The Burning Side(78)

His hand is still on my arm, tenderness ready to return if we’ll let it. “Is that a choice you could make?” I ask. “Me again, after everything?”

The room pulses with our history. Fear and shame waft between us like tendrils of smoke from a fire that is being doused with this emerging truth: our future is worth our past.

“April.” Again, Leo plays the petitioner. “Marry me.”

I let out a sound of surprise. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” he says, and he lifts a hand to my face. The intimacy of it threatens to undo me. “Is it a choice you could make? Me again, after everything?”

I smile through tears and say, “I could be wrong, but I think we’re already married.”

He slides our marriage certificate off the counter, a smile playing on his lips. “Not yet.” He taps a finger on the certificate, drawing my attention to the date.

Leonardo Torres and April Russo, married September 21, 2013.

No, wait. I squint. That’s not what it says.

Leonardo Torres and April Russo, married September 21, 2031.

I laugh full out. “Are you saying I have to wait nine more years to marry you?”

He moves toward me, but I touch our divorce papers, aware that our history will not disappear. “What about these?”

I am asking him if our vows can withstand our pain.

For better, for worse: Firefighters line the burning side of the house.

For richer, for poorer: Leo from little, April from much.

In sickness and in health: Have you thought about getting tested?

Until death do us part: Despair can be an epidemic.

I wait, but Leo does not look down at the papers.

And he does not flinch.

“Burn them,” he says.

His words take up residence between us, a flame of grace.

It has been many parched months since Leo last kissed me, so when he leans in, it takes Olympic effort to put my palm to his chest and say, “Not so fast, Odessa.”

His mouth ticks up in a curious smile. And God if I don’t want to put the tip of my tongue in the corner of that half smile, to suck the fullness of his bottom lip like fruit. I’ve spent many nights fantasizing about this in the kind of feverish detail that is charged by real memories.

Instead I stand up, grab a blanket, tell him to follow me, and lead us out into the night.

Across the grass, I can almost see it shimmering: the fire like a distress signal. A cathedral of flickering light. Marriage is a carousel for those who can stomach the cycles of it, orbiting an axis of children and money, of fear and brute determination. And—in some cases—of love. It’s for those who can survive coming back around to the starting place to discover that it has been subtly but irrevocably changed. We are right where we started, but we are not as we were.

I spread the blanket on the ground, pull the corners, and straighten back up. Leo watches my every move.

I step toward him. “You’re from Odessa.”

“Yeah, I—”

“I’m not done.”

This wins the other half of his smile.

“You’re from Odessa. Son of Rico and Ana. You have your father’s gentle eyes and your mother’s devotion. When your son was a week old, you told him, man to man, that the secret to strength is love. You didn’t know I heard that, but I did. You’re good with money and children. You are not good at singing.” I smile, lifting a hand to his face. “You are a teacher, historian, and writer. And I have wanted you, Leonardo, every single day since you stopped me on the steps of the school.”

He lets me tug him down to the blanket, solid ground beneath our knees.

The sun has gone now, a few streaks of violet from the day’s last light.

I lift Leo’s shirt over his head as our overgrown land rustles around us, a gentle encouragement from all the trees and ash. I’m on my knees in front of him, running my hands down his chest, sick with want.

But he grabs me by the wrists. “Not so fast, Dallas.”

Oh. I groan in frustration as he cradles my neck, his fingertips threading into my hair, memories radiating between us: hands, breath, lips, thighs. He tilts my face up toward the sky and says, “Black? Or navy?”

I laugh outright, my heart exploding with a long-suffering love I’ve never tasted before. I’ve never even known to crave it. My words come out in a whispered concession: “Navy,” I say. “Clearly.”

He eases my shirt off, the backs of his fingers slowly grazing me. I shiver at his mouth an inch from mine, dark hair lazing across his forehead, and I cross the remaining chasm, pressing my mouth to his. The warmth of his lips, his searching tongue, has all the promise of a first time yet all the pleasure of a thousandth. He moans low, and I kiss him harder.

He lays me back, a hand to cushion my head as wind sweeps across us. His arms are pillars on either side of me, and the sky is spread behind him, the stars a thousand sparks.

He whispers hot in my ear, “Mi amor, mi vida, mi patria.”

And we move slowly until we don’t. Until I take in the full sight of my husband and realize that memory can’t do justice to reality. I reach for his hair, neck, shoulders, my fingernails leaving crescent moons in his skin. I arch toward him as if to challenge: There’s gold in this land. Find it.

But he brushes hair from my face in a counter choreography, an insistence that we slow down, as if he’s saying: Yes. Yes, I remember this land. He takes my bottom lip between his teeth too slowly, and I go wild with the torment of his restraint. I grip his back, pull him closer, and beg, “Please.”