21. Adriana #2
“No. I told her no.” I almost smile. “First time in my life I’ve ever said it to someone in my family and meant it all the way down.”
He sits next to me. Doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, carefully: “You okay?”
“I think so.” I lean my head back against the cushion. “I’m going to take the room. Lucia’s room. I told the landlord yes this morning, before class. I move in this weekend.”
I feel him go still. A different kind of still.
“This weekend,” he says.
“This weekend.”
And here’s where I expect the okay. The same careful, generous, trying-so-hard okay he gave me over takeout. I brace for it.
It doesn’t come.
“Don’t,” he says instead.
I turn to look at him. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t go.” He’s looking at the floor, jaw working, like the words are being dragged out of him.
“I keep telling myself I’m going to let you, be the bigger person, give you your room and your independence and all of it.
And I keep getting to the part where you actually leave and I can’t make myself say okay again.
” He drags a hand through his hair. “I’m not good at this.
You know I’m not. So I’m just going to say it badly. Is that all right? Can I say it badly?”
My heart is doing something painful. “Enzo…”
“I’ve wanted you for years.” He says it to the floor first, then makes himself look at me.
His eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them.
“Not since the lobby. Not since the function. Years, Ana. I used to see you at those parties, in the corner, in your sister’s shadow, and I couldn’t figure out why nobody else could see you.
You’d find the piano at every event and play when you thought no one was watching and I’d stand there like an idiot. Watching.”
I can’t breathe.
“And then my brother’s wedding.” His voice goes rough.
“I came to needle our father. To be bored in a nice suit and remind them all I existed. I didn’t even know you’d be the one standing up there, Ana.
I thought it was your sister. Everyone thought it was your sister.
” His jaw works. “And then they lifted the veil and it was you. You, in a dress that didn’t fit, scared out of your mind, going through with it anyway because that’s who you are, you carry the thing no one else will carry.
And the whole reason I’d come, the boredom, the spite, all of it went quiet and certain all at once.
I stood in the back of that church and I have never wanted to do anything as much as I wanted to walk up there and take you out of it.
Carry you out the door. Make a scene they’d talk about for years. ”
“Why didn’t you,” I whisper.
“Because it wasn’t mine to do. Because you hadn’t chosen it.
Because the one thing I knew about you was that everyone in your life kept making your choices for you, and I wasn’t going to be one more man who decided he knew better.
” He almost laughs, bitter. “Which is rich. Considering what I did with Rafael. Considering I’ve spent this whole time managing you, handling you.
But I keep trying not to. For you, I keep trying. ”
He takes my hand. His are shaking. Enzo’s hands don’t shake.
“I love you,” he says. “It’s not the arrangement.
It hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t want you to use me to get back at anyone.
I don’t want to be the thing you do until you figure out your real life.
I want to be your real life. I’m asking you to stay because I love you, not because I’m trying to keep you.
Those are different things. And I need you to know I know the difference now. ”
And there it is. Everything. Laid out on the table, the thing he’s been sitting on for weeks, for years. I should feel triumphant or overjoyed or certain.
Instead I feel like I’m going to be sick, because I don’t know what to say back.
“Enzo.” My voice comes out small. “I don’t… I can’t…”
“You don’t have to say it back.”
“That’s not it.” I pull my hand free, not unkindly, just because I can’t think with his skin against mine.
“It’s not that I don’t feel anything. I feel so much I can’t tell what any of it is.
That’s the problem. A few weeks ago I was married to your brother.
I’d never been wanted by anyone, not really.
Then I walk out of that house and straight into you, and you’re the first person who ever looked at me and saw something worth keeping.
” I press my hands to my face. “How am I supposed to trust that? How do I know this is love and not just… that you were there? That you were kind when no one else was? People drown and grab the first thing that floats. Doesn’t mean they love the thing. It means they were drowning.”
He flinches, and I hate that I said it, but it’s the truest thing in me.
“I like you,” I say. “God, I more than like you. But I’ve never once found out who I am when there’s no one standing next to me, holding me up.
If I stay now, if I say it back now, I’ll never know if I meant it or if I was just scared to be alone.
You deserve better than being someone’s life raft.
And I deserve to find out what I actually want, instead of just taking the first warm thing because I’ve been cold my whole life. ”
The apartment is very quiet.
“So that’s a no,” he says.
“It’s not a no.” My eyes are burning. “It’s a not yet. It’s an I-don’t-know. It’s me needing to stand on my own two feet for once so that if I ever do come back and say it, you’ll know I meant it. And so will I.”
He’s quiet a long time. I watch him fight himself, watch the part of him that wants to argue, to fix this, to find the angle that keeps me here.
I watch it lose.
“Okay,” he says. And this time the okay is the hardest one yet.
The one that costs the most. “Take the room. Go figure out who you are.” His mouth twists.
“But I’m not going to pretend I’m fine with it, and I’m not going anywhere.
You go find yourself, Ana. When you’re done, I’ll still be here.
I’m a patient man. I told you that once. I meant it.”
***
I move out on Saturday.
Doesn’t take long. Everything I own still fits in two bags, which tells its own story about the life I’ve been living.
He carries them down, both of them, even though I tell him I can manage.
He puts them in the trunk of the car that’s taking me across the city to a cheap room near a campus where nobody knows my name.
At the curb he doesn’t kiss me. He just looks at me a while, like he’s memorizing something. Then he tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, the way he does, and lets his hand rest at the side of my neck.
“Go,” he says, rough. “Before I change my mind about being noble.”
I go.
And it isn’t until the car turns the corner, until his building disappears behind me and I’m alone for the first time in my life, really alone, no father, no husband, no Enzo, nobody holding the ceiling up but me, that I let myself cry.
I can’t even tell if it’s grief or relief.
Maybe that’s the thing I have to go find out.