“Ahhh,” Carolina says and gives me a sweet smile. “Well, I will not say anything to Tio either. We don’t want him to kill your man before you can marry him, no?”
Oh, God. Marry? Is that the only other option?
“It’s okay,” Carolina soothes, but I can barely hear her voice as the thoughts continue to rush through my head all at once.
Nico barely makes enough to live on by himself, and what little extra he has goes to taking care of his mother and siblings. Raising a baby in New York City can’t be anything but crazy expensive, and I’m supposed to be going to graduate school next year. He’s going to freak. I’m going to freak. Holy shit, what are we going to do? What is Nico going to do when he finds out he’s going to be a father?
Numbly, I follow Carolina out of the bathroom after shoving the test, wrapped in its plastic, into my purse. Carolina babbles something more about bad contraception methods and how long I have until people realize I was pregnant before we got married instead of after. If we get married at all. Do I even want to get married? Would Nico?
My head is spinning, and suddenly, I can’t take it anymore. Halfway down the stairs, I stop her, tugging on her arm so she’ll face me.
“Hey,” I say. “Carolina? No more, okay? This…this is just our secret for now. Secreto,” I add in Portuguese, just for good measure, even though my cousin speaks decent enough English.
Her brown eyes, which haven’t shown much more than droll curiosity since she walked upstairs, perk a little sympathetically.
“Sim,” she says with a nod that sends her blonde tresses waving. “Of course.”
We enter the patio to find everyone mostly where we left them—the boys still goofing around the yard as they finish another game, the older men having moved inside a bit to check the latest soccer scores, the women chatting around the tables by the pool with their cigarettes and coffee.
I slip around the back of the house before anyone catches me. I need a minute to myself.
There’s no one back here, only a small concrete walkway that leads to the circuit breaker and a generator, along with vines that cover the hillside leading almost directly up from the house. I step over the vines, breathing deeply from air that isn’t laced with cigarette smoke or chlorine, and when I reach the concrete, I lean against the wall and bury my face in my hands.
Immediately, several faces start flashing through my head. They’re all disappointed. My mom. My friends. Nico. My dad. All of them frowning with concern. Disdain. Dread.
I can hear their voices too.
This isn’t you, Layla.
I thought you were better than this.
What kind of girl are you?
But the thing is, I don’t feel the dread I should. I’m scared, of course. Terrified. I have no idea what’s going to happen––if I can afford this, do it on my own if I have to. I don’t even know if I’ll be a decent parent at all.
Still…I can’t regret anything I’d ever make with him. Nico is my heart. My air. My breath. Even if he can’t deal with this—and I know deep down that it will probably terrify him too, more so than it scares me—he’d never abandon us.
Right?
He did leave you for LA.
It’s a small voice, adding to the others, but somehow it echoes even louder.
He did leave you once.
My hands clench the thin fabric of my sundress, and I keep my eyes squeezed shut as I will the doubts away. It’s not fair to me. It’s not fair to him.
But instead, they grow louder.
“There you are!”
I open my eyes to find Nico bounding through the vines, a broad smile on his face. His slacks are wrinkled from too much play, and his shirt, with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, has a couple of grass stains on it. But he looks perfect. Happy.
“Holy shit!” he crows. “I just took your cousin to town, baby. Straight up owned his ass in horseshoes, my first time out!” He pulls a wad of crumpled Brazilian currency out of his pocket and shows off his spoils. “Fifty-five reais, yo! Steak dinner on me!”
I can’t help it. I giggle, looking down at the bills and back up at him. “You know that’s about fifteen dollars, right?”
Nico’s face falls slightly, but he gives me a horsey grin anyway before he tackles me with another hug and a bunch of kisses around the neck. Whether it’s the thrill of competition or just having fun, he’s definitely riled up. Within a few seconds, so am I.
“Beers on the beach, then,” he says as his tongue flickers against my neck. “Damn, you smell good. Are you wearing something new?”
“I think it’s the flowers back here. Bibi loves jasmine.”
