Gabriel takes a juice glass out of the cabinet and pours his own shot. He sits down across from me. “If ever there was a time to get wasted, it’s when you’re toasting someone you’ve loved and lost. I’m so sorry, Diana.”
“I’m not,” I whisper.
His gaze flies to mine.
“There,” I say. “Now you know my terrible secret. I’m an awful, broken person. My mother died and I feel … ?nothing.” I clink my glass to his. “That is why I’m drinking.”
I gulp the alcohol, but it goes down wrong. Coughing and sputtering, I fold forward in the chair, trying—and failing—to catch my breath. It is like aspirating fire.
When I start to see stars at the edges of my vision, I feel a hand on the flat of my back, moving in circles. “Breathe,” Gabriel soothes. “Easy.”
My throat is burning and my eyes are streaming and I don’t know if it’s because I was choking or because I’m crying, and I’m not sure it matters.
Gabriel is crouched down next to me. He hands me a bandanna from his pocket so that I can wipe my face, but the tears don’t stop. A moment later, with a soft curse, he wraps his arms around me. I sob into the curve of his neck.
I don’t know when the air starts moving in and out of my lungs again, or when I stop crying. But I start noticing the rhythmic sweep of Gabriel’s hand from the crown of my head to the tail of my braid. His lips against my temple. His breath falling in time to mine.
“You’re not broken,” Gabriel says. “You can feel.”
When he kisses me, it feels like the most natural thing in the world. My fingers push through his hair as I fight to get closer. I’m struggling for breath again, but now I want to be.
Gabriel is still kneeling beside me. In one motion he picks me up and sets me on top of the table, standing between my legs. “I’m so glad I fixed this damn thing,” he murmurs against my lips, and we both start to laugh. My hands slide up his forearms to his shoulders and my ankles hook behind his knees. He kisses like he is pouring himself into me. Like this is his last moment on earth, and he needs to leave his mark.
His palms move from my knees to my thighs, bunching the soft T-shirt. The whole time, we kiss. We kiss. When his fingers reach the elastic of my underwear, he stops and pulls back. He looks at me, his eyes so dark that I cannot see how far I’ve fallen. I nod, and he drags the T-shirt over my head. I feel his teeth scrape against my throat, against the chain of the miraculous medal, and then he paints words onto me with his tongue, moving between my breasts, down my belly, lower. “Pienso en ti todo el tiempo,” he says, hiking me to the edge of the table before kneeling again on the floor. His mouth is wet and hot through cotton. He feasts.
I am a lightning storm, gathering energy. I pull on Gabriel’s hair, dragging him up, affixing myself to him like a second skin. The room spins as he picks me up and carries me into the bedroom, following me down onto the mattress in a tangle of limbs. He immediately rolls to his side so I don’t bear his weight, and without him covering me I shiver beneath the ceiling fan. My hair has unraveled; he pushes it back from my face and waits. “Yes?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, and this time I crawl on top, pushing at Gabriel’s clothes until they are gone; until I can sink onto him and into him and lose myself.
It isn’t until afterward, when he has fallen asleep holding me tight, that I think maybe I’ve been found.
When I wake up, Gabriel is staring at me. I feel his hand flex on my shoulder, as if I am sand that might slip out of his grasp.
My head hurts and my mouth is dry but I know I cannot blame last night on the ca?a. I went into this with my mind clear, even if my heart was hurting.
Now, it’s an anchor sinking in me.
Just one more second, I think.
I flatten my palm against Gabriel’s warm chest, and I open my mouth to speak.
“Don’t,” he begs. “Not yet.”
Because we both know what’s coming. The slow untangling, the extraction. The excuses and the apologies and the veneer of friendship we will slap over this and never peek beneath.
He kisses me so sweetly, like it is a song in a different language. Even after he pulls back, I am still humming it. “Before you say anything,” he begins.
But he doesn’t finish. Because neither of us has heard the knock or the door opening, but we cannot miss the sound of breaking glass and china as Beatriz finds us knotted together, drops the breakfast she’s kindly made me, and runs away.