“You okay, baby?” I ask her after we choose a spot to hang out for a while at the base of one of the dunes, next to a lagoon so clear I can see all the way to the bottom.
I don’t know why. But I haven’t been able to shake the feeling like something is up with her. She’s been happy, but also looks…I don’t know. Preoccupied.
Layla pauses. “I’m fine. Why?”
I pull a corner of one of the big beach towels tight and give her a look. “Layla. I know you better than anyone else. I know when that beautiful brain is moving like crazy, and you’ve been thinking up a storm all morning. So, que pa’o, mami?”
Layla’s rose-petal mouth quirks a little at the Spanish. She likes it when I call her mami, of all things. It’s not like the other women I’ve known, the ones who think it’s exotic or some shit like that. Layla’s been around my family and me enough to know it’s the most common word in the world. Some men use it for every girl they know: their mom, their sisters, their friends, their lovers. Layla’s been in New York long enough that some random dude has probably called her mami on the street. But hopefully she knows that from me, it means she’s family. At least, that’s what I hope I’m seeing when her eyes sparkle like that.
“I just…” She sits down on the towel and leans back, draping one arm over her stomach. “Do you think it’s weird that I like it better when he’s not around?”
I sit down on the towel next to her, and then, by habit, move through a set of sit-ups while we talk. I went on another long run this morning before everyone got up, but my belly is gonna turn to mush with all of this rich food if I’m not careful.
“Who?” I ask as I touch an elbow to my knee. “Your dad? No, I don’t. I’m not gonna lie, sweetie. I think he’s a dick, especially to you. But I don’t have to like him because I’m not his daughter.”
Layla’s eyes brighten as she watches me push through a bunch of Russian twists. “What? Oh. Yeah.”
I stop moving and grin up at her. “Should I stop doing this while we’re talking, blue eyes?”
She blushes and looks away toward the ocean. “No. I can handle it.”
She doesn’t look like she can handle it if her flushed skin is any indication. Even just being here a few days is giving her a glow, even more than before. But I like the effect too much to stop, so I start doing some boat raises instead.
“What’s a chan-cle-ra?” Layla asks a few minutes later.
I do three more reps, then stop. “What’s a what?”
“A… whatever your sister says when Allie’s being naughty. Sometimes you tell her she better be careful or your mom might come after her with it too.”
I sit all the way up and scrunch up my face for a moment, then burst out laughing as I finally figure out what the hell she’s talking about. “Oh! You mean a chancleta?”
“Yeah,” Layla says, nudging me on the shoulder. “What’s that?”
I grin. “It’s a house slipper. Like your shoes.” I gesture toward her flip-flops. “It’s sort of a joke, something Puerto Ricans say, right? You do something bad, your mom’s gonna smack you with her chancleta, la chancla. You talk in church, you’re gonna get slapped. You say something rude, she’ll fling it across the room at your head. And it always hits, no matter what.”
“So it’s just a joke?”
I turn my head from side to side, considering. “No. I mean, it’s mostly a joke. We make it a joke. But we all got smacked with that or plenty of other things when we misbehaved. I’m sure Maggie does it with Allie. She always gets spooked if you bring it up, you know?”
Layla nods. “I get that. My dad…he used to do that with the kitchen spoons. The wooden ones. He did it until I was about ten or so.”
For a second, it feels like the glory of the day dims a little. I don’t know what Sergio did. I don’t know what Layla did. If you asked me yesterday if I thought people spanking their kids was okay, I would have said sure, even thought getting smacked by a foam sandal is a lot different than a wooden kitchen implement. I would have said there are going to be times where your four-year-old probably isn’t going to listen to reason.
But I also get what it feels like to have the shit kicked out of you when you’re a kid. I get what it feels like to be scared of the people who are supposed to take care of you. There’s a thin line between discipline and abuse for some—and people like Layla and me don’t always know completely where it is. That confusion starts young.
Layla shrugs and wraps her arms around her knees, hugging them close. “It is what it is.”