“No, it’s you.” He continues to trail his nose down my neck. “Do you know how long it’s been?” he asks in between kisses that grow longer every time. I open to them, taking him deeper. Each one works to banish my doubts.
“Um, about three days?” I wonder as I wrap my arms around his neck, amazed, as I always am, at just how easily he’s able to distract me from my worries.
“Baby, are you losing your memory?” Nico leans back and frames my face with his hands. “I had to do three straight shifts back to back to get this time off, remember?”
I grin. Oh, I remember. Three straight shifts meant nine days of barely seeing him. It meant me hoofing it up to the station twice just to sneak kisses in the bunkroom. Both times we’d been interrupted by a call, and then we were on a plane to Brazil. It has actually been a very long time, at least by our standards.
I pop on my toes so I can kiss him, long and hard, enjoying the faint tastes of beer and barbecue that mingle with his unique flavor.
“Mr. Soltero,” I say. “Who do you think you’re talking to? It’s been exactly twelve days.” Kiss. “Four hours.” Kiss. “Twenty-four minutes.” Kiss. “And thirteen seconds since you were last inside me.”
Nico raises an eyebrow. “Where’s your stopwatch?”
I giggle. “Okay, maybe I made up the last three. But it has been over twelve days.”
His teeth graze my jawline before he fixes his mouth on the skin just under my ear and sucks, hard, until it pops from his mouth. “Exactly,” he murmurs as he traces his tongue around to the other side. “Too. Fuckin’. Long.”
He takes my hand and places it on the tented front of his pants. He’s hard and long, and I take hold of him and squeeze, enjoying the way he moans in my mouth as I do it.
“Tell me you need it,” he says, his voice lowering half an octave as I squeeze again. “Shit.”
“Need what?” I squeeze again. This time he groans slightly.
“You need what?” he repeats. “Don’t play with me here, baby. Just fuckin’ say it, Layla. I need to hear you say it.”
I should say what I came out here to mull over. I should tell him the news I only just found out a few minutes ago myself. But like always, I’m not thinking clearly when he’s pressed between my legs, when his full mouth is working that strange voodoo on my lips, my jaw, my earlobe, my neck.
“Your cock,” I mutter as he drops kisses down my chest, testing the collar of my dress to find the sensitive hollow between my breasts. “Fuck, Nico, I need your cock.”
I don’t know if it’s pregnancy hormones or what, but I’m all over the map. One minute I’m about ready to cry out of anxiety and fear, and the next, I can only think of tearing off this man’s pants. It doesn’t matter that my family is literally on the other side of the house. It doesn’t matter that I can still hear their voices clearly filtering through the late afternoon breeze. I need him. Inside me. Freaking yesterday.
“Your wish is my command, baby,” Nico growls before capturing my lips in yet another soul-searing kiss as his hands drop down to take two harsh handfuls of his favorite part of my body.
“Nico.” I try to push him away, but it’s hard, too hard. Especially when I’m also half-clawing at his shirt, grabbing him by the collar and yanking him closer. He just groans and kisses me like a starving man
, practically eating me alive right there in the yard.
“What in the hell is going on here?”
Nico and I fly apart to either side of the patio, but neither of us can hide our flushed faces, swollen lips, the way Nico’s shirt is half-untucked and unbuttoned a bit too low, or the way my dress strap is falling off my shoulder.
My father glares at us, then marches through the vines, kicking them away viciously. “What were you doing to her?”
Nico, to his credit, stands his ground. He doesn’t run or skulk away like a naughty teenager. He holds his chest out firm and crosses his arms over it, like he’s ready for anything my dad has to say.
“Dad, calm down,” I try weakly. “Nothing was going to happen.” Other than the fact that something definitely already has, of course.
“Nothing was going to happen?” Dad growls. “His hands are all over you, and nothing was going to happen?”
“He’s my boyfriend!” I cut back without thinking. “What do you think we do? Hold hands and stare at each other all day?”
