street. She stops at a mural of a rooster and tells me the one on the wall behind her grandmother’s house was better.
She stops at a cigar shop and breathes the door.
She says the word for a fruit at a stand and I don’t know it, and she’s delighted, because there’s finally something in this country she knows and I don’t.
She’s got color in her face. Her hair’s coming loose from the wind. A man at the cigar shop looks at her the way I’m not letting myself. I move so I’m on that side of her before I’ve thought about it. She notices, and she lets me.
Late in the afternoon we end up on the low wall by the park with the last two cups. The old men are still yelling. She’s sitting close enough that her knee is an inch off mine. I keep it an inch.
“Mateo.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think I’m pretty?”
I don’t answer her. I can’t. I’ve spent days not looking at her mouth, not sitting next to her, not letting my hand do what it wants to do when she goes past me in the hall.
I’ve kept my hips off her in my own bed. I have no idea how a woman gets asked that question by a man who’s been sitting on his hands for her for days.
“Why would you think I don’t?”
She looks at the dominoes. “Steel.”
I hear it, and I don’t understand a word of it. “Steel.”
“Mm-hm.”
“What does Steel have to do with whether you’re pretty?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me.”
“Nope.” She takes a sip. “We pinky promised.”
I sit there on that wall and something goes through me that I don’t have a name for and don’t want one. Steel. Steel, who barely talks to anybody. Steel, who I’ve known since before I patched.
She’s been talking to Steel. Privately. About something I’m not allowed to know. And they pinky promised, which is a thing she used to do with me when she was seven and a thing she did to my hand at a crosswalk the other day. Now she’s done it with Steel.
“When were you talking to Steel?”
“Can’t tell you that either.”
“Pluma.”
“You have a face right now,” she says, and she’s enjoying it. She’s enjoying the hell out of it. It’s the most like herself I’ve seen her since she got here, and if it weren’t at my expense I’d be glad.
“Did he say something to you?”
“He said one thing.”
“What?”
She shakes her head. She holds up her little finger. I look at it. I’d like to go back to the Lounge, pick Steel up by the front of his cut, and ask him what the fuck he said to her with his pinky. I’d lose that fight. I’d still do it.
“You’re jealous,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Of Steel.”
“I’m jealous of the wall you’re sitting on.”
She laughs. Then she stops laughing. She turns the cup around in her hands.
“He said bodies do things,” she says. “That’s all. That they do things and it doesn’t mean anybody asked.” She looks at the cup. “So I thought maybe it wasn’t because of me.”
The old men keep yelling. I don’t hear them anymore.
She thought it wasn’t her. She’s been carrying that since the storm.
She came to my bed and put her hand on my chest and I got hard.
She ran. I stayed away from her so she’d feel safe, and every hour of it she read as proof I didn’t want her.
That I’d have been hard for anybody. That she’s a woman in borrowed jeans that nobody looks at twice, and a man being careful with her is a man who doesn’t care.
“Maribel.”
She looks at me. She’s braced for it. That’s what does it, her being braced.
“It was you,” I tell her. “It’s been you since I saw you on the front step asking for me.”
I don’t move. I’ve got no restraint left, and I still don’t move, because she asked the question and she gets to decide what happens with the answer.
She looks at my mouth. She puts the cup down on the wall. Then she puts her hand flat on my chest, where it was in the dark, and she doesn’t take it away.
That’s all I needed.
I kiss her. Not careful. My hand goes into her hair and I take her mouth the way I’ve wanted to since she threw popcorn at my head, and she opens for me and makes a sound against my teeth that I’ll hear for the rest of my life.
She gets a fist in my shirt. She pulls me in instead of away. I’m the one who breaks it, because if I don’t we’re going to give the domino table something to yell about.
Her mouth is red. Her eyes are wide open and there’s nothing scared in them.
“Okay,” she says, out of breath. “It was me.”
“It was you.”
“Say it again.”
“It was you, Pluma. It’s you.”
She picks her cup back up. Her hand isn’t steady. She drinks the last of it and looks out at the old men with her knee against mine, all the way against it now, and her mouth still swollen from me.
“I’m still not telling you everything Steel said,” she says.