I’m quiet for a second. “It’s shitty, is what it is.” I shake my head. “A lot of Latino men are like that. We grow up in a culture that tells us, like, being a man means being to be stronger than other people. To dominate, especially the women in our lives. Macho bullshit.”
“I never want to hit my child,” Layla murmurs fiercely as she stares out at the water. “With anything.” When she turns to me, there’s a look of desperation on her sweet face, one I’m not sure I totally understand.
But I do know one thing: I’m there with her. I’m there with her all the fuckin’ way.
“Never,” I tell her, reaching into her lap to take one of her hands. She looks at our hands linked. “We’ll never do that. I promise.”
Layla lays her head on my shoulder and sighs. Her shoulders relax, and she hums a little.
“My counselor,” she starts to say, pausing a little, like she’s trying not to stumble over the words. “She says…she says we learn how to love and be loved by our parents.”
I nod. “It makes sense.” It’s something we’ve talked about before. The fact that neither of us ever really learned how to be loved the right way. The way it made it so hard for us to believe that we even deserved to be loved. That it always had to be painful. Hard.
“Really, who’s easy to love at all?” Layla wonders, so softly I think maybe she didn’t mean for me to hear it.
But I do.
“You are.”
I can’t help the shake in my voice. I hate that she questions this about herself. She knows her dad is the reason why she’s gone through what she has. Why she lets so many people walk over her, treat her like she’s nothing. The fucked-up thing is that I think Dr. Barros actually does believe in his daughter. He knows she’s smart, knows she can do great things with her life. But her failure to meet his expectations drowns out anything good he sees. And it makes Layla see herself as less than she is.
“You are,” I say again. But my head drops. Because I know I can’t blame all of this on Dr. Barros. “I know I left you too,” I say as I stare at the bright blue patterns in the towel. “And, Layla, fuck…you have no idea, baby. If I hadn’t…I think about…”
A tear drops down my cheek before I can help it. Not too many things make me break, but the memory of Layla, battered and broken last spring is one of them. I’ll die before I let that happen again. I squeeze her hand tight enough that her fingertips turn a little white.
“Stop,” she says quietly, squeezing right back. She’s crying now a little too, but her voice is steadier than mine. “It’s done. That’s all done. It wasn’t your fault, and then you brought me back, Nico. You saved me, over and over again.”
“Ah, shit,” I mutter as I let go of her hand to swipe away another few tears. Fuck. She really does turn me to mush.
But there’s one more thing I need to say. Something I need her to know more than I need water to drink, air to breathe. I slide a hand around her neck and pull her close so our foreheads touch and our breathing mingles on the sea breeze.
“You listen to me, baby,” I say, willing her to feel every word down to her bones.
Layla inhales through her teeth and closes her eyes while I speak.
“No one is easier to love than you. You’re right, baby. Some people are easier to love than others. But no one is easier to love than you.”
* * *
Sometime, maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour later, I
wake up as the sun is falling below the cliffs behind us and the houses perched on top of them. I stare up at the palm trees that hang over us, their wide leaves casting shadows across the sand, and a breeze floats through the hot air.
I’m not tired. No sirens are going off. No blare of traffic outside my window. No crazy people trying to get out of my way.
The only time I’ve ever really spent outside the city was in upstate New York, when I was confined to the youth jail. The country there was so silent it was deafening, and for years I avoided that kind of quiet like the plague.
But here…with the heat and the sun. The lapping of water a few yards away. Here with my girl, the love of my life…this is fucking paradise. And I never thought I’d live to see it.
I turn to tell her just that, but my girl is nowhere to be found. I push up, looking up and down the beach to see where she might have gone, but it’s not until I’m on my feet that I finally spot her.
Layla floats in a sea of aqua, her sun-kissed body cradled in the calm waters of the lagoon. The late afternoon sun blinks off the water, clear down to the sandy bottom, and she lies on her back, eyes closed, arms akimbo while she drifts.