Nico snorts, but immediately shuts up when my father practically castrates him with a hard, black glare. Still, Nico says nothing—just continues to meet that stare head-on.
“What are you doing with him?” Dad asks me. “This is not my daughter. My daughter does not sneak away with boys at a family party. This is not what our family does!”
I can’t help an eye roll. “Seriously? Go check the pantry, Dad. Pretty sure Luciano and his girlfriend are having a really good time in there.”
“Well, my daughter does not!” Dad roars. “Especially not with this…this…”
“This what?” Nico’s voice is low, but I can hear it shaking. “This what, Dr. Barros?”
My heart rises in my throat. It didn’t take long, but it’s been clear this confrontation was going to happen all along. I had just hoped to push it until the end.
Dad looks Nico up and down, dragging his gaze over his faded pants, his rumpled shirt, the tattoos peeking out from under his sleeves.
“Keep your hands off my daughter.”
Nico steps forward, his chest puffing out slightly. “With all due respect, sir…no.”
Dad stomps his foot hard enough that I swear the ground shakes a little. “This is my family’s house. My family’s property. And if you cannot respect me, if you cannot respect them, you can leave. I will pay for your ticket back to New York myself.”
“And if I don’t?”
Dad opens his mouth again, his face twisted deeply with his anger. And then his pager pierces the air. A few seconds later, he starts, as if he has just realized what’s happening. Slowly, gradually, the flush falls from his face, and he pulls his pager off his belt to check the number. With a long exhale and a death glare at Nico, he whips his cell phone off his belt and flips it open to dial the number that’s appeared.
“Alô,” he says when a voice answers almost immediately.
Nico and I stand silently while Dad speaks in rapid Portuguese to the other person, too fast for me to follow. There’s too much specialized language for me to understand. I’m guessing it’s medical jargon. They continue a brief exchange, which clearly doesn’t please my father, because by the time he hangs up the phone, his face is back to being bright red.
“What’s going on?” I ask, suddenly aware that he’s pulling his car keys out of his pocket. “We’re not going, are we? We just got here a few hours ago.”
I look back at Nico, who shrugs. Fifteen minutes ago, he had the biggest smile on his face that I’ve seen in weeks. He’s actually having a good time, and the last thing I want him to do is have to jump into a car with a man who looks like he would rather just take him to the airport and damn the cost of a ticket back to the States.
Dad wrinkles his nose and blows out another long exhale. “I have to go,” he says curtly. “To São Paulo for a surgery. I will be back tomorrow.” He frowns at us. “You will stay here in Guarapari with Bibi and Manuel and your cousins until the party. I will be back for that.”
Nico raises his brows slightly at me, and immediately I know he’s thinking the same thing. With my dad gone, we’d have the apartment to ourselves, with only the housemaid. We’d have space to do…a lot of things.
To tell him, an internal voice says. Okay, sure, that’s totally what I was thinking about, looking at the way Nico’s broad shoulders and chest muscles ripple through his button-down shirt. Absolutely.
I turn back to my dad. “That’s okay. We can just stay in Vila Velha with Benedita. You can ask her to chaperone if you really need that.”
“You will stay in Guarapari,” Dad practically spits out. “Clearly someone needs to keep an eye on you, and Benedita is not up to the challenge. Manuel will take me to the airport, and he will pick up your bags on his way back.”
“Dad, come on,” I try again. “Please don’t make a big deal about this.”
He glares at me. “You cannot possibly think I would allow my unmarried daughter to stay alone at my apartment…with him. Don’t be a fool, Layla!” He pushes a hand through his thick salt-and-peppered hair. “Although, maybe it’s too late for that.”
I wilt, crossing an arm over my stomach reflexively. If this is what he has to say about a kiss in the garden, a child out of wedlock will probably get me disowned. Although, honestly, I’m starting not to care what he thinks of me anymore.
“Dr. Barros.”
Nico’s deep voice cuts across the yard, turning my dad’s deadly glare on him. My cousins, clearly used to my father’s temper, quiet at the sound of the conflict.
