15. Adriana
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Adriana
“What do you want, Rafael?”
“I want to see you. Just for an hour. Less than an hour.” His words come out in a rush, like he’s been holding them behind his teeth. “There are things I need to say to you that I can’t say like this, over a phone. Please. You owe me that much.”
“I don’t owe you anything.” I say it without heat, which I think surprises both of us.
A month ago the word owe coming out of his mouth would have done something to me, made me scramble to prove I wasn’t the unreasonable one.
Now it just sits there, wrong and a little sad.
“Whatever you have to say, say it to my lawyer. That’s what he’s for. ”
“This isn’t about lawyers.” His voice drops, goes intimate, the tone he used to use on me late at night when he wanted something.
“It’s about us. Adriana, I made a mistake.
I know that now. I think I knew it the second you walked out, and I’ve been going out of my mind ever since, and if you would just let me explain… ”
“There’s nothing to explain. I was there. I saw all of it.”
I’m still leaning into Enzo, his arm around me, his hand spread warm on my back, and I know the second Rafael’s voice gets loud enough to leak out of the phone, because Enzo goes still against me.
Not soft-still. The other kind. His hand stops moving on my back and his jaw sets and I can feel him deciding something.
“Give me the phone,” he says, low.
I shake my head.
“Ana. Give me the phone. I’ll be quick.”
“No.” I press my free hand flat to his chest, partly to keep him there and partly because I want to. “I’ve got it.”
He doesn’t love that. I can tell. But he stays.
“You’re not even going to give me a chance,” Rafael says, and now there’s an edge creeping in under the pleading. “After seven months of marriage. After everything. You just throw it away and move in with my brother, of all people, and I don’t even get to say my piece.”
“I gave you seven months of chances. You just didn’t notice you were using them up.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Sign the papers, Rafael. The faster you do, the faster you never have to think about me again. That’s the only thing left between us.”
“Don’t do this. Adriana, listen to me, I know him.
You don’t. Whatever he’s told you, whatever this is, it isn’t real to him, you’re a way to get at our family and the second he’s bored you’ll be standing in the street wondering what happened.
” His voice climbs. “I’m the one who actually knows you. I’m the one who…”
“You’re the one who slept with my sister in our bed.” I say it flat, no tremble, and the line goes dead quiet on his end. “So you’ll understand if I don’t take your read on who really knows me.”
“That’s not…” He stops. Starts again, softer, switching tactics the way he always does. “I was confused. I was scared of the wedding, of all of it, and I did something stupid, and I have regretted it every single day since. People make mistakes. You’re really going to end us over one mistake?”
“It wasn’t one mistake.” I close my eyes. “Sign the papers.”
“Adriana…”
I hang up.
For a second I just stand there with the phone warm in my hand, waiting to feel shaken, the way I always used to after talking to him. I’d spend hours afterward turning the conversation over, hunting for the thing I’d said wrong.
It doesn’t come. There’s just quiet, and the low hum of the fridge, and Enzo’s arm still around me.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I set the phone face-down on the counter. “That’s the strange part. I keep being okay.”
“Good.” Then, after a beat, not letting it go the way I knew he wouldn’t: “What did he say to you? At the end there. Your face did a thing.”
“He said you don’t really care about me. That I’m just a way for you to get back at your family, and you’ll dump me in the street when you’re bored.”
Enzo’s quiet for a second. “Huh.”
“That’s it? Huh?”
“What do you want me to say? He’s not totally wrong about why I went after your family.” He shrugs, and there’s no apology in it. “He’s just wrong about the rest. But sure. Next time he calls, put him on speaker. I’d like to explain to him in person where he’s got it wrong.”
“You’re not getting near him.”
“I wasn’t going to touch him.” He pauses. “Much.”
“Enzo.”
“I’m kidding.” Another beat. “Mostly.”
I should be alarmed by how much I don’t hate that. By how good it feels to have somebody in my corner who’d happily make my problems disappear and isn’t going to pretend otherwise to look nice. I poke him in the chest instead.
“Let me enjoy him being miserable a while longer before you do anything. I earned that.”