The sight of her takes my breath away. I mean, literally, I can’t breathe, and all the air in my chest exits at once. But it’s not just her physical beauty that does it, even though she is and always will be a work of art to me. It’s the look on her face as she floats. The circles under her eyes have disappeared, and her full mouth quirks to the sides with a small, secret smile that’s only for her.
Here, together, in this perfect space, just her and me…my girl is finally happy. She’s finally at peace. It’s a look I thought I’d never see again.
Her eyes blink open, and they are bluer than the water that surrounds her. She smiles, then twists onto her belly and dives below, touching the bottom like a porpoise before she surfaces again. I watch, my voice caught in my throat as she emerges again, then swims closer until she can stand up fully. The water rises only to under her breasts, and I watch, transfixed, as droplets of water roll over her shoulders and down her chest, hanging for a second off her curves before slipping the rest of the way to the water. She’s an angel dipped in gold, a woman from dreams I never knew I had…until I met her.
And she’s smiling. At me. Like a man under a spell, I get up and wade out to meet her.
How the fuck did I ever get so lucky?
“Hey,” she says, waving her hands through the water. “I just went for a swim. When did you finally wake up?”
“Marry me.”
The words tumble out of my mouth before I can even register the thought. Like they’ve been waiting in the wings, ready to charge forward the second my vocal chords could release them. And now that they’re out, it’s like I’ve been waiting since before I knew her to say them.
Layla stills, her hands floating palms-down in the water. “Wha-what?”
“I…”
I swallow. Holy fucking shit. Did I really just say that? Everything blurs.
“I…shit. That was not at all how I was going to ask you that.”
“You were going to ask me?”
“No. Yes. I…I don’t know…”
I look up, and her blue eyes are glossy and worried. They shimmer like the water.
“Layla,” I say softly, taking her hand under the water. I thread our fingers together, then pull them up so I can kiss her fingers. “Hey.”
She finally looks at me, and though her eyes are still uncertain, there’s love there too. She looks at me the way I never knew anyone could. The way I know I look at her.
“Marry me,” I whisper again. And this time, it doesn’t catch me by surprise. This time I fucking mean it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nico
Her wide blue eyes are as big as the ocean.
I swallow, suddenly terrified. “It’s not how I planned to ask, you know.”
I keep going, babbling the way Layla usually does when she’s nervous. I’m glad that out here in the water, she can’t feel my palms, the way I’m sure they’re sweating right now. I take her other hand now for good measure. Otherwise, I’m honestly scared I might fall over.
“I was going to…maybe in a few years or something like that. Save up for a ring, do it right, you know?” I glance around, the water swishing with the movement. Coño, what the fuck am I looking for? A fuckin’ fish to come save me? “Shit, I can’t even kneel here, can I? Fuck…but, baby, I…”
I drift off when I look back at her. Her eyes are still shining, but the surprise and shock from before is gone. Instead, she looks the same way I feel whenever I look at her—really look at her. Like she can’t breathe. Like her happiness threatens to swallow her whole. Her slender hand is over her chest, and the one still in mine is clutching it so hard her knuckles are white.
“You…you okay, baby?” I ask, stepping closer.
“Say it again,” she whispers. “All of it.”
There’s a warmth in my chest whenever I look at Layla. Before I met her, the world felt cold most of the time. Now it expands, so much I feel like I could burst.
“Layla,” I whisper, taking one last step closer so I can pick up her other hand. We’re almost nose to nose now, but I don’t want her to turn away. “I never…you are…how do I say it? I’m not smart like you, baby. I don’t have the words. But when I look at you…” I swallow. “I see the world differently because of you, Layla. And I swear to God, if you give me a chance to make you happy, I’ll never stop try—”
My awkward words are swallowed by her kiss. Her lips are soft, just a little salty from the ocean, but they open quickly, welcoming me home. And that’s really what this is. I want to marry Layla, because she’s already my home. That’s what we are and always have been for each other.
“Yes,” she whispers against my mouth. It’s so soft, and at first I’m not actually sure that I heard her.