“I think that’s enough, sir,” Nico says in a tone that is calmer, lower than my dad’s, but somehow just as threatening. He takes my hand, and squeezes. “We got it.”
“Stay here,” Dad spits, and then turns on his heel and leaves.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Nico
As upset as Layla is when her dad leaves for São Paulo, I’m not a bit sorry he’s gone for a few days, even if the whole point of coming here was to see him in the first place. I can’t pussyfoot around it anymore. The dude’s a straight-up asshole.
I don’t care that he dealt with some bullshit when he was younger. Looking around what his family has here, what he had back in the States, I can promise I dealt with a lot more. And I don’t fuckin’ treat people the way he treats his daughter. Period.
So yeah, it probably wasn’t the best thing in the world for him to see me getting handsy with Layla. And yeah, he might have seen a lot more if he had interrupted about a minute and a half later. I’d probably be facedown in the pool right now, or on my way back to the airport.
But I also kind of don’t give a shit. It’s fucked up, but I kind of wanted the guy to know she doesn’t belong to him anymore. Shit, she doesn’t belong to me either, but she’s mine just the same. And if I want to mess around behind some palm trees, I know she will too. So he can fuck off about it.
Now that he’s gone for a bit, Layla and I are both able to relax a little, even if it is with a bunch of other cousins around. Most of the neighbors clear out before dinner, which ends up being the leftover spread that we just pick at while we spend the rest of the evening lounging around the open-air living room, watching soccer with her cousins. It reminds me a lot of my family, the way they tease, laugh, and shout at each other over the table. The older ones have started families of their own, so there are a few little kids around. Luciano and David, Bibi’s sons, have pretty much accepted me—a hell of a lot more than their uncle has, anyway. Bibi keeps finding excuses to kiss my cheek. If it weren’t for Dr. Barros and his shitty attitude, I’d probably like this side of Layla’s family. A lot.
Layla starts to relax too after her dad leaves. She lounges with Carolina and Marcella, Luciano’s girlfriend, joking around in stunted Portuguese that, from what I can tell, is better than she thinks. I can only catch maybe fifteen percent of what’s said, but I’m proud of my girl. Layla laughs as she takes in her aunt’s stories,
giggles when one of her cousins makes a crazy joke. Her happiness shines. She’s practically glowing.
So I’m not even mad when Bibi sticks me on a stiff trundle in Luciano’s room and Layla on the floor in another with Carolina and Marcella. This house is packed for the rest of the weekend, with three or four people shoved into the four bedrooms while everyone prepares for the banquet coming up. Even though I’m dying to finish what we started behind the house, I actually don’t want to go around disrespecting Bibi and Manuel for the same reason I kind of want to get it on in Dr. Barros’s apartment just to piss him off. It’s just about how they treat Layla and me—with basic goddamn respect. It’s also obvious that every second Layla spends getting to know her family erases some of the sad-puppy look that comes when her dad snaps at her. So, yeah. I’ll take all the blue balls in the world if it keeps making my girl shine.
As luck would have it, the next day Bibi and her kids are pretty much consumed with prepping for Luciano’s graduation party. Apparently this kind of thing is a really big deal here. They have to leave all day, and although they invite us to come tag along to their clothes fittings and last-minute shopping, it’s clear they would probably get it done faster without us. Manuel stays behind, but is too absorbed with watching soccer to do more than wave when Layla and I tell him we’re going to the nearby beach for the day. Dr. Barros seems to be the only one who gives a damn about us having a chaperone.
Which is how I end up walking on a mostly deserted stretch of fuckin’ paradise, hand in hand with my girl. Since, like she told me, most of the people in this neighborhood work in the city during the week, everywhere on the beach that the mostly empty neighborhood borders is pretty much deserted. Just dunes and cliffs of yellow-white sand, bright blue water rippling through lagoons, and gullies that lead out to a wider beach and the ocean beyond. And nobody here but me and my girl. Me and Layla.
Bad Idea: The Complete Collection Page 96