Gabriella

As much as she hates to admit it, the conversation with Nini has rattled her.

That night, while Angel works, while her grandmother sleeps, she lies awake in the dark, her thoughts punctuated by bursts of music or an occasional trail of laughter left behind by a car as it speeds by on the street below.

She can still stop it, she reasons. She could call him tomorrow and put an end to it, and continue her life as if nothing had happened. In a few days, the world—her very small world that cares about this—would have forgotten it, rendering the moment nothing more than a small parentheses in her life.

“But why?” she asks out loud softly, overwhelmed by the blatant unfairness of her predicament. There is nothing sinister about him or what he does. So he travels with a small army. That is hardly unusual in a country fraught with kidnappings and uncertainty. His father is in jail. She admits to herself that it is hardly the ideal situation, and yet, she parries in her mind, it’s not uncommon, either, what with the wave of white-collar prosecutions.

But a father who’s a drug dealer, a major drug dealer, a drug dealer so powerful his net worth is estimated at nearly that of the country’s gross national product?

Gabriella presses the palms of her hands against her eyes, rubbing them until she sees stars. But he is not his father, Gabriella tells herself. I don’t care what anyone says. He is not his father.

She’d slept with two men before him. One was her high school boyfriend, a football player who was gloriously tall and well built, a boy she couldn’t quite believe had fallen for her. He had discovered her in her senior year, when she went from gawky to beautiful, when her legs seemed to grow and she joined the track team, her quickening speed seemingly leaving her shyness behind. She ran around and around the track while he practiced tackling in the field, distracted by her legs and her unwavering gray eyes. It took him a month to get her into bed with him—a rushed and totally unsatisfying affair, for her, at least, that took place on a sagging couch in his basement. The sex never improved and that was all they ever did together.

She surprised all her friends by dumping him first. But he surprised her by taking it in stride; a gracious loser who never quite got over her and who left the door open for her to continue basking in the glow of his popularity in her last months of high school. She never stopped feeling grateful to him for that, and even now, when they meet at an odd party or restaurant, their hugs linger.

“My backup romance,” she would say, not unkindly, when she talked about him.

She poured her affections far more generously on her second lover, a tortured film student named Seth Girard, who had a brilliant mind and an unshakable sense of self-importance.

Her father disapproved. He knew the type. And he could tell she was simply infatuated with the idea of the man rather than in love with the man himself.

But she liked the intellectual challenge and charged on, convinced she could somehow teach him an iota of consideration.

For a long time, she couldn’t figure out why their lovemaking didn’t work, when their minds were so finely in tune. But he never quite understood the rhythm of her body, the kind of touching she needed him to do. For a while, she actually thought it would always be like that: relentless foreplay that led her nowhere. If she moaned hard enough, she thought, she could will herself to feel something more. For a while, she thought good sex was a myth. But when Seth broke up with her, he blamed what he called her “repressive persona” and recommended she see a sex therapist.

Her friends put him in his place.

“Bad sex is always the guy’s fault,” they said categorically.

And then, she met Angel and realized they were right.

She just hadn’t known.

Except that with Angel it isn’t just the sex.

Gabriella closes her eyes and sees him. Sees the genuine spark of pleasure that reaches the clear depths of his green eyes when he makes her laugh, like he did yesterday in the dance hall. With him, she has nothing to prove, and she feels the ease of the time spent together roll over her in waves, like a sailboat that finally catches just the right amount of wind to reach the perfect speed. When they’re together in his car, he steers with his left hand, and with his right, he seeks her out, touching her hair, her arm, her hand, which he holds as he drives, sometimes releasing it for just seconds at a time to shift gears, then firmly claiming it again, never taking his eyes off the road but periodically running his thumb over her wrist, joining her pulse to his.

And yet, the next morning, when he calls and invites her to work out at his sports club, she caves just a little to her grandmother’s wishes.

“I’ll meet you there,” she tells him over the phone, rebuffing his offer to send a driver over, her mind made up to go with Edgar, forgo the showiness of the bodyguards and draw the least attention possible on herself and her family.

The short silence on the other end registers his surprise.

“I’ll pick you up if you want,” he says resolutely, and she feels a surge of guilt, because she knows it’s dangerous for him to drive around unnecessarily, and yet, he’s willing to do that for her.

“No, you know you shouldn’t,” she responds, saying the right thing, but almost choking on her duplicity, angry now at having allowed herself to entertain any doubts.

And yet, as Edgar drives her, each passing mile reassures her that this indeed makes sense; that she can be with him, but still stand apart if she wishes.

“Luis Silva’s son? That’s pretty big leagues, Miss Gabriella.” Edgar interrupts her thoughts with the bluntness earned by years of service that make him more a family member than an employee.

“He has his own business, Edgar,” replies Gabriella curtly, prepared to cut the conversation short. But she can’t help herself.

“How did you know he’s Luis Silva’s son?” she finally asks.

“People talk,” says Edgar, looking straight ahead. “The other drivers in the building. The guards. I’m very sorry, Miss Gabriella. They say he’s a decent guy, but I still had to tell your grandmother.”

“Oh, Edgar,” says Gabriella softly, understanding where yesterday’s scene came from, yet feeling strangely relieved. No matter how furtive she and Angel have been, it was only a matter of time before the truth came out. At least now she no longer has to scurry around in a sea of half lies, like her mother did, and the thought gives her fresh impetus as they pull up to the health club.

Already, his three cars are parked outside, making an immediate statement, his bodyguards leaning nonchalantly against the SUV doors, semiautomatics held loosely at their chests. They don’t look anything like the Armani-clad security detail they show in films. They simply look dangerous and on edge.