“What?”
I can feel her mouth spread against mine, a wide smile that makes that warmth in my chest expand even more. “Yes,” she pronounces, and then she laughs.
It’s not a giggle, even though I fucking love that sound too. But this one is even better. It’s a full-bodied laugh that bounces off the rocks and waves. It’s full of life, and calls back to the girl I first met over two years ago. Someone who wasn’t afraid to open herself up to a stranger. Someone who showed me what it meant to love.
“Yes?” I ask her, suddenly picking her up by her waist. I swing her around in the water, making her laugh even harder. “Yes? Yes?!”
I ask again and again, because I really can’t believe that someone like Layla Barros wants to marry someone like me. Or maybe I can. Because really, that’s what Layla has been teaching me all along. That maybe I’m not such a bad idea after all. That together, we’re the best idea in the whole fuckin’ world.
“Yes,” she repeats every time. We settle into the water, submerging our bodies as she wraps her legs around my waist. Her arms rest around my neck, and our noses touch. “A million times, yes, Nico Soltero. I’ll marry you.”
I close my eyes, so caught up in the moment, in the gravity of what the fuck we are about to do, that I can’t speak. Marry. Wife. Husband. It’s what we were always meant to be. But holy shit. Still.
“Nico?”
When I open my eyes, I still can’t speak. The low, golden light of the sunset casts around her like a halo, lighting up even the darkest corners of her tortured heart. Our tortured hearts. I have never wanted my sketchbook so badly, but even so, I know I’ll never forget the way she looks right now.
Her black hair lies glossy and wet over her shoulders, and her fair skin, flushed from a day outside, gleams as the light skims its wet surface. The thin blue material of her bikini hugs her body as the light shimmers over her curves, and I know it’s not the warm breeze floating around us that has her nipples—which somehow seem fuller, a little riper than normal—pressing through the fabric. Her blue eyes fuc
king glow. The electricity crackles between us. The lines between lust and love are really, really thin. Right now, I genuinely can’t tell the difference.
“Jesus,” I finally exhale. “Holy shit. I just…sometimes I can’t believe you’re really mine, Layla.”
Her legs drop, and I tug her forward so she’s standing between my knees. I run my hands up her bare, smooth legs until my fingertips meet the fabric of her bikini. My heart feels like it’s about to explode, along with something else that just got hard as a rock. Thirteen days now it’s been. Fuck.
I bury my face in her neck and inhale her scent. It’s not strong—something a little flowery—a soap she likes, blended with something a little sweet that’s only hers, something evident with the salt water glistening on her skin. It’s a smell that makes me feel warm and home and turned on all at once.
“Um, Nico?”
Her hands rest lightly on my shoulders. I pull back. “Yeah?”
“Can you…do you think…”
“What is it, sweetie?”
She peers down at me with a fuckin’ adorably determined look on her face. Then she sucks on her lower lip, causing it to puff slightly when she releases it from between her teeth. She watches me watching her. I know she’s nervous. I know I should say something. But she’s so goddamn beautiful, I can’t think straight, much less say anything coherent. And she’s all fuckin’ mine.
“Can you just kiss me again, please?” she finally asks. “And this time…don’t stop.”
I blink in surprise. Of course. Don’t fuck this up again, you pussy. Especially since there are no asshole fathers lurking around the next corner. This tiny lagoon is deserted. It’s just me and her.
Layla shivers as my hands wrap around her tiny waist, but I doubt it’s because she’s cold. The water out here is like bath water, and even with the sun starting to sink, it’s probably close to ninety degrees outside.
She tips her head back, waiting for me to do what she asked. So I do. I start gentle; trying to keep from eating her alive like I did behind the house. I want to savor her, worship her, treat her like the queen she is to me. She needs it slow, teasing. She needs me to tease her mouth open like this, lead a sweet slow dance with our tongues as we unravel bit by bit. At her speed, not mine.
Bad Idea: The Complete Collection Page 97