He grins, sharp and pleased. “There she is.”
***
That night I can’t sleep.
It’s not Rafael. Rafael’s a closed door; I keep checking and the lock holds. It’s the other thing, the thing I haven’t let myself look at directly, lying here in the dark with Enzo’s breathing slow and even beside me.
What is this?
That’s the question I can’t put down. When I came to him three weeks ago it was simple, or it pretended to be.
He had a reason to hurt my family and I had nowhere to go and the two things fit together like a deal.
Then it became revenge, the function, the dress, walking into that ballroom on his arm and watching them choke on it.
That had a shape. A purpose. A finish line.
But the finish line came and went. My father disowned me. Viviana’s a wreck. The whole city knows what they did. I’ve taken everything from them I set out to take, and the strange part is I don’t want anything else from them at all. The wanting just stopped, like a fever breaking.
So what am I still doing here.
It’s not that I want to leave. That’s what makes it complicated.
If I hated it here I’d know exactly what to do.
But I don’t hate it. I like the mornings, the coffee left warm by the machine.
I like arguing with him about nothing. I like the weight of his arm over me at night, which is a thing I never had in seven months of marriage and didn’t know I was missing until I had it.
That’s the problem, actually. It’s too easy to like. And every easy thing in my life has come with a bill attached, and I’ve learned the hard way to read the fine print before I sign.
I turn my head on the pillow and look at him. Asleep, he loses the sharpness, the careful control. He looks younger. One of his hands is open on the sheet between us, palm up, like even unconscious he left it there in case I wanted it.
I don’t have an answer for what this is.
I know I like waking up here. I know the way he touches me has stopped feeling like a transaction and started feeling like the truest thing in my day.
I know that scares me more than my father ever did, because my father could only take things from me, and Enzo could take the one thing I just got back, which is the ability to stand on my own two feet without anyone holding me up.
Here’s the part I can’t say out loud, even to myself, even in the dark: I went straight from my father’s house to Rafael’s house to this one.
Three sets of walls, and I picked exactly none of them.
I have never once in my life lived somewhere because I chose it.
I have never woken up and known that the day belonged to me and nobody could take it back.
I made new friends this week. I have a class I like, an actual class, where the professor doesn’t know my last name and a girl named Lucia saves me a seat.
I have a room waiting for me at the end of term if I want it.
For the first time there’s a version of the future I get to build instead of inherit, and I’m terrified that if I sink too far into how good this is, I’ll wake up one day and find I’ve inherited this too.
That I traded one beautiful cage for another, and called it love because the bars were nicer.
I don’t know how a man fits into that. I don’t know if I’m supposed to figure out who I am first, or if I’m allowed to do both at once.
Nobody ever taught me the rules for wanting something just for myself.
I’m making them up as I go, in the dark, next to a sleeping man I think I might be falling for, which is the worst possible time to be this unsure.
I fall asleep without solving it. I knew I would. Some knots you can’t undo at two in the morning.
***
Classes help. That’s the thing nobody warned me about, how much it would help to have somewhere to be that has nothing to do with any of them.
Three mornings a week I drive myself to campus, park in a lot full of dented cars, and sit in a lecture hall where I am nobody at all.
The professor mangles my name on the roster and I don’t correct him, because the wrong name belongs to a girl with no history here, and I find I like her.
Lucia saves me a seat near the back. She has paint under her fingernails and opinions about everything and she has never once asked me a question about my family, because she doesn’t know there’s anything to ask.
“You’re staring again,” she tells me on Wednesday, not looking up from her notebook.
“I’m processing.”
“You process like someone who got let out of somewhere.” She says it lightly, doodling in the margin, but it hits closer than she knows. “Anyway. The room’s still yours if you want it. Sasha’s out by the end of the month.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You keep saying that.” She finally looks at me, and there’s nothing sharp in it, just a girl being a friend. “No pressure. It’s just sitting there. Sometimes it’s nice to have a door, even if you don’t walk through it.”
I don’t tell her she’s the second person this week to leave a way out lying where I can see it. I just say thanks, and I mean it, and we go back to pretending to take notes.