For a fraction of a second, Gabriella hesitates, then walks in, coming face-to-face with an immaculate receptionist in tiny white shorts and a midriff-baring halter top, who holds court at a chrome-and-white desk at the entrance. Her breasts are huge, her biceps incredibly toned, and her very straight black hair is caught back in a tight ponytail, revealing a perfectly made-up face of fine little features and manicured eyebrows that she now raises with a touch of insolence.

For a moment, Gabriella pictures Angel’s house. The blatant flashiness of it, the elevator, the long marble halls and winding staircases, the lawn that stretches forever, and the cars, the endless line of cars. In all fairness, some of it could be right at home back in Los Angeles, but here his reality assaults her senses.

Gabriella is much too sensitive to be rigid, but she’s always been righteous, like her father, her world an easily discernible division of right and wrong, truth or lies. Everything is fuzzy now, she thinks, and then she sees him, walking toward her, wearing baggy shorts and a loose mesh T-shirt, looking like any other guy would look in a gym.

“She’s with me,” he tells the receptionist quietly, authoritatively, and gives Gabriella his half smile, his eyes and his hand reaching for hers. In that moment, all Gabriella’s thoughts come sharply into focus, and everything makes the clearest of sense.

He assigns her a trainer, and in the beginning, he comes by her station occasionally, but it flusters her to have him see her doing leg lifts and lunges.

“Go away!” she finally says, exasperated, swatting him with her towel. “I can’t concentrate when you’re looming over me.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, raising his arms in surrender. “Just be careful with her hands and wrists,” he admonishes the trainer. “She can’t do heavy wrist work. She’s a pianist.”

“Please, Angel, you sound like my dad,” says Gabriella, acutely embarrassed, although she’s noticed from the onset that her trainer—like everyone else here—is more interested in Angel than in her, tuned to her needs only as a function of Angel’s wishes.

Gabriella smiles wryly to herself. She grew up on movie sets full of sycophants, fawning over the actors, the directors, her father, even her. “Don’t believe any of them, Gabriella,” her father would tell her, sometimes laughing, sometimes dead serious. “They’re about as real as what you see on the movie screen.”

She looks surreptitiously at Angel, watching the easy grace of his movements, appreciating the fact that he’s not one of those obnoxious types that swaggers and shows off in the weight room. He’s focused, or perhaps deliberately aloof, studiously avoiding eye contact with the few people that are here at this time of the morning. Gabriella wonders if Angel knows this isn’t real, either; wonders if he knows how handsome he is, how alluring. Wonders if he wonders what it would have been like to be just Angel, not Angel Silva, Luis Silva’s son.

“When do I get to meet your friends?” she asks him later, as they sit in the sauna.

“You already did. At the party,” he says lazily, eyes closed, head leaning back against the white tile.

“No, I didn’t,” she says with a laugh. “You didn’t introduce me to anyone at all!”

“I was busy dancing with this beautiful girl,” he answers smiling, eyes still closed.

“Angel, really,” she insists, because this is suddenly important to her. “Don’t you have any close friends you hang out with?”

Angel sighs, finally opens his eyes. He looks at her appraisingly for a moment, measuring what he’s going to say. “No,” he finally says with a small shrug of his shoulders. “I don’t have any close friends right now. Quite honestly, I’m going through a phase where I really am not close to anyone at all. And for the time being, I’d like to keep it that way.”

“What about me?” Gabriella asks.

“You’re different,” he answers, smiling gently. “You…” His voice trails off, then picks up again. “You don’t judge. You have an open mind. No one here has an open mind.”

“Why did you throw that huge bash then?” she asks, perplexed.

Angel shrugs again, and for a fleeting moment, he doesn’t look like a self-assured, powerful man, but like a sullen, slightly hurt little boy.

“They’re acquaintances,” he says slowly. “They all expect me to throw parties, so I do it from time to time. But no one there was really my friend. Well, there’s a few people that I’ve known for a long time, but I don’t really have good friends here anymore.”

“Why?” she prods.

“Why?” rejoins Angel, his voice edgy. “Now, why do you think?” he says sarcastically.

“Look,” says Gabriella firmly, emboldened by her relaxed state of mind and chafing at his patronizing tone. “Don’t get mad at me, but you are intimidating, you know? Your house is intimidating. Your gun is intimidating. Everything about your dad is intimidating. And that army you have out there doesn’t help, either.”

Angel looks frankly startled, his eyes completely open now. The people around him usually skirt this topic, or leave altogether. He can’t remember a single time when he’s had this conversation with a girl he’s dated.

“Wow,” he finally says, running his fingers through his wet hair, then leaning toward her with his elbows on his knees. “You think I don’t know that?” he asks seriously. “You think I don’t see it? It’d be nice if my father were a rich, I don’t know, a rich banker! But I can’t change who I am or where I come from, Gabriella,” he says softly, looking at her earnestly.

“Couldn’t you go somewhere else?” she asks plaintively. “Sons of rich bankers go live in other places. You could go to your Switzerland that you liked so much. No one knows you there, Angel. You wouldn’t have to explain yourself at every turn. Do you realize how liberating that would be?” she presses urgently.

Angel smiles at her, a touch of regret in his eyes, and reaches up and strokes her cheek with the back of his hand.

“You can’t let it go, can you, princesa?” he asks ruefully. “Remember what I told you? I have to be here for my father. But afterwards, maybe I’ll go. Maybe you’ll come with me,” he adds, and this time he smiles, really smiles, the smile she loves.

That afternoon, he’s the one who takes her back home.